Smart Dublin

Dublin is a small city of about 1.3 million people, with four local authorities that make collaboration a challenge. Technology is huge in Ireland, with 80 to 90 percent of Irish people online and 75 percent using a smartphone. Although Ireland has the most users of mobile internet per capita, as a city we have been left behind. With the Smart Dublin project, that is changing.

Smart Dublin is an initiative of the four local authorities to engage with tech startups, universities, citizens and researchers to solve city challenges and improve city life. The following are the guiding principles that have helped to make the program a success.

Collaboration Model

What we have realized over the last couple years is that we don’t have the expertise within our city governments to solve the challenges we’re facing. It is difficult to keep up with technology innovations and resources have been cut. This has led us to adopt a new collaboration model.

If you look at Dublin, we have nine out of ten of the top tech companies. We have an amazing tech startup scene. And we have incredible research centers. Smart Dublin is an attempt to connect all of this expertise together in order to address the challenges of the city.

One specific initiative is Dubl:nked, an open data portal that gathers data and makes it accessible so others can innovate and create solutions. We have also set up an advisory network of 40 key leaders across tech, research, and citizen public representation groups. This network will help guide the vision and strategy for Smart Dublin, meeting twice a year to assess whether we are going in the right direction, where the opportunities are, and how we can work better together.

Focus on Challenges Not Technology

Projects in Smart Dublin are challenge-led, not technology-led. We have worked with operational staff in all areas to figure out what problems in the city need to be solved in the first place. We have engaged with over 100 operational staff in strategic workshops that try to uncover what the challenges are, such as:

• The challenge of sustained mobility, and how we can better understand flows in the city to reduce congestion and increase walking and cycling.
• Environmental challenges and how we may use low-cost monitoring to improve noise and air quality and reduce litter in the streets.
• Extreme weather challenges such as rain and flash floods and how we can better predict and respond to these events.
• Energy challenges and how we can reduce our energy footprint while improving building performance and upgrading street lighting.

When challenges are identified, we use them as a basis for how we engage the market. We can evaluate what is currently available to us and what we should invest in ourselves.

Doing More with Less

The Smart Dublin project is also looking into how we can maximize our city assets so we can ‘do more with less.’ As mentioned above, energy as identified as a challenge, with the need to upgrade street lighting in the city. Upgrading to more energy-efficient bulbs will reduce costs and carbon emissions – but what is the bigger opportunity here?

Dublin has 45,489 street lights. Instead of just changing the bulbs, can we completely rethink street lighting to incorporate additional smart solutions that will help us in the future? For example:

• A smart grid street light with dimming capabilities and on-demand light levels.
• Concealed placement speakers within light posts for music, announcements, and alerts.
• A push to talk button that can connect people with an emergency call station.
• Image sensors used for homeland security, counting pedestrians to gauge flow, and other things.
• Digital signage which could be used for wayfinding, alerts, civic information or even as a revenue stream.

By focusing on the bigger opportunities, we can reassess city assets and do more with less.

Engaging Entrepreneurs

When problems are identified, Smart Dublin seeks to engage entrepreneurs for creative solutions. Take the problem of city flow. By increasing biking in the city, we can cut down on traffic congestion; however, bike theft is a huge problem, with 20,000 bikes stolen each year.

In order to learn about new ideas and support startups in our community, we launched the Smart Dublin Cycle Challenge, offering up €100,000 in seed money to pilot data-driven solutions and new safety and security ideas related to improving cycling within the city. The challenge received 96 expressions of interest and 23 proposals. After 14 proposals had been presented, five Phase 1 winners were selected. The ideas received included things like using low-power radio to track bicycles, a smart bell to record actual and perceived obstacles in order to create a safer cycling environment in Dublin, and tracking devices similar to the “find my iPhone’ capability that help recover stolen bikes.

Testing

There are many benefits to adopting Smart City innovations, but cities must first and foremost test and pilot the technology to validate the tech and understand the business models. Dublin is the “Goldilocks” size – a perfect place to test because it is not too big or too small. The Smart Dublin project has allowed us to run trials on smart technology like smart parking, smart bins, and other things. We can learn from these trials and figure out what works before scaling. For this reason, we consider Smart Dublin to be the start of a longer journey into becoming a Smart City, and we are looking forward to the next stage when we begin to scale up.

We have seen excellent progress in the Smart Dublin projects, but one challenge to address in the future is how to get the word out about our projects and our successes. Unfortunately, people don’t know half of the things we’re doing in the Smart space. As we have seen throughout the journey, the ability to demonstrate small successes is the key to growing and getting more people involved in Smart City initiatives.