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i-CORUÑASetting the meta-framework for an intelligent city project

Pedro A. González PérezA Coruña (Spain), March-April 2015

1 Cover image made by the author on a map from Open Street Map (http://www.openstreetmap.org)

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INDEX

Section Page

Introduction 4

The city 5

The city model 7

The meta-framework 9

1. Definition 9

2. Previous actions 9

3. i-Coruña Lifecycle 10

4. Legal framework 10

5. i-Coruña Components 12

6. Data layer 12

7. Indicators 16

8. Services and applications 16

9. User interfaces 16

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Introduction:

Along the last years, urban managers and planners are making more and more use of the term“Smart City”. But, as many other concepts which are frequently used when talking about improvingland managing and economy, "Smart City" is a quite fuzzy one (and, very often, also confusing).Accordingly to its more popular aception, a City is "Smart" when last hour technological solutionsare used to manage it and its urban services.

This technological-only approach results in a simplistic conception and drives to the use of thisexpression as kind of an urban marketing 'tag'. This way, a city which is not publicized as "Smart"is seen as off-streamed, outdated, and dependent on quite inefficient managing solutions.

Against this short-ranged point of view, the Intelligent Community Forum2 proposes a wider rangeconcept: that of “Intelligent Communities”. Accordingly to their definition, an IntelligentCommunity is the one “which have – whether through crisis or foresight – come to understandthe enormous challenges of the Broadband Economy, and have taken conscious steps to createan economy capable of prospering in it.” Still, even wider in concept, it is a biased point of view,as it relies only on an purely economic analisys of human societies.

Finally, the most comprehensive definition that I have read so far is the one contained within theSpanish National Plan for Intelligent Cities3: “Intelligent City (Smart City) is the holistic vision of acity that applies ICT to improve the quality of live and accessibility of their inhabitants and assuresa permanently improving economical, social and environmental sustainable development. AnIntelligent City allows the interaction of citizens in a multidisciplinar way and gets adapted, in realtime, to their needs, in an efficient way regarding both costs and quality, offering open data,citizen (conceived as individuals) oriented solutions and services, to solve the negative effects ofcity growing, within both public and private sectors, through the innovative integration ofinfrastructures and intelligent managing systems. ”

With this definition in mind, the proposal made by Falconer and Mitchell 4 about the need to settingup a “general smart framework” previously to implementing any “Smart” managing system,becomes a rule of thumb to start any intelligent city project. Accordingly to the mentioned authors,this general framework should rely upon:

1. The knowledge about how does the city "work"2. The definition of what are the goals to achieve and what is the role that each of the city

stakeholders (administration, citizenship, companies, academic institutions) must play3. The knowledge about what is the role of ICT regarding municipal managing and urban

services providing.

In consequence, an "intelligent city project" (from now on: ICP) will not be coherent, sustainableand efficient enough if it is not based upon a previously defined "target city", or, in other words, acity model.

2 Http://www.intelligentcommunity.org 3 http://www.agendadigital.gob.es/planes-actuaciones/Paginas/plan-nacional-ciudades-inteligentes.aspx4 Falconer & Mitchell: “Smart City Framework. A Systematic Process for Enabling Smart+Connected

Communities”. CISCO Internet Bussiness Solutions Group (IBSG), September 2012

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Thus, along the next pages, I will define and set the foundations, the set of rules and conceptsthat would inspire the defintion of the general framework of an ICP for the city of A Coruña (its“meta-framework”), making it rely upon (and tightly relate to) a given city model. This project willbe identified from now on as "i-Coruña".

This metaframework should become the document from which all of the stakeholders will begin todiscuss the actual contents of i-Coruña framework.

The final goal to achieve with this work is that of exploring the basic set of rules, contents, tools,etc that will allow using technology to look at the city as a huge information system. This way, theconsiderable amount of data that city planning and managing do produce, as well as thoseacquired by other means, can be transformed into information and, finally, into knowledge aboutthe city logics in order to improve the governance, the sustainability and the power of attraction ofa smart city, thus fostering its liveability.

