What Makes a City Smart?
Think about how you navigated around your city a few years ago. Now, try to identify little things that may have changed. Can you think about how your day to day is different thanks to technology? We now have lots of tech options to help us in our everyday city life: from finding parking spots to car sharing. These types of solutions are a little bit of what the smart city approach is.
But it doesn't end there. There's a lot of possibilities and developments that make a city smart. Techopedia has a comprehensive definition of what types of sectors a smart city affects:
A smart city is a designation given to a city that incorporates information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance the quality and performance of urban services such as energy, transportation, and utilities to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs. The overarching aim of a smart city is to enhance the quality of living for its citizens through smart technology.
In a nutshell, smart cities use technology and the data gathered by it, to think about and work on solutions for their everyday problems. What are some of those things? Let's touch on them a little bit.
Rethinking Solutions to Make a Smart City
One of the enormous problems of a city comes from urban density when the population has grown so much that it affects all areas of city living: transportation, housing, energy expenditure.
Singapore is one example of a city that faces many of the issues that come with this. Here's a video that talks about the steps they're taking towards being smarter and providing out-of-the-box answers to everyday problems.
Technology and Data are Making Cities Safer
Lowering costs, allowing for collaboration within communities and reducing pollution are some of the benefits of having technological solutions available for city living. But, it is not all about mobility and cool apps - It is also about security.
Tunisia recently announced that they would use blockchain for transaction and authentication purposes. Although the possibilities of blockchain are still being researched and tried, it's possible that we will witness more of these coming in the future.
Another exciting sector that would be nice to observe is public safety. Data allows cities to have a trustable idea of where crime is happening. This data even helps in forecasting and predicting criminal activities.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to putting processes and tools in place to improve city life and get rid of problems that have affected cities for ages. It's going to be interesting watching what new apps or solutions come out to make healthcare more accessible, transportation more convenient and less damaging and overall, a more comfortable life.