What is a smart City?
Ask any ten people what “Smart” means to them and you will inevitably get a catalogue of answers based on their perception and interest in the subject.
Definition: A smart city is a municipality that uses information and communication technologies (ICT) to increase operational efficiency, share information with the public and improve both the quality of government services and citizen welfare.
What is its main purpose?
The main goal of a smart city is to optimise city functions and promote economic growth while also improving the quality of life for citizens by using smart technologies and data analysis.
Liveability in the current fast-growing cities depends upon our ability to address urbanisation issues such as traffic congestion, pollution, health, infrastructure, and waste management. In order to address these issues and for sustainable living in these fast-growing cities, changing the method of performing urban activities and functions is necessary to provide agile and efficient services to the citizens in real-time. This can only be achieved by establishing a real inter-communication and seamless connection amongst all the city sectors that create and deliver services.
Smart city promoters have previously been criticised for reliance on fossil fuels and a general lack of consideration for the environment. Increasingly, within academic research on the subject, there has been acknowledgement that smart city projects had begun to prioritise technological advancements for their own sake above all else. The increased awareness of the need to balance sustainability and quality of life with technological improvements is a positive result of careful evaluation and detailed appraisal of the Smart City agenda. Attempts are being made to establish technical standards which are beginning to emerge across projects and allow for comparison along these lines, this is seen as a crucial aspect of transparent policy-making which was absent from the picture a few years ago.
Cybersecurity is now very much a focal point as the rapid onset of the Internet of Things and associated systems being deployed to smart cities has outpaced developments in cybersecurity, with complex models of deep learning required for effective cyber security. As AI becomes more prevalent in daily life and the Internet of Things more ubiquitous, thought is being given to develop the ethical frameworks smart cities must operate in.
Something to bear in mind as well is that poorly conceived and ineffective public-private partnership posed a problem in the implementation of the smart city agenda as the goals of each party were divergent. With programmes being managed through the use of corporate governance across multiple stakeholders including external funders & investors, a fear of “lock in” through the use of long-term and inflexible contracts has posed a problem where accountability to citizens and communities has been sought.
Smart City Trends – Putting people first
Liveability within the current fast-growing cities depends upon the ability to address urbanisation issues such as traffic congestion, pollution, health, infrastructure, waste management and citizen safety. In order to address these issues and also promote sustainable living in these fast-growing cities, changing the method of performing urban activities and functions is necessary in order to provide agile and efficient services to the citizens in real-time. This can only be achieved by establishing real intersectoral communication and seamless connections amongst all the city sectors that create and deliver services.
For the Smart City agenda to come together in the 2020s, leaders will need to be more open than ever to new solutions for handling challenges including finding ways to reduce the carbon output of cities, even by maintaining historical architecture, making cities safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and reinventing how we approach the concept of “city.”
Smart cities will require conversations about the technology layer because of the complexity and potential for misuse. Leaders will have to actively seek to bring citizens into the conversation and consider the long-term impacts of solutions like AI to have a better chance of navigating these complexities. What is clear is the impact that technology can have on the environmental impact of cities as mobility changes. With Net-Zero on the horizon, and a desire not to repeat the disruption of the past years’ pandemic, smart city topics will continue to be a hot topic of conversation.
It should be noted that smart cities are not just about infrastructure. A smart community is a set of interconnected and harmoniously coordinated ecosystems such as urban mobility, smart roads, lighting, renewable energy, and extremely powerful mobile networks which are essential in providing the society of the 21st and future centuries and communities where people, not technology, come first. Care should be taken to avoid the pitfalls that cities can quickly fall into when developing
smart infrastructure. City authorities together with providers could end up focusing solely on the technology and not on the people that will use it. This is why the key goal of smart City development should be to connect people, data, services, and products that are created in individual areas of the smart city and thus use the full potential of digitalisation in the context of smart cities. It cannot be stressed enough that this requires a focus on people and the harmonious development of the competencies needed for a coherent digital transformation, which is the cornerstone of the digital economy.
In concluding, I would suggest that Smart city thinking before Covid hit focussed on technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) and had a techno-solutionist approach that seemed to pay more attention to technology than communities they would be used for. Such technologies were developed to improve the efficiency of for example, water pipes, sewage, and utilities, and would monitor them to predict and reduce maintenance requirements, while promoting the idea of the futuristic smart city humming with intelligent sensors. The pandemic however has changed the way we look at cities, influencing how we commute, live, work, and shop. Furthermore, data privacy and cybersecurity concerns raise the question of how attractive the idea of putting sensors everywhere is to city leaders we note that current city rhetoric is focusing more on recovery, resilience, and equity than purely on smart sensor technology.
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