Cities all around the world are using Smart City solutions to upgrade infrastructure and enhance livability, such as by reducing traffic congestion or improving natural habitats. Furthermore, Smart Cities serve to bring governments closer to people while creating an opportunity for innovation.
Smart cities are moving away from deploying individual networks for every application and opting instead to use horizontal multiservice infrastructures, which can reduce costs while streamlining manual operations.
Environmental sustainability
Environmentalism is at the core of Smart cities. By harnessing IoT and Big Data analytics, these cities can reduce energy consumption and pollution while improving residents’ quality of life. A smart transportation system may even help commuters avoid traffic congestion by optimizing routes and providing real-time information on available public transit options.
These systems offer an eco-friendly alternative to driving cars, using renewable sources like solar panels to power them. Not only does this approach benefit the environment but it can also save businesses money.
AI, IoT and Big Data technologies have gained increasing relevance in the study of eco-sustainable smart cities. This field of research explores its interests, terminologies, developments, applications dynamics and trends that comprise this new paradigm of urbanism. Scholars and practitioners alike may gain from better understanding how these technologies are being employed to design smart cities as they evolve.
Economic growth
Smart City solutions enable cities to lower operational costs while improving sustainability through better managing energy distribution and waste disposal, traffic congestion reduction, and air pollution reduction – benefits which attract business, improve citizens’ quality of life and boost economic growth.
Smart City technology can also assist businesses in recruiting the appropriate talent. Online talent acquisition platforms can match applicants with suitable jobs that help them meet their professional goals more easily, while connecting entrepreneurs to potential investors or streamlining the process of obtaining a business license.
Studies have demonstrated that Smart City solutions increase employment by driving digital technology development (Kumar et al. 2020). The model’s variables represent total employment; primary industry employment (primit), secondary industry employment (secit), and tertiary industry employment (terit). Didit represents interactions between Smart City construction dummy variable and time; zit represents control variables like GDP per capita, urbanization rate, wages that may affect employment; while b1 measures its effect.
Resilience
Cities increasingly face complex challenges that necessitate advanced resilience measures in order to remain competitive, such as an aging infrastructure, population growth, and global trends like climate change. A resilient city is defined as one which can adjust quickly to these changes while remaining healthy, productive, and safe.
Smart cities use digital technologies to enhance its services and make them more appealing for citizens and businesses. This approach allows smart cities to respond swiftly to shocks such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks; resilient communities withstand chronic pressures such as poverty, unemployment and inequality.
At the first panel, CERIS expert Ivonne Herrera discussed smart city resilience while Frederic Guyomard from EDF Lab Paris-Saclay discussed digital security. Participants also had an opportunity to learn more about EU-funded projects PRAETORIAN and NBSINFRA which are exploring Nature-based Solutions as a way of protecting urban CI and could potentially provide new approaches for development with robust resilience and environmentally sustainable recovery in smart cities.
Community engagement
Cities may desire smart city status for various reasons, including economic ones such as cutting costs or increasing revenues. However, any effort towards becoming smart must first begin by engaging all members of its community with it as part of its plan for transformation.
To do so, it is crucial to identify stakeholders early in the process and engage them as early as possible using various means such as discussion forums and surveys. Furthermore, transparency about how collected information will be utilized is vitally important.
Geolocation data and online platforms can also facilitate community participation in smart sustainable city development. Citizens can provide real-time feedback on initiatives being undertaken by their city in real time – helping improve services while simultaneously increasing quality of life for residents. Moreover, using these tools enables smart sustainable city planners to plan better for future changes – for example the City of Pittsburgh developed an app allowing its residents to report potholes or any issues with public infrastructure such as curb cuts.