# Implementing Smart City Technologies to Inspire Change in Consumer Energy Behaviour
## 1 Introduction  
The development of cities increasingly in tune with technological modernity and aiming to improve the quality of life of their inhabitants is a central issue of national and local public policies of demographic settlements. Strategic principles cities adopt in efforts to become smarter are very dependent on the local context [1]. For this, it is necessary to know how countries are creating and implementing a regulatory framework and establishing promotion policies and how cities are using available infrastructures, mainly smart meters and information communications technologies (ICTs), to involve their inhabitants inrelated initiatives. While technology plays an important role, smart city development is not limited to harnessing technological base, it is rather about using technology to make better decisions and improve the quality of life [2]. Hence, the methodology used to implement the work presented here includes elaborating on the following building blocks:  
* Social and environmental policies' political commitment to develop smart cities supports connection of technological tools, especially ICT, with social, economic and environmental benefits to achieve \"smartness\" and deliver a better quality of life for citizens. * Technological base, including sensors and actuators: widespread sensors enable cities to collect accurate measurement data about different cities' systems (e.g., energy grid or transportation, in real time). * The capacity of communication channels: telecommunication networks, whether wired, optical or wireless, were designed for human or person-to-person communications, in order to be able to follow a business model and an operational-functional capacity of the network and always thinking of covering cities of a few square kilometres per thousand inhabitants and bandwidth in Megabits per seconds. If an intelligent city with Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine-to-Machine (M2M) is imagined, the number of new users could be so high that it could quickly saturate the communication network. Therefore, a design and an adequate administration of the resources of the communication network becomes important and necessary to consider while planning a smart city. * Broad adoption and the user experience: users at different levels of activity can become active participants, both using the information provided on the different platforms and adopting technologies and uploading information to the network or intelligent platforms of the city. The work presented in this paper describes a collaborative research project on an ICT platform for sustainable energy ecosystem in smart cities (ITCity) that specifically aims at exploring the ways of engaging consumers in increasing energy efficiency [3]. The evidence received from the energy efficiency projects confirms that well designed gamification tools can inspire end users to change their energy behaviour in longer periods [4]. Furthermore, frequently provided feedback on energy consumption has proven to be effective in attempts to encourage energy savings [5]. At the same time, literature confirms that even when resources do not allow for collection of primary behavioural data, existing survey projects and insights from behavioural science can still help in empirical assumption consumption pattens [6]. These observations together with understanding of deviations in the situation in the state of the art of smart cities in different countries emerged into the unique idea of the project--to design a mechanism of raising consumer awareness, promoting more efficient energy use and increasing predictability of electricity consumption mainly at end-user level in situations when extensive metering infrastructure is not sufficiently developed. This was implemented by establishing a small-scale smart-metering pilot allowing in-depth analysis of electricity consumption profiles based on collected high resolution data in conjunction with extensive consumer surveys [7] and then elaborating on design of gamification tool.