The list of smart city initiatives continues to grow.  Recent examples include the new EU smart city project fund; almost 400 U.S. cities competing for $9 million in awards for city innovation as part of the Mayors Challenge launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies; a £25 million ($40 million) Future Cities Demonstrator competition for cities in the United Kingdom; and a new smart cities network formed by 24 Spanish cities.  One of the most interesting new programs was launched in Barcelona in July.  The first City Protocol workshop, co-hosted by the City of Barcelona, GDF Suez and Cisco, brought together a diverse group of stakeholders including city councils, academia, suppliers and interest groups, all committed to the development of a “more sustainable, efficient, cohesive, innovative and smart city.”  Over 30 cities from across the world were represented, as well as around 20 suppliers, including Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Telefonica, and Philips.

The City Protocol aims to enable cities that are “adaptive, learning, evolving, robust, autonomous, self-repairing, and self-reproducing.” The Protocol spans the whole of the city ecosystem including water, waste, matter, energy and utilities, mobility, goods, people, and information.  Taking its inspiration from the way Internet and Web standards have been delivered, it fosters a similar process of open, transparent, and robust collaboration on an international basis.  Leadership will be provided by the City Protocol Society (CPS), which will loosely follow the model of the The Internet Society,  addressing specific issues and delivering formal agreements, recommendations, technology standards, reference projects, policies, and certification models.

Of course, there are already many collaborative efforts on city innovation that focus on developing innovative solutions to common challenges.  The danger is that the City Protocol will be just another talking-shop on the fascinating challenges of urban renewal and growth.  There are two critical areas where it could make a real difference.

‘Anything Connected to Anything’

First, a well-defined and shared process for the ratification, incorporation, and further development of technology standards that meet the needs of smart cities would be a major step forward.  The City Protocol could make a significant contribution to enabling better integration of information flows and communications networks across multiple domains such as transport, sustainability, and public safety, for example.  This would make analogies to the Internet Protocol or to concepts such as the Smart City Operating System more than just metaphors.  Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, told delegates to the first City Protocol Workshop that one of the biggest insights of the Internet’s early development was that eventual applications were less important than simply creating a platform where an arbitrary collection of computers could communicate over an arbitrary collection of networks.  Tim Berners-Lee had a similar vision for the World Wide Web: “Anything being potentially connected to anything.”  If the City Protocol can help develop a similar approach to connectivity across the diversity and complexity of urban operations, then it will be a major achievement.

However, the need to address practical issues around specific application areas is where the City Protocol most clearly diverges from the Internet Protocol.  This is also where its second major contribution can be made.  Participants in the City Protocol workshop recognized the need for better cost-benefit analyses that can reduce the risk and improve the repeatability of new programs in areas such as energy efficiency.  If the public and private sector can develop models for delivering financial returns and public benefits on energy efficiency programs or better managed transportation systems, for example, then it will be much easier to implement such smart city projects at scale.

The European Commission has launched a new funding program that will help drive smart city innovation through the closer integration of energy, transportation and IT.  The Smart Cities and Communities European Innovation Partnership (SCC) extends the Smart Cities and Communities Initiative that was launched in 2011.

The initiative already has funding for 2012 of €81 million ($100 million), and the initial demonstration projects will focus on transportation and energy.  With the launch of the new partnership, the budget for 2013 has been increased to €365 million ($450 million), and IT has been added to energy and transportation.  Significantly, every demonstration project financed under the scheme will now have to combine all three sectors.

The accompanying communication from the Commission highlights the specific challenges facing European cities.  New building represents only around 1% of housing stock, and less than 10% of vehicle stock is newly registered each year.  So there’s limited opportunity for greenfield development in cities and the adoption of new technologies is slow.  It’s therefore essential that European cities find cost-effective, repeatable, and pragmatic solutions if they are to meet their environmental goals and drive economic growth.

The Commission rightly sees the integration of technologies across sectors as one area in which this can be achieved.  If the smart city concept is to be more than a veneer of hype over business-as-usual, it needs to drive new ways of connecting different aspects of city operations.  Without such a holistic view we will continue to build technology stovepipes and fail to realize the real potential of new IT platforms and new ways of using data.

