INTELCITIES - Intelligent Cities

The main objective of INTELCITIES was to create a new and innovative set of interoperable e-government services to meet the needs of both citizens and businesses. This provided interactive citywide on-line applications and services for users that  make all aspects of what is going-on in the city available to all.

This supports:
- the everyday needs and requirements of citizens and business through 24 hour access to transactional city services;
- more efficient city management & administration by integrating functions and services across city authorities, regional and national governmental agencies, utility and transport system providers and citizens/NGO networks;
- much more innovative and effective approaches to urban planning through more reliable city modelling, using advanced visualisation and predictive techniques, which enable citizens and businesses to play a far more participative and inclusive role in influencing how planned changes in the city affects their lives.

INTELCITIES demonstrated an integrated project approach to all aspects of its work, including:
- providing innovative but user-friendly interactive on-line discussion forums so that citizens, officials, businesses and community organisations/NGOs can work together in more inclusive ways to enhance local decision-making processes;
- developing new mechanisms for negotiation and arbitration in order to help remove or resolve disputes over local development that constrains urban regeneration, whilst at the same time enhancing citizens rights in urban decision making processes.
- using lessons learnt from best practice in different socio-economic environments to build a new interoperable and integrated platform for city e-government services, based on open systems, and capable of being both scalable and transferable;
- developing practical and effective results which are capable of materially supporting economic regeneration and social inclusion by enabling a more intelligible and intelligent city to develop.

This new form of electronic governance is at an experimental stage in which learning by doing in cities is the key, especially in terms of developing and utilising best practice. Prototype system development tests interactive forms of electronic service delivery over different technology platforms, e.g. iDTV, PC based and mobile, in diverse socio-economic environments. The underlying objective was to ensure that all the applications and services can be made to work together in a seamless and interoperable manner. At the same time the project addressed key human factors in order to ensure that these approaches maximised support for social inclusion so that all citizens, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity and disability, will be able to use the applications and services in ways which will increase their knowledge of, and involvement in, the city. Ultimately the aim was to ensure that people can use these to enhance their lives and to participate more fully in the information society and the knowledge economy.

The project brought together 18 cities, led by Manchester and Siena, with 20 ICT companies including Nokia, Microsoft and CISCO and 36 research groups to pool advanced knowledge and experience of electronic government, planning systems and citizen participation from across Europe. It  helped achieve the EU policy goal of the Knowledge Society by 2010 through new forms of electronic governance of cities and greater social inclusion through enhanced access to services by citizens and businesses.

Team:

• Univ. Prof. Mag. Dr. Josef Hochgerner (external Senior Advisor) (project leader)
• Dr. Ulrike Kozeluh

Section: Technology and Knowledge

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