Our contribution from Barcelona is going to be short but hopefully informative. We focus mainly on the smart city data platform that we are developing, and the neighbourhood consultations we are carrying out.
Action area 1: Low-Energy Districts
Converting data: urban ontology for a smart city
City leaders in Barcelona understand the city as something dynamic and changing; a network of networks, as illustrated in their conceptual model of the smart city in Barcelona, which is broken down into three layers: People/ Information/ City Structure.
In order to systematically describe all the elements in a Smart City in terms of all stakeholders, activities, relationships, outcomes etc. Barcelona is working to develop a City Information Model for city ontology that could be used across all city systems and by all city stakeholders.
Currently, Barcelona has an open data portal, OpenData BCN30, which opens up city data sets to the public and has three main aims:
1. To increase the transparency of the City Council
2. To universalise data access
3. To promote innovation and the economic fabric
The GrowSmarter-BCN platform (GS-BCN in short) will allow the consolidation, aggregation and use of existing and new sensor data. Application developed by different use cases and measures will run on top of this platform to monitor and control the performance of lighting, environment, energy consumption, etc.
Like in Cologne, the idea behind this model is to enable data to be easily shared city wide and made available with consistent Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that developers could develop apps that straddle different city systems and so that services (such as payment systems, registration systems, management systems) could be reused across different city systems. It would also enable digital services that are developed for one city to be much more easily be used by another city.
Sustainable Urban Mobility
Barcelona is an extremely compact city, which offers an advantage for sustainability. However, it leads to serious challenges of noise, traffic congestion and pollution. We are working currently together with stakeholders who use the roads on a daily basis, not only citizens but taxi drivers and logistics vehicles to find the best solution for making Barcelona a cleaner, healthier city to live in.
Barcelona: building energy self-sufficiency
Barcelona is the first European city to stipulate that all buildings undergoing major refurbishment had to use solar energy to supply 60% of their running hot water requirements.
As part of our strategy to promote energy self-sufficiency Barcelona aims to decrease demand and consumption, minimise losses by optimising the infrastructures. At the moment we are undergoing a citizen consultation and as soon as we have some more updates we will share this with you.
