ICT as a Utility

Free public Wi-Fi at Pompidou center in Paris to cover the need for connectivity of the citizens. Image by Dave Jimison at flickr

Among the basic services that any municipality must provide to its citizens there are the provision of drinking water and sewage, the street lighting and electricity, the waste management or the guarantee for mobility.

The irruption of ICT technologies about 20 years ago gave people immediate access to information and more recently, thanks to wireless data transmission technologies, ubiquitous access to it. Nowadays ICT technologies have reach a level of maturity that makes of them another utility, an essential, basic service today we could not give up.

Smart City Expo World Congress 2016. Cities for Citizens

© Fira de Barcelona, 2016

A new edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress, one of the most important international events for the smart cities industry, will open its doors in Barcelona in one month. Another three side events, dedicated to the promotion of sustainability and the efficient management of resources in urban areas, will take place in this edition: the Circular Economy European Summit, the iwater and the European Utility Week.

The slogan for this year’s edition is short, but it says lots of things. Cities for citizens or, equivalently, all the actions carried out in the 21st century city

The game of the Smart City

Citizen engagement as a game, an excellent way to encourage an inclusive city. Image by cea+ at flickr

A key factor to the success of the process of transformation of the 21st century urban spaces is to get the involvement of the whole citizens in it. No one better than the citizens themselves know their needs, their concerns and the way they would like to enjoy their city. So it is essential to take them into account to develop initiatives to adopt the concept of smart city.

An image to the concept of smart city

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, in fact any idea, no matter how complex it is, can be easily conveyed with just a single image. Surely anyone of us did visual schemes in our student days to learn the concepts of any subject. Images go beyond languages, for instance, a red octagon on a street or road would make us stop immediately, regardless the text written into it. There are even commercial brands that exploit the power of images and replace their trademark name by their logo, which becomes a worldwide recognized symbol which identifies them universally.

The huge quantity of concepts involved in the smart city can result in a mesh. Image generated at WorldClouds.com

In this post I would like to share with you an image for the concept of smart city, my own vision based on the knowledge I have gained on this field, and which has allowed me to order in certain way the thematic complexity behind the construction and management of the 21st century city.

Weaving the smart city

In the same way we associate pyramidal buildings to ancient cultures as the Egyptian, the Mayan or the Mesopotamian, in the 21st century city we associate the hierarchical and pyramidal organizational structures to something very old and outdated, although they belong to a more recent past.

As fishermen do, cities are weaving their networks. Photo by Xoan Sampaiño at flickr

The widespread use of the new communication technologies has brought a change in relationships that favours and boosts more collaborative and transverse ways of working,

The 21st century city

The concentration of population in urban areas is a worldwide phenomenon that is currently growing. That’s the reason why the 21st century cities are characterized by being more efficient and more effective in their relationship with their citizens as well as in the use they do of those resources they have and those they manage, furthermore they are also characterized by their increasing awareness about environmental issues and their implication to do their bit to solve them.