(inspiration) - Smart city Wallonia

I attended this years edition of Smart City Wallonia in Marche, with conferences, a start-up zone, demos etc.

Here my highlights::

In general it seems to me that the first Smart Region call of Digital Wallonia earlier this year has not only created financed projects, but also has made the Smart city landscape more readable in terms of actors:
Agence du Numérique, as inspirer and ‘mentor’
Most intercommunale like BEP and IDELUX taking a pro-active role in their communes, other less present
The Union des villes et des communes taking a more active role than in the past

The Governmental declaration of last week has furthermore confirmed the Smart city actions for the next years, which is a positive factor for everyone to work more in depth.

The technology has matured and technology deployment with a ‘positive’ business case for cities in terms of mobility, inner-city atraction, energy are to say available ‘of the shelf’ from established as well as from start-up players.  Also bundled efforts linked to actionable themes for communes.  (e.g. COLIBRI project from julelesmart ecosytem)

The climate topic creates a certain ‘sense of urgency’ and a reason to invest in monitoring elements.  

It seems that the evangelist period is over, now we don’t need to jump to solutions too fast either, unless the following has been done:

Understand the smart city process, that includes citizen participation phase and idea making (confer the very nice research fro the Smart City institute on it);

Understand the real problem to be solved and don’t  make it a technology only case

At the same time not be stuck in test and demonstrators only but also adopt and disseminate the use cases;  using the structure of European Smart city project where you have leading cities (that receive funding for implementation) and follower cities (that monitor and can jump on a commercial implementation later) seems an interesting way to go ahead so that not all the cities do the complete smart city process from the start

In terms of technology and usage, it seems quite obvious that common data structures should emerge so that data can be used  and re-used on a different granularity level (area, district, city-level, province, region)

I liked the startup Octobus, that looks at providing a safe and fun last mile school transport.  Also victorliege, the hail taking service for short daily commutes

Smart citizen and civic tech 
Following interesting reports came out:
- Feel good toolkit - from the University of Liège - a toolkit for citizen round-tables to create a positive well being for the citizens in smart city projects and not ony a technology focus.
- Smart citizen , yes how to make the citizen smarter and smart city projects more inclusive and more intelligent thanks to a mix of collective human intelligence and AI.  

Interesting to see that the citizen focus, often forgotten, is finally taken into account.  And that there are a lot of Belgian actors that have a method to work on this both on and offline.

 Smart City Institute
A new booklet about managing the smart city data has just been published, and is again a reference, like the two previous ones.
Like every year the institute  has published the Smart city Barometer, this time first the Walloon numbers, and the Belgian numbers together with the VUB Smart City Chair at the end of November.

Need guidance for your Smart city project?  Don't hesitate to contact me.