Smart cities employ cutting-edge technologies to improve operational efficiencies, engage citizens and drive economic development. In addition, they monitor environmental conditions closely in order to respond quickly when conditions shift or changes arise.
They achieve this by placing data in the hands of all, empowering individuals to take immediate action on issues like traffic jams, air quality or community safety alerts.
1. Smarter Transportation
Smart city transportation systems enable residents to navigate traffic congestion more smoothly while leaving a smaller carbon footprint with solutions that reduce emissions and dispatch vehicles based on real demand.
Smart cities make it easy for residents to communicate with city officials. Boston offers an app for reporting potholes or broken streetlights, helping reduce 311 calls while freeing up city staff for other tasks. Furthermore, the best cities empower their citizens to co-create solutions which improve their lives.
2. Smarter Parking
Any municipality seeking to become a smart city must implement innovative technologies across various fields, including intelligent parking systems that reduce congestion, increase accessibility and promote citizen satisfaction.
These systems allow drivers to navigate directly to open parking spots, cutting time spent driving around town and emissions while managing parking directly via mobile applications for residents and visitors alike.
Implementing smarter parking can present several obstacles for cities. A city must involve many elected officials, departments and interest groups – often switching roles over the course of a project – making momentum hard to sustain.
3. Smarter Energy
Though there is no single definition for what constitutes a smart city, generally speaking the concept involves using technology to improve residents’ quality of life and expand physical infrastructure. This approach to city construction has proven itself effective in improving citizens’ standard of living while simultaneously protecting ecological and economic sustainability.
But for IoT devices to function and produce accurate data, they require energy that is both safe, reliable, and long lasting. Solid state batteries are ideal in providing this power – giving cities real-time observability of assets using an integrated platform which automates communications with citizens.
4. Smarter Health
As cities become smarter, their key quality-of-life measures can improve by 10-30 percent – translating to lives saved, reduced crime incidents, shorter commutes, reduced health burdens and lower carbon emissions. According to the McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report, digital applications may help achieve this gain.
An extensive literature review was undertaken to identify articles reporting smart city applications with healthcare impacts on people. Articles were excluded if they did not publish in English, had no abstract available, or covered topics other than smart city infrastructure such as overviews or applications that did not require infrastructure upgrades.
5. Smarter Education
As smart cities gain prominence, local government officials are turning to cutting-edge technologies to foster citizen participation. For instance, centralized data portals automatically notify residents via text, email or phone when updates become available and allow them to interact directly with city administrators through these same channels.
Smart cities aim to improve urban living through cleaner air and reduced pollution levels, faster and more reliable public Wi-Fi connections, or crime reduction through advanced surveillance systems. But for all this to work smoothly together requires advanced networking solutions that ensure seamless collaboration.
6. Smarter Economy
As more connected devices become available to technology providers and developers, the concept of what constitutes a smart city continues to change. From high-tech metropolises like Singapore which feature drone delivery and virtual-reality modeling; passively cooled solar powered shopping centers of Curitiba in Brazil or “sponge cities” across China that use natural resources to manage rainfall and floodwater; each city has their own way of incorporating data analytics into urban systems.
A smart city strives to create an environment in which information is abundant and accurate, empowering consumers and producers to make well-informed decisions that improve the quality of life for all its residents. Furthermore, smart cities seek to reduce waste while simultaneously increasing efficiency – thus decreasing infrastructure costs.
7. Smarter Environment
Infrastructure is at the core of city life. Smart city technologies enable cities to operate more smoothly while cutting costs while simultaneously increasing sustainability.
Technology behind these systems can also provide cities with invaluable insight into how they operate, manage, and plan for their future. By having a better picture of residents’ needs, elected officials and administrators can create social and physical interventions which meet those needs without wastefully expending resources.
Advanced augmented reality solutions enable field workers to complete difficult and/or dangerous tasks more safely, such as locating underground pipes. This increases worker safety and productivity.