Smart cities were once a vision of the future. They were viewed as a time when connectivity would be ubiquitous in every aspect of urban life. This is still a key enabler of a truly smart town.
However, Singapore and Dubai have already claimed their position as “smart cities” pioneers. This begs the question: What is a smart city?
There are many ways to define smart cities, but I believe that one definition is the same: a smart municipality is a municipality or city that informs, preserves and enhances everyday life for its citizens. They are based on fast acquisition and aggregation data, rapid assimilation into useful content and subsequent dissemination to stakeholders in close real-time. This facilitates and improves decision-making.
It becomes apparent that smart cities are not as simple as they seem. Smart cities will only become reality if governments and businesses can overcome the critical challenges.
Moving closer to a smart urban reality
Smart cities are complex systems that combine hundreds of technology and processes. They all need to work together. Each collects vast amounts data about their environment. This data must be processed and analyzed .
Many believe that 5G is the key to realizing this vision. It will also play an important role in the future development of smart cities. However, 5G is more power-hungry than other technologies and is also expensive. It can also be difficult and time-consuming for deployment.
Smart cities require scalable networks that combine a variety of cost-effective technologies. They must consider how to link disparate sensors to the edge to support real-time applications and backhaul information to remote data centers.
These devices gather data from the city’s core infrastructure including offices, electricity substations and transport systems as well as industrial settings. These devices then combine the data and quickly process it to create valuable insights and content. This information can be distributed to key stakeholders at an ‘edge’, also known as the periphery or networks, as an action that alerts or better informs the recipient or controls and allows an automated event.
This “edge” component is crucial to building a smart city. It is important that those involved in developing smart cities prioritize the implementation and roll-out of edge technologies. Integrators and suppliers who can understand the edge to core infrastructure and how to bring disparate, unstructured and structured data together to provide valuable insights and intelligence to users are what will deliver real value.
Smart cities without their citizens
Citizen participation is another key component of a smart city. This refers to individuals’ willingness and ability to share their data. This process is dependent on gaining their trust. It is becoming increasingly difficult as individuals become more concerned about the safety of their data.
This is a crucial step towards overcoming the challenge. Smart cities should include a comprehensive data privacy strategy and security strategy. Local governments will then be responsible for educating citizens and society about how data will be stored, who can access it, and how it can best be used.
It must be included in the equation from the first letter of “go.” It is essential that developers and governments have it. This is especially true when developing smart cities. Without it, the public could lose trust in the government.
Therefore, cyber security experts play an integral part in embedding security management system that requires data to be moved from “zero trust edges devices” onto secure IT platforms immediately after it is generated.
Too many cooks
Each element of a smart urban must be maintained and repaired at some point. Technology cannot be ignored or forgotten about. The question is: Who will fund and take responsibility for it?
For some technologies, the answer is obvious. Councils will own flood warning systems, but they will also be responsible for other consumer-facing deployments like intelligent traffic systems and integrated traffic systems. Blue light services will have a significant impact on the latter, as they will be able override red lights in order to make progress when dealing with emergency situations.
Others technologies are more difficult to pinpoint. As utilities and private enterprises look to anticipate footfall and EV charging needs, they will be more active in smart infrastructure.
All of this means that public authorities and enterprises must make data available to everyone for a truly smart experience. This adds to security and privacy concerns. It becomes more difficult to communicate with citizens where their data is located and who has access to it, given the number of cooks involved in the kitchen.
Cities will get smarter
Although we are still far from seeing smart cities in action, there have been significant advances and many businesses are making great progress in this area.
However, we cannot let ourselves get carried away. There are many critical obstacles to overcome, as with every major technological advancement. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s ensure we have the basics right: security, ownership, edge to core, and control.
