Santander

SMART CITY STRATEGY In recent years, the city of Santander has moved into the vanguard of smart cities, improving public services and developing policies oriented towards its citizens and stimulating a new business model of productivity in the city. Several years ago, the city government had the perception that a new economic model was needed in our city. This model has to be based on the confluence of innovation and development, thus benefiting from some of the strengths of our City and Region. Among them, our University of Cantabria, SMEs working in the ICT area and the support of the Bank of Santander. All these ingredients gave the city the opportunity to participate in different initiatives related to smart cities. Among them, the SmartSantander project represented a watershed in the way of conceiving and organizing innovation in the city. Santander is well-known as a living lab in which to experiment with new technologies, applications and services. At the municipal level, innovation is conceived as transversal to other areas of governance, coordinating the incorporation of new technologies with municipal services, which leads to an improvement in the services. CITY CHALLENGES Making Santander’s systems and services smarter saves costs and increases efficiencies, contributing to a more liveable city, while positioning us for a long-term economic growth. Innovation in management and governance provides qualitative improvements to the public services. In this scenario, the adoption of ICT technologies allows us to improve how our city works and stimulates a thriving, knowledge-driven economy and also the citizens’ participation. The main Santander challenges are:
  • Citizens participation: the adoption of ICT technologies allows us to improve how our city works and stimulates a thriving, knowledge-driven economy and also the citizens’ participation. Citizens are the most important part of the equation as source and destination of needs and motivations but also the most important asset of contribution.
  • Innovation in management and governance provides qualitative improvements to the public services: Santander City Council is improving the current service delivery capabilities by making municipal services (mobility, transport, street and public lighting, cultural and touristic information, e-government, waste management, irrigation) smarter. Making Santander’s systems and services smarter saves costs and increases efficiencies, contributing to a more liveable city, while positioning us for a long-term economic growth
CONTRIBUTIONS OF IOT SOLUTIONS TO SOLVE THE CITY CHALLENGES In order to deal with the transition to more effective municipal services, Santander City Council is improving the current service delivery capabilities by making municipal services (mobility, transport, street and public lighting, cultural and touristic information, e-government, waste management, irrigation) smarter. The main IoT applications coming from EU research projects, mainly from SmartSantander project are the following:
  • Parking Service Management outdoor parking areas.
  • Traffic Intensity Monitoring.
  • Mobile Environmental Monitoring.
  • Parks and gardens irrigation.
  • Participatory Sensing
From the expertise and knowledge gathered in the different research initiatives, the City Council has incorporated IoT technologies into the municipal services through the public tender procedure. So far the services in which IoT technology is included are the following:
  • Urban Waste Management.
  • Water management: Smart water.
  • Street light Management.
  • Traffic Management
The commitment of the City Council is to incorporate the technology for each new tender procedure from all the city services. In addition, these vertical services are being integrated in the Santander Smart City Platform in order to have a holistic view of the city. RELEVANCE FOR THE CITIZENS Creating a smart city open innovation ecosystem will empower citizens, by adopting a crowd-sourcing approach and being inclusive towards all actors in the city (mainly business, citizens, authorities and developers). Furthermore, it will leverage from the innovation knowledge from these local actors, as well as global collaboration. It aims at facilitating the transfer of innovation into an economy of 3rd party smart city apps and services. This concept relies on three fundamental aspects:
  • Innovation Ecosystem: Engages, and empowers all city stakeholders, that are individuals, businesses, and communities.
  • Open City Data: Access to non-real time and real-time city data provided by city stakeholders.
  • Open City Services: Services from and for citizens
Santander reinvents itself to enhance the quality of life of its citizens with facilities and new services in keeping with the new times. Looking to the future, the traditional, elegant city is also now a ground-breaking city which takes risks an innovates, which embraces technology to make life a little easier with more and better services.
SANTANDER KEY ACTIVITIES
  • SANTANDER SMART CITY PLATFORM: The Santander Smart City platform will integrate heterogeneous data information of all the municipal services of the city, providing a flexible and agile environment that will facilitate the creation of a common repository in which the da Theta belonging to the different services are stored. The total budget for this project is 1.476.985,76€.
  • SMART CITIZEN: This project has been proposed as a result of the knowledge acquired when developing activities related to European innovation projects. Of many of the initiatives contemplated within this project, pilots and experiments have been previously developed. The initiatives included in this project are the following:
- City App: Development of a mobile application in a city in which the citizen and visitor can have in their hands an instrument that facilitates the experience in the city. - Citizen card: This instrument at the service of the citizen will allow you to interact with the municipal services in all its areas, from the transport service, sports facilities, carrying out procedures. - Electronic money. Integrated into the citizen card. - Citizen participation: Collecting experiences in innovation projects (eg Organicity), a system has been designed to promote citizen participation. - 360º Citizen: CRM Initiative to facilitate interaction with citizens, The total budget for this project is 6.5 M€
  • SETA: http://setamobility.eu/. Mobility generates a huge amount of data coming from thousands of sensors, city cameras, connected vehicles, citizens connected through their mobile devices, etc. This project aims to manage these data effectively in order to understand, optimize and manage urban mobility and promote sustainability. The total budget for this project is 5.5 M€.
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Juan Echevarria City Representative: Santander [email protected] http://www.santander.es/