Smart City Initiative

Longwood Collective Smart City Initiative

The Longwood Collective Smart City initiative seeks to harness technology, data, and innovation to streamline and strengthen services available to the institutions in Longwood and to the neighborhood.  It is modeled after the best practices of Smart City initiatives aimed at tackling a wide range of urban challenges from reducing traffic congestion to fighting climate change and improving delivery of city services.  The overarching concept behind Smart City is data-driven insights that allow assets and resources to be managed more efficiently.

Figure 1: Smart Cities sectors. Utility; Smart Buildings; Agricultural and Rural; Data and City Platform; Wireless; Education; Cybersecurity and Privacy; Healthcare; Transportation; and Public Safety. Image source: National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce

Longwood Collective has several Smart City programs in place including:

  • Use of Streetlight data to understand travel patterns

  • Infra-red bicycle counter

  • Real-time, digital display including district information and bicycle counts

  • A pilot Bluetooth irrigation system

  • Partnering with Ride Amigos to provide a self-service Guaranteed Ride Home portal for Longwood commuters

  • Utilization of CLEAN waste management software that monitors and manages our 37 Big Belly solar powered trash compactors and tracks trends in usage

Additional challenges within Longwood that may benefit from Smart City solutions include parking, wayfinding, walk and bicycle safety, and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) such as Transit Signal Priority (TSP). 

By pursuing these Smart City solutions, the Longwood Collective Smart City initiative seeks to support existing initiatives such as the City of Boston’s Smart Streets initiative, and welcomes opportunities to partnering with government agencies, public, private and nonprofit partners to pursue new opportunities.

This Longwood Collective Smart City initiative is led by Senior Operations Manager, Del Mandawe.  Del has more than 20 years of experience in construction management, engineering, and area planning. For more information, he can be reached at dmandawe@masco.harvard.edu