Supporting and enhancing a sense of community in smart cities through big data

Cities play an ever increasingly important role in the lives of vast diversities of people. Hence, (Big) Data in and about cities, becomes more important because it can enable the commitment of cities to competitiveness and sustainability and to become ‘greener’ and more ‘liveable’. Thus, city Big Data can function as a growth engine, it can help to bridge the digital divide and to increase quality of living for city inhabitants. This document proposes a vision or blueprint on Big Data from a ‘smart cities’ perspective. It points to several issues that will have to be addressed to capture the full potential of Big Data in a smart city context and suggest an interdisciplinary action research agenda starting from the guiding principle that Big Data should act as a catalyst to stimulate citizen engagement in becoming active generators of data and information. We state that in order to create such a bidirectional exchange of (Big) data, a certain level of trust and cohesion between citizens of smart cities and city governments is needed. Based on the phrase ‘Sense of Community’ we create a conceptual framework that addresses challenges and solutions related to Big Data and influence, membership, need fulfillment and emotional connectivity. This framework should materialize in concrete actions and policies for European data rich or ‘smart’ cities, encompassing amongst others; the creation of a Data Friendly City Label, the appointment of city Data Ombudsman, and the development of a corpus of initiatives merging communities and big data to address city challenges. The set of ideas described in this paper is certainly not exhaustive but aims at inspiring and informing public authorities about the possibilities offered by the new technologies related to Big Data within the boundaries of a city. The presentation of such a blueprint by the European Commission – added to the promotion of cities already engaged on the path to become Smart cities – can guide European cities to foster bidirectional exchanges with their citizens and face future challenges while making the most of today’s innovations related to Big Data.