What Makes a Modern Smart City?

June 2023

Sustainability & Smart Cities

Nick Maynard

VP of Research

Smart cities leverage connected technologies and other emerging systems to effectively meet inhabitants’ needs, improve their lived experience, and deliver civic engagement without compromising on basic considerations like data integrity and privacy protection.
 
But what technologies and systems does our latest smart cities research identify as being key to the smart city concept?

Smart Buildings

Smart buildings refer to where buildings use information and communications technology-based systems, services, and technology for optimisation of the facility's performance and operations to create a comfortable environment and improve sustainability.
 
These systems and services often involve IoT devices and solutions, such as sensors, which are utilised to generate data to measure power and air quality, energy, and resource consumption, as well as occupancy, and to predict maintenance needs to achieve efficiency. Collectively, they contribute to the lowering of energy and operational costs and enable inhabitants to make informed decisions about changes or improvements they may want to undertake for buildings their own consumption habits.
 
Smart buildings differ from ‘connected’ buildings, with the former referring to building operations connected to and run and/or managed by IT networks. On the other hand, smart buildings produce insights from the data collected, often enriched by AI/ML, and feed them into platforms for responsive and highly configurable solutions.

Smart Grid

Smart grids can be broadly defined as an electricity supply network that uses digital communications technology to detect and react to local changes in usage, leveraging analytics and smart metering, and including elements such as microgeneration.
 
Like smart buildings, smart grid leverages IoT and adapts to changing supply and demand patterns by ensuring communication throughout the value chain without overly relying on separate operators, as well as through data collection and analysis. It acts as an integrated management mechanism to coordinate demand and supply and oversee efficient and sustainable energy distribution.
 
More importantly, since it is a foundational system, it lays the basis for the efficient functioning of all other smart city components, such as smart lighting, buildings, and interrelated systems such as EV charging.

Smart Lighting

Smart lighting is one of the earliest applications of smart cities, where analytics and sensors are leveraged to optimise how lighting is used; helping reduce emissions compared to traditional lighting systems.
 
With the help of sensors, pedestrian traffic is monitored and adapted to traffic and control systems, which also allowed remote diagnostics and visualisation. Smart lighting also has a role in ensuring public safety. Adoption of smart lighting technologies have also paved the way for the use of other sensors leveraging poles for uses in air quality monitoring and parking, Wi-Fi connectivity, EV charging, and more. In this sense, smart lighting is a precursor to smart city solutions employed.

Smart Traffic Management & Parking

These concepts involve the use of digital technologies to manage vehicular traffic for the purpose of driving efficiencies, reducing congestion, and/or minimising harmful emissions.
 
Smart traffic management holds a great potential to reduce GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions by optimising the traffic flow, especially when complemented or supported by other mobility solutions such as congestion surcharges and carpooling/ride hailing. They also contribute to the prevention of accidents and improve road safety.
 
Likewise smart parking solutions aim to reduce fuel and time consumption caused by parking efforts and optimise these activities through data collected by PMS (Parking Management Systems) that include sensor-based solutions.

MaaS

MaaS is a type of service which enables users to plan, book, and pay for multiple types of urban mobility services through a joint digital channel. The channel is often a platform that collates different transport modes, as well as parking facilities to deliver the most efficient and seamless route to journeys.
 
MaaS has gained in popularity within the last decade thanks to increased adoption of local governments and transit authorities/agencies worldwide of the mobility platform solutions to provide unified approaches to transport that encompasses products and services in interconnected industries such as digital ticketing and mobile payments.
 
MaaS, concurrent to smart city developments, is an area that continues to grow and increasingly adapts alternative modes of transport such as ride sharing/carpooling.

Want more insights and statistics?

Download our latest smart cities whitepaper, which examines how technology is enabling new innovations within urban environments, and assesses key trends driving growth. You can also visit our infographics area, where you'll find infographics ranking the top smart cities in Asia, Europe, North America, and the World.