The ICT Unit of the World Bank and the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications (MTT) of Chile launched the “Smart City Gran Concepcion” activity the week of January 13, 2014. The activity, which is financed by the Spanish Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean, has five sequential components that are designed to achieve two goals:(A) to improve local and municipal service delivery by introducing open innovation and ICT tools; and (B) to lay the framework for the development of a local and sustainable innovation ecosystem in Gran Concepcion. The Gran Concepcion area is the second largest populated area in Chile with almost a 1 MM inhabitants and it was chosen by MTT to pilot a model of Smart City for Chile.
The activity is designed to introduce behavioral change in city government and create the links and interactions among stakeholders of the ecosystem through a process of four consecutive components:
- co-design of technology solutions to improve local and municipal services;
- co-creation of roadmap for scaling up the adoption of technology solutions to support local and municipal services;
- Co-creation competition (i.e., open challenge) with local stakeholders (eg, universities, enterprises, civil society, local and municipal government) to develop technology solutions for local and municipal services, and
- co-creation of strategic plan for the development of a local technology-innovation lab for local and municipal services with the ecosystem.
Training on the use of collaborative and intelligent tools. The Smart City Gran Concepción activity introduces to Chile bottom-up smart city methodologies that help local and municipal governments: a) to learn to use and implement tools with better real-time interaction and response with citizens and, b) to create partnerships and synergies between local and municipal government and other actors in the area (e.g., universities, private sector, civil society) to foster active and constant participation to solve local challenges.
Citizen focus. Setting it apart from other smart city projects, Smart City Gran Concepción does not seek to impose heavy, high-cost and top-down solutions, such as city management platforms, sensor networks or communications infrastructure. To the contrary, Smart City Gran Concepción leaves it to the citizens and other city actors to understand their priorities and requirements and to actively respond to them in real time, generating confidence dynamics and involving these actors in work that complements and multiplies the local and municipal governments’ actions.
Focus on cost efficiency. To achieve this, the activity centers as a launching point on making use of existing infrastructure in the area, primarily mobile telephony infrastructure, that facilitates an interaction with city actors in real time using cost-efficient technological tools developed rapidly (e.g., mobile applications) combined with the application of co-creation dynamics and the collaborative cooperation of various agents in the city.
Pilot activity for Transport. Smart City Gran Concepción is a pilot activity in Chile carried out with the Ministry of Transport and Telecommnications. The thematic intervention is transport and mobility, with the possibility of being expanded later to other areas depending on the results.
Sustainability. The operational framework is designed to provide training to technical officials in the local and municipal government and to develop networks of confidence and involvement among other municipal actors while the activity is implemented, helping to achieve a stronger impact and reinforcing the activity’s sustainability.
Results of the event can be found here.