Smart Governance

The city of Paris has set the goal of increasing and improving the green areas of the city for the period 2014-2020. In figures, this means creating an additional 30 hectare garden for the public, planting 20,000 new trees and launching 200 new planting projects under the "Green near my home" program. Another objective is to improve the educational economies, increase the number of orchards and vegetable gardens in schools, create 100 hectares of vegetation on house walls and rooftops, and boost urban agriculture.

The concept of Debrecen Smart city is to establish an intelligent, innovative, livable, effective, sustainable, smart, healthy and rich city. Our city's management works together with the business and voluntary sectors, public utility companies, advisors, the University of Debrecen, and international organizations to deal with operational tasks through innovative, eco-conscious technological solutions and to reach the management’s long-term goals.

The Smart City Wien initiative depends on the cooperation of many participants from the city administration, business, science and civil society. The Smart City Wien Forums are of particular importance to both the development and the implementation of Smart City Wien. The topics and focus varies with each forum. According to the implementation of the Smart City Wien framework strategy, all areas at the given point in time should be paid attention to. The Smart City Wien Forums are organised and coordinated by the Smart City Wien Agency, located in TINA Vienna.

TINA Vienna is already since 2011 in the field of ‘Smart City Vienna’ active, in 2012 it was then commissioned as part of a service mandate of the City of Vienna as official Smart City Vienna Agency (SCWA). By resolution of the City Council in June 2014 the Smart City Wien framework strategy sets out that TINA Vienna, as Smart City Wien Agency, is the main link between all relevant initiatives and programs of the City of Vienna in the implementing the Smart City Wien framework strategy.

New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is automating its water meter reading capabilities to increase billing accuracy and provide customers with the tools they need to better manage their water usage. The Automated Meter Reading (AMR) system consists of small, low-power radio transmitters connected to individual water meters that send daily readings to a network of rooftop receivers throughout the city. In most cases, the transmitters are placed where water meter remote receptacles are currently located.

The City of Melbourne maintains more than 70,000 trees. To manage them they launched the Melbourne Urban Forest Visual project which is a web-based map that gave every tree in the city an individual ID, as well as noting the species and probable life expectancy. The mapping site invited residents to report dying, damaged or vandalised trees so that they could be repaired or replaced.

Melbourne BioBlitz is the City of Melbourne's first major citizen science program, where experts and members of the community work together to discover, document and learn about the species that call their city home. The most recent Melbourne BioBlitz took place over 24 hours on 4 and 5 March 2016. During the BioBlitz 744 members of the public joined 27 activities which included spotting birds at Royal Park, identifying insects at Westgate Park, and searching for plants in the Fitzroy Gardens.

The open consultation and direct democracy platform was launched by the city of Madrid after the recent municipal elections. Enables citizens to propose, debate priorities and implement policy for the city. On the website citizens can create a thread where they can discuss any topic they want to share with other people in the city, and can propose what they want the City Council to do and support proposals from other people. Citizen proposals that reach 1% of support will be put to a vote. The first six months of each year citizens can decide how to spend part of the city budget.

In order to prevent high wind speeds and wind shafts in the new district around the central station of Vienna, the city of Vienna was commissioned in advance to carry out a wind comfort study. The results and the recommended measures could thus be taken into account in the planning of the land use planning. The new quarter around Wien Hauptbahnhof, including all the public spaces, cover an area of 109 hectares and are considered to be one of the projects of the century.

In developing countries, citizen engagement in the rapid growth and development that many cities are experiencing is not a priority. Even when city governments want to engage citizens, finding methods that effectively do this are often quite challenging. With “Block by Block”, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, and Mojang, makers of popular online game Minecraft, are exploring how the game could be used to find out how people want to see their cities develop in the future. Using the game, residents can build simple 3D models of their community.