Digital Cities & Citizens

City as a Platform taking a look at Skåne

Caroline Wendt
November 11, 2020

The municipalities Malmö, Lund and Helsingborg all use the same digital platform when working with sensors, which facilitates future collaboration. This became evident when the project City as a Platform held a digital presentation of the work in southern Sweden. "The more we can collaborate and develop common platforms and services, the better for the citizens," says Anders Trana at Future by Lund. "Many citizens frequently travel between different municipalities and it is easier if the digital services overlap with each other."

The three-year project City as a Platform brings together 18 Swedish municipalities that will explore, implement, and collaborate on joint IoT platforms that will assist in developing beneficial societal outcomes in the cities. In September, Mobile Heights held a digital conference to showcase what is happening in Southern Sweden. Both companies Sensative and AFRY, and the two municipalities Lund and Helsingborg, participated.

Lund's digitalization manager Åsa Melvanius presented Lund's new creative arena Studio Stadshuset. Studio Stadshuset started up at the end of September / and beginning of October with inspiration from Helsingborg and others.

Ander Trana at Future by Lund presented the ways in which the municipality and external partners collaborate in the SOM project to create societal benefits with IoT. The city functions as a test arena, where an open test bed has been built, and that will live on in the new project Lund Open Sensoring City, which explores aspects of the real-time city. Britta Duve Hansen, IT architect at Lund Municipality, proposed a way to visualize sensor data that aids state officials in their decision-making.

Magnus Lindhe, IoT manager at the City of Helsingborg, described how Helsingborg uses culture to encourage employees to try new things. Further, each administration has an innovation leader whose task is to support innovative work and break down the silos that exist between various administrations. There are several initiatives in the city to reach the solutions of the future - municipal accelerator HBG Works is a place with innovation expertise where employees can discuss digital developments, Prismahuset is an environment where tech companies can grow, and H22 City Expo is an international city fair held in early November.

Magnus Sjöström from AFRY spoke about the values and benefits of IoT in the smart city and used examples from two projects in the cities of Hässleholm and Oskarshamn. In Hässleholm a logistics center is opening with the aim to develop autonomous electric trucks that can solve transportation in the city and reduce pollution, and in Oskarshamn, a polytechnic will work on various water solutions. Both projects are supported by a consortium with many stakeholders, including the Swedish Space Agency and AI Innovation of Sweden.

– The important thing is to create consensus, and as soon as you are able to do so, the projects are off the ground, says Magnus Sjöström. It is common to start with a helicopter perspective and draft out a rough plan, which can be developed at a later stage. The technology is already there, making it more about human progress than anything else. It is about being brave enough to step out of your comfort zone and start working.

Britta Duve Hansen, Magnus Sjöström and Anders Trana at Studio Stadshuset. On screen is Johan Lindén, Mobile Heights.

In the news from the Lund Open Sensoring City project is that the integration platform being used to connect all platforms is AFRY's System Platform.

Helsingborg, Malmö and Lund use the sensor platform Yggio from Sensative. Robert Lann at Sensative shared his experiences from their projects with the municipalities and said that the platform focuses on information management.

Johan Lindén at Mobile Heights has worked with Lund's open test bed. He explained some of the radio technologies and their differences - with a focus on Bluetooth BLE, NB-IoT, Sigfox and LoRa.

This is the City as a Platform project

Many cities work with sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) to offer citizens with more efficient public services. City as a Platform provides cities and municipalities the ability to collaborate on data and IoT platforms. The aim of the project is to enable an easy movement of services between the cities, amongst other things. It is also important to ensure national anchoring among the relevant stakeholders and to propose a national management model of the minimum framework, which also includes relevant standards and data models. In another part of the project, "Smart City Lab" is in the process of creation - a "hub" for collaboration that will assist municipalities, cities, technology / service providers and also citizens in knowledge and experience exchange, and dialogue in the development of the smart city.

The project is an innovation project within the strategic innovation program Viable Cities and takes place between 2018 and 2020. The work is coordinated with the sister program IoT Sweden. The initiative was initiated within the framework of the government's collaboration program for smart cities and is funded by Vinnova.

The municipalities of Gothenburg, Malmö, Lund, Karlskrona, Kalmar, Stockholm, Uppsala, Hudiksvall, Umeå and Skellefteå, Ängelholm, Örebro, Helsingborg, Halmstad, Sundsvall, Linköping, Eskilstuna and Västerås are participating in the project.

The provided details are based on text about City as a Platform from Rise.

Translation: Ben Dohrmann

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