The smart city vision anticipates that the whole urban space, including buildings, power lines, gas lines, roadways, transport networks, and cell phones, can all be linked together and monitored. Detailed information about the functioning of the city then becomes available to both city dwellers and businesses, thus enabling better understanding and, consequently, better management of the city’s infrastructure and resources. This raises the prospect that cities will become more sustainable environments, ultimately enhancing the citizens’ well-being. There is the further promise of enabling radically new ways of living in, regulating, operating and managing cities, through the increasing active involvement of citizens by ways of crowd-sourcing/sensing and social networking.

Still, the vision of what smart cities should be about is evolving at a fast pace in close concert with the latest technology trends. It is notably worth highlighting how mobile and social network use have reignited citizen engagement, thereby opening new perspectives for smart cities beyond data analytics, which has been initially one of the core foci of smart cities technologies. Similarly, open data programs foster the engagement of citizens in the city operation and overall contribute to make our cities more sustainable.
The unprecedented democratization of urban data, fueled by open data channels, social networks and crowd-sourcing, enables not only monitoring of the activities of the city but also assessment of their nuisances based on their impact on the citizens, thereby prompting social and political actions. However, the comprehensive integration of urban data sources for the sake of sustainability remains largely unexplored. This is an application domain that we focus on, leveraging our research on combined physical and social sensing.

In a first step, we concentrate on the following specialized applications, which we investigate in close collaboration with other researchers, in particular as part of CityLab, a dedicated Inria International Project Lab, which is currently under evaluation:

• 1. Democratization of urban data for healthy cities. The objective here is to integrate the various urban data sources, especially by way of crowd-sensing, in order to better understand city nuisances, from raw pollution sensing (e.g., sensing noise) to the sensing of its impact on citizens (e.g., how people react to urban noise and how this affects their health).
• 2. Socially-aware urban mobility. Mobility within mega-cities is known as one of the major challenges to face urgently, due to the fact that today’s mobility patterns do not scale and due to the negative effect on the environment and health. It is our belief that mobile social and physical sensing can significantly help in promoting the use of public transport, which we have started to investigate through empirical studies based on the development and release of dedicated apps.
• 3. Social applications. Mobile applications are being considered by sociologists as a major vehicle to actively involve citizens and thereby prompt them to become activists. We study in particular this aspect in collaboration with the Social App Lab at UC Berkeley. Our objective is to leverage such vehicle from the ICT perspective, and in particular elicit relevant middleware solutions to ease the development of such “civic apps“.