The city:

A Coruña is a midsized town (population: 245,000 Hab), capital of province, located at the Atlanticcoast of Spain, in the autonomic country of Galicia. Its geogrphical coordinates are 43º 22' N -008º 24' W, thus about the same latitude as Providence (Rhode Island, USA), but just the otherside of the Atlantic.

It has a municipal territory of 3761.54 Km2, what makes a mean population density of 65Hab/Km2. But the central areas of the city (Old Town, CBD) are built on a peninsula (formerly atidal island), which forms the North-Eastern side of the mouth of Ría de A Coruña (Firth -or Fiord-of A Coruña). This location produces very high population and building densities at CBD, whichseats mainly on the istmus.

It has an hinterland that extends along other eight municipalities, which add other 250.000inhabitants to those of the main city. This way, A Coruña is the gravitational centre of the territoryfor most of that population, be it due to job (commuters), education (high school and universitylevels), health, administration, leisure or shopping motivations.

Moreover this, A Coruña municipal water supply company (Aguas de La Coruña S.A. - EMALCSA)provides of domestic water to five of those municipalities, and its Wastewaters Depuration Station(EDAR, accordingly to its acronym in Spanish) treats the waste waters coming from the set ofmunicipalities which pour waters to the Western and South-Western coast of Ría de A Coruña.

A Coruña is also the second city in population in Galicia, whilst being number one in economicactivity (i.e: here is where “Zara” shops were born and where its head company – INDITEX –headquarters are located).

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Fig 1: Location Map. Source: Open Street Map (http://www.osm.org)

Fig 2: Map of A Coruña. Dark brown areas are those with higher densities.Source: gisEIEL, from Diputación Provincial de A Coruña (A Coruña Province Council)

(http://webeiel.dicoruna.es/en/giseiel)

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As for its history, A Coruña was officially founded in 1208, when King Alfonso X th of León grantedthe village the status of 'Town of the King'; but it would exist, on its current location, from longbefore, as archaelogical rests do demonstrate: on the same site there are pre-roman and romanrests which arise everywhen a land survey is undertaken. Actually, the main simbol of the city is'Torre de Hércules' (Tower of Herakles), which was built by the Romans by the end of I st CenturyAD and is currently the oldest lighthouse still in service in the world, as well as having beenrecognized as World Heritage Monument by UNESCO5.

Fig 03: Torre de Hércules (CC-By: Pedro A. González)

The city model:The model that will inform the present work is the one proposed by the local branch of SpanishSocialist Party (PSOE) for the mayoral elections of May 2015. Its general schema is depicted in Fig04.

It relies on five basic and transversal principles: sustainability, equality, diversity, transparency andpublic participation. As you may see, this set of principles do quite exactly fit the ones taken intoaccount in the above mentioned Spanish National Plan for Intelligent Cities.

As a consequence of this foundational principles, all of the components of the IC project must beselected, developed and implemented in such a way that i-Coruña does properly fulfill them. As an

5 http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1312

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example, when selecting the set of indicators that must be taken into consideration in order tomonitor the evolution of i-Coruña, these ones would have to allow city planners and administratorsto check up that the city is correctly evolving towards the predicted model. We will moreextensively develop this idea when speaking about each of the components.

Fig 04: General schema of the proposed city model

Relying on those five principles, the model describes the three main areas of activity: citizens,territory and economy. This three areas contain the set of actions that will be undertaken totransform the city. Some of these actions will be area specific, but most of them will overlap two oreven all of the three areas. This relationship between areas is shown in Table 01 below.

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PLAN/ACTIONACTIVITY AREA

CITIZENS TERRITORY ECONOMY

Social Rescue / Social Inclusion

Plan of Support to the Elderly

Socio-sanitary Network

Corridors for Walkers

Mobility Plan

Public Services Optimization

Re-activation of retail commerce

Fostering of R+I

Plan for the Employment

Fostering Tourism

Improving Housing + Rehab

Environmental actions

Softer Urbanism

Artabrian Cluster

Sustainability of Resources

Improving Harbour Activity

Re-activation of Industry

Compact City / Cohesive City

A Coruña of Neighbourhoods Table 01: Relationship between plans/actions and activity areas

For each one of these plans and actions i-Coruña will need to include adequate data sources,proceedings, applications, services and monitoring indicators, all of which would be used to solvethe needs of the third level of the model: planning, managing and adminstration, plus thosederived from the monitoring activity.

