Periodic Reporting for period 3 - OrganiCity (OrganiCity – Co-creating smart cities of the future)
Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2018-06-30
he project OrganiCity has developed a service for experimentation, which explores how citizens, business and city authorities can work together to create digital solutions to urban challenges. OrganiCity’s vision is that the data that we emit from our cities has the potential to transform how we design for and respond to people’s needs. Gathering, connecting and analysing this data – whether from our environment, transport, homes or social media accounts – can provide us with rich and reliable insights into how our cities currently operate and, therefore, how they could operate more effectively in the future.
As we move into this digital age, more people than ever before are moving into our cities. Rapid urbanisation, growing and aging populations, extreme climates and new technologies are adding considerable strain and complexity to our cities. These challenges require us to reimagine how we can design and deliver more flexible, sustainable and resilient systems that not only manage our limited resources more efficiently, but also strengthen our communities, protect our environment and prioritise our health and wellbeing.
Tech companies, academia, public authorities, start-ups and citizen groups are all attempting to respond to these challenges with new solutions. Yet, one of the biggest inefficiencies of all is that we continue to tackle these issues in silos; the local knowledge of city authorities often doesn’t inform the latest health app, and the resources and experience of large corporations often doesn’t support the innovative ideas of small start-ups. OrganiCity has worked from the idea that if we share the same mission to develop the most useful products and services to future-proof our cities, then we need to start working together.
As we move into this digital age, more people than ever before are moving into our cities. Rapid urbanisation, growing and aging populations, extreme climates and new technologies are adding considerable strain and complexity to our cities. These challenges require us to reimagine how we can design and deliver more flexible, sustainable and resilient systems that not only manage our limited resources more efficiently, but also strengthen our communities, protect our environment and prioritise our health and wellbeing.
Tech companies, academia, public authorities, start-ups and citizen groups are all attempting to respond to these challenges with new solutions. Yet, one of the biggest inefficiencies of all is that we continue to tackle these issues in silos; the local knowledge of city authorities often doesn’t inform the latest health app, and the resources and experience of large corporations often doesn’t support the innovative ideas of small start-ups. OrganiCity has worked from the idea that if we share the same mission to develop the most useful products and services to future-proof our cities, then we need to start working together.
Through two open calls OrganiCity has achieved to attract 423 proposals from highly diverse teams and proven its accessibility. Citizens, freelancers, developers, companies, public bodies, civic organisations, academia started working together to use open data and cocreation tools to develop digital services and contributions to solving urban challenges. 42 of these 423 were funded through the OrganiCity funding scheme and co-created the OrganiCity facility with the feedback they provided.
With its framework for systematic experimentation as its core value, implementing in a systematic way methodologies of codesign and co-creation across city stakeholder groups in connection with robust and scalable technical infrastructures, OrganiCity has made a major contribution to the current turn toward the experimental city. OrganiCity has succeeded in setting an example of how challenging the scale at which change is made in fact depends on both participatory and good governance processes by shaping an ecosystem for innovation rather than offering projects as OrganiCity as a platforms and product.