INTELCITIES – Intelligent Cities
Contract Number 507860
IST-2002-507860
Start allowed by the EC: 01/01/2004
1st period: 2004/2006
The main main objective of INTELCITIES is to create a new and innovative set of interoperable e -government services to meet the needs of both citizens and businesses. This will provide interactive citywide on-line applications and services for users that will make all aspects of what is „going-on“ in the city available to all. This will support:
- the everyday needs and requirements of citizens and business through 24 hour access to transnational city services;
- more efficient city management and administration by integrating functions and services across city authorities, regional and national government agencies, utility and transport systetm providers and citizens/NGO networks;
- much more innovative and effective approaches to urban planning through more reliable city modelling, using advanced visualisation and predictive techniques, which will enable citizens and businesses to play a far more participative and inclusive role in influencing how planned changes in the city will affect their lives.
INTELCITIES will demonstrate an „integrated project“ approach to all aspects of its work, including:
- providing innovative but user-friendly interactive on-line discussion forums so that citizens, officials, businesses and communitiy organisations/NGOs can work together in more inclusive ways to enhance local decision-making processes;
- developing new mechanisms for negotiation and arbitration in order to help remove or resolve disputes over local development that constrains urban regeneration, whilst at the same time enhancing citizens right in urban decision-making processes;
- using lessons learnt from best practise in different socio-economic environments to build a new interoperable and integrated platform for city e-government services, based on open systems and capable of being both scalable and transferable;
- developing practical and effective results which are capable of materially supporting economic regeneration and social inclusion by enabling a more intelligible and intelligent city to develop.
This new form of electronic governance is at an experimental stage in which learning by doing in cities is the key, especially in terms of developing and utilising best practise. Prototype system development will test interactive forms of electronic service delivery over different technology underlying objective is to ensure that all the applications and services can be made to work together in a seamless and interoperable manner. At the same time the project will address key human factors in order to ensure that these approaches maximise support for social inclusion so that all citizens, regradless of gender, age, ethnicity and disability , will be able to use the application and services in ways which will increase their knowledge of, and involvement in, the city. Ultimately the aim is to ensure that people can use these to enhance their lives and to participate more fully in the information society and the knowledge economy.
The project brings together 18 cities, led by Manchester and Siena, with 20 ICT companies including Nokia, Microsoft and CISCO and 36 research groups to pool advanced knowledge and experience of electronic government, planning systems and citizen participation from across Europe. It will help achieve the EU policy goal of the „Knowlegde Society“ by 2010 through new forms of electronic governance of cities and greater social inclusion through enhanced access to services by citizens and businesses.