SMART CITIES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (original) (raw)

Building The Future: Smart Cities and Their Development

2023

As urbanization accelerates and technological advancements reshape our world, the concept of a smart city has emerged as a promising solution to address the growing complexities and challenges faced by urban centres. A smart city leverages cutting-edge technologies and data-driven approaches to enhance the quality of life for its residents, promote sustainability, and optimize resource allocation. This paper provides an overview of the key aspects involved in developing a smart city, including the underlying technologies, critical infrastructure, and the potential benefits and considerations. The development of a smart city revolves around the integration of various technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, and cloud computing. These technologies enable the collection and analysis of vast amounts of data from sensors, devices, and systems distributed throughout the city, providing valuable insights for efficient decision-making and resource management. Additionally, advanced communication networks play a crucial role in connecting different components of the city's infrastructure, facilitating seamless data transfer and real-time monitoring. Critical infrastructure forms the backbone of a smart city, encompassing areas such as energy management, transportation, waste management, healthcare, public safety, and governance. Through intelligent monitoring and control systems, a smart city can optimize energy consumption, reduce traffic congestion, manage waste efficiently, provide responsive healthcare services, enhance public safety measures, and foster citizen engagement in governance processes. Furthermore, the incorporation of renewable energy sources, sustainable building designs, and eco-friendly initiatives promotes environmental sustainability, making the city greener and more resilient.

Cornerstones of a Smart City: More Sustainable and More Versatile

Nevsehir Journal of Science and Technology, 2019

A smart city finds ways to better serve its citizens, and brings together key urban systems, including energy grids, water management, waste systems, smart mobility and transportation based on the engineering applications. The smart cities should aim to strengthen the socioeconomic backbone of the city, so the subject needs to be addressed in multi-dimensional framework. Thus, different disciplines such as engineering, architecture, sociology, economics and urban design are practiced upon in order to design smart technology plans and systems. Even though innovative smart city projects offer sustainable, mobile, digital, safe infrastructures that enable flexibility to different needs still there is no consent about what really forms a city smarter. This paper considers smart cities as integrated models, and aims at disclosing major catalysts for socioeconomic development in smart city projects. Besides, discusses about the tools for urban development enabled by knowledge-intensive digital applications, the role of open data in smart mobility systems and nature-based solutions. Several dimensions and elements of the smart cities are defined based on the projects of five chosen cities located in different continents. Findings from each project about their critical systems, salient concepts and driving elements are utilized to conclude the study with triggers that can set cities on the path to becoming smart.

Smart Cities for Real People

2018

Accelerating urbanization of the population and the emergence of new smart sensors (the Internet of Things) are combining in the phenomenon of the smart city. This movement is leading to improved quality of life and public safety, helping cities to enjoy economies that help remedy some budget overruns, better health care, and is resulting in increased productivity. The following report summarizes evolving digital technology trends, including smart phone applications, mapping software, big data and sensor miniaturization and broadband networking, that combine to create a technology toolkit available to smart city developers, managers and citizens. As noted above, the benefits of the smart city are already evident in some key areas as the technology sees actual implementation, 30 years after the creation of the broadband cable modem. The challenges of urbanization require urgent action and intelligent strategies. The applications and tools that truly benefit the people who live in cities will depend not on just the tools, but their intelligent application given current systemic obstacles, some of which are highlighted in the article. Of course, all the emerging technologies mentioned are dependent on ubiquitous, economical, reliable, safe and secure networks (wired and wireless) and network service providers.

Smart Cities: The Main Drivers for Increasing the Intelligence of Cities

Since the concept of smart cities was introduced, there has been a growing number of surveys aiming to identify the dimensions that characterize them. However, there is still no consensus on the main factors that should be considered to make a city more intelligent and sustainable. This report contributes to the topic by identifying the most important smart city drivers from the perspective of professionals from four broad areas of expertise: applied social sciences, engineering, exact and Earth sciences, and human sciences, which provide important insights for the understanding of smart and sustainable cities. In this study, we conducted a wide and detailed literature review, in which 20 potential smart city drivers were identified. The drivers were prioritized from the results of a survey conducted with 807 professionals that work in the concerned field. The results showed that the seven drivers identified as the most important to increase the intelligence of cities are related to the governance of cities.

