The Smart City is stuck in the middle between visionary concepts and implementation problems whose origin often lies in organizational and management problems. Since Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are often a commodity, what hinders the development of the Smart City is a lack of business and governance models defining how ICT-based initiatives can create economic and social value, how they can be replicated at low cost across cities.
The Data4Cities project tackled these issues in one of the most information intensive fields of city life: infomobility. Two teams analyzed how mobility of cars, public transportation vehicles and tourists could be enhanced by the deployment of established ICT tools.
Both the two teams have developed a state-of-the-art analysis of how ICT is supporting infomobility and the tourist’s experience in a city. Then the two teams developed different approaches. A team followed a market-pull perspective, dealing with the requests of Infoblu (i.e. the infomobility player of Autostrade per l’Italia) to propose a concept for a new ICT platform that can help city governments and technical bodies to monitor and manage traffic and mobility in a city. The team addressed this challenge by undertaking a series of case studies with the technical bodies managing traffics in some large cities and regions. This primary market analysis highlighted the need for an open and modular platform inspired on the concepts of re-usability across cities and low costs of implementation. Coherently with this idea, the team developed also a proposal for a governance model for this platform at the country level. The second team analyzed how social networks and communication technologies could enhance the experience and the mobility of tourists in Italian cities and in their world-class historical heritage. The distinguishing feature of the concept developed by the team is using social networking technologies to develop a community-based and bottom-up approach for the recommendation of hidden point-of-Interests (e.g., squares, monuments, palaces, gardens) in cities. The analogy is thus with Tripadvisor. The idea may represent a new and alternative paradigm to the ones of touristic guides. The team developed this concept through a two stage process: 1) a market analysis on how people use mobile technologies and recommendation systems to explore cities; 2) the exploration of a feasible business model, whose revenue sources can be based on location-based advertising. Their effort was thus translated in a quest for a feasible business model and the individuation of alliances with other players of the Smart City.
Principal Academic Tutor
Paolo Neirotti, Politecnico di Torino – Dept. of Management and Production Engineering
Academic Tutor
Chiara Francalanci, Politecnico di Milano – Dept. of Electronics and Information
Patrizia Lombardi, Politecnico di Torino – Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning
Emilio Paolucci, Politecnico di Torino- Dept. of Management and Production Engineering
External institutions
Infoblu- Gruppo Autostrade per l’Italia
Istituto Superiore Mario Boella
External tutor
Francesco Ferrero, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella
Fabio Pressi, Infoblu- Gruppo Autostrade
Team A members
Mattia Cantono, Telecommunication Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Andrea Colagrossi, Space Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Michelle Jung Boehm [team controller]
Product- Service- Systems Design, Politecnico di Milano
Alice Mora, Industrial Engineering and Management, Politecnico di Torino
Ario Sadafi, Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Team B members
Mario Aricò, Biomedical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Dora Coccorullo [team controller], Industrial Engineering and Management, Politecnico di Torino
Alessandro Conti, Civil Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Anita Fontana, Architecture Building City, Politecnico di Torino
Davide Ivaldi, Aerospace Engineering, Poltecnico di Torino
Federico Pavan [project communication coordinator], Mathematical modeling in Engineering, Politecnico di Torino