Smart Cities is a term that seems to mean everything and anything, with companies across the transportation industry keen digitise old fashioned infrastructure. This week CIHT hosted an event to help shed light on the issue. Designed to support the continued professional development of all our members the speakers discussed how the transport and telecoms industries can better integrate, how we can use behavioural insights to understand our users and how practitioners are delivering real world results.

Miranda Clarke from O2's big data team discussed how they are integrating existing sources of data from traffic signals with mobile phone data to understand real time movement across the Thames Valley. But importantly they were able to tie this in with healthy travel, air quality and multi-modal journeys to show real benefits.

Carolin Reiner from the Behavioural Insight Team discussed how we can apply behavioural science to deliver better cities in particular using their EAST framework which can encourage certain behaviours. Standing for Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely it will be impossible to ignore the social element in the adoption and acceptance of new technologies. She highlighted in particular people moving houses and jobs as key times to encourage different travel modes.

We also had Jonathan Jarritt from Amey discussing about the work they've done, including a tool for where to best place electric charging points, difficulties with the business case for smart infrastructure and the challenge in keeping the assets up to date. Rob Elvidge, PlanGrid, explained how 'smart buildings and construction' fit in to the Smart City and how these technologies will help us tackle the productivity crisis in our sector.

And finally we had Patrick Andison from Arup argue that a Smart City needs to control traffic and congestion on its roads, and that this will likely include congestion charging and road pricing. Taking an international approach he discussed the successful examples of London, Singapore and Stockholm with those were facing greater difficulty such as New York and Manchester – one of the main reasons for a successful scheme is understanding the local context. You can read the report Arup supported  Green Light: Next generation road user charging for a healthier, move liveable, London published by the Centre for London for more information.

Throughout the day there was a thorough debate on who is pushing for smart cities, who benefits from the data collection and analysis and how we can ensure that privacy and data protection is ensured at every step in the journey.

For those who were unable to attend the slides and videos from the day will be accessible in the members at this week from early next week. To hear about our events first follow us on Twitter @CIHTUK