Strategies to guarantee the prosperity of urban innovation ventures known as smart cities
In the heart of England, Oxford is leading the charge towards a connected future, demonstrating how a smart city can be developed through a unique blend of city-led initiatives and citizen-driven projects.
The city's smart city journey began with the Smart Oxford Challenge, a one-day event that brought together 13 teams to develop connected products and digital services for urban issues. The Challenge highlighted the need for smart city concepts to secure funding from sources beyond council budgets, such as crowdfunding or corporate sponsorship.
The teams were given access to business, technical, and marketing experts to accelerate their plans and present their projects to city officials and experts for feedback. The teams with a clear plan on how to act upon collected data had the strongest overall concepts during the Challenge event.
However, the IoT is currently locked in machine-to-machine standards and platform silos, making interoperability a challenge. To overcome this, the IoT should aim for full interoperability between systems, and reusing existing internet and web standards can help achieve this. Many participants in the Challenge were using proprietary IoT platforms that struggled to interoperate at anything below a cloud data API level.
To create a truly connected smart city, there are five key considerations. These include integrating comprehensive sensor networks and encouraging citizen participation to gather real-time data; ensuring robust connectivity to link devices, services, and stakeholders; and developing centralized digital platforms to manage and analyze data for decision-making and service delivery. Governance, sustainability, inclusivity, and collaboration among government, private sector, universities, and citizens are also crucial to foster innovation and equitable benefits.
Oxford is leveraging its existing commitments to sustainability, public transport, and smart planning by enhancing pedestrian zones, cycling infrastructure, and low-carbon initiatives already underway. The city is also deploying integrated sensor networks and connectivity systems, modeled on examples in other UK cities. For instance, Manchester’s Triangulum Project uses cloud-based energy management to reduce carbon emissions, and Hull’s Smart City OS centralizes data from multiple council systems to optimize services.
Promoting citizen involvement and transparency is another key aspect. This is being achieved by establishing forums or assemblies for input on transport, environmental policies, and urban development, as seen in Oxfordshire’s citizen assemblies influencing transport policy.
The city is also applying smart growth principles to create compact, walkable neighborhoods with mixed-use development, reducing reliance on cars and supporting diverse housing and services within accessible distances.
Developing partnerships across sectors involving universities, technology firms, local government, and citizens is also crucial. This collaboration will help share data, test innovations, and co-develop solutions that fit Oxford’s unique social and cultural context.
Emphasizing sustainability and climate resilience is another important factor. This is being achieved by incorporating nature-based solutions alongside digital infrastructure to adapt to climate impacts and enhance urban quality of life.
Russell Haworth, CEO of Nominet, emphasized the importance of thinking strategically about the data collected in smart cities. Local authorities should make data sharing requirements part of their procurement and development/planning permission procedures. Smart cities should prioritize using data from both public and private sectors to address real problems and not just collect or analyze data for its own sake.
If these ideas work in Oxford, they have the potential to work anywhere. Spending on IoT hardware will exceed $2.5 million per minute throughout 2016. The Oxford Flood Network utilizes DNS, MQTT, and HTTP, along with web best practices. Almost every city will have an established history and its own set of distinct issues. For example, Oxford has a medieval layout, a city centre of narrow streets, protected old stone buildings, and faces unique problems such as congestion, increased demand for housing, and the risk of flooding.
In summary, Oxford can effectively implement smart city solutions by building on its sustainability focus, engaging citizens deeply, investing in scalable digital infrastructure, adopting smart growth urban design, and fostering multi-sector collaboration. Examples from Manchester, Hull, and Glasgow provide tested reference models of digital platforms and IoT hubs that Oxford can adapt to its needs.
Technology plays a vital role in the development of a smart city, as demonstrated by the Smart Oxford Challenge, where teams used technology to create connected products and digital services for urban issues. Data-and-cloud-computing technologies are essential for managing and analyzing the vast amounts of real-time data collected by comprehensive sensor networks in a smart city. To ensure a truly connected smart city, there should be full interoperability between systems, leveraging existing internet and web standards.
