Page 25 - Digital solutions for integrated city management and use cases: A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

• Unified management dashboards allow municipal departments to consult geo-referenced
data and information of interest in the form of indicators, such as economic management,
administrative tasks, traffic management, waste, and air quality. All of these should be broken
down by each municipal department.

• Geographic Information Systems connected with city platforms provide geo-referenced
information on existing resources in the city. This information is extracted from different
municipal departments that report data through layers of geographic information as well as
from companies contracted by the city council to perform different services. These systems have
APIs for direct access to objects stored in the municipal geodatabase. This allows integration
with third-party applications that require geospatial functionality.

• City apps are key elements that integrate all the information related to the city in a single
environment, allowing citizens and visitors to consult the information of interest based on their
geo-positioning and carry out procedures with the local administration, including smart services
that the city council can provide. One relevant example could be in the domain of mobility
services: In the interactive city map, they can find public transport, enable cycle hire, promote
car-sharing services, and locate pedestrian paths .
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• The creation of transparency and open data portals based on the data integrated into the city
platforms makes it possible to provide all the information of the city available to citizens and
companies in different formats, accessible through web portals, through open APIs and in real
time.
• City platforms improve security for data privacy and security management because the
information is contained in a centralized schema.

• City platforms could contribute to entrepreneurship and innovation, co-creation of city services,
and citizen engagement. “Living Labs” initiatives using city platform services enable “4P helix”
(Public-Private-People-Partnership) ecosystems that provide “opportunities to citizens and
businesses to co-create, explore, experiment and validate innovative scenarios based on
technology platforms, such as future internet experimental facilities”.
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• City platforms also provide support for environmental sustainability or social objectives, such
as liveability, reduced inequality, public health and poverty reduction.

4 The experiences of cities with smart city platforms

In this section, several state-of-the-art integrated smart city platforms are described through the
cases of various cities, communities and municipalities. Some of the featured cities are part of
United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) (See Box 1).

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