World Smart Cities Outlook 2024

United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), 2024

This report analyses people-centered smart city development globally. It examines six key areas: strategic agendas, policies and regulations, public sector leadership, collaborative ecosystems, urban digital infrastructures, and smart city applications for public services. The report uses both qualitative and quantitative data to assess current practices, challenges, and trends, ultimately offering recommendations for future development. A significant focus is placed on inclusivity, sustainability, and ethical considerations surrounding the use of technology in urban environments. The report also includes numerous case studies illustrating successful and unsuccessful smart city initiatives worldwide.

Smart Cities

Smart cities have been considered the wave of the future. A smart city integrates information and communication technology (ICT) in a secure manner so as to manage the city's assets. This paper presents a brief overview of the concept of the smart city. It is argued that smart cities promise sustainable development and a high quality of life for the residents.

ICT and Digital Technology based Solutions for Smart City Challenges and Opportunities

Srinivas Publication, 2022

Purpose: Today's Smart Cities are rapidly evolving with the help of the latest tools and technologies and also due to large investment and priority focus by various countries across the globe. Smart Cities while growing also consider the environmental aspects such as producing lower carbon footprint, lower harmful gas emissions, and lower consumption of power. Abiding by this new paradigm, various Smart Cities started focusing on continuous improvement and innovation in their different services. Many Smart Cities have their own pain points such as traffic congestion, water scarcity, energy deficiency, waste management, poor participation of citizens in city administration, maintenance of complex IT Infrastructure, and so on. Such kind of issues may differ in scale and type but mostly common across geographies. While developing, operating, and maintaining Smart Cities, it is necessary to identify the most pressing and urgent issues that Smart City solutions must tackle on priority. In such cases, high-end technologies and tools can help to focus and eliminate the problems. In this paper, we analysed key challenges faced by Smart Cities during the development, operation, and maintenance related activities of various Smart Services and how these challenges and issues are effectively addressed by some of the key technologies with special attention to ICT and digital technologies. We have also reviewed some selected research papers devoted to Smart Cities challenges ad issues and how these issues are addressed using the latest tools and technologies. Finally, we have also specified the future plans about the discussed technical solutions to undertake its full-fledged implementation and addressing of its some of the limitations. Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper is based on the primary data collected while preparing research papers written by us on Smart Cities and a systematic literature review of existing literature including journal research papers, book chapters, dedicated websites, and white papers. Findings/Result: Smart Cities various operational and development challenges are effectively get addressed using various ICT and digital technologies. Some of the key technologies that played an important role in addressing some of the key concerns of Smart Cities include IoT, AI and ML, Blockchain, Data Analytics, Digital Twin, 5G, and Cloud Computing. Originality/Value: The Information presented in this paper is genuine and original and based on own research, data collected from industry professionals, systematic literature review of existing relevant research papers, and relevant data analysis and findings. Most of the information presented in this paper is derived from our own research papers written on Smart City services and solutions.

Projects for Intelligent and Smart Cities: Technology and Innovation Transforming City Ecosystems

2021

Intelligent cities or smart cities evolve bottom-up along with the digitisation and the creation of digital entities linked to human activities, physical space, and institutional settings of cities; but also, they progress top-down through smart city strategies and projects designed and implemented by public authorities. Yet, thirty-five years since the first use of the term “smart city” or “intelligent city” in the second half of the 1980s, and more than ten years of intense publications in this field, since 2009, there is still a great deal of fuzziness about the projects that make cities intelligent or smart. There is low awareness about the big differences between large, complex urban projects, such as ‘Zero Energy Districts’ or “Mobility-as-a-Service” and projects for automation of city infrastructures, such as smart city lighting, smart metering or finding a parking place. There is a widespread misconception that city intelligence or smartness, the core attribute of smart citi...

Smart Cities: The Hopes and Hypes

ArXiv, 2019

Smart cities are being planned for several advanced applications and services for the inhabitants. Smart cities initiative promise many new services which are not possible in the traditional city frameworks. In the smart city framework, the basic aim is to provide all the essential services through sensor based systems which does not need much human intervention. This system is designed to operate on its own in a self-organizing manner. Therefore, the hopes are really big from the smart cities to enhance the quality of lives and the economy. However, some of the promises in the smart cities are very much over hyped. In this article, we analyse the realities of the smart cities and their practical significances based on the technological aspects of these projects. We also address the false promises that are around which are just the hypes. We clarify these hypes with appropriate logical explanations.