Smart Cities a consensus of innovation.

In a smart city topic, a vital element beside infrastructure focus is, the aware citizen. Citizens at some point are sensors with the most powerful feature: decisions which are facilitated by information and communications technologies. As shared in a prior article, the extend to smart cities services are moving towards sustainable environments and infrastructure technology enabled.

With this, an important aspect shall be in place: the “smart city” topic needs to incorporate into the urban infrastructure, information and communications technologies with solutions to provide a better quality of life, better city access to resources, better work environments and meet the city relevant goals.  Those solutions such as urban dashboards, centralized and edge data centers, ITS ( intelligent transport systems), bike share schemes, logistics management systems, smart energy grids, controllable lighting, BMS ( Building management systems), network sensors and others find out a commonplace: a global network infrastructure where physical things connect objects, using data captured by actuators or sensors, processed by equipment used to locate and communicate data; in simple three letters IoT.

Then, it is key to see which are the smart cities relevant goals:

? Be Inclusive and achieve diversity for meaningful events, access to cultural sights, in cultural and educational facilities providing good conditions for health.

? Public safety where environmental and territorial monitoring, children protection, emergency solutions, safe roads and public areas, waste management, smart air quality, real-time weather information prior, during, after natural weather events, needs to continue evolving.

? Governance where the decisional process is called for transparency, being faster accessible, with citizens involvement for citizens in legislative initiatives.

? Smart grids, where energy consumption thresholds are a significant improvement field of play, then seeing the energy cycle starting with power generation, then distribution, then storage, all need to be managed, measured and optimized.  

? Mobility: as simply as reach out point B from point A; then, how traffic management would be? What mobility mode to use: Car/bike/sharing? Or by multimodal transport? Or by private car?  How is road conditioning monitoring? Once in the area, where to park and what set of information do we have?

Realization of those goals requires also a city to be attractive in its economy: cities forging entrepreneurial spirit? Cities providing high-level jobs and business competitiveness?  Cities with the ability to invest in research and innovation? Or a mix of all?

So, the relationship between a smart city and citizen, in all cases needs to be on the foundation by urban collaboration planning drive-by unique IoT technology innovation that imply: an insight coming from data acquisition, a transformation to achieve sustainability, prediction to precisely estimate the impact of such transformation, consensus between city leaders, citizens and providers, then governance to incentive social behavior.  

Where is your city related to any of those goals?