What is your definition of a Smart City?

[Gabriela EhrlichKeymaster]

This interesting article by the Smart Cities Council reports that there is dissent about what a Smart City really is.http://smartcitiescouncil.com/article/cities-want-get-smarter-so-why-it-taking-so-long-what-you-can-do-move-faster

I would be interested in your definition!

Thank you in advance for sharing.

 

[Felicetto MassaParticipant]

SmartCity is a city where day after day the quality of life is improved and the costs of sevices are decreased

[Chris CooperParticipant]

In my humble opinion a smart city has the following elements:

1. Open & Interoperable - Open Data - Open Standards - Interoperability between modules/domains/services/data.
2. Standards Based
3. Sustainable Objectives - economically, environmentally & culturally
4. Outcomes centric - no silos’s in a smart city.
5. Governed and well led - from top down and bottom up.

I recognise that certain elements are missing from this list such as: Finance/ Information Marketplaces / Urban Design to name a few. However, without the above being there in the first place the fact that a city has funding to be smart is pointless if no one can create or use the new smart services provided.

[LADJI DIAKITEParticipant]

A very short view:
A smart city puts smartness/intelligence (i.e. data, data processing algorithms, interactivity/networking means) in all the services it provides, to enable
• The city to ensure their distribution efficiently and sustainability, and their management optimally,
• Citizens to make an efficient, responsible and environmentally friendly use of them.

• This reply was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by  LADJI DIAKITE.

[Roger AmiotParticipant]

The article states: “…that energy, water and telecommunications providers should play a leadership role in smart cities initiatives — they shouldn’t be relegated to a supporting role.” And “…If your city does not have a reliable, high-speed data network, you need to seriously consider building one. Most of the respondents identified that as the number one need.”

In addition to Felicetto’s comment I think we should set our priorities. What good is a 1 Gb/s bandwidth on my phone if I can’t even drink water from the tap? Even if the water were safe to drink (considered a basic right by many), who/what determines the price? Should the city be the owner of the waterworks? Technology and politics combined can cause some serious friction…

All in all a smart city should be a reliable, safe and healthy place to live.

[Felicetto MassaParticipant]

Roger !! I think that each city have its own priorities that must converge to high quality of life and low cost of services. I want design with the others merbers of forum the first “maslow pyramid of the needs of smart cities” with all ISO 37120 indicators. But we will uncover that there is no single pyramid but each different city can have its own.

[Alanus von RadeckiParticipant]

Smart Cities are cities that intelligently combine the use of smart solutions with smart processes:

• Smart solutions are integrated socio-technical systems that link clean technologies through data and that integrate users and individual behaviour in the form of a wider service and business model.
• Smart processes are sequences of connected activities by multiple actors in different municipal departments and other institutions that aim to deliver an urban service in the most efficient and sustainable manner.

[YutaoParticipant]

Smart City shall strengthen governance capacity, provide ubiquitous service to people, invigorate industries based on the overall perception of the city, by combined utilizing inter-connection-communication, intelligent processing and system engineering technology etc., to solve critical and hard issues in the process of city renewing and upgrading, so as to promote city developing more harmoniously, safely and sustainably.

[Felicetto MassaParticipant]

This is my pyramid of SmartCity needs. Right or wrong is the first step to drive the smartcities priorities

The next will be made with the ISO37120 indicators.

• This reply was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by  Felicetto Massa.

[Giovanni DominiciParticipant]

The smart city is the city that offers the main services with hight quality and safety, with a low cost, which guarantees the safety of people and things, which governs the management processes in a transparent and participatory manner with a focus on people’s quality of life and respecting the environmental.

[MythParticipant]

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) have together developed an international definition for Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC):

A smart sustainable city is an innovative city that uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social, environmental as well as cultural aspects

 

More information on Smart Sustainable Cities is available here: http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ssc/Pages/default.aspx

 

 

• This reply was modified 7 months ago by  Myth.

[Graham ColcloughParticipant]

I am biased, however I rather like the new ISO definition for a smart city. It is unusual in that it includes a (very necessary) “call to arms”; it focuses on ‘smart as a means; it identifies four key features (which includes leadership - which is so often neglected, at one’s peril!); and it puts ICT in the right place / order - ie as a vital enabler.

Here you go…

A “SMART CITY” should be described as one that:
- dramatically increases the pace at which it improves its sustainability and resilience,
- by fundamentally improving (i) how it engages society, (ii) how it applies collaborative leadership methods, (iii) how it works across disciplines and city systems, and (iv) how it uses data and integrated technologies,
- in order to provide better services and quality of life to those in and involved with the city (residents, businesses, visitors).

[yawadomParticipant]

I agree with the dissent and all the earlier views shared. Below has been my high-level definition of a smart city and smart growth, coined sometime back while working on a research project:

A smart connected community, in order words a smart city is an urban space capable of reinventing itself through appropriate and optimal communications between local nodes enabled by the network and in addition, socially and technologically self-sufficient and engages in spatial and aspatial interconnectedness with foreign entities relevant to local sustenance and/or evolution.

Also I see smart growth, as an environmental dividend of a broader smart city where product of carefully crafted design or plan is green, compact, sustainable and unobtrusive to normal activities and to the local ecosystem.

There are many subsets I could espouse on but at the high level I stick with these

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