Statistics, forecasts and population studies confirm the continuous migration of population towards cities. There, people find jobs, better access to services and living conditions improvement. The current urban environment is not adapted to this massive migration. This means, new challenges in the fields of security, environmental issues, transportation systems, water distribution and – more general – resource management will rapidly occur.

Today, large cities are faced with problems such as waste or misuse of resources, which could be changed by increased in-time information. In Digital Cities, people will arrive just in time for their public transportation as exact information is provided to their device in due time. Even parking your car will be easier as free parking spots around you are shown on your device.

Real time information that is always available will optimise time, save energy and make life easier.

Always connected - everywhere

The Citizen-Centric Cities (CCC) is a new paradigm, allowing governments and municipalities to introduce new policies.

This enhances the participation of citizens in the information, decision, and implementation processes for a better life in the city within democratic governance.

These new polices will aim in particular at increasing the awareness of the citizens of their individual and collective capabilities, both in the decision making process and in the implementation of these decisions. The ultimate goal in this area is to realize a migration from the customer-centric to the user-centric model.

Citizen participation could take different forms:

• Collection of data to be broadcasted, or to be used to analyse and “sense” the status and the dynamics of the city
• Citizen participation in democratic decisions for the evolution of the city
• Execution of necessary actions to improve the city’s performance and sustainability

Expected Results

To realize the CCC model, ICT will provide tools to offer facilities and features for citizens. Those tools could be summarized in the following items:

• Create infrastructure to offer large-scale telecommunication systems to facilitate data exchange
• Provision of distributed schemes for scalable systems aiming at large numbers of participants
• Optimized data management
• Identification, security and privacy
• Customized and new intelligent services
• Intelligent and ergonomic Human Machine Interface
• Business model innovation: an open foundation of software/service components that can be utilized for building highly personalized services
• The business and innovation model is based on engaged citizens supported by the digital cities open foundation for service creation.