Barcelona - A Model Smart City

The name Barcelona conjures up a variety of mental images: the Olympics; beautiful architecture; Antoni Gaudí; excellent food and wine…. But something else that's interesting is that Barcelona also happens to be the gold standard for Smart Cities projects. (A Smart City being an urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently). The social and economic progress that Barcelona has made through its Smart Cities initiatives over the past decade has made it the subject of a number of worldwide case studies highlighting ways that cities can better serve their citizens through technology and automation.

I’ve developed an interest in Smart Cities initiatives lately because of a related project that I’m working on for the City of Chicago. And since I had been planning to be in town to run the Barcelona Marathon last month, I decided to take advantage of my time there to sit down for a chat with Paco Rodriguez Jiminez from the Institut Municipal d’Informàtica de Barcelona. Paco is one of the key members of the Information Technology team that’s responsible for heading up Barcelona’s Smart Cities projects. We talked about the city’s original vision, how things have evolved over the past few years, challenges and lessons learned brought on by early projects and some upcoming initiatives.

Typical Smart Cities Goals

Smart Cities Initiatives vary from city to city. Geographic limitations, existing policies and a variety of other factors can influence what’s actually possible from location to location, but in general most Smart Cities initiatives tend to have one or more of the following goals in mind:

• Sustainability of Energy use and reduction of water and other resource usage
• Improved Mobility Options and Public Transportation Services
• Flexible Smart Services (Waste Management, etc...)
• Open Data
• Social Collaboration
• Citizen Engagement and Empowerment

Not only has Barcelona managed to achieve the majority of these goals, but the city continues to iterate on the foundation it built early on, with an ever-increasing focus on citizen collaboration and engagement. Some of the services that are currently available to Barcelona citizens and visitors include:

Free City-Wide Wi-Fi

Citizens and visitors can to the city’s free Wi-Fi Service on any laptop or mobile device. The only thing that’s needed is a mobile number that can receive a text message with a code that will grant access to the network.   

Air Quality Improvement Plan

IoT sensors collect measurements of various pollutants and the city posts current and forecasted NO2 and PM10 concentrations in different areas of the city on its website: https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/qualitataire/

Affordable Housing

Barcelona provides an online map of available rental and vacant properties, which allows citizens to easily locate the properties but also allows the city to identify businesses whose practices lead to rises in housing prices and take appropriate action.

Smart Lighting

• Street lights across Barcelona were replaced with a sensor network and LED-based lighting, which has led to the following benefits:
• Reduces the waste heat given off by the old lamps.
• Generates cost savings for the city since LED-based lights are significantly more efficient than other forms of lighting.
• Allows the city to have more control over the level of lighting.
• Helps the city attract people toward specific locations of interest

Smart Waste Disposal

Barcelona Citizens deposit their household waste into smart bins, which contain sensors to identify when trash collection is needed, optimizing the overall collection process.

Citizen Engagement

Barcelona’s Fab Labs are classrooms where citizens can learn to access the information and tools needed to innovate technologically, allowing them to directly participate in the city’s smart city projects and create things for themselves that in turn create an entrepreneurial economy within the city.

Citizen-Government Collaboration

Decidem BCN is Barcelona’s participatory democracy platform, which allows citizens to see and discuss proposals being put forward by their government, as well as to submit their own ideas and get their questions answered via an online portal.

Mobility

Barcelona has increased the frequency of buses and USB charging stations at interactive solar-powered bus stops.

Barcelona's Bike Sharing Program, called Bicing provides each subscriber with a card to unlock any of the city’s bikes, which are free to use for short journeys of up to thirty minutes with a small hourly fee for longer rides.

Barcelona’s subway trains are electric, run 24 hours per day / 7 days per week, typically arrive at each station every 4-6 minutes and arrival times are tracked to the second.

While this isn't necessarily technology related, Barcelona encourages the use of electric vehicles and the city has initiated a pedestrian-first policy in certain areas known as the ‘superblocks’, which restrict all vehicular traffic to no more than 10 kph (about 6mph).

Barcelona’s Smart Cities Evolution

Early on, Barcelona’s Smart Cities projects were mainly technology based. Some of the challenges the city hoped to solve were related to system integrations, efficient deployment, building a common communications platform, determining what to do with the collected data and long-term maintenance.

