Podcast explores how CEF Building Blocks are helping Smart Cities flourish in Europe
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Joao Rodriguez Frade, from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT), spoke at the Smart and Sustainable Cities podcast about how the Connecting Europe Facility's (CEF) digital Building Blocks are helping cities and municipalities all over Europe accelerate their digital transformation.
You can listen to the full podcast here.
Digitalisation of services, whether from public administrations or private companies, is a trend that was on the rise even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which is now pushing organisations to adapt even faster so they can offer online services to citizens. As Head of Sector for the Building Blocks, open digital solutions that can be reused in any cross-border or cross-sector European digital project, Joao had the opportunity to explain just how the CEF Building Blocks are helping create "Smart Cities".
Smart Cities
Smart Cities look to leverage on the array of data and digital technology available to run a city more efficiently and sustainably, and to provide citizens with better online public services.
The Building Blocks are helping cities all over Europe do just this, in particular by helping municipalities and businesses to create solutions that extract maximum value from open data to inform policy- and decision-making and create innovative new services for citizens. This ranges from city-wide open-data platforms so citizens and businesses have access to important information in real-time, to improving efficiency and reducing waste and pollution, for example by monitoring weather or traffic congestion hotspots and altering city services accordingly.
Thanks to their international standards and specifications, digital systems and services built with the Building Blocks have guaranteed interoperability, ensuring connectivity with other systems across sectors and borders, for networked cities and a truly interconnected Europe.
Leverage on your city's data
The CEF Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) is a ready-to-use virtual environment for performing analysis on large datasets, which can help inform policy-making.
The CEF Context Broker gathers city data from a variety of different sources, then organises and displays it in real-time on a dashboard for data-driven decision-making.
You can learn more about how the Building Blocks are helping create Smart Cities on our dedicated Smart Cities page, here.
This edition of the Smart and Sustainable Cities podcast is also available on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Apple Podcast, Radio Public and Spotify.