The meta-framework:1. Definition

To the effects of this document, we will consider that i-Coruña meta-framework consists of thegeneral description and definition of the principles, components, rules, stakeholders' roles, goals,etc to be taken into consideration when working in the set up of the intelligent city framework fori-Coruña project.

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In some sense, the meta-framework is, thus, the technical description of how to follow the fivebasic principles of the model and how to guarantee the achieving of the goals derived from them,when proceeding to build up the framework for i-Coruña.

2. Previous actions

Prior to start setting up i-Coruña framework, it will be necessary to compile all of the neededinformation about what are the currently available datasets, applications, services, computers,servers, sensors, etc, as well as about what are the technical capacities of municipal servants andwhat is the technical capacity of A Coruña society in general (including academia, companies,individuals, non-profit organizations, etc). This way, a general inventory must be built up in orderto have a thorough knowledge on what is the current situation regarding the use of ICT by ACoruña municipality, as well as to prevent that none of the previously developed tools or existingcapacities results deprecated without a good reason, thus contributing to the fulfilling of thesustainability principle of the general project. This should be “Action Line 0” of the setting of i-Coruña project framework.

Action Line 1 will consist of setting up the rules for the interaction between all of the stakeholdersthat will collaborate in the definition of i-Coruña framework and later develop and put into serviceof the project itself. These stakeholders are:

• City managers and planners: Politicians and technicians• Companies & professionals (both technological and traditional)• Educational, academical and research institutions• Citizens

Given its nature, this setting up should be done by means of the participation of all of thementioned stakeholders.

3. i-Coruña Lifecycle

i-Coruña project will have to get developed and be active along a given period of time. Theshortest one that can be foresight is that of 4 years, which corresponds to the length of onemayoral mandate in Spain. Ideally, nevertheless, and in order to obtain the most adequate resultsof its implementation, it should be alife for at least eight years, which is the legal standard lifespanof urban plans in my country.

During this period, the different phases of its put to practice would be those depicted in figure 05,in next page.

The process will begin with the definition of the framework on which i-Coruña must be based. Assaid, this framework should be developed with the active participation of all of the stakeholders, soa previous process of engagement should be undertaken.

Once the framework is set up, the next step will consist of identifying all of the needed datasources, and designing the correspondent data repositories or data capture protocols, as well assetting up the security and privacy policies that should protect data from missuse or abuse. Thesepolicies should include the classification of data regarding their degree of sensibility.

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The next step will consist of the definition of monitoring indices and indicators. These ones willhave to allow city managers and planners to be aware enough about how is the city evolving, andhow is it fitting the city model. Due to this fact, the definition of indicators will imply theidentification of the needed data sets, thus it will have to be undertaken in parallel with dataidentification phase.

Fig 05: i-Coruña lifecycle

From this point on, what will follow is the process of implementation of i-Coruña and its puttinginto service, including data gathering and management, the design, testing and implementation ofapplications and services, and, finally, their use to plan and manage the city.The monitoring process will, as said, allow to know whether the city evolution is being the mostadequate or not, as well as the degree of fitness of this evolution to the city model. In the case

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that anyone of the components of the project shows an unadequate performance, it will benecessary to begin again, be it from the step of framework setting, or from the given step thatfails. Under extreme negative conditions, even the city model may need to be re-thought, totallyor partially.

4. Legal framework

Necessarily, i-Coruña project will need to fulfill all of the laws, normative, technicalreccommendations or standardization rules that may affect to its contents. This set of legalconditioninings will form its legal framework.

The laws will come from European, Spanish and Galician levels, whilst standards and technicalreccommendations will come from different international organizations, as we will see.

