OrganiCity was a service for experimentation throughout the collaborative research project which ran from 2015 to 2018. The project, funded by the European Commission through Horizon 2020, brought together 15 partners from across Europe to test whether Experimentation as a Service is a useful approach for developing solutions to city challenges.
THE VISION
The data that we emit from our cities has the potential to transform how we design for and respond to people’s needs. Gathering, connecting and analysing this data – whether from our environment, transport, homes or social media accounts – can provide us with rich and reliable insights into how our cities currently operate and, therefore, how they could operate more effectively in the future.
As we move into this digital age, more people than ever before are moving into our cities. Rapid urbanisation, growing and aging populations, extreme climates and new technologies are adding considerable strain and complexity to our cities. These challenges require us to reimagine how we can design and deliver more flexible, sustainable and resilient systems that not only manage our limited resources more efficiently, but also strengthen our communities, protect our environment and prioritise our health and wellbeing.
Tech companies, academia, public authorities, start-ups and citizen groups are all attempting to respond to these challenges with new solutions. Yet, one of the biggest inefficiencies of all is that we continue to tackle these issues in silos; the local knowledge of city authorities often doesn’t inform the latest health app, and the resources and experience of large corporations often doesn’t support the innovative ideas of small start-ups. If we all have the same mission to develop the most useful products and services to future-proof our cities, then we need to start working together.
Built upon the values of co-creation, transparency and inclusivity, OrganiCity is asking, what if our public bodies employed a new model for addressing urban challenges? One that combines our collective knowledge, perspectives and resources and applies the rich insights of data to city making? What impact could we achieve if we brought together everyone in a city to collaboratively test and develop their ideas? What scale and at what rate could we begin to address the relentless issues that affect our cities around the world every day.
PROJECT OUTCOMES
The project outcomes deliver the OrganiCity Playbook: It provides an overview of what Experimentation-as-a-Service is, the journey of the OrganiCity project, the lessons that we learned along the way, and a quick-start guide for taking the OrganiCity vision forward and launch Experimentation-as-a-Service in cities.
