# Urban Open Platform for Borderless Smart Cities
## 2 Urban Open Platform: Vision and Architecture
### The UDP's Working Concept  
The UDP's working concept applied in this paper is based on the previous work of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC). EIP-SCC has defined six Action Clusters as its key priority areas, including \"Integrated Infrastructures and Open Data\". A general observation is that Urban Platforms are a prerequisite to support fast take-up of smart solutions in cities to allow many stakeholders to participate. It is also expected that Urban Platforms would have a key role in the integration of third-party vendor solutions.  
The Urban Platform vision of EIP-SCC is that by 2025, 300 million EU citizens will be served by platforms within their cities and, in the short term, accelerate the adoption of Urban Platforms through an easy-to-implement template approach and cross-sector collaboration. Meanwhile, the cloud platforms will have picked up and the public sector will have started to move their services into AWS, Google or Microsoft Azure cloud services.  
Urban Platforms are expected to form a core building block by which cities better manage the current explosion in the volume of city data and more easily share this data between city services in order to provide meaningful services to their residents. It should be noted though that the UP is not a single IT system or server. It is a collection of smart city services that communicate internally and externally with harmonised APIs. The platform should be distributed and decoupled for various reasons. The city organisational complexity does not support the idea of a single-owner, single-administrative platform but the operational models should be based on a governance model that takes this into account.  
The Urban Platform initiative was supported by launching a memorandum of understanding that had 85 signatories, including both city- and smart-city-related vendors. In 2016, it was estimated that the UPs were fragmented, had uncertainties on the demand side and were lacking interoperability and common standards from the supplier side. At the moment, there is still work required on all these areas.  
The Urban Platform concept has evolved through several Horizon 2020 and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)-funded projects such as bloTope, mySMARTLife, Select4 Cities and SynchroniCity. In many of the projects, the usage of Urban Platforms has focused on being an IoT platform with dashboards. The support of spatial data and large-scale data utilisation have been somewhat limited and many of the pilots were experimental platform products that were not ready nor intended to be in full-scale production use. The limited vision of the scope also missed the opportunity to support cities in some of their new data-related responsibilities, such as maintaining Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) - compliant data services and providing support for Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP)-reporting. The Urban Platform should also not be seen as a monolithic, single service but as a distributed and decoupled collection of services that can complement cities' existing data platforms. In both Helsinki and Tallinn, a key question is how can the Urban Platform build on top of the Microsoft Azure data lakes and data warehouses that both cities have already invested in.