BARCELONA, Spain, December 1, 2011 - As part of the Smart City Expo & World Congress, the Deputy Mayor for Urban Habitat, Antonio Vives, recently announced partnerships with Cisco, Telefonica, Abertis, Agbar  and Schneider Electric to promote the Smart City Campus, an area dubbed 22@, a new district in the Poblenou area of Barcelona which will focus on the development of businesses, universities, entrepreneurship, ICT research centers, ecology and urban planning. The Barcelona City Council has sought strategic relationships with these worldwide technology leaders to convert  Barcelona into a laboratory for experimentation and innovation.

Barcelona City Hall and Cisco are collaboratingto promote a leading integrated urban platform which allows for the development of funcional technological applications to improve the efficiency and quality of services received by citizens. Currently, both parties are working to reinforce their framework, dig into the collaboration and faciliate the possible future implementation of an Innovation Center in Barcelona that would be a leader in exploring new technological possibilities, serving cities and people.

Mr. Vives also announced, ​​along with the alliance of universities, cities and international companies, and in collaboration with MIT,  the development of  the "City Protocol", a worldwide standard to measure the degree of sustainability and capacity to generate a higher-quality of life for its citizens. This protocol is expected to be developed within the next 18 months.

In February 2011 Cisco Chairman and CEO, John Chambers, met with Jordi Hereu, the mayor of Barcelona to announce the initiative that will use technology as an enabler to help transform Barcelona into a blueprint for modern urban development. The initiative placed Cisco's® Urban Platform Reference Architecture at the heart of the city's vision to become a global reference model for sustainable urban development and the economic engine for Southern Europe.  

Key Highlights:

• Cisco - Barcelona Collaboration: Cisco and Barcelona are collaborating to create a service provision platform for more efficient management of the city through a holistic vision of all available municipal services.
• Barcelona has been working on pilot projects to install an urban platform of sensors which allows for the sharing of information, giving added value to citizens.
• Barcelona is creating an intelligent and efficient platform for all municipal employees, which contains a single database with all the information from these sensors. This system has been developed through the public-private collaboration between the City Council and Cisco and the City Council's collaboration with Abertis and Indra.
• The various pilot tests have covered various measuring purposes such as sensors for trash containers (to reschedule waste collection routes more efficiently), sensors on the street (to measure the use of parking spaces), environmental sensors (to measure the degree of air pollution), humidity sensors (to manage the irrigation system of public parks of the city) and urban sensors (to read gas, water and electricity use in homes).

• City Protocol: Through l'Agència d'Ecologia Urbana (Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona) and alliances with universities, cities and companies around the world, Barcelona is working toward the development of a "City Protocol" which will ultimately define the parameters around what cities should transform into.

• These parameters will be based on environmental, cultural, social and economic values, and will guide cities towards increased efficiency through the use of resources and innovative design.
• The City Protocol will promote a new way for cities to merge urbanism, ecology and IT, Smart Cities.
• Smart City Barcelona Campus: The campus represents a magnet of attraction and generation of knowledge in the new urban development model. It aims to create a favorable environment to foster relations between companies, institutions, universities, technology research centers, business incubators.
• The 22@ district of Barcelona will become a region where companies, knowledge centers and entrepreneurial institutions converge to create a new cluster of innovation that will educate, research and develop solutions for Smart Cities and the City Protocol.

Supporting Quote:

Jordi Botifoll, senior vice-president of Cisco for the South of Europe, "I must highlight the depth and breadth of our partnership with the Barcelona City Council. Barcelona is a worldwide leader in the use of information technologies in urban management and has a unique and innovative vision and strategy in its urban development model. Cisco is a leader in internet and communications infrastructure. Together we are working in the development of an urban platform that allows us to integrate current and new public services with the aim of improving efficiency in their management and quality of the services offered to citizens. We believe that Barcelona is a point of reference that allows us to scale both experiences and knowledge to other cities. In short, it is a model that aims to transform the way cities are designed, built and renewed in order to ensure economic, social and environmental sustainability."

Supporting Resources:

• For more information on Cisco Smart+Connected Communities: 

        http://www.cisco.com/go/smartconnectedcommunities

• For more information on the February 2011 announcement:

        http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=5918850

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