Wireless city berlin

Wireless City Berlin – Solutions for a Smarter City
Till J. Winkler, Valentin Schöndienst, Gerrit Tamm Institute of Information Systems Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 10178 Berlin {winkleti,schondiv,tamm}@wiwi.hu-berlin.de

Abstract Cities in Europe face the challenge of combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development. Technology such as wireless communication and ubiquitouscomputing is playing an increasingly important role in this context, helping to co-create solutions which can make the urban space „smarter‟. The city of Berlin is launching the project „Wireless City Berlin‟ (WCB) to demonstrate the potential of such technologies in multiple application scenarios. This paper analyses the terms „smart‟ and „wireless‟ with respect to urban development and introduces atypology of wireless city initiatives. Further, it presents the main work areas of the WCB project and relates it to other wireless city initiatives in Europe.

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Introduction

Cities face the challenge of combining competitiveness and sustainability in their urban strategies. Particularly in the European Union where differences in economic, social and environmental standards are harmonized“one of the common trends has been [...] the increase in competition between cities to attract inward investment. A dominant theme is what is termed „public-private partnership‟.” [Thor96]. Cities partner with industrial organizations, with academic institutions and – sometimes – directly with their citizens, aiming to sharpen their city profile and co-create solutions which improve the urbaninfrastructure and the quality of public service provision. Information and communication technology (ICT) is one of the key enablers in this context [Mino00]. Increasing network bandwidths, evolving wireless transmission standards, miniaturization of hardware and mobile access at decreasing costs allows to create solutions,

which enhance current services or disruptively create new innovations. Suchservices can target at individuals (e.g. citizens or tourists), businesses (such as local commerce) or public institutions (also referred to as e-government and mobile government). While state-of-the-art solutions have been built as web-based solutions, the upcoming paradigm of ubiquitousness will lead to services which are embedded in the user‟s environment [Gall03]. This vision implies that theurban environment autonomously adapts to their actors making the use of ICT ‟smart‟. The limits of public ICT investment are less of a technical, but rather of an economic kind. A careful analysis is needed when evaluating the benefits and costs of evolving technology investments as well as the expectations and acceptance of the prospected users. New services will only succeed, if the technologybrings a substantial benefit and integrates seamlessly into people‟s everyday life. The city of Berlin is launching the project „Wireless City Berlin‟ (WCB) involving multiple industrial and research partners to demonstrate the potential of wireless technologies in the urban environment. This paper presents the WCB project in detail illustrating and discussing the value of wireless city solutionsin selected application scenarios. We conclude by comparing the WCB project to other European initiatives and qualify the overall approach in Berlin in the light of the experiences made by other European metropolises.

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Related Work
The Notion of Smart Cities

In many western countries, the discussion about the future of urban development has been influenced by the concept of socalled „smart cities‟. Yet, it is surprising that the term has not been widely used in spatial planning literature nor in urban research [Giff07]. Rather we notice that the concept derives from a self-labeling process adopted by some designated cities and regions which use the term to market certain aspects of their urban development [Holl08]. This marketing can refer to new urban districts (e.g....