Barcelona Smart City
Case Study:-
Smart City Series: the Barcelona
Experience
environmental, economic, As predicated by the United
Nations, more than half of the world’s population live
currently in urban areas, and around 70% will be
concentrated in the cities by the year 2050. This
anticipated urbanization of the world pose significant
challenges related to and social sustainability
Nevertheless, modern cities have a defining role in
sustainable development and a central position in
applying advanced technologies to support progress
towards sustainability in the face of urbanization. In
other words, sustainable smart cities, the leading
paradigm of urbanism today, are seen as the most
important arena for sustainability transitions in an
increasingly urbanized world. They hold great potential
to instigate major, and make significant contributions
to, societal transformations by linking together the
agendas of sustainable development and technological
innovation.
Barcelona Smart City Strategy
In 2013, having realized the importance of explicit smart-
city strategy, the City Council started to work on one, in
order to become the first truly smart city in Spain. In the
process, they also formulated this definition of a smart
city: “a self-sufficient city of productive neighborhoods
at human speed, inside a hyper-connected zero
emissions metropolitan area“. Barcelona aimed at using
new technologies and infrastructure to foster economic
growth and guarantee a greater quality of life for its
citizens.
Several local and regional stakeholders, such as businesses
and universities, were involved in the definition and
implementation of this strategy. On a reflective note, it can
be said that collaboration with other public administrations
and public-private partnerships proved highly effective.
In the case of Barcelona’s smart city brand, the
Autonomous Government of Catalonia also supported
many initiatives when it came to wider projects that
included other areas of the region. Cooperation with other
cities in Spain, along with European Union support, was
also important.
Technologies that helped to transform
Barcelona
Barcelona, as a smart city, has achieved a wide
range of benefits through investment in IoT for
urban systems. The high-tech improvements seen
throughout Barcelona offer a good example for
various other cities looking to improve their
technological infrastructure in similar ways. Some
of them are listed in continuation:
o Street light
LED-based lighting system solution has helped
Barcelona to become more energy efficient and
reduces the heat produced by the old lamps thus
leading to cost savings for the city. With the help of
the sensors, the system also receives information
regarding the pollution, humidity, temperature, the
presence of people, and noise.
o Waste Disposal
The use of smart bins that use a vacuum and suck
the waste into underground storage helps
to reduce the smell of trash waiting to be
fetched and the noise pollution from collection
vehicles.
It also enables the city to detect the level of waste
that comes from different places and optimize the
collection of waste, which decreases both the
resources and time needed for this service.
Meanwhile, the incineration of waste is used
afterwards to produce energy for heating systems.
o City Bike System
After many years of public bicycle sharing it might
seem just another service, but back in the
day Barcelona was one of the first and largest
cities to implement the system. This initiative is
aimed at reducing the number of cars circulating in
the city. Despite occasional controversies, Bicing
can still be considered a success with its over
120,000 users.
o Bus Transit System
The bus transit system stands out for sustainable
mobility and decreasing emissions with the help
of hybrid buses. This system also has smart bus
shelters utilizing solar panels to provide energy for
the screens that show waiting times.
o Noise Sensors
The residents of Barcelona’s Plaza de Sol, who had
complained about the nighttime noise for decades,
used low-cost and easy-to-use sensors that can
detect air pollution, noise levels, humidity and
temperature to detect and prove that the noise
levels were almost 100 decibels which were beyond
the recommendations of the WHO. Armed with
this information, the residents went to the city
council, pressing them to rethink the use of the
plaza.
o Irrigation System
Various sensors in the ground offer live data on
humidity, temperature, wind velocity, sunlight, and
atmospheric pressure. That means, for example,
that gardeners can decide what the plants need
based on that data and adapt their schedule to
avoid overwatering. It was estimated that the city
will earn back its initial investment in building the
first phase of the system in one year when they cut
water usage by about one quarter.
o Fab Lab
Barcelona was the first city in the world to have
a public network of fab labs, small-scale
workshop offering (personal) digital fabrication.
The premise of this enterprise was simple: “no
smart city without smart citizens”. Citizens play a
key role in the development of smart cities,
therefore it is important that they can participate
in the changes at grassroots level.
Sustainable Smart development
The sustainable smart city as a holistic paradigm of
urbanism represents an approach to sustainable
urban development, a strategic process to achieve
the long–term goals of urban sustainability—with
support of advanced technologies and their novel
applications. Accordingly, achieving the status of
such city epitomizes an instance of urban
sustainability. This notion refers to a desired
(normative) state in which a city strives to retain a
balance of the socio–ecological systems through
adopting and executing sustainable development
strategies as a desired (normative) trajectory. This
balance entails improving and advancing the
environmental, economic, social, and physical
systems of the city in line with the vision of
sustainability over the long run—given their
interdependence, synergy, and equal importance.
This strategic goal requires fostering linkages
between scientific research, technological
innovations, institutional frameworks, policy
formulations, planning practices, and development
strategies in relevance to
sustainability, sustainable smart city relies on
constellations of instruments across many scales
that are connected through multiple networks
augmented with intelligence, which provide and
coordinate continuous data regarding the different
aspects of urbanity in terms of the flow of
decisions about the environmental, economic,
social, and physical forms of the city. The evolving
research and practice in the field of sustainable
smart urbanism tends to focus on harnessing and
exploiting the ever–increasing deluge of the data
that flood from urban systems and domains by
leveraging the value extracted from this deluge
through analytics in advancing sustainability. In
this respect, sustainable smart urbanism entails
developing urban intelligence functions as an
advanced form of decision support, which
represent new conceptions of how the sustainable
smart city functions and utilizes and integrates
complexity science, urban science, and data
science in fashioning powerful new forms of urban
simulations models and optimization and
prediction methods. These can generate urban
structures and forms that improve sustainability,
efficiency, resilience, and the quality of life.
