Monthly Archives: March 2017

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Zaragoza Smart Citizen Card: a tiny plastic card that fits 100 ideas

Just speaking on behalf of the Zaragoza Citizen Card’s outstanding team at the Cities in Transition International Conference…

Let’s imagine how a tiny piece of plastic that fits in your wallet can both be a cashflow generator for the city and a tool for granting refugees access to the city public services. A piece of plastic that can be shared with a visitor through a mobile app or that can be used by a disabled person to pay for a taxi ride just the price of a bus trip. A card that encompasses 15 different other cards and that can turn as well into the digital passport to citizen partipation. Your all-in-one key to the city, or the future city social currency…

When the city hall becomes a facilitator, you can count on your ideas to be set in motion. We need everyone’s ideas to make a smart city, let’s move on to a zero waste circular economy of ideas! Let’s hack and co-create the Zaragoza’s Citizen Card!!

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Citykeys: guidelines to measure our progress to a smarter future

During the last 2 years, we have been lucky enough to be part of an outstanding team: the Citykeys team. Lots of learning and thinking around tricky issues: what a smart city is (no one really knows), what smart city rankings should mean, how can we measure urban innovation or our progress towards a smarter urban future.

I write these lines in rainy Brussels, on the day after meeting with the European Comission’s reviewers, the discussions still fresh, a glimpse of nostalgia (the sense of an ending), a sort of rewarding feeling: that maybe our contribution may have had some impact in future European innovation policies.

This article is meant to be a quick guidelines into some of the project results, but it also contains personal reflections, in the form of a logbook, on the ample subjects covered by the project. Continue reading →

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