What is a Smart City?

what is a smart city, drivers of smart cities, role of planners in the smart city, smart cities improve quality of life

SMART CITY

In the 21st century, the impact of the automobile in the previous century in urban form and urban life is huge. Cars brought convenience accessibility and mobility but at the same time, the unintended consequences of cars were increasing in greenhouse gas emissions, congestion, and urban sprawl. So it is wise to adopt any technology with extra cautious steps.

What is a Smart City?

A Smart city has been defined differently by organizations agencies scholars and practitioners. Smart cities council has defined smart cities as a city that uses digital technology, smart technology, or the internet of things to enhance its livability, work-ability, and sustainability. The outcome of the impact of these technologies can be replaced by other terms such as the quality of life of citizens, the community involvement in the planning practice, the performance of urban services, and environmental sustainability.

Core functions of a Smart City

The core functions of a smart city relate to these five steps collecting data, processing, communicating, analyzing, and making data-driven decisions.

A Smart city is a ubiquitous city

A ubiquitous city is a city that connects all information systems. The residential school, medical, business, and government. Another definition of a ubiquitous city is when we integrate information systems with social systems essentially every device and service is linked to an information network in that case city planners and managers can micromanage numerous aspects of cities from energy consumption's to traffic.

The Drivers of Smart Cities

So what are the drivers of smart cities? Why do we need smart cities?

Growing urbanization

We are in the age of urbanization more than half of the population live in cities. With the scarcity of financial and environmental resources, there is a need for more efficient solutions to accommodate the needs and better serve the residents.

Growing environmental challenges

Environmental challenges like climate change have created complex problems for cities that require more advanced technology to solve.

Growing economic competition

In the age of globalization, cities are also competing with each other to attract more investments by creating a higher quality of life for their residents and provide better services.

Rapidly improving technology capacities is combined with declining costs and has made new things possible for cities.

Who is making smart cities happening?

The first actor in this real is private-sector tech companies who have the knowledge and capacity to implement information communication systems in cities. To companies such as Intel, Cisco Systems, IBM, Verizon, and Siemens.

But it is also important to notice the role of government, state, and local governments in bringing those technologies together and combine it with the services that they provide to the citizens.

Citizens are also an important role in this cycle because first of all they are the users of those services but also their input and their engagement in the process of making those systems happen is very critical for smart cities.

What is the role of planners in the smart city?

We have to notice that planning issues are not necessarily technological issues. They are mainly political issues. Urban issues such as poverty sustainability, equality, and quality of life. These are called wicked problems. Problems that are hard to define and even harder to solve. So it requires planning rather than a quick technological fix to address these issues. So a planner can contribute to the smart city by better defining the issues, understand the relationship between different actors, and stakeholders in this process and also avoid piecemeal and siloed approaches to have a more comprehensive solution that can respond to different needs and planners can play a significant role to engage citizens in the decision-making process.

How do smart cities technologies improve the quality of life for residents?

By using the cloud for machine learning, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and more. Local governments can improve commute times and reduce traffic congestion, connect people to important information and answers and tackle climate change or food insecurity. Open data initiatives make large data sets available to anyone for analysis and use and empower the broader community to take an active role in building solutions.

For example in the UK transport for London used AWS cloud to provide open access to their transportation data. This allowed developers to build more than 600 applications to help improve Londoner’s commutes. Now commuters receive real-time traffic information and fine charging stations for zero-emission capable vehicles.

In India, AWS partner Minfy Technologies Private Limited used blockchain and the cloud to help West Bengal Electronics Industry Corporation Limited. Deploy a secure birth and death registry and crowdfunding app. the app helped improve the citizen experience.

In Australia transport for New South Wales collaborated with AWS partners Contino and Visalytics technology on new predictive Internet of Technology tools that will allow decision-makers to respond to challenges in near real-time. Now transfer for New South Wales can predict how many individuals will use their services across the entire transport network and improve customer satisfaction.

Since 2014 the AWS City on a cloud competition has recognized organizations from non-profits and hospitals to startups and AWS partners who are positively impacting communities by using the cloud. These organizations are awarded AWS promotional credit and technical support to help innovators, accelerate, implement, and scale their projects via new technology.

Winners this year included precelt.org who developed a suite of tools that will help cities and countries better address their constituent’s needs. That includes health alert a verified helpline that directs users to key information services, health worker alert which gives care providers on the front line up-to-date health info and mental health support, and health check which digitally assesses risk and maps for early detection and management of COVID 19 cases.

Winner graphical help the city in the Philippines create an integrated digital twin system for disaster resiliency. This will help save lives with better early warning systems improve disaster response by helping direct emergency services and even help farmers plan better to avoid crop loss and improve yield.

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