Smart Docklands successfully facilitates and enables the testing and trialing of smart city solutions by identifying real local challenges. Working with diverse stakeholders to come up with lasting solutions, this work has developed innovations in areas such as telecommunication infrastructure, environmental monitoring, waste management, smart mobility, citizen engagement and real-time asset management.
Smart Docklands is also a key part of Smart Dublin’s district approach. Smart Districts are strategically selected locations where innovation projects are fast-tracked. Smart Docklands was the first district of this nature with additional districts scaling across the county.
Each Smart District delivers a bespoke portfolio of projects designed to meet the needs of the people who live and work there. Through outreach and engagement with local communities and businesses, our Smart District teams identify real-life challenges experienced in the area. Every Smart District is unique, with different thematic priorities based on the local context.
Smart Docklands strives to improve the lives of those who live and work in the Docklands with a particular emphasis focusing on future connectivity opportunities and education and engagement initiatives. Through collaborative effort, this ability to transform Dublin City can provide solutions and governance models that can be scaled globally.
Our mantra is do not deploy “tech for tech’s sake”. Through our community engagement programme we work closely with a diverse range of stakeholder groups to identify challenges which can be addressed through new smart city technology and applications.
Our work on the future densification of telecommunication infrastructure has brought industry, academic experts, local authority representatives and other public assets owners together to catalogue and address issues related to the deployment of 5G across Irish cities and towns.
The world’s economy is at a pivotal point as we see a move towards an increasingly connected society driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. The pace of adoption of these types of technologies will become the basis for long-term national economic growth. The impact of these emerging technologies will be underpinned by the robust connectivity that 5G offers. As a result, our 5G testbed highlighted the economic, technical and infrastructural considerations regarding infrastructural deployment and future network requirements.
During the 2021/2022 academic year, the Academy of the Near Future programme successfully delivered once-off smart city workshops with over 1,000 students nationally. The following year’s programme expanded that workstream to include a three-part workshops series, initiating multiple citizen science projects in 14 partner secondary schools and 5 primary schools.