Smart cities of the future: 7 things that successful cities do
Source: Cities Today Published: January 2021
By: Fernando Alberto Brügge, Analyst at IoT Analytics
At IoT Analytics, we have extensively researched the current developments in the smart city space and found that there are seven things that set the leading cities apart from the rest.
Cities like Prague, Manchester and Melbourne use smart trash bins that notify (“talk to”) waste collection centres when they are full and ready for collection. Connected streetlights that automatically dim on and off according to actual lighting demands have become a reality in Miami, Edinburgh and Jakarta.
Citizens of Los Angeles, Hamburg and Beijing can charge their electric vehicles while parked on the street.
Despite these advances, global smart city development in 2021 is still at an infant level, with billions of urban populations not having access to many of these solutions. And cities are at significantly different stages of smart city development.
The cities that can be regarded as being at the forefront include Barcelona, Amsterdam, Singapore, New York, San Francisco, Dubai, Copenhagen, Seoul, Tokyo and Adelaide.
Here are seven things successful smart cities prioritise – and which other cities should also consider:
Holistic smart city development [rather than application-specific]
Successful smart cities tend to exhibit a holistic approach towards smart city development, prioritising the integration of (new and legacy) city applications and infrastructure under the same system to gain a complete view of the city.
Holistic “smart cities of the future” initiatives focus on developing a common IT infrastructure and platforms that can be further leveraged by multiple smart city applications.
This contrasts with solely focusing on a particular application area (e.g. mobility, energy, governance), where solutions tend to work in silos limiting the potential reusability of the deployed IT infrastructure for additional use cases.
Typically, these holistic projects involve using a centralised management software (i.e. smart city platform or operations centre) for a complete view of the various smart city applications.
Example: In 2010, the city of Rio de Janeiro developed an Operations Center to improve the city’s resilience. The centre monitors and controls the city’s daily operations, integrates several public entities involved in Rio’s routine and manages crisis and emergencies.
Since its creation, Rio Operations Center has provided numerous benefits to city officials and citizens. The centre helped the city to improve management efficiency in challenging areas such as transportation. Emergency response times were reduced by 30 percent due to the centre’s ability to automatically identify traffic incidents and rapidly send field teams to the incident’s location.
Rio Operations Center also played a key role in fighting the spread of dengue fever. Based on geographical analyses of cases, the city was able to identify the specific areas with the highest infection rates. This information was used to implement preventive measures.
Citizens-come-first mindset
Successful smart cities of the future exhibit a citizen-oriented approach by developing infrastructures that connect and enable citizens to become co-creators of their future city. They set up IoT ‘living labs’ across the city where citizens, students, researchers and businesses can create and test smart city ideas and applications under real conditions.
These urban labs typically consist of a specific area within the city that is either equipped with IoT capabilities (e.g. Amsterdam IoT Lab) or delimited for deploying and testing smart city solutions at a small scale without any regulatory restriction (e.g. Copenhagen Street Lab).
Example: In Copenhagen, developers can submit a request for testing their smart city solution to the city’s Street Lab. Once accepted, Copenhagen Street Lab offers full assistance to install and connect the solution to the existing infrastructure.
Additionally, Copenhagen Street Lab provides developers with the necessary permits and access to feedback from citizens using the solution and industry professionals.
Successful smart cities also develop participatory platforms that empower citizens to submit and vote on local policy proposals (e.g. Barcelona’s Decidim platform, Seoul’s mVoting platform).
These platforms also enable cities to listen to their citizens’ opinions without conducting traditional surveys that are costly and time-consuming.
Example: As of March 2017, 4,404 proposals have been voted on via the Seoul mVoting platform (88.3 percent of which were proposed by the citizens, with the remaining 11.7 percent by officials), with 181 of them becoming Seoul’s Policy.
Through mVoting, citizens have been able to participate in various city decisions, ranging from ordinary city life issues such as whether certain city parks should be designated non-smoking areas to major budgetary decisions such as where to spend a certain portion of the municipality’s annual budget.
3 Alignment with government initiatives
Successful smart cities tend to tie their initiatives into larger municipality or government initiatives in a smart city programme or plan. Compared to standalone smart city programmes, governments’ smart city initiatives typically are accompanied by policies and legislations that facilitate their development and implementation.
Example: In 2014, smart city initiatives in Singapore were included within the government’s Smart Nation programme to create a digital economy, society and government. To realise its nationwide smart city project, Singapore’s government has adopted several measures harnessing innovation and research.
These measures include, among many others, investments in research and development through agencies such as the National Research Foundation, the creation of test-beds and trials (e.g. Juring Lake District), the co-funding of startup accelerators, and regulatory reforms (e.g., FinTech Regulatory Sandbox).
Long-term vision
Programmes for smart cities of the future exhibit long-term character. Implementing specific smart city solutions should not solely focus on addressing a particular goal (e.g. improving urban mobility) but should be geared towards realising an overarching smart city vision.
Example: Copenhagen’s smart city strategy has five focus areas (health, mobility, energy, smart citizens, and smart learning) where numerous smart city projects and solutions are being developed with the overarching aim of improving citizens’ quality of life and making Copenhagen the world’s first carbon-neutral capital by 2025.
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