Smart City Bristol

Bristol is the 8th largest city in the UK and a booming city region of 1.1 million people. It has been identified as a leading city in the 2016 UK Smart Cities Index and touted as “the best place to live in the UK” by the Sunday Times. How did we get there?  Throughout the past seven years, we have been working tirelessly to become a Smart City that will lead the future. Here is the story of our journey.

Step 1: Recognizing Why

The first step in our journey was identifying the reasons why we needed to become a smarter city. Some of the important drivers of our decision include:

• Economic Benefits: Becoming a Smart City would help us grow and become more prosperous by driving the ICT business sector.
• Environmental Benefits: Smart technology would help us meet challenging carbon targets of reducing emissions by 40 percent by 2020.
• Energy Benefits: The population in Bristol is growing, and Smart City initiatives would allow us to deliver better services at lower costs.
• Citizen Engagement: Despite being a prosperous city, some communities in Bristol still face high levels of poverty. A Smart City platform would allow us to connect the city and make everyone feel like an important part of it.

Step 2: Seek Advice

Once we identified our reasons for wanting to become a Smart City, we sought advice from Professor Chris Tuppen, a leader in the area. He benchmarked our activities, looked at our priorities and strengths, then came up with a report that included a set of recommendations about what we should focus on to achieve the biggest movements toward becoming a Smart City.

Step 3: Set Up a Smart City Program

Based on Professor Tuppen’s recommendations, we set up pilot programs in the three major areas identified within the report: Smart Energy, Smart Mobility, and Smart Data. Here are some of our initiatives in each area.

Smart Energy

• Teaching citizens in their own homes to better understand their energy usage through the use of smart meters.
• Making energy usage in council buildings more transparent through smart meters and open data.
• Working with citizens on a smart grid project whereby we deployed solar PV and battery storage in council houses, allowing people to offset their energy demand.

Smart Mobility

• Launching two connected, autonomous vehicle projects, including Venturer, a driverless car.
• Developing more innovation in community transport, including Boxy, a hybrid between a bus and a taxi that allows people to order a ride then the route is adapted based on where everyone who is on board needs to go.
• Exploring different fuel sources, including a bus that runs on biofuel (human waste).

Smart Data

• Developing a community of people in Bristol who are interested in open data and how it can be used to launch innovative businesses and improve transparency.
• Becoming one of the global nodes for the Open Data Institute in London.
• Establishing a virtuous circle of providing tools to the community and then encouraging developments by the people, such as the creation of apps that solve city issues.
• Embedding the use of open data through policy by making it compulsory for people within the city authority to release the data that they can.

Step 4: Develop Infrastructure

In Bristol, we have a research and development smart cities infrastructure where Bristol is a joint venture between the City Council and the University of Bristol. We have a fiber optic network overlaid by a showcase wireless network and on top of that is a radio-frequency mesh network. It hangs off of 1,500 lampposts in the city, allowing us to deploy data sensors and monitors quickly and cheaply.

With all that data coming in, we also invested in an open data platform to house the data and allow people to access it.

In addition, we have a Data Dome inside our planetarium that uses 24K 3D projectors to show what the data looks like visually. The theater seats one hundred, allowing decision makers to come together and view what is happening in the city in real time (congestion, air quality, etc.). Experts can see the data and discuss how they might solve the problems – a better way of engaging problem solvers than writing a report that they will never read.

A final bit of infrastructure that is coming live next year is the Combined City Operation Center, which will bring together our Emergency Center, our CCTV cameras, and our Traffic Control Center into one single area, thus encouraging organizations to come together, and share the space, the data, and the intelligence.

Step 5: Combining Individual Elements

We have seen excellent results with each program, but we are currently working on building a Smart District so we can see how all the different components of the programs and infrastructure can come together in one area. The project is called Replicate, and the goal is to be able to combine individual elements so we can produce results that are more than just the sum of the parts.

Step 6: Future Focus on the Community

Most of the Smart City initiatives implemented in Bristol so far have been created from the top down because that is where the investments are, and the majority of the initial interest has come from commercial organizations. However, increasingly there is a movement toward taking a bottom-up approach. By engaging the community, we can understand what their problems are and where their priorities lie. We can work with them to refine their ideas and create programs that speak to these individual- and community-level problems.

The Smart Cities initiative in Bristol was started by the City Council, which took control and made decisions about the direction of the city. I think we’re now in a space where we need to open up more and recognize that the community can bring something really powerful to this too.