Co-Creating the Cities of the Future

• Main Authors: Verónica Gutiérrez, Evangelos Theodoridis, Georgios Mylonas, Fengrui Shi, Usman Adeel, Luis Diez, Dimitrios Amaxilatis, Johnny Choque, Guillem Camprodom, Julie McCann, Luis Muñoz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2016-11-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: co-creation; smart cities; IoT; platform; tools; experimentation; social innovation; OrganiCity; data observatory; opportunistic communications
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/11/1971

In recent years, the evolution of urban environments, jointly with the progress of the Information and Communication sector, have enabled the rapid adoption of new solutions that contribute to the growth in popularity of Smart Cities. Currently, the majority of the world population lives in cities encouraging different stakeholders within these innovative ecosystems to seek new solutions guaranteeing the sustainability and efficiency of such complex environments. In this work, it is discussed how the experimentation with IoT technologies and other data sources form the cities can be utilized to co-create in the OrganiCity project, where key actors like citizens, researchers and other stakeholders shape smart city services and applications in a collaborative fashion. Furthermore, a novel architecture is proposed that enables this organic growth of the future cities, facilitating the experimentation that tailors the adoption of new technologies and services for a better quality of life, as well as agile and dynamic mechanisms for managing cities. In this work, the different components and enablers of the OrganiCity platform are presented and discussed in detail and include, among others, a portal to manage the experiment life cycle, an Urban Data Observatory to explore data assets, and an annotations component to indicate quality of data, with a particular focus on the city-scale opportunistic data collection service operating as an alternative to traditional communications.