International Area

Smart cities: the implementation of urban innovation through public - private collaboration

Milton Keynes is one of the fastest growing cities in the UK with a great economic success story. Milton Keynes, the last of the "new towns" in the United Kingdom founded in 1967 to become "the city of dreams", is located about 30 minutes by train from London and is currently the city with the highest population and economic growth rate in the country, and stands out for being at the forefront in the implementation of innovation policies that combine both technological experimentation and the active involvement of others players in the area, from the business sector to research centers.

For instance, MK:Smart is a large collaborative initiative, partly funded by HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) and led by The Open University, which is developing innovative solutions to support economic growth in Milton Keynes.

Central to the project is the creation of a state-of-the-art "MK Data Hub" which supports the acquisition and management of vast amounts of data relevant to city systems from a variety of data sources.

These include data about energy and water consumption, transport data, data acquired through satellite technology, social and economic datasets, and crowdsourced data from social media or specialized apps.

One of the major challenges for the administration of Milton Keynes is to balance Smart City solutions with a widespread and low-density urbanization area, as prevalent also in the Veneto Region

In-depth Materials

• Milton Keynes - How we made our city smarter
• Rebuilding economy together
• The Smart City concept in the 21century
• Digital Vision for Mobility