Smart Cities
November 2020
Smart cities that reach the upper echelons of digital living
Connected communities such as Bleutech Park Las Vegas are a tech-fan’s dream – but without system integration, smart is a non-starter.
From the futurist visions of tech giants, entrepreneurs and technology integrators, smart cities are evolving far beyond sensor-outfitted light poles along sidewalks. Instead, their blueprints depict whole communities whose systems and services ebb and flow on waves of real-time data streams. Smart city plans now reach the upper echelons of digital living, and Bleutech Park Las Vegas (BTP) illustrates this well.
BTP is a $7.5 billion development that bills itself as the world’s first entirely sustainable, self-contained ecosystem. Built on digital platforms, BTP will use communication technologies to integrate and umpire critical systems such as water, energy and transportation. The resulting synergies – as well as a cache of cool apps, devices and technologies – will form a sustainable environment with the swagger of vintage Vegas.
Like all smart cities, data is the lifeblood of BTP. And this means that system integration is vital to build a secure, citizen-centric community that is flexible, sustainable and livable.
Viva (smart) Las Vegas
The future of digital infrastructure is taking shape in the Las Vegas Valley. BTP promises to be “the first city in the world to boast a digital revolution in motion, redefining the infrastructure industry sector.” Designed as an “eco-entertainment park,” BTP will feature a mixed-use, sustainable living environment comprised of net-zero buildings, including approximately 2,500 ultra-luxury residences, 1,500 workforce housing units, tech-smart offices, retail, hotels and casinos, and a state-of-the-art entertainment tower that will redefine the skyline as it soars 1,200 feet above the street.
The 210-acre development is scheduled to break ground in March 2021 and should take six to eight years to develop. To achieve its goal of building a fully integrated, self-contained ecosystem, BTP will be developed from the ground up, with all smart infrastructure built entirely from scratch.
As a hallmark of smart cities, BTP’s underlying connected systems will share an awareness of emerging situations and react by finding alternative paths and best actions across distributed devices and systems. BTP is working with several strategic partners – including Black & Veatch – to incorporate digital infrastructure into the community and ensure proper integration. Without this, smart is a non-starter.
Take transportation, for example. Like other smart cities, BTP is planning to incorporate autonomous vehicles (AVs) as public transportation shuttles to leapfrog traffic. Autonomous shuttles put many smart technologies into play, including road sensors, LiDAR, radar, 5G and edge data centres. These devices and apps create situational awareness through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications to ensure safe and efficient transport. With several tie-ins, network design and deployment require an end-to-end approach to interconnect each technology seamlessly, ensure secure network performance, and support the demand for substantial bandwidth, rapid response times and low latency.
The same integration is essential to create sustainable energy systems that expand and contract alongside need. BTP’s energy system includes 33 “supertrees” that will tower 50 to 100 feet above the walkways. Teeming with vertically grown desert plants and foliage, this unique biome will double as a solar photovoltaic system to generate power. In fact, photovoltaic glass will be standard in all structures, turning entire building exteriors into single solar panels. The park will harness power from the kinetic energy generated by footfall, and the main plaza will be constructed from transparent concrete with solar panels underneath, providing wireless charging for electric vehicles (EVs). Smart cities can also produce Green Hydrogen onsite to power fuel cell AVs, cars, buses or trucks.
Smart cities often include distributed energy resources (DER) – such as EVs, hydrogen technology, energy storage, and solar – to offset energy costs and achieve a net-zero carbon footprint. As smart cities and sustainability initiatives multiply, DER will scale, and could cause significant ripple effects across the electric distribution grid due to intermittency and load balancing. This emphasises the need to plan smart cities with broader community and regional systems in mind. Developers, municipalities and utilities should align goals and projects across sectors because disparate systems become interdependent when they connect under internet of things (IoT) and smart city configurations.
The currency of livability
Everyone is thrilled by cool technologies, and smart cities such as BTP are a tech-fan’s dream. The intrigue around self-healing concrete that uses water-activated bacteria to fill cracks, or the allure of hologram-driven AR and VR workspaces, for example, are the magic beans of smart cities, the elements from which excitement sprouts.
But smart cities aren’t just a collection of digital technologies, and the hardware and software must weave a social fabric in which people want to live, work and play. To this end, data is the quality-of-life currency in smart cities. Flexible telecommunications and analytics platforms collect, organise and convey real-time data that inform apps in BTP and other smart cities. This insight guides system adaptation to reflect the changing needs and desires of workers, visitors and residents.
