Emerging priorities & resources
In the course of producing this guide, OASC cities have also highlighted some additional priorities that will bring considerable additional capacity to cities and city networks, including:
Digital Twins
The capacity to ‘see’ the city in digital and miniature spatial form as an aid to strategic and spatial planning and decision-making is a goal shared by most cities within OASC, and for the EU as part of the Digital Europe Programme. For some, this is a virtual 3D model of the city, ascribed with core data values, like construction timelines, built form composition, zoning and other planning aids. For other cities, the digital twin is something they hope will enable dynamic decision-making through the integration of data sets from across the city into something that could act as a scenario or diagnostic toolkit. For example, enabling the overlaying of carbon scenarios on new development plans, or the calculation of health benefits from nature-based solutions...and so on. While digital twins have been around on a small scale for a few years now (having been successfully deployed in the engineering world to resolve complex design challenges since 2002), the capacity to create city-wide digital twins is something that is only emerging now as a reality for cities everywhere.
Where to look for more tips and guidance:
Digital twins will be addressed as the topic of a separate white paper - please stay tuned.
Marketplaces
Data, application and tech marketplaces offer cities an exciting opportunity to engage with innovators that wish to purchase access to data in order to deliver a product or service. Tools developed to support data integration or data consumption into specific products can also be bought and sold in city data marketplaces - enabling a virtual ecosystem of tradeable virtual goods to exist that supports the strategic goals of cities. They provide one way for cities to have greater control over how data they own is used. Some city conglomerates are looking to create their own marketplaces, often linked to data lakes. In the meantime, the OASC CITYxCITY Catalogue is a good example of a functioning marketplace.
Partnerships
Partnerships with corporations, learning institutions and third sector organisations are key to OASC cities in developing ways to work more smartly with data. Partnerships offer cities the opportunity to do what they do best, while allowing others to bring their best game to the table. Whether this is through data-sharing agreements, skilling, insights development, data lakes or any of the other tools and approaches, cities are recognising that there is no viable option to ‘go it alone’ in the world of data-driven innovation. Cities are looking for ways to best shape partnerships that offer value to both parties without ‘giving away the farm’.
City co-operation
In our view, this is the way forward in securing the best outcomes for cities in the data economy. Rather than competition, which depletes competitive resources, strategic co-operation provides a platform for cities to learn from each other and to collaborate on projects and platforms - facilitating ways to address challenges such as size, budget and skills across a pool of aligned administrations. Many OASC cities are benefiting from city co-operation arrangements, including the Scottish Cities Alliance, Swedish Cities and Regions Association and cities in Finland (eg. Turku and Helsinki).
Where to look for more tips and guidance:
The Finnish Six Cities Strategy |
Open and Smart Services - known as ‘6Aikia’ - is an excellent example of the way in which co-operation is being applied strategically to collectively solve complex challenges with open data at its core. Operating across the six largest cities in Finland, the strategy has three focus areas: Open Innovation Platforms; Open Data and Interfaces; and Open Participation and Customership. https://6aika.fi/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/6Aika-strategia_päivitys_2015_EN.pdf |
Overcoming legacy issues
Unsurprisingly, this features at the top of the list for some cities. Whether this is working on how to disentangle from legacy systems, or driving better governance through existing programmes, cities are keen to embrace data-driven innovation with a fresh approach to how they control the data they own, and the data they consume or share.
The opportunity to leapfrog from legacy to cutting-edge is now available, including by taking a tactical approach to priority issues (small cities, in particular, can benefit from laser focus rather than broad-brush when escaping the drag of legacy issues). A key pathway is through cloud-based services.
Where to look for more tips and guidance:
Saint Quentin |
Saint Quentin is an example of a city that was able to create a cloud-based function to manage water usage in parks and gardens as well as other services across the city. The city decided that it wanted to use a context broker within the cloud rather than via a back-at-base vendor system, enabling a flexible approach. https://data.europa.eu/fr/news/cef-context-broker-saint-quentin |
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