Barcelona: Data Strategy for a Sustainable City

A city is the place where “citizens” develop an increasing number of interactions, between them and also with city infrastructures or with the environment.

The complexity of economic and social evolution force the cities to look for new tools to better manage this complexity in a sustainable way.

Technology can help on both sides: City and citizens, but, although it is difficult to think of sharing technology 100% without gaps, it’s possible to share the main city services information, in a neutral way, to be used for any city user with its own technology.

The objective of the city of Barcelona is to reach a new position, from organizational and technological point of view, to make it possible.

Open data BCN roadmap shows the initial benefit in fields like “Improving services for citizens” or “Generating business activities’, but also shows the three new concepts that appear very strongly at this new social reality: Transparency, Improving internal efficiency and Generation of social impact activities, in open and collaborative technologies to current open data policy.

Lluís Sanz Marco

Lluis Sanz Marco

Industrial Energy Engineer from UPC and MBA in public administrations from ESADE, and extended post-degree courses in GIS and Urbanism. Belongs to several Professional TIC associations and has been professor in GIS and Urban Applications in Ramon Llull University. Currently is Director of Corporate Information in the City of Barcelona, where has developed his experience for more than 25 years. It includes responsibility over Official Cartography, GIS Systems, Demography, Census information and other Corporate Databases. Because his position, it’s related with the most relevant Technical Departments in the City Council, and is City Council representative in a lot of committees: national and International.

In the last years, he has been involved in several standardization groups: INSPIRE, OPEN DATA, City Protocol Society, and has experience also in EU projects.