“The problem of the smart city has been that when you start with technology without a strong idea of why you are deploying the technology and for what kind of needs, then you only end up solving technology problems.” – Francesca Bria

Having completed a PhD in Innovation Economics at Imperial College London, she worked for the UK’s innovation foundation Nesta and led the EU’s D-CENT project, to show how data needs to be protected for citizens and used for their benefit.

The first pillar of the new strategy is digital transformation: how a city government should work with technology or whether it even should. Bria is spearheading a fundamental change in the relationship between the public sector, private sector and citizens to move away from a technology-led agenda.

This has also meant reworking procurement agreements to reflect that data is a public right for the common good. Bria envisages a situation where a partner company will transfer good quality data to the city so that the municipal government can reuse that in its open data platform, with privacy assured, so citizens and local companies can create value out of it.

In Bria’s opinion cities have a duty to experiment with new models that respect the fact that the resources they have come from taxpaying citizens. Barcelona is working alongside Amsterdam to drive home the importance of e-democracy through the <link https: decodeproject.eu _blank external-link-new-window decode-website>DECODE initiative, a grouping of 14 European city, business and academic partners.

DECODE’s collaborators are seeking to take on big tech and allow citizens to enjoy services such as peer-to-peer ridesharing or homesharing without the middleman owning or exploiting their data.

Even if data is democratised and a robust strategy is in place, cities are still unable to make the best use of data without the right systems of governance. Bria agrees that organisational structures will be key to the success of her new model.

“When I got here the city hall had bought seven different dashboards with complex analytics on top but they were not integrated and the data did not talk to each other. This I because it was an organisational problem and you are never going to resolve it with technology.”

As well as transforming the city-business relationship to drive local economic growth and allow citizens to control their own data, the background of Barcelona’s mayor as an activist for affordable housing has driven a third pillar of the Barcelona strategy: digital empowerment of residents.

“Participatory budgeting is in the DNA of our city and we look at how to integrate citizens into our decisions,” says Bria. “We are running 16 participatory processes in parallel from culture through mobility to urbanism and have four public Fab Labs where we are prototyping new educational programmes for the digital age. If you don’t give people capabilities then it is very hard for the technology revolution to go beyond technology agencies.”

As with the formation of Barcelona’s digital strategy, the key element for Bria with DataCity is that the local ecosystem is involved including big corporates.

Thes are excerpts from a more detailed article by <link https: cities-today.com editorial-staff>Richard Forster, published at Cities Today on 20 March 2018.

<link https: cities-today.com power-to-the-people _blank external-link-new-window smart city strategy is giving to the>Read full article