A first step towards a “smart city brain” for sustainable development - turning experiences of two cities into replicable processes

Abstract

In this paper, we compare two projects from the cities of Basel and Shenzhen, which are transforming – or in the case of Shenzhen already has – their public transportation from fossil-fuelled to electric vehicles (EVs) only. In so doing, we derive two different processes that could be reused as templates for many other cities in both Switzerland, China or elsewhere. Moreover, to address the far-end goal of actually reaching Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within cities, we propose the vision of a sharable platform as a Smart City Brain for Sustainable Development that will allow the collection of data from individual projects, share them within a community and create re-usable visualisations of important KPIs and other indicators. We also extend the existing concept of technological connectivity to include product material data as well in order to support circularity.