Barcelona Smart City

The city of Barcelona wants to become the first self-sustaining city in the world. Barcelona is the First Smart City in the Spanish State, the 4th in Europe and the 10th in the World. In Europe, with Amsterdam and Helsinki, is one of the cities with a large number of initiatives, each covering a variety of characteristics. Barcelona is a major innovator, introducing a solar thermal ordinance in 2000 that requires all new buildings over a certain size to generate hot water from solar thermal energy. More recently, an initiative known as LIVE Barcelona promoted electric vehicle adoption.

To being one of the most important european Smart City Bacelona had developed an important programme that includes seven strategic initiatives:

• Smart Lighting: Barcelona developed a master plan that includes projects to remotely control street level lighting in addition to transitioning 50 streets and a total of 1,155 lampposts to LED technology.
• Smart Energy: From smart grid projects to self-sufficient blocks, the City has developed a programme to achieve greater energy efficiency and has currently deployed more than 19,500 smart metres in the Olympic Villa.
• Smart Water: Barcelona is well on its way to implementing a programme that includes remote irrigation control for the City’s green spaces. Thus far, 77 fountains are controlled remotely.
• District Heating and Cooling: Two networks provide hot water in 64 buildings spanning an area of 21km.
• Smart Transportation: The City developed a master plan to improve public transport efficiency by deploying orthogonal bus lienes
• Zero Emissions Mobility: As part of an extensive plan to foster the use of electric vehicles, Barcelona is deploying electric charging stations, as well as electric vehicle fleets and car rentals. To date, the city has more than 500 hybrid taxis, 294 public electric vehicles, 262 recharging points, 130 electric motorbikes and an estimated 400 private electric vehicles on its streets.
• Open Government: The City has developed a programme to make municipal government activities more transparent to its citizens, starting with the deployment of 44 “citizen’s attention” kiosks and the launch of an Open Data portal in 2010.

The importance of this city is demostrated by the fact that Barcelona has hosted the IV Edition of  the Smart City Expo World Congress, from the 18th to the 20th of November, where were presented the most innovative solutions and advanced research on Smart Cities.