The city of Stockholm has been chosen as the Smart City of 2019 at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona.
Stockholm’s Smart and connected city – Inclusive, sustainable and thriving initiative has been key for the jury’s decision to name the Swedish capital as Smart city of 2019. Its strategy to create a smart and connected city, via innovation, openness and connectivity to provide Stockholmers the highest quality of life and the best environment for business rose above the other finalists.
At city level, Stockholm is making efforts for years in this way implementing a strategy, developed together with the Stockholmers, focused on smart and integrated solutions in a number of areas such as low energy districts, integrated infrastructure and sustainable urban mobility.
The City of Stockholm has also been featured recently as a best practice in ArcInsight Partners’ new whitepaper – THE MAKING OF INTELLIGENT DIGITAL CITIES.
Technologies such as digital twins allow processes that city planners can leverage for a fast, easy, and visual way to successfully communicate, promote, and share city projects in an interactive way to gain buy-in from residents and attract investors. This sharing includes delivering digital experiences (mixed reality and wearables), or visualization and crowdsourcing through devices such as web, mobile, touchscreens, and digital billboards. This information enhances the city’s ability to deliver on its promise of greater transparency, while communicating its vision for mobility and other infrastructure improvements.
Transparency and openness are two key priorities of Stockholm’s urban planning approach. The city used 3D visualization to engage inhabitants in the planning process from the beginning. A photorealistic 3D model of the metropolitan area, which spanned about 500 square kilometers, was created with Bentley Systems’ ContextCapture for use as an urban planning visualization canvas. OpenCities Planner from the same vendor serves as the visualization and dialogue platform for online, mobile, and showrooms – spreading 3D project visualizations to both the residents of Stockholm and project stakeholders. OpenCities Planner is also used for promotion at real estate events and exhibition to inform about the development projects in Stockholm.
The City of Gothenburg (ranked second among a listing of smart cities in 2019) considers sustainability, long-term urban planning, and accessible government data open to all as key motivators of its urban development goals. The city also used ContextCapture for creating a 3D model, and used OpenCities Planner for its primary simulation and dialogue platform as it engaged a wide range of citizen stakeholders with ages ranging from 18 to 78, much more effectively than traditional survey methods.
The Jury for the Smart City of 2019 Awards, comprised of representatives from the Barcelona City Council, the UITP International Association of Public Transport, UN-Habitat and the World Bank. The Smart City Expo World Congress which hosts the awards has considered that in a context in which Climate change continues to present a growing and significant global challenge to humanity and the biosphere in the 21st century, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development but also Paris Agreement have been created to tackle these issues.
HEXAGON
An interesting award winner in another category, Urban Environment, was Hexagon with built a solution Connecting satellite and operational data to trigger predictive maintenance for utilities. The project addressed the need to reduce the cost of sewer system maintenance by preventing the breakdown of sewer pipes caused by subsidence or ground instability. Using satellite monitoring combined with operational data it improved the effectiveness of inspections by 40% and can now predict future problems. ArcInsight Partners has covered Hexagon’s Preventive Maintenance capabilities in an earlier report, titled ” How Pervasive Digital Twins Are Extending Enterprise Intelligence. “
Hexagon leveraged continuous data acquisitions made by the Sentinel satellites of Copernicus, to highlight areas that present instabilities that can be either the cause or the consequence of problems underground, monitoring over 6000 km of pipelines in an area of 3,500 square kilometres.
Using Hexagon technology the utility HERA built Rheticus® Network Alert, a Smart M.App web application that combines the results of time series InSAR analysis with the sewage or water network graph. Thanks to sophisticated data fusion algorithms and geocoding, Network Alert returns an always-updated list of those features of the network that may present problems. This way it have simplified the use of complex information such as that derived from satellite radar, providing actionable knowledge to HERA. The analytics outputs are now being used to address field inspections in order of priority, instead of responding to a problem or following the traditional planning.
Most recently, HERA has pushed the envelope beyond integrated data visualization. To further improve the reliability of the information provided each month by Rheticus® Network Alert, it is now combining M.App Enterprise analytics derived from the SAR analysis with many other data sources: citizens’ reports, traffic flows, characteristics of the network and other ancillary data. This way, the identification of the sections at risk becomes even more precise, and that enables the preventive maintenance of the sewage network. With this approach, the Hexagon solution helped HERA Group identify as many as 13 critical situations out of a total of 23 inspections, and again, we have increased monitoring effectiveness by 40%.
Among Winners In Other Categories Were The Following Outstanding Participants.
In the Innovative Idea category, the winner is the Modular, versatile, self-supporting, high efficiency e-mobility lorry platform for urban services developed by FCC Environment in Barcelona (Spain). The project consists in the design of a self-supporting modular lorry chassis with permanent electric traction, plug-in function, high-power batteries and advanced low entry cab that is suitable to all urban service purposes, economic due to its industrial development and applied on side-loading waste collection bodywork.
IoT-Based Yingtan: The World’s First 5G-Powered Digital Twin City by the Government of Yingtan (China) won the Digital Transformation project. Yingtan is piloting IoT and envisions an “IoT-based, Smart Yingtan.” The initiative is is building the world’s first 5G all-domain digital twin city, and uses 5G+NB-IoT networks, digital foundation for cities, high-precision city information models, and an AI-powered IoT brain to develop new applications.
The Government of Buenos Aires (Argentina) received the Inclusive and Sharing Cities award for its Tackling informality: social and urban integration in Barrio 31 initiative that analyzes what policy should be put forward to tackle informal settlements. For years, the only answer involved evictions and social housing in the outskirts. The project is changing that reality in Barrio 31 and is finding new ways to integrate the neighborhood to the formal city.
The Governance and Finance award has gone to the Los Angeles Data Science Federation launched by the City of Los Angeles – Information Technology Agency. The Data Science Federation is a collaborative research partnership between the City of Los Angeles and 18 Los Angeles area colleges and universities. This federation has produced over 40 projects that have benefitted LA’s residents as departments and elected officials find valuable insight on how to improve City operations, services, and policies while university students and professors benefit from working on real-world data challenges with access to real-world datasets and data sources.
The Mobility award has gone to the System of Urban Cable Cars of La Paz and El Alto by the State Cable Transportation Company Mi Teleférico in La Paz (Bolivia). This metropolitan integration network was the first main public transport network of a city made up of cable cars. It comprises 10 operational lines, 31.6 km and 37 stations, being the largest urban cable car system in the world and has been used since its opening by more than 242 million users.