A city can be defined as ‘smart’ when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory action and engagement.,
The smart city concept essentially means efficiency. But efficiency based on the intelligent management and integrated ICTs, and active citizen participation. Then implies a new kind of governance, genuine citizen involvement in public policy.
Smart cities can be identified (and ranked) along six main axes or dimensions:These six axes connect with traditional regional and neoclassical theories of urban growth and development. In particular, the axes are based - respectively - on theories of regional competitiveness, transport and ICT economics, natural resources, human and social capital, quality of life, and participation of citizens in the governance of cities.
It insists that smart cities are defined by their innovation and their ability to solve problems and use of ICTs to improve this capacity. The intelligence lies in the ability to solve problems of these communities is linked to technology transfer for when a problem is solved. In this sense, intelligence is an inner quality of any territory, any place, city or region where innovation processes are facilitated by information and communication technologies. What varies is the degree of intelligence, depending on the person, the system of cooperation, and digital infrastructure and tools that a community offers its residents.
Urban performance currently depends not only on the city’s endowment of hard infrastructure (‘physical capital’), but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure (‘human and social capital’).
The latter form of capital is decisive for urban competitiveness. Against this background, the concept of the ‘smart city’ has recently been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and, in particular, to highlight the importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the last 20 years for enhancing the competitive profile of a city. The present paper aims to shed light on the often elusive definition of the concept of the ‘smart city’. We provide a focussed and operational definition of this construct and present consistent evidence on the geography of smart cities in the EU27.
Our statistical and graphical analyses exploit in depth, for the first time to our knowledge, the most recent version of the Urban Audit data set in order to analyse the factors determining the performance of smart cities. We find that the presence of a creative class, the quality of and dedicated attention to the urban environment, the level of education, multimodal accessibility, and the use of ICTs for public administration are all positively correlated with urban wealth. This result prompts the formulation of a new strategic agenda for smart cities in Europe, in order to achieve sustainable urban development and a better urban landscape.
The key challenge – serve citizens better than ever before
For public forces such as the police, ambulance or fire department, the ability to receive and process all relevant information in the control center in order to make informed decisions is essential, because if anything goes wrong, the human, economic and environmental consequences are severe. This means that the communication network may never be congested, and the encrypted, reliable flow of information to and from the control center has to be maintained at all times.
Apart from these basic requirements, any communication technology solution in a modern city has clear goals: It has to provide intelligent tools to make operations more efficient, it has to make access to public services as easy as possible and increase service quality for citizens, and it has to build bridges between public service agencies to realize synergies wherever available.
Our solutions – reliable communications technology
We offer a wide range of advanced Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) solutions based on the mission-critical, wireless industry standard TETRA that turn any dispatch center into a full-fledged control room. They feature an easy-to-use touch screen GUI with on-the-map geo-location and integrate into public broadband networks in order to give your dispatcher the best possible overview of the situation in the field using video and audio applications. Multi-VPN technology enables different organizations to work together on the same network, for example police and fire department in a disaster scenario, but keep to themselves when cooperation is not necessary. All components of our TETRA portfolio are designed to work seamlessly with each other and ensure that important processes are perfectly in sync, hence both the communication quality and workflow reliability are consistently high.
For public infrastructures, our Smart Lighting solution brings your street lights into the internet. It leverages cutting-edge communication technology to link every single light to a central control room where it can be automated and actively managed.
On the horizon – become smart or fall behind
Cities - and here we are not only talking about megacities – need to optimize the utilization of their limited resources in order to tackle the challenges of the future. They have to become environmentally sustainable, provide citizens with a high living standard and create a safe place to live.
To achieve these different goals, the integration of all public agencies, systems and infrastructures into one holistic system is the utopia of city management. Although this may not be realizable at once, modern communication technology provides numerous starting points to make a city or municipality more intelligent and prepare it for future challenges.
Our way forward – shaping the future
Imagine the following scenario: A citizen takes the subway, buys the ticket with his mobile phone and automatically gets a discount because he doesn’t own a car. He uses the mobile phone to pay for the theater with the bonus points he was awarded for the energy surplus of the solar panels on his property. Whenever his solar panels do not produce enough energy, he uses the mobile phone to prepay for electricity from the municipal utility company.
With our cityWallet and Prepaid Energy solutions this scenario becomes reality. cityWallet fosters a new kind of interaction between various stakeholders within your city by creating a revolutionary way of accessing and paying for public services – all from the comfort of a mobile device with one single log-in. So no matter if your citizens want to visit the public theatre, take the bus, or park their car, all it takes is one push of a button to purchase the service and collect additional bonus points. With these bonus points you can create targeted incentives to influence the behavior of your citizens – the perfect tool for strategic city development. Prepaid Energy utilizes sophisticated smart metering to integrate prepaid electricity into this system.
The logical next step for the Smart Lighting solution is to link it with your TETRA network dispatcher. Now a police officer can easily switch street lights on or off in order to help him catch a suspect at night. These are just a few examples of how in a modern city, services that up to now were completely unrelated can be converged in order to improve the life of your citizens. We are constantly working to take this trend one step further and bring you the next solutions that will turn your city into the city of the future.
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