Urban Digg Infra prestudy - digital infrastructure for smart cities

Purpose and goal

The project’s goal has been to take on a holistic view on the digital infrastructure of a city; its IT infrastructure, as well as its usage, governance, legislation, and standards. Being smart as a city means also being resilient and adaptive to change. To create a cohesive understanding of the public perspective a transition is necessary, towards collaborative systems with horizontal layers, guidelines and best practice. It’s important to practice and simulate possible future events, allowing stakeholders to try what-if scenarios, and thereby create better models for how to cope.

Expected results and effects

Within the project pre-study and its continuation, we expect to learn more on how stateholders’ needs and wants form demands related to the IT infrastructure. To find common denominators that can solve problems in regards to accessibility, ease-of-use, security, transparency and other parameters that form an infrastructure which citizens can have faith in and trust as an increasingly integrated part of daily life. We also expect to become better at systems’ thinking, to give partners tools to better assure strategic governance and further develop areas for which they are responsible

Planned approach and implementation

In the working group, a mélange of users, integrators, technology companies, municipalities, researchers, telecom and security experts, spent time on working together to identify common themes leading towards the smart city. A forerunner theme of “trust and security” was selected, and elaborated further in exercise tasks, analytics and outlook to further refine the working methods to develop a viable collaboration model for the city’s IT infrastructure, where both specialized systems and operators coexist, and where the citizens can get the best from various approaches.