Urban data concepts and frameworks being developed and implemented in European cities to enable urban data ecosystems.
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Insights
1/ Cities are a key data generator of our times
Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez of MIT Senseable City Lab provide an excellent discussion of cities as data generators and opportunities therein, implications in light of global urbanization and conclude the challenge is finding the necessary balance between data-driven approaches with socially critical views.
2/ The European Union has been paying increasing attention to supporting the data driven economy and creating models for technology to enable human centered, sustainable cities.
The European Data Strategy aims to create a single market for data that will ensure Europe’s competitiveness, empower businesses and the public sector through data utilisation whilst maintaining human centric values and rights. In terms of urban digitisation, the EIP SCC Smart Cities Marketplace is the umbrella platform covering the European Commission’s main activities on smart cities. Soon the Smart Cities Information System (SCIS) platform will also merge into the Marketplace.
3/ With suitable data infrastructure, cities can facilitate urban data ecosystems.
Data infrastructure in this sense refers to physical, digital, organisational and governance structures and processes needed for the management of data. For public administrations it includes the connectivity, data generating assets, data operating systems and platforms. Pioneering work on data infrastructures for smart cities was published in 2015 by computer scientist Larissa Suzuki for her PhD thesis and implemented in many EU cities.
4/ For cities, urban data ecosystems can pool and utilize data from various sources to develop applications that improve the efficiency of city services, public infrastructure and resources, reduce pollution and congestion, lower costs through risk prediction as well as support innovations in the broader economy.
Urban data ecosystems are systems within wider systems of our digitised world. They cannot thrive in isolation from simultaneously developing data sources, flows, and networks, of other urban agglomerations or data spheres at the national or global level. The EU is currently building a number of data spaces to promote and shape mutually beneficial data spaces in realms including health, Green Deal, mobility and industrial data spaces, as identified in the Appendix to the Communication ‘A strategy for data’ (starting at page 26).
The concept of the urban data space, which builds upon the EU data strategy’s data spaces, encompasses the characteristics of what I call a ‘urban data ecosystem’:
“The Urban Data Space includes all data generated by persons, companies and/or machines (personal and non-personal) as well as behavioural data (i.e., data generated by human behaviour), be it internal, commercial or freely available, provided that it is closely related to the corresponding urban space.”
The reason I use the term ‘urban data ecosystems’ rather than urban data spaces here is to pay attention to the city-wide scale that I believe bears significant potential for multi-stakeholder driven data optimisation through AI applications in cities, and the nature of cities as complex adaptable systems. Like ecosystems, cities have multivariate dynamic elements as well as dependencies between different actors and networks. Cities possess systems within systems, and exist within broader economic, social, and environmental systems at multiple scales. The European Commission’s concept of ‘data spaces’ are a key initiative to develop the European data economy ecosystem, which naturally connects to possibilities for strengthening the potential of innovation and improved service delivery in cities through harnessing data, depending on their urban data space characteristics.
5/ In Europe, central elements emerging so far for developing urban data ecosystems include data spaces, common ICT Reference Architecture for open urban platforms and open standards.
For more information about these urban data system enablers, I recommend the following topics and sources.
Urban data spaces
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) and Technical University of Berlin provide an excellent proposition for urban data spaces, which they extrapolate at the municipal level in Germany. The research includes a useful extrapolation of different types of urban data (personal, behavioural, freely available, commercially available, internal or publicly unavailable data) as well as actions that can be taken to implement urban data spaces.
Data marketplace or data exchange
Whilst there are many cities with open data websites, few data marketplaces or exchanges have been established where data from all city stakeholders can be bought, sold or transferred. The Municipality of Copenhagen has been piloting a City Data Exchange with the Capital Region of Denmark, and Hitachi to examine the possibilities of creating a marketplace for the exchange of data between public and private organizations.They released a Lessons Learned report with findings from the first two years of the project.
In the absence of a data exchange or market entity, data collaboratives represent a process that can be undertaken to enable data access between public and private data actors. Whilst there are various models possible, the goal is to provide “functional access to previously siloed data assets so that they can be leveraged in the public interest,” as outlined in this definition by Young and Verhulst.
Reference architecture
ICT (information and communications technology) reference architectures are the backbone of digitised urban governance. It is the framework for a city authority to accept and disseminate data from both public and private service providers and other systems, and to collect and analyse data to better understand and address urban challenges.
One of the activities of the EIP SCC has been the development of a common technically agnostic reference architecture for public administrations based on standards for interoperability and vendor neutrality. This would enable cities and localities across Europe to adapt their ICT systems to accommodate innovative ‘smart cities’ activities and create or contribute to urban data ecosystems. The main report of the EIP SCC Work Stream 2 Reference Architecture and Design Principles explains the nominated reference architecture in detail which can be appropriated by city and local authorities to achieve Open Urban Platform capabilities (Heuser et al 2017):
“Open Urban Platforms form a core building block by which cities better manage the current explosion in volumes of city data and more easily share this data between city services in order to improve outcomes for society.”
