Published At: January 10, 2023
Amsterdam, the Dutch capital city, has become one of the leading smart cities in Europe. The city's smart city approach, which has been in place since 2008, is based on a quadruple helix concept that involves the government, businesses, universities and research institutions, and citizens. The city's approach covers all relevant fields of action for a municipality, including smart economy, smart environment, smart government, smart living, smart mobility, and smart people.
To ensure progress towards becoming a smarter city, Amsterdam realized the importance of open government and open data. The city therefore took a full inventory of the local records of more than thirty individual city departments and created the City Data project, a mostly open database that includes topographical and address data, land value and ownership information, healthcare data, traffic data, and more.
The Amsterdam Smart City web platform is at the heart of the city's strategic approach and acts as a centralized forum for the communication and coordination of smart city ideas and projects. The platform is a partnership of twelve public, private and university/research partners, and it enables smart collaboration by facilitating the verification of ideas and their conversion into projects. To date, the platform has a community of nearly 4000 active members, with 240 projects in various stages of development, piloting, or broad implementation.
An open and collaborative mindset, coupled with favorable government regulations, has facilitated an entrepreneurial spirit in Amsterdam, which has engaged a high number of stakeholders both inside and outside of the city. This broad engagement has led to the formation of a whole ecosystem of smart city solutions, which is key to Amsterdam's smart city approach.
An example of such a collaboration is the Internet of Things (IoT) Living Lab, which is a collaboration of several companies that established a network of iBeacons along a 3,400-meter stretch of the city. The beacons use a low-frequency radio signal technology, called LoRaWan, to transmit small packets of data over distances of up to 3 kilometers to the cloud, where it can be accessed by users via Bluetooth-enabled devices and used to develop new smart city apps.
Other initiatives, like StartupAmsterdam, aim to connect startups with the tools, talent, and corporate backing they need to support them and strengthen Amsterdam's economy and startup ecosystem. Some projects described on the Amsterdam Smart City platform are aimed at empowering citizens to take a more active role in the development of smart solutions for their city.
Amsterdam is a world leader in smart city development, and other municipalities can learn a lot from Amsterdam's smart city approach and the solutions that have been developed because of it. The city's holistic strategy, combined with its open and collaborative mindset and favorable government regulations, has enabled the formation of a whole ecosystem of smart city solutions that continually improve Amsterdam's livability and economic prosperity.
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