[Spotlight] Smart Cities: Improving city infrastructures with data
A Re-cap of ODC’s Implementation Working Group meeting on June 27, 2023
by Valentina Sisto, ODC Volunteer
According to the European Commission a Smart City is a place where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of its citizens and business. Today more and more cities are advancing towards addressing issues regarding the environment, mobility, governance and housing with a technology based approach. ODC’s last Implementation Working Group meeting discussed Smart Cities featuring three speakers that reflected on their related experiences and takeaways.
The first to open the floor was Maria Alexandra Viegas Cortez da Cunha, Coordinator of the Technologies and Governments area of the Center for Public Administration and Government Studies at Fundação Getulio Vargas. She presented on the project Waterproofing data: engaging stakeholders in the sustainable governance of flood risks for urban resilience. This Brazilian initiative emerged to solve the question of how to rethink flood data production and flow to enable transformations to build sustainable, flood resilient communities?
In a partnership with academic, government and funding partners, an app and a dashboard were created with three objectives in mind:
- Making visible how stakeholders engage with data
- Engaging citizens to produce, circulate and embed data
- Integrating citizen-generated data with other sources to support decision and policy making
These platforms allow citizens to upload data from manual rain gauges, inform the rain intensity, provide pictures of flooded areas and upload information about the water level.Thanks to the alerts of the rainfall given by people living in that specific area, residents were able to evacuate from their homes and no deaths happened, while nearby communities reported more than 200 deaths.
Moving on to the second speaker, Ben Hur Ben Hur Pintor, head of the development of the Data and Technology Strategies at the Civic Literacy Initiative and SmartCT, shared some actions taken by SmartCT’s team.
SmartCT is a data and tech nonprofit based in the Philippines with the aimof contributing to building smart, sustainable, ethical and equitable communities, by acknowledging the role of data and tech. Their primary focus is on communities and citizens, and their solutions are based on an open-by-design approach, advocating for open data, open source and being transparent with their own processes.
Ben highlighted the importance of building and bridging communities, given his own experience with the data community in the Philippines. He states that although there are many data science, smart cities, urban tech projects, these are often isolated from one another which limits the potential of learning and benefitting from each other’s successes or sharing best practices and experiences. Smart CT focuses on bringing people together.
Another of SmartCT’s guiding principles is that often high-tech solutions can do more harm than good, given the inequities in the access and use of technology. To tackle this difficulty, they implemented data literacy activities such as data literacy and open geospatial trainings and workshops, as well as creating the Getting Started Card Kit which provides a visual and non-technical overview of key elements that make up a data-driven local government.
Wrapping up the session, we had Iván Durán, ICT High Commissioner of Bogotá, as the final speaker. He gave an overview of the public policy of Smart City Bogota 2032 which, in his terms, constitutes a great example and provides lessons on how we can use technology and data in a complex and big city like Bogotá.
This public policy has been designed by a very participatory process, with 57 spaces for participation, more than 24,000 comments from citizens, experts, scholars and policy-makers, and 5 polls to learn about the associated problems and opportunities.
As part of the policy, the strategy of Open Government for Bogotá was implemented and a web platform and Chatico, a chatbot, were created to facilitate the interaction between the citizens and the government. Apart from that, some data leveraging initiatives include Ciudadanía 360, which is a software specifically designed for social policy, Bogotá trabaja, aimed at matching employees and employers, and Bogotá te escucha, a system that identifies and addresses public requests made on social networks.
Looking ahead: the role of the community and the citizens
All three presentations brought interesting perspectives on the topic of Smart Cities. Beyond their differences in terms of content of the projects and location, they all emphasized the central role of the community and the engagement of everyday citizens.
Maria Alexandra highlighted that one of the key findings based on their work was the importance of instructing school students and protection agencies in citizen science in order to increase their awareness of flood risks, improve data literacy, and fill data gaps to help disaster monitoring agencies to improve risk models. Engaging the whole society in the use of the open source resources developed by the Waterproofing data project was crucial for its success and effectiveness in reducing risks, as shown by the Recife events.
Along the same line, Ben Hur also stated that the focus should be on building community and on citizenship. Smart CT’s efforts to gather diverse actors to think about innovative approaches is an example of this, as are their initiatives to improve data literacy and spread information on data related topics.
Finally, Iván shared a similar view by stressing that Smart Cities should mainly target inclusion, integrate citizens with technology and coordinate work between different actors to find solutions. In his own words, Smart Cities should count not only with smart systems but also citizens that are capable of using the city’s technology.
The technology gap and the enduring inequities in this area are significant factors to take into account when designing Smart Cities strategies. The collaboration of all parts of a community becomes crucial to bear in mind the possibilities and limitations of these initiatives, and as Ben put it, sometimes “a simple tool that many people can use is better than a complex tool that only a few can master”.
Watch the session in English or in Spanish. If you would like to join our next Implementation Working Group meeting later on 25 July at 2PM EST, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: info@opendatacharter.org.
