City as a Platform (CaaP) is a Swedish innovation project built around a practical question: how can municipalities share data and digital infrastructure more easily across city boundaries? Led within the Viable Cities programme, the initiative brings together 18 municipalities, including Gothenburg, Malmö, Stockholm, Uppsala, Umeå and Örebro, to test common Internet of Things (IoT) platforms and data management models.
The project’s main goal is to create a minimum framework for municipal data platforms that can support real-time data collection, sharing and service development. In the background is a common problem for Swedish cities: many have started experimenting with connected sensors and IoT, but few have implemented the technical and organisational mechanisms needed to share data across departments or with suppliers. CaaP addresses this through joint proof-of-concept projects, where participating municipalities work on concrete use cases and compare approaches.
A second objective is national anchoring. The project aims to propose a governance model for this minimum framework, including standards and data models, so that solutions tested in one city can be transferred to others. The ambition is not only technical interoperability, but also easier movement of services between cities.
The project also plans a “Smart City Lab” as a collaboration hub for municipalities, technology providers and citizens. According to Viable Cities, the work is coordinated with the sister programme IoT Sweden and was launched under Sweden’s government collaboration programme for smart cities. It is financed by Vinnova, the Swedish innovation agency.
Key people listed on the project page are project leaders Claus Popp Larsen and Therese Balksjö from RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. Partners include KTH, Mobile Heights, LTU, IVL, Kista Science City (Urban ICT Arena) and SIS, alongside the participating municipalities.