This article is part of a blog series on smart cites and what services they provide.
The benefits of smart cities are as follows:
According to TWI Global, smart cities
Use information and communication technology (ICT) to improve operational efficiency, share information with the public and provide a better quality of government service and citizen welfare. The main goal of a smart city is to optimize city functions and promote economic growth while also improving the quality of life for citizens by using smart technologies and data analysis. The value lies in how this technology is used rather than simply how much technology is available.
To improve the quality of life in normal towns, it is helpful to use technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and Information and Information Communication Technologies (ICT)
IoT has a major impact on, making it easier for the management of traditional cities worldwide to switch to smart management. Smart Cities use IoT to:
IoT applications can:
Smart Cities extensively use ICT to integrate all their systems and help their government to:
ICT helps municipalities, businesses, and communities to make sharpened decisions, via better communication, to improve the quality of life of their residents, cut costs, and increase sustainability. ICT has been introduced in urbanization planning to develop:
Urbanization is here to stay. An urbanization survey made in 2018 shows that 55% of people worldwide live in cities, and it is expected to reach 68% by 2050.
If we consider the worldwide population growth, it is predicted that 2.5 billion more people will move to cities by 2060. This huge potential expansion of our towns requires new resources, to fuel the changes needed, to not damage their environmental, social, and economic durability.
Taking the right actions will take time which we, unfortunately, do not have. Agility and initiatives from the residents, the construction industry, and municipalities will be required to develop Smart Cities, to overcome this enormous challenge and be successful.
To get a successful smart city ecosystem in the municipality strategy, five crucial aspects of its development must be considered rigorously. Let’s see what they are.
The first thing a successful smart city will need is to identify which skills it will require. This will depend on the strategy the government has decided on. Factors can range from technologies that will be employed, how the ecosystem will be interconnected, what type of services will be needed and measure the impact on social class, living area, and commuting profile, to implement appropriate solutions and create adequate support for the people in the city.
The ecosystem required for a smart city is new, complex and not well understood by many people. The first challenge will be to provide training to construction industry professionals so they can deliver. This will require adopting a new way of working, new technologies and an understanding of the ecosystem interconnection.
Existing jobs such as coders, marketers, experts in infrastructure & system security will need to be reviewed so skills specific to smart cities can be developed.
The undesirable effects of the strategy, and the changes required to implement it, have to be anticipated. Here are a few questions the municipalities will have to answer:
Smart Cities produce a lot of data coming from various sources: citizens, city management systems, etc., and constitute a major risk if not properly managed. Data sources are collected in real-time and come from different horizons, so scalability is of the utmost importance to address potential issues arising from their mismanagement.
Data are provided by:
The data management issues to address will be:
The system should be able to identify where the data are coming from and send them to an authorized person or system like:
After the scalability solutions are defined, data security should be addressed for:
For example, Blockchain or IoT can be considered to solve security issues.
For data security in Smart Cities, a study proposes a structure to approach the security vulnerability required on four levels:
Local governments should continuously be made aware of all the issues associated with smart things, spaces, services, and citizen security via an agile and centralized council.
The council's goals should be to advertise and advocate national and local initiatives about:
Seventeen global goals signed by 193 countries in 2015 were adopted by the United Nations. The aim is that by 2030 actions taken will be able to:
Goal number 11 targets sustainable cities and communities. The only way to achieve sustainability is to revolutionize the way we build and manage urban spaces. It means:
Smart Cities are role models for other towns around the world, to achieve the targets set out within the Sustainable Cities and Communities goal, so they can benefit from the innovations.
The adoption of smart technologies and the changes that ensue generate a positive impact on the way people live in these cities. The top 7 cities in 2023, according to the Earth.org study are:
Ratings for Structure and Technology as well as an overall rating of "A's" help rank Smart Cities worldwide. The highest rating is AAA. Only one city, in the world, achieved the AAA overall rating, Singapore.
Below, we take a look at five examples of Smart Cities around the world, one in each continent, and the ways in which they have embraced smart technology.
Singapore's aging population focused the government on embracing digital technologies and initiatives to raise productivity, including:
Singapore is developing a new eco-smart city that is entirely vehicle-free. The planned forest city will be home to five residential districts with 42,000 houses, as well as safe zones for both pedestrians and cyclists.
Oslo is a smart city that focuses on being sustainable and smart in an eco-friendly environment. The initiatives include:
Over 650,000 LED lights, all connected to processing stations, are intelligently adjusted to the level of lighting needed according to the weather conditions and time of day.
The city is committed to only having electric vehicles by 2025. Oslo has a large population of 670,000 citizens, so this goal is challenging, to get the sustainability level and the smart technology required, but the municipality is on track to achieve that goal. To achieve the target the town created incentives for zero-emission cars including free parking, the use of bus lanes, and lower taxes and toll prices.
Another initiative is to Improve traffic congestion by collecting data from license plate detectors on cars to regulate the flow around the city.
New York is not very high on the smart cities ranking system but is considered one of the smartest cities in the world as it has the following features.
Smart sensors placed all over the city, as part of its smart city pilot project started in 2020. Data collected by the system help the management of essential services.
High connectivity for citizens. The town has replaced phone booths with WIFI-enabled charging stations
Popular car-sharing system introduced a long time ago to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, all over the city and help to regulate traffic congestion.
Web-based software used by the police department to collect crime data, terrain modeling, and other information that help them to predict and respond to crime. During testing, violent crime decreased significantly. The system can be shared with other city agencies that are interested.
The basis for the development of the smart city plan is the local government’s telecommunications network. It has been introduced in the last few years to help the city to become more inclusive and to provide better quality of life. It includes:
The Konza integrated urban ICT network distributes and manages urban services efficiently integrating the following four key city initiatives:
The system architecture includes:
The implementation of the smart city framework has started with the ICT infrastructure.
The next steps will consist of developing a technology network to implement best international practices by learning from global cities that have already achieved high-level rankings on the smart cities list mentioned above.
In 2023, we see a trend for all cities in the world, to get smarter by embracing IoT solutions to deal with issues including:
We can expect to observe some exciting projects rolling out around the world.
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