AVEIRO STEAM CITY LIVING LAB, THE CITY-AS-A-PLATFORM

In a 2015 post published on Techcrunch, a very famous US blog that deals with information technology, the authors draw a strange parallelism: they point out that the companies that have grown fastest in the last 10 years are companies that perform as platforms; therefore they ask the readers: can this trend also be borrowed for cities? Can cities be technologically disrupted?

According to the authors the answer is definitely yes: cities, to evolve, must be viewed as platforms, with population encouraged to utilize technology to creatively disrupt and redefine core functionalities. Every digitally enabled citizen living in a city is a hub of real-time data: let’s think of the city as possessing its own complex but penetrable API!They invite the readers to recognize that, like its physical architecture, city’s digital foundations can be augmented and sustainable solutions can be built from the data we collectively produce.
The “concept” of the living labs partially integrates this vision and enriches it with additional components. According to European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) which is the international federation of benchmarked Living Labs in Europe and worldwide, a Living Lab is an “open innovation ecosystem based on a systematic user co-creation approach that integrates public and private research and innovation activities in communities, placing citizens at the centre of innovation.”  By combining creative thinking with scientific rigour, living labs can be seen as open platforms, sourcing and prototyping ideas with people of different backgrounds, combining the expertise within the lab with the real world knowledge.

A couple of years ago the Guardian even declared the need, no longer to be deferred, for cities to become active as Living Labs, as places where designers, scientists, companies and customers collaborate to investigate, make and test ideas with the communities that live in them. Local people should be at the heart of development. The number and thematic areas of Living Labs have been steadily growing since the launch of ENoLL about ten years ago and currently there are 170 official recognised Living Labs across the world running projects.

The majority of Living Labs have tackled one of the following three goals:

1. Mobility à enabling and improving mobility as a service, encouraging more non-motorized transport
2. Environment and well-being à mitigating climate change impacts, reducing noise and air pollution
3. Citizen engagement à increasing citizen engagement in decision making and increasing a greater level of diversity in political engagement.

Examples of domains, where solutions were tested and developed, include:

• High tech, hyper local, personalized wayfinding based on crowding and traffic data
• Autonomous delivery
• Interactive apps
• Waste collection
• Smart urban furniture.

Living Labs can be used for a diverse range of purposes and are not limited to the above, including designing user-friendly apartments, reducing food spoilage, creating smart cycling plans, reorganizing learning spaces to support new styles of teaching, reducing congestion on sidewalks, delivering better services to deaf and blind populations and discouraging radicalism among young people.

The city of Aveiro is committed to developing a technological urban centre of reference at European level, by promoting the development of innovative solutions, through the creation of the first Living Lab of the city, placed in the city centre.

The Aveiro Steam City’s Digital Urban Platform is the services’ enabler core of the City that collects, analyses and combines data from multiple sources to deliver real-time high added-value information for quick decision-making at strategic, tactical and operational levels. The platform services are offered in a virtualized, elastic and secure cloud environment, which makes it particularly suitable to be used by other cities or different activity sectors such as Smart Cities, Industry 4.0 or Mobility, just to mention a few. By relying on a “as a service” model, the platform services can be easily replicated, fostering the creation of agile and open digital services for citizens and the development of city’s innovation ecosystem.

The urban platform, currently under development, will allow the reception, treatment and analysis of data and the sharing of information from various sources (sensors, integrable databases, and others), providing analytical and predictive services for IoT applications and vertical applications for the city. Technical support will also be provided to Living Lab users, allowing them to take full advantage of the potential of the infrastructure, urban platform services and available data.

Besides the value arising from the individual exploitation of platform’s analytic capabilities, the additional value created by the digital urban platform directly depends on the number of entities that are willing to locate and share its data with the other public or private users of the platform. The more the data available in the platform the richer the information one can generate to support a business decision-making or investigating a new business process or technological solution. Experts from Altice Lab believe that attracting and involving new “operators” to this ecosystem will highly depend on the deployment of a well-established set of use cases that enlighten the advantages of the concept behind the platform and a clear and open strategy of information sharing, focused on the positive impact in the community – municipality, local industries and commerce, academia, city visitors and citizens.

The urban platform is composed of an integration, aggregation and processing component of data from various information sources, such as:

• Electrical energy consumption
• Statistics and performance of the experimental communications network
• Garbage collection
• Environmental sensors
• Vehicular units
• Mobility
• Municipal activity and performance according to ISO 37120 standard
• Gas and water consumption

The data integration component also has the ability to manage APIs, allowing the creation of APIs for dissemination of specific information datasets according to the needs of each project or experimental activity. The urban platform also includes a data visualization and exploration component, designated as a city governance centre. This component provides access to various sources of information, in tabular, graphic and geographic format, allowing an analysis and correlation of data. Access to this data access interface can be made available for experimental projects in the territory.

It’s interesting to make a few comparisons with some very significant European running living labs:

Copenhagen Street Lab (https://cphsolutionslab.dk/en/what-we-do/labs/street-lab) is a laboratory in the city centre where it’s possible to test new solutions under real urban conditions. The objective is to test the solutions for their potential and limitations, so to assess what can be scaled to larger areas of the city. Therefore, Street Lab is a vital source of knowledge about the solutions that work, thus making it possible be one step ahead of city operations and services for Copenhageners.

Since Copenhagen Municipality established the Street Lab test area in 2016, they have tested solutions in areas such as smart parking, care of urban nature, waste management and measurement of air quality. Street Lab was developed in a public-private partnership between Cisco, TDC, Citelum and Copenhagen Solutions Lab.

Copenhagen street lab is very interesting, not only because of the effectiveness of the experiment, but also because of the contractual framework they were able to set. The agreement with private operators is framed through a Public Private Innovation Partnership (art.14 public procurement Directive).

The PPI project is divided into 6 phases:

1. 1. Design of the basic smart city infrastructure
   2. Contruction of the basic smart city infrastructure
   3. Trial period
   4. Evaluation of infrastructure and use cases
   5. Operation and mainainance of the basic smart city infrastructure
   6. Develop, implement and test new use cases.

This contractual framework was very much appreciated by policy makers during the deployment of interventions because it let them be able to develop, evaluate and correct the quality of the process through a methodology similar to the “startup lean approach”, so by small adjustment, without binding them with long term contracts with a number of fixed private partners.

This can be of inspiration also for Aveiro’s policy makers, thinking in advance about the future of the experimentations, in case the Municipality would like to procure some of the most successful services that with arise from the Living Lab public call.

Another interesting model to consider as food for thoughts is the one developed in the city of Amsterdam.

Amsterdam has the greatest broadband connectivity and second- highest Internet connection density in the world. The first living lab was launched in 2015 and now the City has over 40 Living Labs https://www.ams-institute.org/how-we-work/living-labs/

Corporate partners include Cisco, IBM, JCDecaux, Intel and hundreds of experiments, tests, pilots are taking place throughout the urban space. The city provides open access to data to developers to test next generation interactive mobile applications that then also generate open data, creating new value chains across industries. The local government also provides funding and approvals for experiments throughout city; extra support is also provided by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

The vision that inspires the civil servants is the one of an innovation playground where consumers, knowledge institutions, and companies work in close cooperation to develop new products and services and foundational to process is community engagement. The private sector plays an important role: large companies provide additional support (financial and in-kind) to smaller companies developing prototypes. This model can lead to further reflection for the case of Aveiro, once the Living lab will expand and – hopefully – scaled.