Becoming a Smart City
https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/cities-looking-become-smart-need-look-beyond-adding-sensors/
“What is a smart city ?
Not even the people building them seem to know yet. Get 10 people in a room and ask what a smart city is, you’ll get 11 answers.
“It won’t look like Minority Report and it won’t look like The Fifth Element,” said Satyam (Cisco’s managing director of smart cities and digitization division). “A lot of people think about smart cities and they think about flying cars and futuristic skyscrapers, and stuff like that. We believe that cities won’t fundamentally look different in the next 10 years, but cities will be a lot more efficiently managed.”
Data Sharing :
Better parking, efficient lighting, improved traffic flow, smarter security, improved waste management, and disaster planning are all areas where technology can make an impact.
Having access to the data from — for example — your environmental sensors and connected trash bins is the first step; making sense of it is the next. But sharing that data and analysis is just as crucial.
If the trucks are only picking up the bins that are, say, 70 percent full and above, the traffic management agency can use its real-time information to route them in the most efficient
Looking at neighboring cities and working together :
In order for cities to begin on the right track to becoming smarter, many stars need to align. The biggest factor is having leaders who are on board.
In Europe, 56 cities “built their own bad variations of the same service”
For a city with “incredibly tight budgets,” said Bennett, there’s little room for failure.
When a city has a strategic goal in mind, it requires collaboration across the board.
Red Tape can Kill innovation :
Sometimes funding isn’t the issue. “Procurement is a nightmare,” said Charles Brennan, CIO of Philadelphia, during a SCW panel. “I have less trouble getting money than I have spending it.” A startup may want to work with a city but might struggle to fill out 30-to-40-page forms required for consideration. City ordinances that haven’t kept pace with technology can also pose a problem.
The problem of security :
Much more disruptive and dangerous would be if control of a hydroelectric dam fell into the wrong hands, for example. Another concern is creating or worsening a digital divide, where parts of a city are left without access to the same technology — even something as simple as internet access — as the rest of the city.”
For more information : https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/cities-looking-become-smart-need-look-beyond-adding-sensors/
This article is made of abstracts from an article of the Digital Trends called “ Becoming a smart city takes more than sensors and buzzwords”. You can find it here : https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/cities-looking-become-smart-need-look-beyond-adding-sensors/