What’s a Smart City?
"Three million people move to cities every week.” — City Metric
According to City Metric, urban areas attract more and more people. With more people condensed into urban areas, what does that mean for cities in the future? How do cities prepare to manage more people and manage to create a higher quality of life?
Recently, I moved to New York City and embarked in a graduate program tasked to produce urban data scientist. As I study big cities and urban data, the term smart cities often comes up in class discussions and urban science literature. As a new student of Urban Informatics, I quickly learned and engulfed myself in the fascinating concept of smart cities.
SMART CITIES
At first glance, the complicated task of defining smart cities can have many moving parts. The continuous development of new technologies in the urban science field has made defining smart cities difficult but not impossible.
According to Deakin and Al Wear, smart cities have four common characteristics:
- The application of a wide range of electronic and digital technologies to communities and cities
- The use of ICT* to transform life and working environments within the region
- The embedding of such ICTs in government systems
- The territorialisation of practices that brings ICTs and people together to enhance the innovation and knowledge that they offer.
*ICT: Information and Communications Technologies
New York City, in my opinion qualifies as a smart city in the making. As a new resident of the city of New York, I have learned of New York City’s initiative to have open data. If you go to the New York City Open Data website you can find many data sets pertaining to city operations and its residents. The availability of city data provides the opportunity for developers and innovators alike to produce ICTs for cities like New York. Such practices can create a catalyst for many cities to evolve into smart cities.
Although I’m new to New York City, I think New York City has great potential to lead cities into the future. What city are you from? Can you think of any ideas that can help your home city evolve into a smart city? Comment below!
References
- https://nycopendata.socrata.com/
- http://www.citymetric.com/skylines/three-million-people-move-cities-every-week-so-how-can-cities-plan-migrants-1546
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city
- http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/What%20is%20Smart%20City.pdf
- http://www.smartcitiesprojects.com/tag/lucknow-smart-city/
