<p>A partnership between Living Labs Global,CityMart.com and The Climate Group will support cities in answering these questions on how new technologies can be used effectively to meet climate, urban service, social and economic objectives. The initiative will provide a concrete platform – CityMart.com - for linking cities with solutions available in the global market.</p>
As urbanization trends continue, cities are dealing with complex challenges. At the same time, citizens have a profusion of tools - such as mobile phones, Internet access - to help them live better lives. At the intersection of these are opportunities both for cities and citizens. The application of new ‘smart solutions’ helps complex systems become more efficient, increasing connectivity and feedback, and providing powerful new decision-making tools.
Cities have the most to gain: they are dependent upon infrastructure that is of high complexity and is facing increasing pressures, and they are responsible for over 70% of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions through transportation, buildings and other city services. It is therefore critical that city leaders understand the opportunities available, and know where these services provide value for the city in delivering policy outcomes related to economic development, job growth, environmental impact, social inclusion and quality of life.
Over the next decade, cities across the world are expected to invest massively in new high technology infrastructures. These infrastructures promise to make cities more productive, more efficient, and thereby more sustainable, through the implementation of smart solutions, thereby becoming smart cities. This means cities are faced with a considerable challenge in becoming agile global procurers and regulators of technology on a large scale, raising several questions for city management. A partnership between Living Labs Global and The Climate Group will support cities in answering these questions.
The initiative will support cities in creating strategies around the use of IT and telecoms to enable city services, and provide a concrete platform - CityMart.com - for linking cities with solution providers in an intelligent marketplace. City governments are necessary catalysts for innovation in the clean, smart revolution.
Agile Cities will be providing more access to data and supporting the private sector to unleash innovation. CityMart.com was founded out of the experience that the marketplace for city solutions was not transparent and intelligent enough to facilitate the diffusion of innovative products and services between cities. With a failing market, entrepreneurship and innovation fail also.
Cities and their citizens will have an overall gain by delivering better services, at lower cost and understanding the impact of technologies on accessibility, climate change and other policy objectives through the use of shared evaluation methodologies, piloting, and data and experiences collected in other markets.
Marketing costs for businesses are expected to fall by up to 90% which could be carried over into more competitive solution pricing.
Calendar
| Date | Duration | Phase / action |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 2012 | 3 months | Consultation of participating cities: questionnaire |
| May 2012 | 12 months | Briefing seminars |
| Jan 2012 | 24 months | Creation and management of a Beta user Group |
| Jan 2012 | 24 months | Implementation of the new functionality |
| February 2012 | 12 months | Presentation of brief information about innovation pilots |
| May 2012 | 18 months | Workgroup for evaluation processes |
| Nov 2013 | 1 week | Dissemination of results at Metropolis Annual Meeting |
The initiative will help cities to:
- Understand the value of a smart city to their specific local challenges Understand the pathways to becoming smart, and the ‘diffusion curves’ of the solutions they adopt
- Understand the approach for calculating value at each stage of the curve (initiative level, departmental level, cross-department or city level
- Gain access to an approach for how to prioritize projects and actions
- Understand how to build market intelligence and interact with solution providers without contradicting procurement guidelines
- Participate in developing an important shared methodology and standard on how cities communicate challenges, evaluate solutions, launch pilot implementations, interact with solution providers and document their engagement
- Critically influence the development of CityMart, a free online tool to support cities in finding, evaluating and interacting with solution providers from around the world from challenge to pilot and pre-procurement.
Agile Cities seeks to develop an open standard, inviting Metropolis Members and outside cities and stakeholders to create the standards on which a new, intelligent marketplace for cities will operate. Such a standard will incorporate not just best practices and share these, but will also provide the tools to manage the continual improvement by participating cities and companies alike.
Agile Cities will promote workshops and consultations throughout the process which will be open to city and business participation. Further, the online marketplace at CityMart.com serves as a publicly accessible catalogue in which also citizen initiatives, the media and other stakeholders can browse to collect insights into services available around the world.