What is a Smart City?

Today, not only major cities are facing a multitude of new challenges, but also smaller communities and their economic infrastructures have to deal with similar problems. As a consequence, future development of our societies must focus more on material factors such as environmental protection and climate change, but also on social aspects such as inclusiveness, diversity and the participation of all stakeholders to communities’ lives.

From a business perspective, in parallel to these societal phenomena, local economies are also busy dealing with the adoption and validation of innovative technologies and methods in order to make processes, such as the production or logistics of goods, as climate neutral as possible. The private as well as the public sector must deal with these and other challenges in order to create attractive places to live.

Digitalisation can help to address many of these challenges. Many of these new requirements can already be solved by developing a Smart City, using technological progress to enable efficient urban planning and to establish sustainable, citizen-oriented services.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation has published an apt definition of a Smart City:

“Smart City” is the term used to describe the goal of a new integrated urban development that combines current technical and social innovations”.

A Smart City is built on connecting people and things

Following the vision of creating a safe, liveable and lovable living space, urban neighbourhoods offer a good opportunity to implement and validate new ideas and innovative concepts. For instance, by using data and services platforms, information from existing applications or data portals can be used to develop new digital services.

Designed as an open participatory platform, new citizen-oriented services can be developed ensuring a higher level of acceptance among those involved. We believe that this development approach can help addressing the challenges of the coming years.

Together we can build the city of the future

The IDEASFORUM community helps to assess and map what society may need in the future and identify new methods, technologies and digital business models. Together with our experts we focus on enhancing the benefits of future digital services for our communities.

From a technological perspective, our members can offer the playground for sustainable innovation management in our open Real Laboratories and advise you on the possibilities of digitalisation. By leveraging on the open participation of our members, IDEASFORUM can offer access to platforms based on established open source software solutions, making it possible to develop new digital services across all fields of activity and to jointly prototype and validate initial ideas and test existing Smart City concepts.