Synchronicity – H2020 Internet of Things – Large Scale Pilots (2017 – 2019)
Principal Investigator: Ulysses Sengupta
Co-Investigators: Robert Hyde
Researchers: Amir Khorasani
Funding: H2020
Synchronicity is a €20m project funded under Europe’s Horizon 2020 research programme connecting 34 partners from 11 countries over four continents.
SynchroniCity is a collaborative R&D project established to help cities simplify the creation of new services that tackle urban challenges they are facing using Internet of Things (IoT) and data technologies.
MMU has two investigators and two RA’s involved – all from the ‘Complexity Planning & Urbanism’ research cluster at the Manchester School of Architecture – developing a new ICT enabled methodology for ‘Agile Governance’ in Manchester with Manchester City Council and Bronze Labs.
Ulysses Sengupta leads research activity from the faculty of Art and Design (School of Architecture) and is the founder of Complexity Planning & Urbanism (CPU). The focus of this research strand is on co-evolution ICT and governance in the context of urban transformation. A transdisciplinary complexity science framework is being used to develop the methodology.
SynchroniCity represents the first attempt to deliver a Single Digital City Market for Europe by piloting its foundations at scale in reference zones across 8 European cities, involving also other cities globally. It addresses how to incentivise and build trust for companies and citizens to actively participate, in finding common co-created IoT solutions for cities that meet citizen needs and to create an environment of evidence-based solutions that can easily be replicated in other regions.
SynchroniCity starts and ends in cities and their citizens. The innovation ecosystems in cities constitute the pillar upon which all the activities in the project will rely. Through a strategy adapted to the reference zones, they will identify, engage and support the different stakeholders, including citizens and communities. The latter ones will help to identify the problems to be solved in the city and to validate the solutions.
While an agreement on technology assumption is crucial for the emergence of a single digital market, the right environment for impactful citizen centred services to emerge must support it. A key element is to empower (local) ecosystem participants with guidelines for co-creation around the marketplace and provide a flexible regulatory and policy environment for experimentation with potentially disruptive technologies. The reference zones chosen in the project and the pilots will derive best practices that can be shared with other ecosystem participants as blueprints, increasing the acceptability of emerging solutions by citizens and regulatory business environment.
Tags: adaptive, agile, cities, city, complexity, CPU, futures, governance, Internet of things, manchester, smart city, urban
