The Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) was born on March 2015 as an initiative to adopt FIWARE common standards in a way to develop an open smart city market based on the needs of cities and communities. That is, to develop an ecosystem in which we can improve citizen-centred sustainable solutions. The Open & Agile Smart Cities has been currently signed by 75 cities from 15 countries in Europe, Latin American and Asia-Pacific.

The goal of this important agreement is promoting the use of open standards and principles, which enable the development of smart city applications and solutions that are applicable to other cities, that is, interoperable systems and also it has a social commitment. All this through a set of tools and devices that generate data about the city and bring improvements to citizens’ daily lives.

How can the citizens use correctly this project? The main idea is to create a comment-based system that allows city hall personnel to interact and exchange information directly with citizens. They are moving from old models where citizens filled in long applications forms to a transparency model where they can see the progress in a real and authentic way.

Fotografía tomada de https://www.districtoffuture.eu/

More than 70 cities are participant in this iniciative

The Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) deal will allow cities to share their open data so that startups can develop apps and tools that benefit all citizens. Moreover, these systems will be shared between cities; Fiware will also give startups and app developers in these cities access to a global market for smart city services. Therefore, cities compete with each other, but also they need each other to be able to learn from the good ideas when somebody finds a good strategy in a city.

This Open & Agile Smart Cities initiative was launched, as we said, less than a year ago and at the very beginning it had the participation of 31 cities among Sevilla, Malaga, Santander and Valencia. At present,  the number of cities reaches 75 making anticipate that this project will become in a very concrete way to understand a city in the future.

Fotografía tomada de https://www.euengage.eu

One of the projects involved the development of this new business in an urban scale is h2020 through two distinct parts:

– Smart Cities and Communities based on demonstrating sustainable, cost-effective and replicable district-scale solutions at the intersection of energy, transport enabled by ICT. They should integrate smart homes, energy efficiency measures, smart grids, energy storage, electric vehicles and smart charging infrastructures, using latest generation ICT platforms (and infrastructure) based on open specifications.

– Sustainable cities though Nature-based solutions: focusses on providing evidence that re-naturing of cities through the deployment of innovative, locally adapted, systemic solutions – that are inspired and supported by nature – can be a cost-effective and economically viable way to make cities more sustainable, resilient, greener, and healthier.

For any more information about these projects it can be found at these websites:

• https://www.oascities.org/open-and-agile-smart-cities/
• https://ec.europa.eu/research/index.cfm