In a first search, we may identify the following set of legal documents:– European level:

– Public Sector Information Directive (PSI), which rules the need to publicly shareinformation, documents and data from public administration bodies in Europe

– INSPIRE Directive on the setting up of an European Spatial Data Infrastructure, thusregarding geo-referenced data, and its set of implementation rules and technicalreccommendations

– Transparency– Spanish level: Moreover the transposition to the Spanish legislation of the above mentioned

European legal documents,– Law on transparency, public information and good governance6

– Spanish National Schemae on Security7 and Interoperability8

– Galician level: Basically, transposition of Spanish level legislation– Standards and other technical reccommendations:

– ISO: 37120:2014 + 37101 (Smart Community: services) and TR 37150:2014 (SmartCommunity: infrastructures) and their transposition to Spanish normative by SpanishNormalization Agency (AENOR)

– Dublin Core for metadata

Moreover these ones, anyother law, standard or technical reccommendation that is passed orapproved during i-Coruña lifespan, regarding smart cities, data sharing and distribution,transparency, public participation, etc.

5. i-Coruña Components

In September 26, 2012, Rick Robinson published a post in his blog “The Urban Technologist” inwhich he proposed a 3.0 architecture for Smart Cities. This new architecture is the one depicted

6 http://estaticos.redsara.es/transparencia/portaltransparencia/0/1/docs/ley_transparencia/Act_19_2013_on_transparency_access_to%20public_information_and_good_governance.pdf

7 http://administracionelectronica.gob.es/ctt/ens#.VSy_dNyNqkc8 http://administracionelectronica.gob.es/pae_Home/pae_Estrategias/pae_Interoperabilidad_Inicio/pae_Es

quema_Nacional_de_Interoperabilidad.html#.VSzAr9yNqkc

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in Fig. 06 below, directly extracted from Dr. Robinson's post.

Fig 06: New architecture of Smart Cities

(Rick Robinson - http://theurbantechnologist.com/2012/09/26/the-new-architecture-of-smart-cities/)

This new architecture describes in a very comprehensive way the physical components of an smartcity: its infrastructures (both, hard and soft), its city systems or services, its ecosystem, its people,plus a non-physical component: its goals (which are direct consequence of, and could be identifiedwith, its city model).

Some of those physical components are the ones to be identified and inventored during theundertaking of Action Lines 0 and 1 described within Section 2 above, whilst ecosystem andpeople form what we are calling “the stakeholders”.

In consequence, Dr Robinson's architecture does also describe a holistic view on smart citiesphenomena, as proposed within this paper,

What follows will, nevertheless, describe more in detail and from a more conceptual point of viewthe technical architecture of i-Coruña, as depicted in Fig 07, and how should its differentcomponents be taken into consideration within its intelligent city framework.

This proposed architecture includes six different layers:

• The city model• The intelligent city framework

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• The data and indicators layer• The services layer• The applications layer, and• The user interfaces layer

Fig 07: i-Coruña architecture

First two layers comprise the theoretical and coceptual determinations that will inform the contentsof all of the upper ones, which we are describing below.

6. Data layer

As previously explained, Action Line 0 will consist of building up an inventory of, between others,the currently available datasets, their sources, contents, completion, degree of updating, datapolicies, etc. This inventory will be completed with all of the datasets and data sources that maybe identified along i-Coruña framework definition process.

To undertake this identification, it will be necessary answering several questions. Between others:- What are the data that are needed for each of the applications, services and indicators that are

to be implemented?- In the opposite, what applications, services and indicators may be benefited from currently

available data?- What are the data that may help fulfilling city model goals?- Are all of the needed data currently available?

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- Otherwise, what are the possible sources for the needed, missing, data?- Will it be necessary to sign data sharing agreements with third parties?- How should each dataset be captured and stored?- How and under what conditions should each dataset be used, shared and distributed?- How do the different datasets (pre-existent or newly built) relate one to each other? Is it possible

to map different datasets to stablish logical links between them?

