Guiding the Future of Smart Districts

Filed: Smart Dubai Stories

Dubai is unique in many ways. When thinking about the creation of a smart city, one may note that Dubai is an emerging city. What does this mean? It is a city, in which urban development is far from being completed. Acknowledging this unique feature of Dubai, Smart Dubai has creating a set of guidelines, so-called Smart District Guidelines, which aim to support developers, landscapers and architects of business as well as residential areas to embrace smart initiatives by giving high-level technical references and build a smart city from the drawing board.

The overall goal of providing such Guidelines is to align commercial and investments goals with Smart Dubai’s vision to make Dubai the happiest city on earth. The Smart District Guidelines are aligned with the city’s protocol for ICT infrastructure, unifying the communication networks and the Internet of Things data aggregation. They are built to to maintain seamless, efficient and impactful experiences for all residents and visitors of the city.

As a first example within Dubai, the Dubai Design District (d3) was built based on a collaboration of developers and private sector technology providers, such as du and Cisco. Through direct partnerships in the development phase, d3 was able to integrate smart building and infrastructure solutions seamlessly and efficient into the district, creating an infrastructure and environment for commercial and private residents, unprecedented in Dubai.

Looking as d3 as an example the pillars of Smart Dubai, namely efficiency, seamlessness, safety and impact are clearly aligned with the idea of the districts, and hence directly transfer into Smart Dubai’s dimensions to be realised.