For the trend of smart cities to move beyond a buzzword and into becoming a market, the emerging sector needs to be less fragmented and more focused on interoperability, say several European leaders who will be hosting the Connected Smart Cities Conference in Brussels, this Thursday, 21 January.

Martin Brynskov, Chair of the Open and Agile Smart Cities Initiative which is hosting the conference (to be held at Square – Brussels Meeting Centre) this Thursday, says the event has already reached capacity and now has a waiting list of attendance of city representatives, businesses and startups who want to hear how Europe will work collaboratively to clear the obstacles of individually focused solutions and create a common platform for new technological projects. 

The move comes as new consortiums around the globe attempt to address a similar pressure point. In the US, telco AT&T announced earlier this month they will be partnering with key vendors including Cisco, IBM, Intel and others to form a smart cities consortium aimed at agreeing on a common infrastructure framework for smart cities technologies.

There, the consortium will work on pilot projects in several US cities focusing on city issues like energy efficiency and water consumption, and on public safety enhancements.

“Open and Agile Smart Cities is built on the stuff that people are doing already and finding what works,” says Brynskov. “We are asking: what is the minimum common ground that is needed to get smart cities projects shared across different cities?”

Brynskov says one of the biggest barriers to smart city adoption has been that solutions must take into account the deeply complex roots of individual cities, where cultural and political forces mean that a solution cannot be transported wholesale from another location and expected to work the same.

Juan José Hierro, Chief Architect at FIWARE, a technology platform for smart cities infrastructure and one of the co-organizers of the conference, points to a recent example where a startup has built a GPS navigation tool in Porto, Portugal that lets drivers not only route their mapping journey, but also end it by driving directly to a vacant car parking space that is discovered in realtime as the car gets closer to its destination.

Hierro says that solution is now being applied in Spain’s northern city of Santander. “The two cities own rather different system for managing their parking slots. They have different providers with different systems,” says Hierro. “But the two cities are exporting the relevant city context information in a common way. 

....