How an UNESCO city can be Smart

By , 19 September 2016 at 17:30
How an UNESCO city can be Smart
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How an UNESCO city can be Smart

By , 19 September 2016 at 17:30

What Game of Thrones fans recognize as King’s Landing is the seventh century Croatian city of Dubrovnik. This small 42,000-person city is one of those stunning, once-in-a-lifetime places, attracting 14,000 tourists a day looking to experience this place out of a storybook, that’s somehow has remained preserved in the world’s most war-torn continent. Perhaps part of that astonishing preservation comes from the entire city being named as one of the first United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites back in 1979.

One of the most popular destinations along the Mediterranean Sea, this UNESCO status and subsequent funding has helped ensure Dubrovnik can maintain its medieval beauty “of universal value,” enabling it to attract droves of tourists. But how can a city be literally stuck in the past and still be capable of advancing? As Dubrovnik looks to turn itself into a first-class smart city, it is facing unique challenges as it looks to answer just that question.

First, in order to keep its UNESCO status, it must remain “among the ten best preserved medieval walled cities in the world,” which “means everything smart must be hidden and invisible from sight,” said Niksa Vlahusic of the Dubrovnik Development Agency. But even this challenging restriction isn’t holding the city back from technological upgrades.

dubrovnik-smart-city

Vlahusic says that one major way the city is able to innovate is by bringing together its millennials both to take advantage of their creativity and to protect the small city from the usual risk of the brain drain of young graduates looking for jobs abroad or in larger cities. By holding citywide startup weekends for three years straight, they’ve brought together the city’s programmers, designers, laywers, marketing and public relations professionals with municipal employees to work together to form local, innovative startups and small companies.

Earlier this year, the city also held a hackathon specifically focused on Dubrovnik, the Smart City. Thirty local engineers created 12 smart city projects and prototypes, three already being implemented touching on these citizen issues:

  • smart parking: wireless infrared sensors placed on each parking space, coordinated with iPhone and Android apps, an interactive map, pricing, and near real-time updates
  • resident card: using iBeacon and geolocational technology, allowing local businesses to attract new clients and build loyalty programs all via iPhone and Android apps
  • smart sprinklers: automating the irrigation and sprinklers system in public parks, based on soil humidity levels for water conservation and improve foliage growth

The next step by 2017 is to not just do one-off smart city projects but to build a City Operating System on top of the open-source FIWARE middleware platform, with a focus on scalability with shared documentation, open data, open source, all within the city government’s adopted centers.

“We are currently working on the projects that function by themselves but you need eventually to have the projects work together,” Vlahusic said.

Smart cities aren’t built in silos

Vlahusic said that one of the main issues is traffic during the summer, which makes sense for this geographic anomaly. This picturesque city by the Adriatic sea is cut off from the rest of Croatia and the rest of the E.U. by a tiny strip of land giving Bosnia Herzegovina access to water.

Last month, Dubrovnik became one of 75 cities in 15 countries in Europe plus Brazil who are focused on the Open and Agile Smart Cities initiative, each committing to actionable results within two years, with an emphasis on sharing and replicating experiences from the code on up, building open international smart city standards together. “For programmers you need those standards that are exactly the same and only then they can exchange information and work for the network like we are working right now,” Vlahusic said.

One way Dubrovnik like many smart cities large and small are accelerating is by partnering with another city. Typically cities can only be accepted into the OASC Network if they have partnerships within their own countries, but in this case, Dubrovnik partnered with its neighbor Bosnia’s Sarajevo. On Wednesday we’ll dive into the differences and similarities between these two surprising partners and talk about how the latter is building a smart city from ruins.

Jump to the second part of this issue here.
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