Open & Agile Smart Cities’ (OASC) annual Connected Smart Cities Conference (CSCC) took place on January 11th 2018 in Brussels, Belgium. The 5th edition of the event brought together policy makers, businesses, and city representatives from around the globe to discuss this year’s theme “Cities Driving the Digital Transition”.

Discussing a diverse set of topics, from ‘Ecosystem Innovation’ to ‘IoT-enabled Smart Cities Market Creation, and from ‘Data Protection’ to ‘Natural Resources’, the event provided its attendees with all the necessary information to help “chart a simple but good roadmap to the future for digital development for our cities” (Martin Brynskov, OASC Chair).

With over half of the world’s population living in cities, Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, suggests “We need better ways to manage energy, water and waste, and the transfer of data for the benefit of all of us as citizens […] with the explicit goal of supporting cooperation, joint development and duplication of successful solutions and approaches”.

In order to create a shared market, cities need to agree on a common set of principles and building blocks. There are currently over 110 cities from 24 countries who have joined the Open & Agile Smart Cities initiative, which endorses and uses open standard APIs, such as FIWARE NGSI, and as of November 2017, TM Forum’s Open APIs. The use of these common standards is targeted at providing the basic artifact for portability and interoperability of Smart City solutions, enabling access to real-time context data in any given city.

Head on over to the OASC website for all the slides, reports and videos from the Conference.