A city that learns
A smart city usually means sensors and dashboards. For the people who live in one, it means something much simpler, and that is the idea CityX grew from. This is a short story of how a startup idea was born.
Say "smart city" and most people picture sensors on street lights, cameras at junctions and a large dashboard somewhere in city hall. All of that exists, and it makes sense, but the people who live in the city rarely see any of it. Their questions are smaller, and they come back every morning: when is the bus coming, when is the waste collected, who do I tell that a street light is out, what is being built outside my building.
To me, a city is smart when it answers those questions quickly, in one place, without its residents having to go looking. I have been working on that idea for five years.
How it began
For a long time I worked on projects for the American market, for clients I never met in person and users on the other side of the world. In 2019, with Grga, a project I was building with Gastrobit, I was once again building something for the market I lived in, in my own backyard, after a long time away from it. I was still living in Croatia then. It was a modest project, but it gave me back a feeling I had missed: you can try your product on the people around you and see straight away whether it works.
A year later came the crisis that shut everything down. I was among the founders of UGP, an association of entrepreneurs, and every day brought new problems with the same request: can this be solved digitally? I have never had more partnership offers than in those first days of Covid. Each of those solutions was needed that week, and each looked like a cure for one crisis.
Underneath it all I saw something that would not end with the crisis. People are moving to cities and will keep doing so, and the questions a city has to answer grow with them. A crisis passes, but urbanisation does not stop. What I wrote down about it then, I can confirm even more firmly today.
Four versions
CityX grew out of those notes. I brought a team together, and the project went through several complete turnarounds before it took the shape I felt was right. Each one taught us that a city is not a single customer. A city is its services, its people and its habits, and each of them keeps its own rhythm. At the same time, a solution for one city is a solution for every city. A city that insists on "its own solution" loses an enormous amount by trying to live in its own bubble.
Today CityX is in its fourth version, and only now is it entering its mature phase. Ideas that were for years too expensive or too slow for a system this complex can finally be built, because the work is no longer done by people alone.
One app
CityX is one app for every city. Residents do not swap it when they move or travel. They simply pick another city, and the app adapts.
Inside it live modules, small apps for a single need: reporting a fault, waste collection, live public transport departures, winter services, parking, events. Each module connects to the systems the city already has instead of replacing them. The city chooses which ones to switch on, and residents use them for free.
Modules in weeks
The biggest change in the fourth version is how a module comes to life. The city describes what is bothering it, an AI agent assembles a module from ready-made parts, a second agent reviews it, and a person approves it before it reaches anyone. What used to be a year-long IT project now takes a few weeks.
One rule comes with it: a module is never just a view of data. Moving a table from a city system into an app is not smart, it is just a new home for the same numbers. A module has to add something the data does not have on its own, such as linking roadworks to the congestion they cause, or opening a conversation among residents about what they see.
Same problems
When we looked at what European cities themselves bring to EU challenges and pilot programmes, we saw the same questions come back from city to city. The problems are the same, only the data differs. That is good news, because a city does not need a new app for every problem. It needs one app that can learn a new one.
A city that learns
That is why, to me, a smart city is above all a city that learns. When a new question comes up, it does not wait a year for a project. Within a few weeks it has an answer in every resident's pocket. The technology for that is only recent, but the questions have always been there.
If your city could describe tomorrow one thing that bothers it, what would it write down first?