What's a smart City anyway?
Most major cities in the world are working on some kind of smart city project, but the expression is sometimes misused for advertising purposes. Check out a few interesting projects to follow:
Smart city is a general term that can be used to describe different types of initiatives in urban areas. It means improving public services through technology and data collection, by using sensors and public participation to evaluate and upgrade health, mobility and security initiatives.
BOS:311
It’s a project for empowering Boston citizens to take care of their communities by reporting problems to the local municipality. It’s used for basic public participation, such as informing on potholes on the road, dirty streets, graffiti and broken street furniture without having to call service lines. https://www.boston.gov/civic-engagement/bos311-app
Smart Dublin
Created to tackle four main challenges: Sustainable Mobility, Extreme Weather & Flooding, Environment and Energy. The objective is to turn Dublin into an ideal place for testing smart cities solutions and to be a reference of open data sets. It could help improve logistics in the city, reduce congestion, have low cost monitoring on natural disasters, clean streets and check air quality, reduce energy footprint and more. Have a look at the project’s video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqaPBC__JY8&t=5s
Data for London
The idea is to turn London into the most dynamic and productive City Data Market in the world, by facilitating how citizens share and use the city’s data. The objectives are to save money, to incubate innovation and to drive economic growth, all through organising most data available to deliver better services to citizens.
Cooling Singapore
This project aims to improve citizens’ health and comfort by reducing heat stress in specific parts of the city (Urban Heat Island effect). Cooling Singapore uses city sensors and computational modeling to identify and mitigate areas in a city where thermal discomfort can be a health hazard.
Masdar City
This city project in Abu Dhabi is planned to be a whole connected city. Masdar was created to optimize solar energy gains and to integrate all aspects of life to reduce the use of transportation, providing high quality of life to its residents. One of its most impressive milestones was to achieve a reduction in building’s energy consumption by 50%.
After this year’s pandemic, let’s watch out for potential changes on smart cities’ plans when it comes to contact tracing and data on public health.
