Introduction

LOTI is working in the field of smart cities because we know that realising the full potential of these powerful tools and approaches in London depends on collaboration. For example:

Addressing Pan-London Issues: The types of issues that smart city tools and approaches are apt to address, such as pollution, congestion and energy consumption, do not neatly confine themselves to borough boundaries. Without some coordination, there is a risk that each borough implements a completely different approach, creating new data silos and preventing the creation of insights and services that could work across boundaries and benefit all Londoners.

Promoting Innovation: By coordinating and sharing lessons from their various experiments, boroughs can reduce the time, cost and risk of trialing new smart city innovations. This way, all get to learn faster. And by implementing some common standards and principles, they can make London a more attractive place for innovative companies to trial their products, and enable a greater number of innovators to build useful products and services with their data.

Protecting privacy and reputations: All boroughs take data privacy and ethics extremely seriously. Yet the use of the new and innovative tools and approaches in the field of smart cities presents new complexities for managing data well. LOTI can help boroughs by sharing design principles and guidance to implement smart city projects openly, ethically and securely to ensure they are worthy of Londoners’ trust, confidence and support.

We’re focused on helping boroughs establish common principles for designing smart city projects, and supporting them to use this style of technology to tackle London’s environmental challenges.