Recently, Amsterdam Smart City visited the World Smart City Expo in Barcelona. There I met with several European Cities to see what knowledge and experiences we could share. Most cities are organising pilots or demonstration projects in a city quarter aiming at energy transition and fighting climate change. But very few of them roll out or replicate these projects on a larger scale.
Earlier, we posted about the upscaling research of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. https://amsterdamsmartcity.com/posts/organizing-smart-city-projects-lessons-learned-fr.
It is good to see the research in this field grow, and we will keep following it closely and sharing it with you here.
But what could cities themselves do directly to accelerate the upscaling process?
In Barcelona, Nathan Pierce, Programme Director of EU-project Sharing Cities for the Greater London Authority, shares his thoughts with us about cooperation between cities in the short interview below.
As Nathan describes, not only will cities learn from each other, together they will also form a huge upscaling potential for sound new business models developed in these pilots and demonstrations. And together, a group of cities will have interesting procurement power compared to one city on its own.
Therefore, the coming years the Amsterdam Economic Board will interact with other cities to see what business models shoot up in their local projects and how we could let them grow in our region. And on our turn, we will share our successful business models to see if we could scale them up abroad. Above that, we'll do our best to involve scientists such as AUAs mentioned above to learn even better while doing.
If you are a city interested to work with us on this, please leave a reaction in the comments below.
Sharing ideas about smartness is as important as sharing in general. I feel that global smart cities stay a little behind the cities calling themselves '100 Resilient Cities'. This group is well-organized (subsidised by the Rockefeller Foundations). You might remember, I wrote about is, a couple of months ago. Big meetings like the World Smart City Expo are great, but a permanent exchange of ideas and a mild form of institutionalisation are also needed. I know that the European Union offers a platform for exchanging ideas about smart cities, but I am afraid that is too non-committal. Probably you might use your ties within the EU to see wether European wannabe smart cities can be aligned a little bit closer.