Future Smart City

Urbanization is an environmental force to be reckoned with given its destructive effects on the planet’s natural resources. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas and this percentage is expected to increase by 2050. According to recent research, if we don’t improve urban planning now, several species of animals may go extinct, species of plants may disappear, and natural resources may decrease significantly. It is therefore a pivotal need to establish and use technological innovations in building new cities, known as Smart Cities.

What is Smart City?

The definition of Smart City differs from one person to another and from city to another, as it depends on the level of development, infrastructure of the city, and the aspiration of the city’s citizens.  In that regard, smart city should promote the adoption of smart solutions for efficient use of available assets, resources and infrastructure.

A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets. These assets include, but are not limited to, local departments’ information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, and other community services.

According to The British Standards Institute, the smart city is “the effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment to deliver sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future of its citizens.”

Why do we need Smart City?

The goal of building a smart city is to increase economic development and sustainability by enabling local area development and harnessing technology which leads to improve the quality of life. Using multiple information and communication technologies in smart cities helps the officials to interact with the cities’ community and monitor the livability & infrastructure of the city to keep it suitable for the standard quality of life.

Features of Smart Cities

Adopting smart cities trend in building and developing cities has a lot of valuable features like:

• Reducing the budget of public spending, given the reduction in money spent on services.
• Eco-friendly city as it helps to reduce congestion, air pollution and resource depletion.
• Improve the quality of life for citizens & residents.
• Enhancing positive communication between government & citizens.
• Create an identity for the city regarding its main economic activity.

Requirements for shaping Smart Cities

There are a lot of devices that facilitate optimization of service availability in smart cities, like:

• Sensors that evaluate the conditions of electricity, water supply, load on surface transport and capture real-time data.
• Gateways to collect data from sensors, analyses these data, and take proper action.
• Communication infrastructure that connect sensors with gateways.

The smart city of  Singapore

Singapore was awarded this year the title of the world’s best smart city by Juniper Research. In 2014 Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong launched the first program to transfer Singapore into a smart city. They deployed sensors and cameras across the island to track everything happening on the island. The government also developed and announced ” Virtual Singapore” which is a 3D model that enables planners and architects to run virtual tests on how people might evacuate from a neighborhood facing an emergency.

“Cities’ Identity Through Architecture and Arts” conference

Smart Cities are no longer a futuristic idea, as many countries adopted these initiatives. And now, the need of creating identity for these cities raised as Cities’ Identity became a pressing issue for many countries nowadays.

There is an upcoming international conference on “Cities’ Identity Through Architecture and Arts”, to be held in Cairo from 11: 13 May 2017.This conference is dedicated to the investigation of the different new approaches developed in Architecture and Contemporary arts. Smart & Future Cities. Will be one of the main topics in the conference. You can Know more about the conference through the following link:

http://www.ierek.com/events/cities-identity-through-architecture-and-arts/#conference-topics