Integrations

IoT is still in its infancy, and as such, there really isn’t a standard communication protocol for IoT Sensors. Most vendors have their own proprietary applications that don’t communicate well with each other (and competing vendors don't necessarily care about making their equipment play nice with their rivals). Barcelona did not want to be tied to proprietary software created by a single manufacturer and wanted an open source solution. The result was a custom built open source platform called Sentilo. 

• Sentilo can obtain data from any type of sensor from any manufacturer
• The code for Sentilo is Open Source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/sentilo/sentilo
• Other cities can download the source code and implement Sentilo as well if they are interested
• Data collected by Sentilo is stored in a distributed database called CityOS, which is used for operational solutions.
• Barcelona has a BI solution for data analysis, and also provides APIs that allow data stored within CityOS to be accessed by third parties.

Data Usage

Barcelona knew that there would be a lot of value in data collected from IoT Sensors but since this was (and still is) uncharted territory, they had to figure out what specific types of data to collect and what to use the data for once it was collected.

For example, the city originally wanted to put IoT sensors in every parking spot in the city, but quickly determined that doing so wouldn’t be realistic since conditions change too frequently and there won’t be enough time to process all of the sensor information (during busy periods, cars come and go from individual spaces within seconds of one another). Additionally, maintenance of hundreds of thousands of sensors would eventually become cumbersome. So, instead a smaller number of sensors have been deployed along with a software platform performs probability calculations to determine how likely it is that a spot will be available in a particular area.

IoT Project Governance

In order to further address the data usage challenge, Barcelona has put a policy in place that requires every new city project involving IoT sensors to get input from three different groups (collectively known as a workgroup):

Technicians, who are responsible for the sensors themselves and can provide input on how difficult the maintenance efforts will be. (Note that these are not IT employees – they are managers of lighting, mobility, etc… from other city departments).

Barcelona’s IT Department, who is responsible for maintaining the communications platform used to collect sensor data and other applications that will utilize it once it’s collected.

Citizens, who communicate with the city through city officials called district managers to determine the value of a project.

Deployment and Serviceability

Aside from determining what type of data to collect and how to integrate it, another challenge the city had to solve was how to deploy the sensors themselves. Some of the challenges are:

Many sensors are embedded into roads, sewers, water pipes, or require connectivity to electrical systems, etc… and it isn't realistic to tear up all of the city infrastructure to deploy sensors. Sensors also have to be deployed in a way that makes them easy to service later. Barcelona employed a variety of solutions to address these challenges:

Beginning in 1998, Barcelona began to lay over 500km of Fiber Optic lines to connect street lights, traffic signals, buildings and other city assets. The ducts that were placed for the fiber lines are often used to deploy sensors.

Whenever there are construction projects around the city to resurface roads, sewer lines or water pipes, the city’s IT department gets involved to determine if there is an opportunity to deploy or maintain sensors or if any existing sensor deployments will be affected.

Next Generation Smart Cities Initiatives

In 2015, Barcelona shifted the focus of its Smart Cities projects from being technology driven to being driven by citizen collaboration and engagement. Some of the topics Barcelona is currently trying to address include:

• Determining the best way to make social services more accessible.
• Enabling citizens to connect with each other as well as with local businesses.
• Determining how to better support elderly and disadvantaged people who live alone.
• The initial push to build out the technical infrastructure as part of the early Smart Cities initiatives paved the way for a lot of newer programs.

Ongoing and Upcoming Projects

Vincles BCN – Barcelona provides tablets with a special app to elderly citizens in need (particularly those who live alone). The app allows them to connect with other citizens in their neighborhood as well as pharmacies, grocery stores and other local businesses that provided needed services. The app also provides connections to other neighborhood networks.

Digital Transformation – This is an overall program that includes several projects aimed at automating governmental processes to eliminate the need for printed forms.

What I found the most interesting during my conversation was that there seem to be a number of challenges that most American cities haven't even had to think about yet while cities like Barcelona have already found solutions, implemented them, and then moved on to future project phases. While many American companies are fairly advanced from a technological perspective, our public sector agencies have historically lagged behind and we're quickly approaching a day where this won't be acceptable any longer. It may be time to think about collaborating a little bit more with our friends in Europe.