Madrid, Oct 12 (EFE).- Access from your mobile phone to the urban routes most suitable for wheelchairs or baby strollers, as well as the best routes for allergy sufferers, free of certain plants, are some of the applications you are looking for. develop an ambitious European project, in which Barcelona is involved.
The "Commons for Europe" project, led by the ESADE Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management, in collaboration with fourteen European cities, has just been selected by the EU within the framework of the Competitiveness and Innovation program, with a contribution from 2,5 million euros to co-finance the initiative.
Some of the cities involved are Helsinki, Berlin, Amsterdam, Manchester, Rome and Barcelona, along with several universities and research centers.
This is how Esteban Almirall, associate professor at ESADE and person responsible for this initiative, which seeks to transfer to Europe the philosophy of a successful American project, called "Code America," explained it in an interview with Efe.
The aim is for developers and municipalities to work together, sharing data, and for technological innovations to be transferred to other cities and municipalities through open, easily accessible software, creating a kind of virtual "marketplace" in Europe.
The examples of technological applications that could be developed within the framework of the "Commons for Europe" project are multiple, according to the expert.
In his opinion, information systems can be designed, for example, from mobile phones, on routes with better urban accessibility for people with wheelchairs or for baby strollers.
Also, parents could benefit from access to information, from their mobile phones, on those routes with public facilities enabled for changing diapers, and allergy sufferers could receive updated information on the different plant species along one street or another.
Mobile phone access to information about available parking spaces in one or another public parking lot is another field of work that could be developed within this project.
Almirall recalled that in the field of transport the possibilities of new technological developments are very numerous, and he referred to "interesting" projects that are applied in cities outside of Europe such as New York, for example, in the suburban area.
There, he explained, the passenger can have information available from their mobile phone that tells them the exact stopping place of one or another car, to know in advance which one will leave them closest to the exit they are interested in.
A very popular application in some countries is what is called "see, click and fix", and which allows you to contact the city council directly to inform it by mobile phone, using a photograph previously taken by the user, of the damage caused on the streets of a neighborhood, mainly because of bad weather.
The same application, or others with very similar developments, have been designed in the Nordic countries, in some states of North America, in various areas of the United Kingdom, in Hong Kong, etc.
According to Almirall, this type of action without joining efforts does not seem the most appropriate, especially in these times, with cities increasingly "smarter" from a technological point of view, but with greater demands for urban services and with budgetary scenarios in progressive decline.
"It seems like a mistake to want to continually reinvent the wheel," Almirall warned, to illustrate the setback of not sharing knowledge for the development of new applications that improve social well-being.