UN-Habitat’s People Centered Smart Cities flagship program has released a new series of playbooks that focus on empowering local governments to take a multi-stakeholder approach to digital transformation that will lead to sustainability, inclusivity, prosperity, and human rights for all.
The six downloadable playbooks include:
- Centering People in Smart Cities is a framework that aligns with the New Urban Agenda Shared Vision #11 of “cities for all”: the equal use and enjoyment of cities and human settlements without discrimination of any kind. The goal of the playbook is to provide local governments with knowledge, tools, and resources that support putting people at the center of digital transformation;
- Assessing the Digital Divide provides a pragmatic approach to assessing the digital divide, with information that can be used to establish a culture of digital inclusion within organizations and communities;
- Addressing the Digital Divide has six steps that authorities can take towards taking action to address the digital divide: collecting, analyzing and reporting data about the digital divide in the form of a digital divide assessment; identifying the unique conditions of a communities’ digital divide; co-creating a digital inclusion plan; choosing a framework for taking action; choosing a finance model; and executing the plan;
- Shaping Co-creation and Collaboration provides guidance to municipalities to accomplish the goals of autonomy over the development and use of smart city technology; establishing a new generation of services that are open, accessible, transparent, and interoperable; and establishing a commitment to integrating human rights into digital services across the organization;
- Infrastructure and Security has three activities that support the Infrastructure and Security pillars of the people-centered smart city approach: improve the convenience & accessibility of services by digitizing them; create a data governance framework that sets standards and responsibilities for effectiveness, accountability, and inclusivity; and safeguard public trust by protecting smart city assets; and
- Building Capacity provides activities to support the Capacity Pillar that addresses how to develop multi-stakeholder partnerships and build organizational capacity that better facilitates people-centered smart cities.