I was delighted to be invited by the New Cities Foundation to write for ‘The Big Picture’ editorial’s ‘Special feature: Smartcities and technology’ with Cisco. My short article “A Tale of Smart Cities in the UK” published 10/11/2018 is available at .
“The Big Picture is an online special editorial that brings together prominent political, business and academic leaders who provide cutting-edge analysis on the complex challenges facing cities in the 21st century.”
Work on the SmartDframe research project is continuing with new ideas for evaluation design for smart city projects and programmes. This follows the publication ‘City approaches to smart city evaluation and reporting: case studies in the United Kingdom’ in the journal -Urban Research and Practice
Caird, S. (2018) ‘City approaches to smart city evaluation and reporting: Case studies in the United Kingdom’ Urban Research and Practice. [to be published in Volume 11, Issue 2, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2017.1317828]. A number of free copies may still be available http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/w9XqTmr2seRVWS4MjK7z/full. If not please check the Open University’s Open Research Online system http://oro.open.ac.uk/49248/.
Sally Caird launched the Report ‘A Tale of Evaluation and Reporting in UK Smart Cities’ at the First International Smart Cities: Smart Regions Conference in Finland, May 2016.
The challenge to design the smartest cities has been embraced in most larger UK cities but less is known about how to evaluate and measure the “smartness” of each approach.
Now, the SmartDframe project linked to the MK:Smart project led by The Open University has published a report: A tale of evaluation and reporting in UK smart cities, which analyses city approaches in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough to the evaluation of smart city projects and programmes and their impacts on city outcomes. This is by:
Caird, S. with Hudson, L. and Kortuem, G. (2016) A Tale of Evaluation and Reporting in UK Smart Cities. 51pp. The Open University, UK. ISBN 9781473021082 http://oro.open.ac.uk/46008/
The report includes a Foreword by Geoff Snelson, Director of Strategy, Milton Keynes Council.
The report provides a series of smart city case studies informed by city reports and interviews with representative local government authorities that exemplify contemporary practices, offering a timely, insightful contribution to discourse about best practice approaches to evaluation and reporting of smart city projects and programmes developed in complex city systems.
Dr Sally Caird, Research Fellow, The Open University, the author of the report, said:
‘Smart city programmes are springing up across UK cities, offering solutions for contemporary challenges facing cities associated with population and urbanisation pressures, and bringing opportunities for smarter: governance, economic development, citizenship, living, environments and mobility. To support future city strategies, we need to understand the benefits of the embedded ubiquitous technologies and smart city developments in our everyday lives, by examining existing and best practice approaches to evaluation, measurement and reporting on the outcomes for cities. Cities around the world will find this new research report on smarter UK city evaluation approaches of considerable interest, in providing case studies and analysis that supports drives towards continuous improvement and city learning.’
The news is now on the Open University research website: http://www.open.ac.uk/research/main/news/evaluating-smart-city-success.
Greetings from Sally Caird and Gerd Kortuem
We were awarded funding following an application to The Open University’s Smart Cities Open Challenge Competition to work on the SmartDframe project 2014-2015. This aims to develop new cross cutting ‘smart city evaluation frameworks’ to support city development programmes, and performance evaluation against relevant targets.
SmartDframe aims to trial smart city evaluation frameworks linked to city performance indicators that are holistic, data-driven, well-defined, impact-focused, and transferable across projects. We are working closely with the OU flagship initiative MK:Smart and with a range of UK and European city authorities, industry stakeholders, academics, and policy-makers. The project is at the exploratory phase and we are in process of recruiting staff and setting up arrangements to interview city authorities in the UK and EU.
Find out more SmartDframe