Open Urban Platforms are now referred to as urban data platforms in EIP SCC communications.
Standards
Across Europe there are several initiatives developing ICT reference architectures and standards for smart cities, for example to adapt strategic frameworks to national contexts. Open and Agile Smart Cities has developed a helpful Standards Library for cities and service providers to find standards associated with urban digitization.
The visualisation below represents my understanding of the emerging nature of urban data ecosystems, based on European progress so far.
6/ European lighthouse projects
Many cities are piloting projects and/or have implemented aspects of the urban data ecosystem visualised above with the intent to further develop and expand capabilities. They seek to connect the array of data actors in urban contexts to create mutually beneficial data platforms and flows. These include the EU initiatives Sharing Cities and their Urban Sharing Platform (USP) and RUGGEDISED smart open data decision platform and central management system.
One example with a citizen empowerment focus was IES Cities, an open technological platform piloted by four cities between 2013-2016 and co-funded by the European Commission Competitiveness and Innovation Program (CIP). It involved each city running different applications allowing the citizen to become ‘prosumers’ and provide and consume internet-based services based on their own and external linked data.
7/ London’s urban data ecosystem
Outside of EU funded lighthouse projects, the Greater London Authority (GLA) continues to pursue an ambitious program to foster a strong data ecosystem in London, as set out in the Data for London: City Data Strategy (2016). It has now been more than 10 years since the GLA launched the London Datastore open data portal. The Datastore has since widened its scope to include non-government and non-public data, morphing it into a data exchange with intentions to deliver platform development, community building and standard setting as part of its core services.
London has more advanced digital technology companies than any location in Europe. For example, it has more AI and IoT startups and scaleups than all of Germany and France. This critical mass in emerging actors that can utilise data supplied by the city provides much impetus for London government authorities to be global leaders with data ecosystem development goals and scope for experimentation with pilots and funding. Flow on effects will impact not only the local, but the national economy, and with targeted initiatives of public and private collaboration have much potential to produce scalable technologies for public good. There is also strong longstanding history of support for data sharing from the national government.
The Tech Charter for London strategic guidance is currently being drafted by the Mayor’s Smart London Board, which will include provisions for data collected by the city’s platforms. On top of the significant amount of work the city has released to discuss and guide how data and technology should be developed e.g. Smarter London Together, the Charter will draw upon work undertaken by other major cities including San Francisco’s Emerging Technology Board, Boston’s Smart Cities Playbook; Helsinki’s MyData initiatives.
The recent recommendations of the London Data Commission, an industry driven cross sector working group, call for a new city-wide framework called Data for London (DfL). Drawing parallels with the establishment of Transport for London (the greater metropolitan transport authority), the Commission sees data as a “vital infrastructure asset” in need of a standalone strategic body to convene leadership actions, create a Data Charter and promote data based innovation for common good in public and private data sharing collaborations.
8/ Outlook
Whilst progress on creating urban data ecosystems has occurred across Europe, EU funding assistance has been the primary enabler. Securing funding and capacity building, especially for smaller cities (that represent the largest market), are key barriers. With the help of public private partnerships and other funding sources, the EU aims that “300 million European citizens are served by cities with competent urban data platforms, by 2025.” Research at the start of 2020 proposed that reaching this goal might still be possible, entailing the adoption of urban data platforms by approximately 1,500 cities. The same survey found that of the 80 city respondents, 45% are developing or have an urban data platform that includes data from municipality and other business stakeholders.
Interview
Dr.-Ing. Nikolay Tcholtchev is a Senior Researcher and Project Manager at the Quality Engineering Competence Center of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) in Berlin. His research expertise includes open urban platforms, network and systems management and cybersecurity.
After reading the paper he co-authored on urban data spaces I was curious about progress made in open urban platforms and urban data spaces in Germany since the work was published in 2018 and how it is being further developed.
tg: In the 2018 research paper on urban data spaces, several shortfalls in European and German local governments were identified that act as barriers.
NT: For each of the points, I can reflect my experiences and observations during the previous year and a half.
tg: Let’s start with the lack of comprehensive knowledge about the data available in municipal organizations.
NT: There has been progress in this area given the various formats for information exchange between municipalities and stakeholders on German and European level. On the German level, the Morgenstadt framework of Fraunhofer with its Urban Data Partnership (UDP) platform has started enabling the interactions between different municipalities in order to work out best practices, to study relevant use cases and to explore suitable data formats towards the efficient sharing and publishing of data from municipal organisations.
On European level, initiatives such as Living-in.eu, Open Agile Smart Cities (OASC) and the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC) have been establishing the dialogue process towards sophisticated understanding of the data availability and sharing practices within cities and communities.
tg: What are your thoughts on the restricted usage of data within local government departmental silos?
