Smart City projects win bank backing, see cautious roll out in Czech Republic
Prague last week hosted an international symposium about Smart Cities. The concept is a fairly simple one: to marry the latest information and communication technologies so that cities can run more efficiently and in a more environment and citizen friendly fashion. And Czech universities, banks, companies, and towns and cities are taking part in the moves to try and harness technology so that urban areas operate differently.
Imagine for instance solar panels on roofs of offices. When temperatures rise above a certain level in winter, the heat being produced cuts out and the electricity is diverted to power electric cars in the garages below. The cars take part in a sharing scheme with drivers and potential passengers connected. And the whole urban environment is planned so that flats, jobs, entertainment, and shops are within easy reach of each other.
Not science fiction but reality, or near reality in the case of the most advanced Smart City applications now being hatched around the world. Of course, some of these scenarios have started from scratch in the last years designing modern suburbs or towns. That is, for example, the case of a brand new suburb which is developing in the north of Vienna which will eventually host around 10,500 apartments with 20,000 jobs being sited there. The project should be completed by 2028. One of the banking groups behind the Vienna project is the Erste Group, which has one of the Czech Republic’s biggest banks Česká Spořitelna, as Spořitelna’s Marcel Babczynski comments:
“Smart City has recently become part of our overall strategy and, for example, our bank in Vienna is developing the whole new suburban area, the Seestadt, where a whole new area is being from scratch using these Smart concepts.”
So Česká Spořitelna is running with the Smart City concept in the Czech Republic for largely selfish reasons. Spořitelna is the biggest bank currently serving Czech local and regional councils, with an estimated 55-60 percent of that market, and sees the knowledge it can pass on about Smart City concepts and applications as part of its overall package of services to retain that slice of the market and possibly expand.
“The things that interest municipalities in the Smart Cities concept is e-governance, transportation and the issues connected with waste collection.”
The bank’s target group is the around 132 Czech towns and cities boasting more than 10,000 inhabitants. And Česká Spořitelna sees around 100 billion crowns in potential spending on so-called smart applications by 2020. Marcel Babczynski takes up the story:
“The things that interest municipalities in the Smart Cities concept is e-governance, transportation and the issues connected with waste collection. So, for example, when it comes to e-governance what we are piloting with several municipalities is those municipal e-shops where citizens can pay for their transactions with councils from their homes without the necessity to go the counter of the municipality or somewhere else. Typically, they can pay for waste, they can pay for their dog, they can pay for parking or their fines if they have some. If the municipality has a theatre, then they buy tickets for that on-line. That’s for e-governance.
“For transportation, the hottest issue is parking for municipalities where they try to solve the issue of cars going round and round trying to find a free parking space and with modern technologies they can provide the drivers with on-line information where they can park, And they can pay on-line as well using standard payment cards for parking without the necessity for throwing coins into the machines. Waste collection is the third topic that I mentioned: it is various ways of smartly or intelligently measuring when the waste was thrown out and indicating when it should be collected and that kind of stuff. And there again there are various kinds of systems that allow for this.”
Some towns and cities have grasped the Smart concept with both hands. The central Bohemian town of Písek, with just under 30,000 inhabitants, is one of those and has sealed a series of agreements aimed at paving the way for smart technology from energy saving at the local swimming pool to town lighting and better function of local bus services. The moves have attracted some fears from locals that Písek is paving the way for a ‘Big Brother’ society which the council has tried to dispel. It argues that the Smart City path is one way to ensure that jobs and young people and families stay in the town and are not enticed away to bigger cities with more to offer such as Prague, Brno, or České Budějovice.
Česká Spořitelna’s Marcel Babczynski says Czech towns and cities are interested in Smart City concepts but translating interest into specific projects is not always easy.
So far the take up of projects has been fairly widespread but still tentative with the grand coordinated projects of some Western cities, such as those already outlined for Vienna, lacking. Some projects, such as Prague’s infamous Opencard digital transport pass, is an example of an isolated Smart City type application that ran into trouble with the city council and card and technology provider still in a long-running wrangle about the terms of their contract. Marcel Babczynski outlines where some other projects are proceeding relatively smoothly.
“For example in Liberec you can already see a functioning parking solution, which I already mentioned. For the intelligent waste collection there are several smart bins installed in Prague, Karlovy Vary, and Brno. And the waste collection systems exist on a more extensive scale, for example in Bruntál or in Vestec near Prague. But generally, this is still in the pilot phase so you can see examples here and there but none of that has been implemented on a large scale.”
According to Mr. Babczynski, one factor in favour of some Smart projects is the fact that Czechs have already switched massively to the use of contactless payment cards. According to some figures they are already among the biggest per capita users of such cards in the world.
“This is still in the pilot phase so you can see examples here and there but none of that has been implemented on a large scale.”
One of the speakers at last week’s symposium was Jakub Vorel of the architecture faculty at the technical university. He has long been trying to chart how much residential moves within Prague are determined by the key factor of travel distances to work by public transport and by car. The results show that the 30 minute distance to work criteria is often fundamental for decisions by people in Prague about where they will live. That suggests, for example, that the eventual completion of a ring road round Prague will result in a much greater shift of population away from the central districts of the city and out to the suburbs.
But, such location decisions, are complex ones, for example with whole families and not just one individual contributing to the final result. And certain key public data which could build up a much clearer picture of the interplay of forces at work are not available. Short of paying for rather expensive inter-disciplinary research to fill in the gaps, some basic finding that could contribute to urban planning and development is simply not at hand at the moment irrespective of whether the city is signed up to Smart City projects or not.