Data from wearables, for example, can help residents avoid Covid-19 exposure, and biometrics can help workers avoid ergonomic stresses related to heavy lifting or repetition. Wearables, sensors, and an open data platform can integrate with intelligent building management to capture distributed environmental sensing and user wellbeing status to inform and adapt heating, cooling and ventilation.
Relying on connectivity places data privacy and cyber-security as top priorities. Digital communications platforms are designed to establish cyber-security protections and standards, which means security is embedded within apps and interconnected devices to protect data and ensure privacy as data is transferred across the system. Securing information at its source and creating a cyber-secure culture helps put smart city populations at ease. It also keeps their secure data input flowing to a central analytics platform, which is what helps makes smart cities personalised and livable.
Flexible, future-proofed smart cities
It won’t be long before success is measured by how well a city applies digital innovation to build sustainable, future-proofed essential systems such as energy, water and transportation. But how can a city future-proof technologies that are still evolving? It can focus on the communications systems that support them, such as fibre.
Fibre is future-proof. Once fibre is in place, the 4G or 5G network can reach exponentially higher speeds, and support more sophisticated apps and technologies, with simple radio equipment additions. Secure, converged wired and wireless networks can scale over time to support a fusion of old and new digital apps and processes such as wearables, big data, artificial intelligence, robotics and sensor-enabled intelligence, as well as anything Elon Musk dreams up.
This is when the magic happens – when systems, apps, technologies and people become a synchronised entity. At this nexus, small scale adjustments, such as room temperature, are made automatically, while on the large scale, smart city systems continually adapt to changing circumstances – from disruptive technologies and evolving business models to global pandemics. This is the ultimate future-proofing: resilience and stability no matter what the future brings. Like holding pocket aces, the smart community is going to dominate, and may even win big.
Accelerate the future with Black & Veatch. For more information visit bv.com/connectedcommunities
by Steph Stoppenhagen, Director of Strategy & Innovation, Black & Veatch
Putting disruptive open source tech and collaboration at the forefront of the smart city movement
ICT, open source, big data, IoT and collaboration will be the talking points of the smart cities of the future
Cities are the drivers of global economic growth, responsible for generating more than 80 per cent of worldwide GDP. But they also consume more than two-thirds of the world’s energy and account for around 75 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. To make matters worse, extreme climatic events, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, storms and hurricanes, have a huge and costly impact on city infrastructure, housing and public health.
In this context, cities need to become far more sustainable, smart and resilient if they are to match the pace of climate change and technological development. The term “sustainable city” has surfaced as a result of rapid urbanisation, the diffusion of sustainability and the rise of information and communications technology (ICT). In the transition towards sustainable development, ICT will play a big role – and one of the most common applications of ICT in urban environments is the internet of things (IoT) and related big data applications.
In the September edition of this report, FIWARE community members Red Hat and the Future City Foundation enlightened us with practical examples of how they are, with their IoT-centred solutions, guiding the cities of Amersfoort (Netherlands), Barcelona (Spain), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Montevideo (Uruguay) to further embrace the smart city concept, based on FIWARE technology. This time around, we'll bring you a perspective from Greece and Spain to better exemplify how cities can boost growth, deliver more efficient services and create more livable environments where both citizens and businesses can thrive, with the help of the growing FIWARE community.
Moving towards cities that live and breathe the urban model
Traditional city models have failed. Short-term and on-the-fly approaches to urban development result in chaotic environments and frustrated citizens, and are clearly not the definition of a sustainable city
By Spiros Mazarakis, Business Development Executive, Uni Systems, Greece
In an era filled with smart devices and digitally literate citizens, the future is unveiled through new patterns of communication and living, as people increasingly require faster, more advanced services and open access to information. Municipalities should adjust their operations and work hard to implement solutions that will allow their continuous growth in an efficient and cost-effective manner, toward a sustainable future. The transformation of cities into smart ecosystems should be the top priority for municipalities.
Focusing on the operational features of cities, digital back-office systems are becoming of utmost importance. After all, no matter how innovative and well designed the solutions are, if the necessary structure is not in place, there will be fundamental issues when executing them.
How are smart cities efficiently using available resources?
Based on its Local Government Information Management Systems and FIWARE’s open source framework, Uni Systems has created a number of solutions under one intelligent and integrated platform, the City2Live Urban Platform, actively contributing to the creation of the cities of the future.
