Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Federico MINELLE
If you know what a smart city is, please raise your hand.
Well, I don't see that many hands up,
so these 15 minutes will certainly be extremely useful.
Indeed, there are many definitions of smart city.
And why this?
Because cities are very complex organisms
and smart cities are very complex too,
because they have many infrastructures which have to be connected to each other,
many services to be delivered
and many people who have to cooperate
to make the city more and more liveable and accessible.
But what do citizens think about smart cities?
What have they understood about the concept?
We did some street interviews
and we collected them in a video
which I am now going to show you a clip of.
[What is a smart city?]
Ehm… well…
A smart city is a city where it is possible to buy services,
use goods, all through apps and mobile phones.
A smart city must easily connect us with easy-to-use services.
Er, no - you caught me unprepared.
Efficient urban organisation.
Oh God, I haven’t got the faintest idea.
I can't think of anything - I don't know.
A city full of technology, services, with public Wi-Fi,
where you don't have to pay,
with your phone you can do a series of activities.
Let me think about it.
So, smart city:
services which you can use on your smartphone.
Basically, an integration of several services,
both technological and social ones.
As you can see, everything and more:
those who gave an answer,
gave it based on their way of living the city
and on how they expect this may be improved someway.
What is our definition of smart city?
It is a city which puts the citizen at the centre
and makes the use of the city easier, cheaper and more sustainable.
In order to give citizens, but also administrators,
a way of measuring how smart their city is,
and discover who did better
and therefore be able to learn from those who already have some experience,
we invented a Smart City Index.
It is a ranking of all the Italian cities
based on the level of cleverness that these cities have achieved,
that is the services which are actually available in the cities.
And what are the results?
As you can see, the cities are 116:
they are the 116 provincial municipalities of Italy.
And the difference is considerable.
The first one is Bologna, considered very liveable;
then Milan and Turin, but there's also Mantua,
a small city which recently has made itself very smart.
Ranking last, there is Sanluri.
I imagine that very few of you have been to Sanluri;
maybe just a few know
that it is an official provincial municipality of Sardinia,
where we found very little innovation.
But there is a young mayor, extremely bright,
who immediately called to show what he's doing to make smart the city
and this will certainly raise him in the rankings.
Where is Como? Como ranks 41st.
An average ranking, neither good nor bad.
Then we'll see some more details,
to better understand how it is placed.
How do we create the Smart City Index?
And how do we try to rank cities?
We put ourselves in the shoes of the city users.
I mean, we act as virtual citizens of all of the 116 province municipalities.
We try to move in the city, to study, to take care of our health, to work there
and look for simple ways to do so.
We check if there are services on the Web, on the Internet, on our phones
that may help us do these things in the city.
And we do the same thing from the point of view of a tourist,
who tries to figure out what the city attractions are,
what he or she can find there,
where to find a place to eat and sleep,
how to buy online the tickets they need to visit the city.
So, we put ourselves in the shoes of real city users.
And if we find many digital services, we assign many “+”;
if we don't find them, many “-”.
This way, at the end we have a city ranking.
So, let's put ourselves in the perspective of the citizen.
We chose a theme: mobility.
What does it mean?
Which city has the smartest mobility?
It proves to be Genoa, followed by Turin and Milan,
but also Arezzo is a close second,
so even a small city can have many smart services.
The last one is Campobasso, where we found very little innovation,
and Como is placed here, slightly better than the average.
It was 41st in the general ranking and it is 32nd for mobility.
A little smarter than in other fields.
What did we find in Genoa and in the other cities
that makes mobility a smart one?
For example, smart cards for public transport,
on which it's possible to upload tickets and passes.
We found that in the parking meters
you can pay also by cash, ATM cards or credit cards,
even with an app.
We found that it is often possible, when you are shopping,
or having a lunch with friends,
or at a meeting,
and your parking is about to expire,
instead of rushing to feed more coins into the meter
and display the ticket inside the car,
you can go on the app
and extend the parking session, for example, by one hour,
without moving.
In cities like these, public transport arrival time
is not only displayed on information panels,
which are now common in many cities, but can also be found on your phone:
so, if I have to get off in three stops and take another means of transport,
I can check if it is running late or on time
and decide between hurrying up and taking it easy.
There are cities where we find user-oriented information.
Milan's ATM, for example,
informs travellers via Twitter about the status of individual lines.
This means that if I take tram 16 to go at work every day,
I'd rather be informed
not about every single disruption in the public transport network,
but only about my specific tram.
Therefore, they inform me
if there is a service block, if there is an alternative route
and when this service will be resumed.
This way, I am able to better organise my movements.
But smart mobility is not only about public transport:
it is above all the decrease in private transport,
what is called “shared mobility”.
In a growing number of cities we now find car sharing, bike sharing.
Italy - among the first countries - has also introduced scooter sharing!
It is available in Milan and Rome.
It is possible to choose a vehicle which is not mine, but it is shared;
I can use it to move and for the time I need it,
then I leave it somewhere in the city and keep moving around.
Why are cities betting on shared mobility?
Because, for example, a study carried out in Milan
shows that cars are used for 15 minutes as an average per day.
