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Smart Cities
UrbanTide leads £24 million program to make Glasgow a Future City
November 25, 2022
In 2013, Glasgow beat a host of other UK cities to win funding worth £24m from Innovate UK. The funding was awarded with the goal of creating a program that would allow the city to explore new and innovative ways of using data and technology to make life in the city safer, smarter and more sustainable. In other words, to make Glasgow a ‘Future City’.
Open data was identified as one of the key drivers that would help Glasgow realise its vision to become the UK’s Smartest City. This was based on the knowledge that open data improves transparency, accountability and leads to innovation in the marketplace.
As open data experts, a group of consultants who would later move on to form UrbanTide led the development of Glasgow’s Open Data processes to embed a legacy pipeline for open data in the city.
Opening up city data was identified as a main lever to helping Glasgow realise its ambition to become the UK’s smartest city. This was because, cities like Glasgow hold vast amounts of valuable data, but much of it is difficult to access. Typically, it’s locked away within organisations that use their data for a specific purpose but not necessarily understanding the value it could provide to the city as a whole.
By encouraging organisations across Glasgow to make non-sensitive and non-personal data discoverable online, this would give the city (the public, voluntary, academic, private sectors and communities) the opportunity to harness it and use it in ways that would help make Glasgow a better place to live, work and play.
The key challenges with the Future City Glasgow programme were to:
As part of the Future City Glasgow program, UrbanTide developed an Open Data Toolkit that would function as a framework for accelerating Glasgow towards becoming a Future City.
The Open Data Toolkit comprised of:
Find out more about the Open Data toolkit project here.
As part of the Future Cities Glasgow development program, UrbanTide also delivered the City Technology Platform. This was a state-of-the-art data insights platform that would collect and integrate open data to help the city reap the benefits that valuable data could offer.
The platform was comprised of the following key technical components:
The City Technology Platform provided a key technical component to help create innovation and business opportunities within Glasgow and the rest of the UK.
Glasgow now publishes the second highest number of open data sets of any city in the UK (surpassed only by London) and have delivered key benefits in terms of transparency and market-led innovation.
The Future Cities Demonstrator Programme provided a unique opportunity to demonstrate the value of Smart City principles and technologies at scale within the UK, and the City Technology Platform provided a key technical component to help deliver against this opportunity.
The Glasgow Open Data Hub is a data insights platform that is now powered by the City Technology Platform. It holds over 400 data points from various organisations across Glasgow that are open for reuse.
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