It’s also encouraging to see the EU putting transportation at the heart of its smart city agenda.  In our recent Pike Research webinar, Smart Cities and the Future of Transportation, Lisa Jerram and I explored why transportation is so important to the smart city vision.  Clean, smart transportation is crucial to meeting the three core objectives of the smart city: sustainability, economic development, and citizen well-being.

We were joined on the webinar by Arturo Corbi Vallejo from Schneider Electric.  Arturo detailed Schneider Electric’s SmartMobility Integrated City Management (ICM) solution, based on the company’s new smart city platform.  SmartMobility ICM is another example of suppliers that are developing integrated, platform-based solutions for city operations.  Schneider Electric’s approach is one of the first examples of a smart city platform concept to emerge from an infrastructure provider rather than from the IT world.

An airport may not seem like the most obvious platform to deploy sweeping smart energy upgrades.  Globally, airports represent only a fraction of the building infrastructure worldwide – accounting for around 1% of commercial square footage globally, according to Pike Research’s Global Building Stock Database report.

Integrated with sustainability measures, though, airports have the potential to champion energy efficiency and smart energy efforts worldwide while also boosting their host cities economically.  With large footprints and plenty of open space around runways, there are a number of low-hanging fruit opportunities that have yet to be exploited.

Take Berlin, which is counting on its new Berlin Brandenburg Airport Willy Brandt (BER) to give the city a major economic push while at the same time making it a vital transport hub.  The airport will incorporate sophisticated recycled heat and power systems to reduce operating costs, and draw on Brandenburg’s leadership in renewable energy innovation.  The new airport “is a crucial stage in Berlin’s return to becoming a global city,” Burkhard Kieker, CEO of the tourism organization visitBerlin, told CNBC.

Meanwhile New Songdo, in South Korea, provides a glimpse of the continued integration of smart cities and airports.  The project is squarely focused on streamlining economic activity between South Korea and lucrative markets in Japan, China, and further afield.  As an incentive to New Songdo’s developers, the Korean government has agreed to construct a 7-mile, 6-lane bridge from New Songdo City directly to Incheon International Airport and provide all utilities.  Incheon, for its part, aims to be carbon neutral by 2013 and plans to build a new eco-friendly passenger terminal that will source power from solar panel and wind turbine installations.

While airports may be viewed as platforms for smart energy integration, it’s the potential for highly visible demonstration projects that is particularly exciting.  Three key aspects of airports make them ideal platforms for integrating smart energy technologies:

Smart City Meets the Aerotropolis

In his book, Aerotropolis, John D. Kasarda explains, “Airports will shape business location and urban development in the 21st century as much as highways did in the 20th century, railroads in the 19th and seaports in the 18th.”  This is significant because airports have become an unavoidable exchange point along the supply chain for the global exchange of goods and services.  According to Kasarda, one-third of all products consumed are shipped by air.  He estimates that passenger and cargo service will double or triple over the next 20 years.  Airports have become hubs of economic activity unto themselves, as evidenced by the integration of high-end retail as well as artistic and recreational attractions.

The idea of an aerotropolis shares many parallels with the Smart City concept, which Pike Research has discussed in past reports and in its recent Sustainable Megacity webinar.  Multi-dimensional in form and function, smart cities aim to integrate clean technology into a cohesive ecosystem, improving the lives of residents while facilitating sustainable, economic growth.  Similarly, the aerotropolis is a complex ecosystem of technology, infrastructure, and functionality requiring 24/7 power and thermal conditioning.  Any disruption in power can lead to significant economic loss for airlines and for the businesses that reside onsite, and in the worst case frustrate international aid efforts in the event of a significant natural disaster.  These attributes make airports attractive targets for distributed generation projects.

Closed Ecosystem

One of the unique characteristics of airports is that they are closed systems.  This reduces the administrative complexity of integrating innovative solutions (less stakeholders to satisfy than a large city, for example), while also skirting many of the infrastructure challenges associated with clean technology deployments in the broader market.

As my colleague, Anissa Dehamna, explains in her recent blog on port policies, “Although vehicles (trains, trucks, ships) carry goods away from ports, the fleets and activities at a port itself remain within a fixed area.  This makes them ideal for alternative fuel fleets because infrastructure can be installed at a few key sites in a port and then entire fleets can be fueled.”  The same is true for airports.  Refueling of ground fleets, for example – baggage carts, fuel trucks, and tow tractors – is made easier by the fact that such vehicles operate around a hub where refueling can take place around the clock.

