Small city ICT4D: Smart Santander
Posted on November 8, 2011 in (Social) Media, English, Hippy-ism, Media+Hippy-ism
Let’s get some facts straight: Santander, although a charming city, is tiny. At about 180,000 residents, it has about half the population that the university where I study does. So, in a way, one would think that the government in Santander would use its ‘small city’ budget on ‘small city’ needs. Or, in other words: one wouldn’t immediately associate Santander to that group of big contributors to the Smart City movement.
At least I wouldn’t.
And that’s why I was pleased to hear Santander Mayor Íñigo de la Serna present Smart Santander as one of the most important initiatives ever made by the city government during a dialogue he held with future public workers from Latin America. We were able to meet him thanks to Programa de Fortalecimiento Institucional 2011 sponsored by Fundación Botín, about which I will be blogging more in the near future.
Let’s talk Smart Santander.
Project info: www.smartsantander.eu
Quick facts: it is a research project (it’s financed by the European Commission as part of the research efforts to build a better Internet for the future); it involves academics, entrepreneurs and public workers from countries of the EU and Australia; it aims at installing 20,000 wireless sensors in the city, which will give Santander the biggest WSN in the world.
Even though Smart Santander is a research project, they really aren’t fooling around. And that leads me to some concerns I have about this initiative.
The first concern I have is that, looking through the available documents, it isn’t clear to me that the project goes beyond infrastructure building and into user-end concerns. In other words: how will they make sure that people actually use this multi-million Euro project? When asked about this, Mayor De la Serna answered that this question came down to the public usefulness of the infrastructure. “When people see all the useful things they can do for free through their phone, they will be hooked”. In my opinion, ICT4D projects are particularly prone to failure when it comes to reducing the gap between the infrastructure and users, and relying on the usefulness of the project seems like a rather big gamble to me.
Another concern: maybe this has actually been taken into account, but this info just isn’t available enough. Even though the project has an official site, channels and plenty of media coverage, there isn’t much information to allow for a fair judgment of the project itself. Someone will have to spend a few weeks hunting for it all when it’s time to make sense of it.
But Smart Santander doesn’t only bring concerns; it also brings a lot of enthusiasm.
Mayor De la Serna’s tone was special when he explained the potential of Smart Santander. With a background in engineering, I think he is genuinely excited about the project. During his explanations, he spoke about the government’s conscience on ICT4D matters. He showed awareness of open data discussions, business models for development work, international collaborations in the smart city department… All in all, he showed that Santander may be a small city, but it surely is taking the necessary steps to be a smart one. Let’s hope this research proves to be useful not only for Santander, but for other small (and big) cities worldwide.
There are no more excuses, mayors of the world!
