The Scottish Cities Alliance, made up of the cities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Perth, and Stirling – along with the Scottish national government – have joined forces to create a smart cities program. The Alliance aims to create efficient infrastructure, support urban planning, and improve the population’s well-being using insights taken from sophisticated data analytics. The seven cities have jointly contributed $18 million pounds sterling and the European Regional Development Funding will add an additional $13 million.
There are five delivery objectives for Smart Cities Scotland:
- Improving Lives: the cities will work together to establish a nationwide test-bed for innovations in health and well being, while generating data-led insights on the links between health, economic growth and productivity.
- Collaboration & Engagement: a Smart Cities Sharing and Learning Platform is being developed to enable cities and associated partners to freely exchange information and combine resources to solve problems and track emerging projects.
- Open Data and Transparency: moving from passive provision of data to an active engagement with the data community to identify and develop innovative smart city solutions.
- Technology and Innovation: attract investment and create opportunities to test, develop and commercialize smart mobility solutions in Scotland’s cities that will be unified by a national mobility as a service (MaaS) platform that combines transport options from different providers across Scotland, handling everything from travel planning to payments.
- Environmental Sustainability: use a circular economy approach to efficiently manage the flow of resources within and between cities.
“By working together Scotland’s cities are utilizing economies of scale to learn individually and share that knowledge collectively, to be at the cutting edge of Smart City technology and the benefits that brings,” said Andrew Burns, Chair of the Scottish Cities Alliance. “Our inter-city approach to developing Smart City solutions has been praised publicly by the European Commission and we have attracted the attention of other nations who are looking to emulate our collaborative model.”
