Eco-city Valdespartera, an Entire Neighborhood with a Smart City Soul.

We have participated in the development of the Valdespartera project from the beginning. Logitek is a fundamental part of this new neighborhood with the soul of a Smart City.

One of the challenges facing smart cities in Europe is deploying Smart technologies in the built city. Developers face many difficulties in improving the efficiency and management of their urban systems: old buildings, lack of modern communication networks, difficult access, structural problems in water supply and sanitation networks, inefficiency of energy distribution networks, etc.

Experiences such as the construction from scratch of the Valdespartera Eco-City in Zaragoza have become international references for the potential of SMART technologies in the integral management of a neighborhood.

Zaragoza has a population of 680,000 inhabitants and is leading benchmark initiatives in the Smart Cities sector with a broad and cutting-edge vision of the concept. From the constitution of a municipal working team that coordinates the urban innovation of the city, to the design and implementation of the Open Government Strategy in the Digital City 2012-2015, or the launch of the Milla Digital project.

Eco-ciudad Valdespartera began to take shape in 2001 as a new urban development on the former grounds of a military barracks in the south of the city. On a surface area of 243.2 Ha, 9,680 homes were planned to be built, 96.9% of which were officially protected.

The urbanization project set 3 major challenges:

• Urban spaces: Urban furniture made with recycled materials, and xeriscaping in green areas.
• Mobility: Connection with the peripheral neighborhoods through a wide range of transport networks: streetcar, bike lane and shared transport streets.
• Network infrastructure: Pneumatic collection of urban waste, double separate water management networks (Supply/Irrigation and Rainwater/Sewage), Remote Control Network for the efficient management of public services.

The technological deployment has been developed in three areas:

• The first of these allows to collect data from critical services of the hydraulic system in the urbanization: water filtering, irrigation water, drinking water storage and irrigation ponds.
• The second area goes one step further, and allows to collect information from elements of new services: flow rates, consumption, water quality, supply and control of rainwater, public lighting consumption, electricity consumption, volume and classification of waste, meteorology…
• The third and last area collects information on electricity, water and gas consumption from the 9,000 digital meters installed in each of the homes.

All this information converges in the CUS, Sustainable Urban Center, which with Wonderware Spain technology allows to store and manage a database of knowledge for the management of services and infrastructures, as well as to perform analysis and studies on the efficiency of the bioclimatic design of the urbanization.

In short, Eco-ciudad Valdespartera Smart City has become, thanks to Wonderware Spain technology, an international benchmark for the integral management of city-scale operations, the work done has been recognized as a global good practice within the framework of the CONCERTO program of the United Nations through its U.N. Habitat committee.

We are proud to have been participants in this new experience of coexistence, efficiency and comfort in a neighborhood where thousands of citizens can already enjoy Smart City technologies.