This means that they stand still, unused and basically useless
for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day.
Just imagine what it means to have fewer cars in the city,
but more efficiently used, through sharing among citizens.
This may smack of utopia,
but actually in Milan,
nine years after the gradual introduction
of all these alternative forms of transport,
which give citizens the opportunity
to choose among different mobility options,
there are 50,000 cars less.
With these measures, Milan has been able
to reduce by 50.000 the number of circulating cars.
This means, in the long run the effects of these policies do show up.
There are also cities which reinvented themselves
through technologies and social networks.
For example, this is a Spanish city called Jun.
It is quite small actually.
But through Twitter, it reinvented and reorganised itself.
Not only does the town council have a Twitter account -
many town councils do -
but so do all the employees of the town council, also.
And all citizens have a Twitter account, supplied and certified by the town council
and administrators and citizens communicate via Twitter.
Citizens can notify the presence of a broken bench or street lamp,
a poorly maintained green area;
the town council sends someone to see to the problem,
the employee takes a photo, posts it on Twitter
and so he informs the citizen who spotted it out,
but also all the community, that the intervention was made.
This has improved communication between citizens and the town council:
citizens are more motivated to notify any problem
and the town council is more inclined to intervene as soon as possible.
Let's talk about tourism and smart culture.
What's our ranking?
Even here, you see, there is a great difference among the cities.
The first one is Rome, definitely considered a problematic city:
citizens and visitors tend to define it as anything but smart.
But if you analyse these extremely schematic standards,
we find many problems and inefficiencies, but also several excellences.
Surely, were they better known,
the citizens would use these services more
and maybe they would have a different perception of the city.
Once again, Campobasso ranks last.
In Campobasso, according to data,
people don't move and there are no tourists.
And where's Como?
Como is peculiar, because it ranks 56th,
which means it has a below average performance.
It was 41st in the general ranking… 56th.
Then we'll see why: some considerations are to be made about this.
What makes Rome so particular?
A multilingual online system to attract tourists from abroad.
That means,
it is mainly concerned with explaining what it's possible to find in Rome,
where one can sleep, where one can stay.
And the possibility to book online museums,
a series of museums, galleries and monuments.
Online, before arriving.
So many videos, personalized tours,
apps which show you what you can visit around the city,
that is it focuses on drawing foreign tourists.
For example, it has an app
which allows you to skip the queue in some monuments.
At the Coliseum there's always an endless queue at the ticket office.
But, also in real time, thanks to the app,
I can buy the ticket, go to the entrance and they let me in.
So, technologies which simplify admission to monuments.
A very interesting, futurist experience is the one of virtual reality.
At the Roman Forums,
there are two events which are arranged on summer evenings,
where attendees are given small glasses
through which they can see the Forum rebuilt with virtual reality,
as it was 2,000 years ago.
And there's a voice, Piero Angela's voice,
telling tourists what happened there, how the spaces where used,
what occurred 2,000 years ago and which historical events,
like the murder of Caesar, took place in the area.
So there is the opportunity to introduce very advanced technologies,
which allow you to go beyond the ruins - beautiful as they may be -
that we can find in Rome.
We’ve done citizens and tourist,
so the next step is dealing with the packages.
Because the issue of goods and packages circulating in the cities
is also one that many are taking at heart.
Many cities are moving towards so-called “smart logistics”,
so vans won't drive in the city, and congesting it,
thus also optimising the delivery of goods.
I’ll wrap up with Como.
This is our vision of Como
on all the aspects we analyse for the Smart City Index.
The red line is the score
which gives the ranking of Como
for each thematic area.
Como has two excellences,
where its score is higher than in other fields.
One is digital healthcare,
a feature of all cities in Lombardy,
thanks to which, for example,
it's possible to have all clinical data online,
it is possible to book medical appointments online,
to receive medical reports via email and pay the ticket online, in many places.
The other is environmental networks,
that is the part concerning water, sewers,
the city green areas and waste collection,
the performance of Como is higher than the average for Italy.
These are the two aspects where Como works particularly well.
More problematic are the areas these you see framed in red:
energetic networks - public lighting, energy efficiency and savings.
There are cities which are investing heavily in renewable energies,
trying to reduce energy consumption, thus increasing sustainability.
Also in terms of e-government, namely online public services -
many cities are pushing on online registry certificates,
building procedures, digital identity.
Como does certainly need to improve in these areas.
The surprising thing is the area concerning “Tourism and culture”.
Como is packed with tourists and is famous worldwide,
so finding it here comes as a surprise.
Actually, it is a characteristic we find in many Italian art cities:
they are somehow satisfied with the tourists they have
and so they post online just some information
to show what can be visited in the city.
Maybe the sites themselves are anyway well-done,
but many cities are paying much more attention to this aspect.
We need to bear in mind, tomorrow's tourists are today's youth,
who inform themselves, share
and dream of the places they want to go to
on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
Nowadays, if a city doesn't present itself well,
with many services,
providing a wealth of information on these channels,
runs a risk that today's youth may not become tomorrow's tourists.
I’ll leave you with this task to fulfill.
Thank you.
(Applause)