City2Live offers customizable solutions for all available resources needed for the operation of Smart Cities: Eco, Mobility, Water, Fleet, Parking and Waste let smart cities monitor all of the vital aspects that differentiate them from the traditional, monolithic models of the past. By capitalising on the recently established Pleiades IoT Innovation Cluster, as well as its strategic partnership with FIWARE, the City2Live Urban Platform can empower data collection and the management and operations of smart city ecosystems, enabling municipalities to manage their flow of operations in all fundamental areas.
With both existing tools and newly developed interfaces, municipalities can create network connections among digital applications, gather valuable large-scale data, and allow the real-time monitoring of smart city operations. The value of the collected and analysed data will be immense for municipalities that are ready to take on the challenge and improve their decision-making processes toward a more efficient and cost-effective assignment of resources, with the ultimate goal of strengthening the operation and the administration of their ecosystem.
For more information on how Uni Systems is helping municipalities to deliver their digital vision, offer better and higher quality services, and accommodate its citizens, click here.
Málaga: delivering sustainable environments for business growth and citizen wellbeing
By Francisco Salas, Managing Director, Promálaga, Spain
When you arrive in Málaga you are captivated by its stunning coastline, the surrounding mountains and the friendliness of the locals. But something else stands out too. Despite being one of Europe’s oldest cities, the Málaga of today exudes modernity and digital innovation, and has, in recent years, moved away from simply being the gateway to the Costa del Sol.
Revamped and revitalised, Málaga is home to the Andalusia Technology Park (PTA), which includes more than 650 companies and 20,000 employees, developing solutions for energy efficiency, urban services, communications and tourism. It is no wonder the city has been awarded the title of 2020 European Capital of Smart Tourism, alongside Gothenburg.
Long-term planning
These achievements did not happen overnight. They are the result of the city’s ambitious, smart and innovative vision, whose overall strategy is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Málaga’s forward-looking approach was spearheaded by the 2009 Málaga Smart City project and expanded by the city’s Innovation Strategic Plan 2018-2022, which encourages the creation of solutions on citizen participation, e-government and open data projects, focused on turning it into a more innovative, inclusive, technological and smart city.
A “Powered by FIWARE” city
Committed to providing useful data sets to its citizens, Málaga has initiated its own open data environment, which generates information sources, specifically data, which are open to the public and, above all, can be downloaded by any company, professional individual or citizen, and used for any purpose. As a FIWARE user, the city encourages solution providers to develop applications – in an easy and replicable manner – on top of the FIWARE platform, integrate city data into it, and hence, boost the local economy.
Similarly, with CityGO, a “Powered by FIWARE” transportation planner and intelligent mobility solution developed by Atos (a FIWARE Platinum member), locals and visitors can find the best route and means of transport from A to Z, based on real-time information. From inputs on trains, buses, and the nearest public bike rental station, to available parking spaces, everything is managed in real time. For instance, the solution’s dashboard monitors the flow of citizens within the city and supports Málaga’s decision-makers in making educated decisions about its transport planning.
The city also houses FIWARE Zone – one of FIWARE’s global iHubs – which provides training sessions, mentorship, and webinars on smart digital solutions for the local SME and start-up scene, as well as facilitating start-ups to connect with research institutions, accelerators, and private and public companies.
Find out more about what is transforming Málaga into a city of the future.
Digital services for the public good
How robust regulation is the key to ensuring smart cities work for their residents
Over the past 20 years, digital transformation has shaped our daily activity beyond recognition. The platform economy has delivered a range of new services for people, from easy home deliveries, to on-your-doorstep mobility options and hassle-free city trips. And today, in the midst of a global pandemic, many of us find we can hold meetings, events and even conduct office jobs from the relative comfort of our own homes.
For cities, meanwhile, digital transformation brings other benefits, such as greater revenues from tourism. In many ways, city administrations are drivers of this transformation: cities power innovation ecosystems, invest in tech start-ups, support digital skills development and provide digitalised public services.
Nonetheless, digital transformation creates many challenges for cities. This is partly because existing legislation was not designed to take the new business activities of the platform economy into account, leaving gaps where current regulations are unable to rein in some of the negative impacts of digital services on public life.
What can cities do to protect local retail against unfair competition from global online retail platforms? How can the right to housing be ensured if short-term rental platforms do not comply with the rules that govern the real estate market? And what can be done to protect the rights of platform workers?
In places where the freedom for digital services does not serve the public interest, current European legislation makes it very difficult for city administrators to take effective measures against globally operating companies.
