We are nearing the point where the term Smart City will cease to be a buzzword and become a reality for many people living in the most progressive conurbation. 2018 will be the year of the smart city, and their impact in making everyday living greener and healthier is getting more and more noticeable.
Watch:
Intelligent / Smart Cities Solutions
Black & Veatch just released 2018 Strategic Directions: Smart Cities & Utilities Report. The report explores the current landscape of smart city efforts, as 2017 marked an inflection point for initiatives around the world. The report finds that Big Data’s potential to improve community quality of life while making critical human infrastructure more efficient and sustainable is overcoming lingering fears about costs. Bold advances in data analytics, electric transportation and next-generation communications systems are propelling smart city development, while creative financing strategies challenge old notions about massive upfront investments.
Two years ago, in 2016, electronics giant Panasonic teamed up with the city of Denver, Colorado, to create a futuristic smart city from scratch, using a 400-acre stretch of available land near the Denver International Airport. It was envisaged as a decade-long project, but just two years later, the steps being made to apply technology to the new city’ s road system show that considerable progress is already being made and the project is under way.
Smart cities are an extremely popular concept in recent years. As cities grow and technology advances, cities around the world are adopting smart technologies such as smart traffic lights, street lights, and a multitude of sensors for weather, traffic, water and power, which are making them more efficient and environmentally friendly, and improve quality of life.
The implementation of smart city technologies could save enterprises, governments and citizens a total of over $5 trillion globally per year, by 2022, according to a new white paper by ABI research, which has analyzed the scope for cost savings and efficiency as a driver for smart city deployments, smart technologies and the Internet of Things.
As city dwellers swell in number, reaching half the world’ s population for the first time in history, the need to increase quality of life in cities is more pressing than ever. In this respect, the sudden availability of new technology comes at exactly the right time.
New technologies can make smart cities even smarter, by incorporating new solutions and capabilities such as artificial intelligence, sensor-driven analytics to solve pressing challenges that cities face, easing traffic, boosting economic growth, and improving access to government services for all residents.
India’ s Smart Cities Mission aims to create 100 ‘˜smart cities’ in the country by the year 2020. The Mission, one of the most publicized among the many slogan-led schemes of the National Democratic Alliance government, is characterized by ambitious goals, large planned investments, multiple private sector actors, and new governance structures induced by the corporatization of cities. As the Mission completed two years in June 2017, the Housing and Land Rights Network of India (HLRN) examines how it has unfolded and what exactly it means for India’ s urban Continue reading