Concentration of Demand

Like ports, concentration of demand for things like fuel at airports overcomes many obstacles preventing the widespread scale-up of clean technology solutions like biofuels.  With biomass (feedstock) resources unevenly distributed, aggregation and processing can be prohibitively expensive.  For this reason, municipal solid waste (MSW) has been targeted by a number of companies as a potentially low-cost feedstock for biofuels.  Through advanced gasification pathways, these companies are aiming to produce jet fuel for commercial aviation partners in a growing number of projects worldwide, such as at London’s Heathrow and other sites internationally.

By 2015, fast-growing China is aiming to build 70 new airports and expand 100 of its current ones.  Growth in the Middle East, and to a lesser extent, Europe, will allow for sustainability and clean technology to be increasingly integrated into these facilities.  Whether greenfield builds, retrofits, or expansions of existing airports, smart airports have the potential to be showcase projects that can raise the profile of their host cities and accelerate the deployment of clean technologies.

Following on my recent blog I am returning to the concept of the city-as-platform. The idea was raised by Chicago City CTO, John Tolva, in an excellent review of Chicago’s open data projects, and starts with the provision of an open application programming interface (API) to the city’s data portal. Developers can use this to receive a continually updated stream of city data without manually refreshing their applications each time changes happen in the feed.  As Tolva says, this changes the city from a static provider of data to a kind of platform for application development. In turn, this leads to a rethinking of government’s role in the smart city, moving from being a prime developer to providing a foundation for others to build upon.

A number of other projects can be considered as developing a view of the city-as-platform including:

• The SmartSantander sensor network trial in Santander, Spain is looking to provide a common platform for a range of sensor-based applications. Barcelona is developing something similar with its Urban Labs pilots in the 22@Barcelona development. A number of start-ups are developing solutions for this new architecture, including Urbiotica with its “City Operating Systems” for sensor network management.
• The integrated networking services that are a core part of the Songdo IBD development in Korea are designed on a platform concept.  Cisco is building on its experience with the Songdo network to position the Cisco Unified Service Delivery Platform as an IT and communications platform for city-scale developments.
• Living PlanIT’s Urban Operating System a distributed middleware platform that provides monitoring and control over a network of intelligent devices, some of which may be buried in the city infrastructure.
• IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities is providing the basis for a number of smart city projects, as in Zhenjiang, China and in Rio de Janeiro, where it’s the foundation for a wider range of customer-driven City applications

The technical architectures and commercial models behind these approaches differ considerably, but they all aim to provide a development platform on which city agencies, suppliers and third-parties can build new applications and services for city management and citizen engagement.

In our model for smart cities, we refer to these multiple capabilities as the Smart City Operating System  (SCOS).  The SCOS is not a single technical solution.  Instead, it consists of a number of different approaches to finding a means of making the smart city more than the sum of its parts.  To do that, it has to draw together diverse and ubiquitous systems. It is therefore not a single unified system itself but more a “platform of platforms,” acting as a distributed middleware for linking different application areas – what engineering consultancy Arup calls an “urban information architecture.” The city-as-platform concept also offers an alternative to thinking of the smart city as either a top-down or bottom-up project. One criticism of the smart city concept is that it is driven by a vision of grand projects suited to large property developers and global ICT companies. The early focus on smart cities was certainly more top-down as a result of the attention paid to ambitious new developments like Masdar and Songdo and also to the strong support offered by the likes of IBM and Cisco.  The rapid adoption of the smartphone as an intelligent end-user device and the growing importance of the Apple and Android apps markets has encouraged a resurgence of a more bottom-up view of the potential of urban computing platforms.

These different perspectives on city technology echo long-running debates about the nature of city planning, in particular Jane Jacobs’ famous counter-blast to the centralizing, mechanistic view of much 20^th century urban planning. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs helped restore an appreciation of the messy, human, dynamic, and highly contingent, aspects of city living. The city-as-platform concept is a way for cities to encourage bottom up innovation while still making the necessary investments in the large-scale operational and infrastructure systems needed to meet the challenges of the future.