Matching our online and offline worlds
Cities, as the level of government closest to citizens, are only too keenly aware that digital transformation can create both new opportunities but also new layers of inequalities, unless the policies guiding the process are user-centric and citizen-focused.
Indeed, in a recent joint statement by 22 European cities, city representatives pointed out that cities welcome tourism as an important source of income and employment for many people, but the responsible rental of private homes can only be done if the necessary regulation is in place.
Central to this debate is enabling the flow of data between public authorities and businesses, without which the enforcement of regulations, taxation and health and safety rules cannot be applied.
More precise data – on, for instance, short-term holiday rental (STHR) – would enable city administrations to levy taxes and better serve the interests of residents, who should be their primary concern. Additionally, data can also be used to create better public policy and better services.
For example, the consequences of illegal housing rentals can include reducing the stock of houses intended for residential use, the increase of nuisances (such as noise disturbance) in city districts, and sometimes breaching other areas of public safety such as how many people can stay in one location. With access to the right data, city authorities can start to work with these companies to address these issues.
Yet the status of collaborative economy companies is often ambiguous, given that their evolution has occurred since the EU’s e-Commerce Directive was first introduced, which provides the current grounding for what are considered “information society services”.
Moreover, there is often little incentive for collaborative economy platforms to do anything about illegal activity occurring through their services. With this in mind, we need better ways for cities to flag up illegal activity, as well as placing more responsibility on service providers, such as requiring platform economy businesses to take down illegal goods and services from their sites.
In this endeavour cities are natural allies of European policymakers working towards a more digitalised society which puts people first. Cities are ready and able to work with the European Commission and European Parliament to ensure an effective EU framework that protects and empowers people and businesses, while ensuring data and new technologies are used to deliver better public policy.
Let’s ensure that what is illegal offline is also illegal online.
Eurocities wants to make cities places where everyone can enjoy a good quality of life, is able to move around safely, access quality and inclusive public services and benefit from a healthy environment. We do this by networking almost 200 larger European cities, which together represent some 130 million people across 39 countries, and by gathering evidence of how policy making impacts on people to inspire other cities and EU decision makers.
Connect with us at www.eurocities.eu or by following our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts
By Anna Lisa Boni, Secretary General, Eurocities
The standards that let smart cities stand on their own two feet
Focused on sustainability, air pollution monitoring and open standards, the stories below showcase how the FIWARE Community is benefiting from the freedom and adaptability of open tech smart applications
Cities themselves may survive shocks and stresses, but their citizens and organisations often need a helping hand to get by. There are many paths to the ideal resilient city: dynamic economy models that generate sustainable growth; innovative and collaborative approaches taken by open and transparent government; inclusive and cohesive societies; solid digital infrastructures, and the intelligent use of natural resources. But we clearly have a long way to go before we arrive there.
Before they can create impactful strategies on such fronts, cities need better data and the right skills and manpower, and great freedom to implement smart technologies. To that end, cities need to collaborate with private and non-profit sectors to deliver their digital vision. Partnering up with strong institutional structures is of the essence and non-profits can play a key role in helping cities to get their digital strategy on the right track. The FIWARE Community is one of these entities making it happen. With more than 380 international members and relevant partners behind its mission, the community focuses on driving the development of a sustainable ecosystem around open source, standards-based, innovation-driven technologies on a global scale.
One may wonder why standards are important. Common standards for application programming interfaces (APIs) and data models are at the heart of platforms and digital infrastructures, enabling the interoperability and portability of solutions. In order to successfully make it into the market today, new smart services and solutions must be able to securely communicate with other services and devices, traversing a multitude of infrastructures and systems. This way, solution providers benefit from knowing that their solutions can be connected with other applications or pieces of software – already developed and widely available – or that they can replicate them for multiple customers with low adaptation costs.
Urban sustainability indicators for smart cities
Effective evidence-based action plans are crucial to mitigate climate change, access investment funds and guarantee regulatory compliance
By Andrea Gómez, CMO, and Antonio Jara, CEO of HOPU, Spain
HOPU empowers urban innovation with disruptive technologies such as AI for environmental assessment and IoT devices, to monitor impact, sustainability and the environment. HOPU’s service simplifies available data in a unique indicator that contextualises, models and forecasts the environment to support better informed decision-making, based on cities’ specific characteristics, management team and citizens.
Current use cases include a high range of indicators related to pollen families and levels, pollution sources detection (industry, traffic, etc), the impact of low emission zones (LEZ), compliance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, low urban security zones control, and urban health monitoring in specific areas, such as schools, to inform urban planners about harmful situations for their young population.
