What Is A Smart City And Why Do We Need Smart Cities?

The only way to reach the ideal lifestyle is considering smart city solutions. Let’s study in detail what smart city is.

In today’s fast paced world, people are expecting higher standards of living with good infrastructure, high internet connectivity and solutions to major pollution and population challenges faced by maximum countries in the world. The only way to reach this ideal lifestyle is by considering smart city solutions. 

Let’s study in detail what a Smart city is and why is it the need of the hour currently? 

WHAT IS A SMART CITY?

Simply putting it, a smart city is a place where conventional (old) networks and services are made more flexible, efficient, and sustainable with the use of new digital technology and information, to improve its overall operations for the benefit of its citizens. Smart cities are known to be greener, safer, faster and friendlier. One can divide a smart city into various components such as: Pan City Infrastructure, Smart Transport Infrastructure, Clever Energy Generation, Sustainable Healthcare Services, and Ever Evolving Technology. These components when put together make a city more productive and efficient giving it a label of a smart city. We cannot deny that the backbone of a smart city is Information and communication technology (ICT) which aids you to address various current city problems effectively. ICT technology frameworks mainly involve 2 components: Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data (BD). Though these 2 components foster smart cities to be efficient and responsive, on the other hand there is a need for improved physical infrastructure to make these cities smart worldwide. 

TOP 5 REASONS WHY WE NEED SMART CITIES:

  •   Encourages good Infrastructure:

One of the main characteristics while constructing a smart city is to provide good infrastructure to the inhabitants. Infrastructure can be classified in various ways such as”

  1. Providing adequate and clean water and sanitation services,
  2. Smart Energy Generation by ensuring 24/7 electricity supply,
  3. Rainwater harvesting (reusing natural resources)
  4. Waste Management,
  5. Continues communication connectivity Technology (Building effective network towers all around the city),
  6. Smart metering services for gas, electricity and other government analytics,
  7. Intelligent traffic management to ensure less travel time,
  8. Smart parking Facilities,
  9. Housing for all,
  10. Open Spaces: Parks, Plat grounds, etc for citizen recreation, etc.

There are many more classifications, the most vital being the ones mentioned above. The above pieces when intelligently compiled towards a bigger picture the city turns efficient and productive.

  •   Smart solutions to major problems:

Each and every city today is complaining about overpopulation, pollution, longer travel time, no pedestrian friendly walk paths on streets, etc. Due to various resource depleting problems such as mentioned above arises a need to allocate resources efficiently to not allow further misuse/depletion. When a smart city is under development they identify citizens' pain areas and ensure they address them using planned smart technology solutions.

  •   Promotes Over all City Development:

Smart cities are known to have accelerated developmental activities in the respective area. Infrastructural developmental activities such as: building schools, higher education institutes, work places, shopping malls, multiplexes, spacious roadways and interconnected bridges, factories, etc. These activities benefit everybody including citizens, businesses, government and environment enhancing city development.

  •   Increases employment:

Constructing a smart city is beneficial to the citizens in a direct way, as it requires a lot of manpower. Financial institutes, Engineers, raw material stockists, interior designers, Architects, etc. all have to amalgamate their skills to make this happen. Also a smart city development plan helps boost the economy as more money is pumped into the market for its circulation. This indirectly helps enhance the standard of living of the citizens within the area and also gives opportunities to outsiders to share their expertise knowledge.

  •   Improves Standard of Living of the citizens:

With updated technology and seamless processes comes inhabitant’s satisfaction. Keeping into account all the above activities in the planning pipeline there is higher scope of specialised education which in turn gives a higher standard of living to its citizens.

With all the above mentioned benefits a smart city gives to its citizens, you cannot ignore that these developments need heavy investment and capital for execution. The gap between ideation and execution is bridged by TendersOnTime. Led by first-generation enthusiasts, the orgnaisation houses the largest database of tenders, e Procurement, RFP, global tenders, open tenders and government contracts. We help you capture the right opportunity at the right time with our USP of scanning 500+ Newspapers/e-papers and various Tender Gazettes on a daily basis making it a “One Stop Shop” for global tenders.

License: You have permission to republish this article in any format, even commercially, but you must keep all links intact. Attribution required.