Analyzing the success, at least in affluence, of the Smart City World Congress held in Barcelona less than a month ago, we could say that we are ready for a smarter world, or at least interested in this world full of opportunities for both, businesses and citizens and of course, for public administrations.

In a sense, I would say that the Smart City concept could even seem a little bit disrespectful, I don’t know if we would tell a citizen of Memphis in ancient Egypt or ancient Roman or Greek cities, that their cities were not smart because they didn’t use technology. The challenge is being able to leverage technology to meet the needs of an advanced city in an increasingly intelligent world, where objects have and will have more intelligence (or at least more communication skills, which by the way is not the same), but all with one purpose: that technology provides added value. It is necessary that this transformation is directly linked to civic participation and especially the double sustainability, economic project sustainability and the environmental one, probably even more important than the former.

When you sit in front of an auditorium, a mayor, a TV camera, or a paper and begins to explain the Smart Cities concept, there is always the same chat about the need to adapt to a new paradigm where cities have 70% of the world population, 75% of energy consumption and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. But If it ends up talking about a solution for your Smartphone to locate the nearest pharmacy and guide you there through a map, it mean that we were wrong at some point.

In fact, the Smart Congress this year drew something different, something that some of us had already bet: the urban platform. Revolving around the idea that the solutions have to be comprehensive and be planned holistically. The sensorification, data obtained, etc., must be reuse and the different solutions or strategic areas of the city that make up the urban platform must seek the interaction among them holistically. And not because the concept is nice but because like there is no smart city without citizens, without interconnected services with and integrated view, there is no smart city services, there are just “smart” solutions in a “dumb” city.

Source: published in Open Thoughts , blog of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya