Santander Spain

What we offer

Santander is a small-medium size city located in the Northern coast of Spain which has become a world reference in the smart city domain. The SmartSantander project, budgeted by the European Union 7th Framework Program represents a flagship initiative mimicked by worldwide cities.

The city itself represents the paradigm of an urban laboratory, upon the massive IoT deployment carried out during the last ten years. Academia, research entities and companies make use of this unique city- scale experimental facility to design, test and validate technologies, services and applications fitting the demands of the urban ecosystems.

Santander Municipality is a key enabler fostering the collaboration between different city stakeholders and advising to them during the different pilot phases.

Santander City Council is also member of several smart city associations both national and international. City representatives are fully committed and participate in a very proactive way sharing experiences and identifying synergies.

Smart City itinerary

Santander is committed with the innovation, focusing efforts to build a smart, innovative and open city strategy that offers citizens quality, efficient and collaborative services, fostering entrepreneurship as well as the establishment of new business activities.

Since 2010, Santander innovation strategy has been characterized by:

• Boosting Santander Smart City initiative, applying technology to provide more efficient urban services, increase citizen satisfaction and contribute to environmental sustainability.

• Development of open government policies to foster local entrepreneurs and developers to create new services based on public information provided through different channels such as Santander Open Data platform (datos.santander.es).

• Modernization of public administration through measures to promote e-government and optimize public infrastructure to improve efficiency of both internal administrative processes and citizen services.

• Active participation in research projects, at European and at Asian level, such as EMPOWER and M-Sec projects, collaborating with more than 350 institutions and companies at national and international level.

 

 

Key Projects

  • City initiatives which use technology to improve the efficiency in urban services. In 2013, Santander decided to include the use of technology and Smart City Platform integration in all public tenders. Nowadays, several urban services include technology in their daily management.
  • Santander Smart City Platform & IT office, in which data from all urban services is being integrated, creating the intelligence of the city and the dashboards to carry out an integral management of the city.
  • Santander as a Smart Destination is using big data technologies to better know the behavior of visitor and tourist profiles.
  • Santander SmartCitizen aims to offer more citizen-oriented urban services and better communication channels.

Santander as urban laboratory

As mentioned before, Santander is nowadays an urban laboratory where you can test your own technology or develop new services and applications based on the data gathered from the IoT devices deployed in the urban landscape, municipality systems or external sources of information that you may consider.

Innovation ecosystem capabilities

Santander will offer you support in the following areas:

  • Project definition: We will evaluate the feasibility of your pilot and once validated, will collaborate to define the specific pilot that better fits city requirements.
  • Technologies: Santander, as an urban laboratory, will facilitate access to public venues to install new devices within the urban facility.
  • People engagement: Santander organizes workshops and hackathons which can be used to introduce ideas or technologies to interested stakeholders. In this sense, the Smart City Demonstration Centre offers you the possibility to:
    • Disseminate the smart city initiatives and showcase technological solutions implemented in the city for citizens, collectives and entrepreneurs.
    • Develop training activities, workshops and other types of events for different groups such as officials, citizens, neighborhood associations,…
    • Share experiences with delegations coming from other cities and administrations.