NT: The mentioned initiatives (Urban Data Partnership of Fraunhofer, OASC, EIP SCC …) clearly enable the discussions regarding breaking the silos in the context of the public administration in terms of e-Government and belonging processes. This even includes the collaboration between different utility companies as well as special companies which are dedicated to the transformation of particular urban environments (e.g. Berlin Tegel area which is available after shutting down the airport).
tg: Has much been done in terms of lack of technical infrastructure to enable connections between different municipal actors for the integrated use of data?
NT: There has been significant progress on the infrastructure and related standards, documents, and software components. In the meantime the work has been initiated on the DIN (DIN: German Institute for Standardization) SPEC 91397 “Guideline for the implementation of a neighbourhood management system” which aims at defining the instantiation of the open urban platform concept within the scope of smart neighbourhoods thereby enabling the collaboration between different providers and vendors towards establishing a viable eco-system for data exchange and smart district control and management.
In addition, the DKSR (Daten Kompetenzentrum Städte und Regionen) has been established as a key entity towards the establishment of a scalable data and IoT platform for German and European municipalities based on the robust and field-proven technology UrbanPulse of the Urban Institute. The DKSR platform conforms to DIN SPEC 91357 Open Urban Platform (OUP) and implements key aspects of the International Data Spaces (IDS) and Gaia-X when it comes to functionality of facilitating efficient data governance and data sovereignty for Smart Cities and Communities. Furthermore, a new DIN SPEC (DIN SPEC 91377) is being initiated which aims at complementing the OUP specification by defining abstract interfaces and standards for the interaction between urban ICT components in addition to capturing the key processes and requirements for ensuring data quality, data sovereignty and overall interoperability within smart cities.
tg: The final barrier identified in the research paper was a lack of concrete business models for sustainable data exploitation by municipalities.
NT: The quest for the business models continues to be cumbersome from my perspective. However, a number of companies already manage to create and successfully run business models in urban environments (especially in the areas of mobility, transportation, and energy).
Hence, data is obviously creating businesses and revenue, which indirectly bring benefits to the municipalities by increasing the quality life and the tax revenues in particular areas.
tg: There has been an absence of legislation regarding the utilization of data created by municipalities. Has regulation been established in the EU or Germany in this regard?
NT: Regarding legislation, the GDPR should be mentioned. Furthermore, there have been several updates of the PSI (Public Sector Information) directive within the last years, particularly over the last year. I am aware of discussions regarding the establishment of a European Data Space on the level of the European Commission.
tg: There are a few challenges of data acquisition and provisioning for the creation of urban data spaces. In terms of the use of open interfaces and standards in municipal governments, what would be ideal actions or priorities to start with for public administrations that would like to move in this direction?
The following points are perceived as necessary from my perspective: identify data sets, establish processes for data governance and data sovereignty, identify relevant data formats, identify and deploy relevant open source solutions, and extremely important: invest in education of the personnel. Educate and help the civil servants to become efficient digital experts contributing to our digital future.
tg: Are you, or other research groups at Fraunhofer FOKUS working on research that further develops the urban data space or open urban platform frameworks?
NT: Yes, the group Quality Engineering for Urban ICT at the System Quality Center at FOKUS continues the research. The research activities are also conducted in the scope of Smart Cities and Communities Lab at Fraunhofer FOKUS.
tg: Who are the people, organizations, or projects that you would recommend to generally look to for inspiration, research or good practice concerning open and urban data systems and ICT infrastructure?
NT: Alanus von Radecki, CEO DKSR; Morgenstadt Initiative; Morgenstadt Urban Data Partnership, Alexander Schmidt, CEO Bable UG and Bable Smart City Platform.
tg: Are there any books, journal articles, reports, or sources of any kind that you would recommend to others seeking to develop ‘essential knowledge’ on urban data systems and ICT infrastructure?
NT: Briefing Notes on the Key Case Studies profiled, Building Data Ecosystems to unlock the value of Urban (Big) Data: A Good Practices Reference Guide; Building Data Ecosystems to Unlock the Value of Urban (Big) Data, EIP SCC Study on Urban Data Platforms conducted by the Erasmus Rotterdam University (also here[TG1] ); Nikolay Tcholtchev, Philipp Lämmel, Robert Scholz, Wojciech Konitzer, Ina Schieferdecker„Enabling the Structuring, Enhancement and Creation of Urban ICT through the Extension of a Standardized Smart City Reference Model“; Urbane Datenräume - Möglichkeiten von Datenaustausch und Zusammenarbeit im urbanen Raum.
READ For critical voices on the emerging relationship between data and urbanism I recommend checking out the latest issue of ARCH+ which (once you get past the creepy cover) has informative and thought-provoking essays, photo essays and interviews exploring the datafication of cities framed by Marxist critique of the production of space. With the advance of the smart city it calls for architects and urban planners to pursue not only resistance, but also despite the contradictions, action through design and planning for an emancipated urban society.
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