Smart cities use technology to monitor, optimize and automate city infrastructure – increasing efficiency, sustainability and citizen well-being in the process.
Smart technologies can play a vital role in helping cities reduce their carbon footprint, from monitoring and optimizing all energy flows in public buildings to waste bins powered by solar energy – they all play their part! Discover cutting-edge research in this area at PLOS.
Digital services
Digitalisation is one of the cornerstones of smart city development. It opens up new economic dimensions that add significant value to society while creating additional problems like digital inequality and environmental sustainability.
As cities increasingly adopt digital economies, ensuring inclusive communities that foster innovation and sustainable growth is of great importance. Ensuring citizens are involved and accessible data will allow cities to become human-centric environments that support sustainable digital economy growth.
Hardware, wireless components and cellular data plans needed for creating smart cities have become more affordable in recent years, making smart technology accessible and feasible in everything from streetlights that dim during periods of low usage, to solar powered garbage compactors and car recharging stations that reduce energy use. This information is then collected real time by devices collecting real time information on all aspects of city performance as well as helping law enforcement apprehend criminals more quickly – which ultimately benefits residents who live there by improving quality of life and improving overall city efficiency.
Sustainable initiatives
Smart cities not only bring public services more efficiently, but they can also offer environmental and social advantages. For example, their infrastructure can be optimized to maximize energy use, reduce emissions, and enhance air quality.
Smart cities can also help manage and mitigate traffic congestion while supporting environmentally sustainable transportation systems that reduce carbon emissions and enhance urban mobility. Furthermore, intelligent technologies enable cities to implement green building standards and eco-friendly practices to decrease their ecological footprint and enhance urban mobility.
For a city to qualify as a smart city, innovative digital services must improve citizens’ lives. This could include collaboration tools, user-friendly websites, mobile applications or self-service portals that make accessing information, completing tasks or engaging with digital ecosystems easy for residents. A smart city thus creates an environment which fosters economic development while offering a high quality of life for its inhabitants – their respective projects and initiatives will differ depending on context, priorities and goals.
Co-creation with citizens
Cities are taking steps toward smart-city initiatives in an attempt to maximize economic benefits, take advantage of potential system efficiencies, and improve quality-of-life for their citizens. But for smart solutions to work properly, public entities must remain transparent and inclusive with local populations – this can be achieved using design thinking frameworks for co-creating smart city solutions; such frameworks foster civic participation while instilling feelings of ownership over these initiatives.
Co-creation is not a novel concept, yet its impact in designing and delivering public services has become ever more significant. Co-creation requires new ways of thinking about the relationship between public services and citizens; building their capabilities and agency so they can enjoy good lives is central to co-creation; however, current theory often focuses primarily on service users while neglecting service professionals or leaving out those unable to participate actively in co-creation activities altogether.
Prioritization and selection of projects
As the smart city movement gains steam, municipal leaders and residents are eager to use technology to make cities more efficient. From optimizing traffic management strategies to installing responsive infrastructure solutions, smart city initiatives are revolutionizing urban landscapes while opening the way towards an era where innovation meets efficiency.
Smart city technology enables a constant stream of data to be collected and transformed into alerts, insights and actions that enable municipal officials to improve operations and deliver superior city services while city planners use the technology to reduce carbon emissions, enhance air quality and spur job creation.
However, this technology presents its own set of obstacles. Chief among them is that it relies heavily on data connection and device connectivity which leaves cities open to cyberattacks. Therefore, priority should be given to ensure secure data collection and processing – in addition to testing it first in an actual public environment before rolling it out publicly.