How do you create a shared vision for smart city mobility?

For Concepción, Chile, a smart city began with people using Lego blocks.

Together with the World Bank, Chile's Unit of Smart Cities in its Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications has been working with Concepción to create a vision for techonology solutions that will help build the Gran Concepción of 2025. A variety of stakeholders – including local and municipal government officials, academic staff, the private sector, civil society actors and citizens  – participated in a vision exercise during a co-creation workshop. The workshop applied design thinking and foresight analysis techniques, organized teams with different stakeholders and assigned roles to each different group.

That's where the Lego blocks came in. The groups used Legos to develop scenarios and then completed a foresight template with technology milestones to achieve the vision of Gran Concepción Mobility in 2025. The result of this exercise was the creation of a roadmap for technology implementation from the current situation. This is the second phase of the project, which was launched in January 2014.

The team also carried out a diagnosis of the current state of the use of technology applications and services, as well as databases, to support mobility services. This diagnosis will work with the roadmap to guide the future of Gran Concepción Mobility.

To discover more about Smart City Gran Concepción, please visit  http://innovatingcities.org/innovatingcities/chile, download a newsletter describing this phase of the project and watch the following video describing the visioning component.