Challenge / Goal
Edinburgh may be an ancient city, but it has always been at the forefront of innovation. As one of seven Scottish cities working in partnership on the ‘Scotland’s 8th City – the Smart City’ ERDF programme the City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) is using smart city technology to make Edinburgh a better place to live, visit, and work.
CEC is delivering several projects as part of the 8th City programme and is focusing on intelligent infrastructure, public safety, and a city operations centre and platform. Collectively, these three projects represent smart city investment of almost £6.3M, of which over £2.5M is via ERDF grant. Development of the Smart City Operations Centre has enabled investment in the Driving Operational Efficiency project with a foundational platform and sensors to drive insight and proactive delivery of services. Edinburgh is looking to develop an integrated Smart City Operations capability to improve the city’s responses to events and proactively manage the city using real time data, analytics and actionable insight. It is seen as a crucial enabler of maintaining Edinburgh’s reputation as a world class destination city, while providing an enhanced service to its citizens.
Solution
For this project, Edinburgh is deploying 11,000 smart bin sensors placed in residential communal bins and in all of the street litter bins across the city. These sensors provide data which allows service teams to see accurate usage of bins, predict when they will overflow and take proactive action to mitigate that.
The project also includes deployment of environment sensors in social housing. This enables the service team to predict, manage and prevent extensive damage to the properties caused by issues including, but not limited to, damp conditions and related mould growth. Utilising this technology will not only reduce the council’s costs of maintaining social housing properties but will also improve the health of our citizens due to improvements in the quality of living conditions.
Citizen participation
- The Edinburgh Driving Operational Efficiency project is being delivered as part of the 'Scotland's 8th City - the Smart City' ERDF programme. All seven cities involved are committed to 'community and citizen stakeholder engagement' as an additional programme output - with engagement required pre-, during, and post-project delivery.
- For this project an extensive Stakeholder Engagement strategy and action plan was implemented with engagement taking place with internal (CEC) and external partners at the planning and delivery, phases, with further engagement planned as part of post-project activity.
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