A Smart City integrates the physical, the digital and its greatest resource – the citizens, in order to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for all. A Smart City is first and foremost a city that understands its needs and addresses those in an intelligent manner, adopting a „system of systems” view to adapt to changes, either good or bad: innovative solutions which shape the future of how we will live, work and interact together, but also mechanisms for long-term resilience.
On the path to „becoming Smart”, cities have a lot of key ingredients to consider: Leadership, Vision, Data, Participation, Communication, Innovation and Standards. Standards are the building blocks which support the different systems coming together, creating a common understanding, shared values and language, confidence in Smart solutions, efficiency, data protection and privacy, to name but a few. They also help cities communicate their vision better to investors and citizens alike, assisting the process of securing funding: an increasingly challenging aspect in the global competition.
A great number of ICT based solutions have been developed to contribute to the needs of a city, but because several different techniques and formats are used, they are difficult to re-use in other cities or with other applications. Therefore, it is crucial to specify a standardized integrated framework which can be used to build Smart City Solutions more scalable, replicable and efficient.
Wake up your city with a standard: ESPRESSO!
ESPRESSO will develop this smart city framework by identifying relevant open standards, technologies and information models, analyzing potential gaps and overlaps among existing standards as well as providing architecture, guidelines and roadmaps. ESPRESSO will adopt a bottom-up approach engaging a wide and interdisciplinary network of cities, industries, organizations and academic partners.
The existence of different solutions highlights the importance for European cities of adopting a systemic approach to standardization. Different systems will integrate by means of existing open standards enabling the scaling up of solutions and preventing the vendor lock-in with real economic benefits.
ESPRESSO at a glance
During its two-year implementation period, ESPRESSO will pursue a very ambitious path summarized below:
URBASOFIA: Experts working under ISOCARP
Urbasofia experts work in collaboration with the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP), leading the activities of this organization within the project: Development of the Smart City concept, Use Case creation, working with cities and the Smart City Stakeholder Network, creating KPI packages for Smart City benchmarking and self-assessment.
We have been deeply involved in creating the two-way bridge between SDOs and Smart City industry on one hand, and the cities on the other. Our team has so far held several workshops and webinars on the topics of:
- Smart Cities: Barriers and opportunities;
- Roadmaps for SC Standardization
- Key performance indicators for SC assessment and certification.
ESPRESSO Workshop on Smart Cities in Bucharest, 21 April 2016
ESPRESSO Workshop in Rotterdam, 24 May 2016
Want to get involved? Join our SmaCStak!
In the scope of pooling together efforts and resources for an EU-wide network of Smart City stakeholders, we are holding an ongoing registration for the SmaCStak: Smart City Stakeholder Network of ESPRESSO. Registration is easy and provides you with access to our webinars, news, events and deliverables.
REGISTER HERE