A breeze of fresher air
Following the FIWARE open source approach, HOPU integrates datasets from different data sources including water consumption (utilities), air quality, mobility and urban health, to understand and contextualise the effectiveness of every action. HOPU manufactures IoT-based environmental monitoring devices, which allow the monitoring of air pollution, noise and the flow/density of people. The devices measure gases – such as NO, NO2, H2S, SO2, CO, CO2, and O3 – in specific areas and in real-time, detect toxic substances and particulate matter (PM) to identify specific nanoparticles such as dust, pollens, pollutants and viruses.
Thanks to its sophisticated laboratory – which calibrates and certifies every device before selling it – HOPU offers high-quality data-based solutions. The accuracy of the sensor measurements is improved in the laboratory by machine learning techniques, fatigue compensation and reducing the effort of cross-sensitivity. In addition, blockchain is used for continuous assessment of the maintenance to provide data with over a 90 per cent accuracy rate.
HOPU offers a reliable and robust solution that supports the monitoring of environmental emissions, and a preventive detection of anomalies. HOPU engages urban planners and decision-makers in the processes to ensure that deployments are understandable, intuitive and usable, making relevant city-driven solutions available for the entire ecosystem.
With that purpose in mind, HOPU has so far worked with different cities to create services of indicators based on their specific needs. Currently, HOPU is working in more than 30 cities such as La Palma, Spain, on a pollen service for asthmatic and allergic people, and Madrid, Spain, on a flagship project monitoring nanoparticle pollution.
The main value and differentiation are the innovative services to support urban design. For example, in Cartagena, Spain, HOPU offers a service focused on the use of smart spot data on air quality, weather and people flow for an efficient management of green zones. This successful deployment has been recognised by Le Monde and the European Commission. In Helsinki, Finland, HOPU has used AI and visualisation tools to detect and classify the main sources of pollution for data-driven and more efficient decision-making. Discover more about HOPU here.
Getting more from your data through standardized context management with Stellio
To address the many EU Green Deal challenges, we need to continue to do more intelligent analysis, which will lead to the collection of big data sets. This often also stimulates the deployment of IoT for the provision of key data
By Philippe Cousin, President and Founder, and Franck Le Gall, CEO and CTO, EGM, France
We see a growing tendency to collect and accumulate data, with data holders proud to showcase their data sets. However, the bad news is that it will be hard to exploit the true power of data if no emphasis is placed on the following:
• The validity of such data
• Its contextualisation with time and geospatial information
• Its relation to other data sets, through semantic and cross-domain data models, which offer the potential to turn data into a powerful asset
Driving the materialisation of global, open standards, based on open source
It was ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute and a strategic partner of FIWARE, that once stated “data without context are meaningless”, and we at EGM could not agree more. To empower data owners, EGM, in line with the FIWARE open source model, has developed an intelligent and context-aware data broker, Stellio. The product is based on the context information management standard NGSI-LD as specified within the Industry Specification Group (ISG CIM).
The NGSI-LD standard provides a cross-domain data model built upon semantic web (linked data) principles as well as a query-subscribe API allowing different services to dynamically exchange contextualised information. It supports centralised, federated, and distributed architecture to fit any deployment plan within or across organisations.
Every sensor measurement, every entry in a database, every tweet sent, and every video viewed has its own context. Taken out of context, each piece of information is almost useless. And software or agents looking for useful information may only find it if the context is available – that is, published with the data. A contextual information management system (CIM) serves as a clearing house for publishing, discovering, monitoring and maintaining data, according to contexts relevant to intelligent applications.
The ISG CIM specifies open standards for the contextual information management layer that accesses and updates information from different sources (IoT networks, information systems and so on), thus making it possible to implement contextual behaviour for intelligent applications and extend its interoperability to provide openness and avoid vendor lock-in to users.
NGSI-LD: an industrial standard to ensure large-scale sustainability and interoperability
Recent months have witnessed a rapid increase in interest from the global community to adopt the NGSI-LD specification, which is the evolution of the NGSI context API at the center of FIWARE’s open source platform. The Stellio broker is under active deployment and use by several partners and customers. Its latest deployments revolve around optimising water consumption in sport field irrigation, reducing food waste within connected school canteens, optimising facilities' energy management, and so on. Next steps are underway within the projects aqua3S and Fiware4Water to build digital twins of water facilities (i.e. water network), dynamically connected within the NGSI-LD infrastructure.
