Smart Oxford

 

The vision of Smart Oxford is a city where innovative ideas, active citizens, and aligned stakeholders come together to build a city that develops, evaluates and deploys new technologies and methods, to enhance understanding of itself as a living, breathing community, and achieve understanding and consensus on how it should change to become equitable, sustainable, prosperous and resilient.

To achieve this vision, the initiative aims to support the city’s citizens and stakeholders in collectively exploiting the opportunities arising from data-sharing and smart city technologies, to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of public and private service delivery to Oxford’s citizens and businesses, to bring about sustainable improvements in the quality of life for Oxford’s people socially, economically, and environmentally, and to attract investment and innovation from around the world into the city and region.

In this way it aims to help build a stronger, safer, economically and environmentally sustainable city, which will stimulate innovation in Oxford’s world class researchers and innovators, generate growth and jobs in private sector partners, empower citizens to identify and be part of the solution to the city’s challenges, enable public service providers to improve the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of their services, and contribute to economic growth and prosperity in Oxford and the surrounding region.

The Smart Oxford initiative aims to develop an understanding of current practices and actively implementing them in projects targeted at directly addressing the city’s problems and exploiting opportunities, for example, to make city services more efficient, to make homes and businesses more sustainable in terms of resource consumption, to be more resilient to emergencies such as flooding, to be safer, and to be healthier.

The City of Oxford itself is compact at 46km2 but has a surprisingly diverse demographic. The region that the City serves has both challenging environmental, transportation and housing problems, but also an enviable intellectual capacity and capability able to develop, test and deploy smart city technologies at scale. Importantly it has an aligned and active city stakeholder group which is committed to working together to attract investment, and already has a number of highly relevant programmes, representing a very sizable investment by a range of partners. These projects provide a firm foundation upon which to build a broader, smarter Oxford; with the initiative providing a way to accelerate the transfer of learning from these projects to others addressing challenges facing the city region in other areas, and secondly, providing a robust framework to enable data sharing and inter-operability.