After having answered those questions, a search for additional data sources that fulfill thoseconditions must be started up. This search should include the following kinds of data sources:

a) Those datasets owned or produced by the municipality. In example:◦ Data used in accordance with each of the currently available municipal management

applications or services (census, taxes, procurement, education, public health,commerce, urbanism, etc)

◦ Data provided by municipal companies (water supply, transportation, housing, ...)◦ Data captured by municipal sensors◦ Data provided by other Public Administration bodies

b) Outsourced data:◦ Those borrowed from or shared with third parties (i.e. those served through Spatial

Data Infrastructures)◦ Data bought from third parties◦ Crowdsourced data: those provided by the public in a volunteer and conscious way (i.e.

data sent when interacting with municipal administration through public participationtools, crowd mapping, open municipal wikis feeding, etc)

◦ Crowdfed data: those provided by the public in an non-concious way (i.e. whenchecking at public transports. The case of 'London Oyster Card', explained by Prof.Batty in one of Week 5 videos is a clear example of this kind9)

Next step will consist of developing and aproving the appropriate data policies regarding security,privacy, distribution, sharing, authorship, etc. At this point, I would like to introduce areccommendation: all of the data which are not classified as “sensible” should be distributed underlight conditions that allow public to re-use them as freely as possible, as well as following OpenData concept and rules. Creative Commons – Attribution license would be a good election.

In the same sense, data should be shared and published in such ways that their re-use is as easyas possible. Thus, they should be distributed and shared both as agregated data, when thisagregation produces significant and useful information, and as raw data, hence letting the publicto agregate them in different and creative ways, producing added value to those data andgenerating added knowledge about the city and how it works.

A second consequence of this usability requirements is that data must be correctly and completelydescribed by the adequate set of metadata. So, building up this metadata set becomescompulsory.

9 "Context: Urban Data/Big Data" (https://class.coursera.org/techcity-003/lecture/143)

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7. Indicators

Indexes and indicators are i-Coruña components that will let:a) Monitor the evolution of the city in relation with the adopted model, detecting posible

deviations or missfunctions, in which case failing actions should be re-definedb) Monitor the effectiveness of i-Coruña project itself, again detecting posible deviations or

missfunctions, in which case the missfunctioning components or policies should be re-defined

c) By using a system of indicators whose core is based upon international standards likeISO 37120:2014 + ISO 37101 (Smart Community: services) and ISO /TR 37150:2014(Smart Community: infrastructures), A Coruña planners and managers will be able tocompare how does our city score in relation to other intelligent cities in the World.

In consequence, the selection of the indexes and indicators must be done taking these goals intomind, and the finally selected set should adequately fit them.

But indexes and indicators are built by combining given raw or agregated data into adequateformulae, hence their selection must be done in parallel to data specification in order to guaranteethat those data are actually available when needed. Otherwise, some of the indexes or indicatorsmay not be feasible or useful at all.

8. Services and applications

Services and applications, be them mobile or not, are the pieces of software that make use ofdata and indicators to:

– Manage the city and its urban services, networks and infrastructures– Provide the citizens with the adequate tools that will let them interact with administration

and get engaged in city life, its managing and its governance– Take as much advantage as possible of data gathered from the sensors, crowdsourcing and

crowdfeeding from citizens in order to improve the knowledge about how does the citywork and, as a consequence, to also improve the performance of the city, its governanceand its livability.

– Monitoring the city, its evolution and i-Coruña project itself

These ones will include server applications, desktop applications, web services and mobile apps.

9. User interfaces

The uppest layer in i-Coruña architecture is the one containing final user interfaces to thepreviously mentioned applications and services. They should present a common and easilyidentifiable visual design, so that all of them are clearly and quickly perceived as individual parts ofa common set.

So, regarding this issue, a corporative visual identity document and a coherent set of design rulesfor menus should be approved prior to develop any application, service or app, and pre-existentones should be re-designed to fulfill those new identity rules.

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This corporative identity should be applied also to all of the documentation related to i-Coruña.

A Coruña (Spain), March - April 2015

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