What Are Smart Cities? How to Create an Integrated Smart City?
One of the main advantages of smart homes is their ability to ease daily life for individuals as soon as they enter their homes, automating tedious tasks and improving their overall quality of life. However, once individuals step outside their homes, they often revert to using traditional and simple services, especially those they rely on daily, such as transportation, restaurants, or governmental services. This has led to a long-standing dream of integrating smart services beyond the home, embodied in the concept of smart cities.
What Are smart cities?
A smart city can be defined as creating a digital environment for residents within a moderately large geographical space. This transformation converts everyday services into automated, digitally managed smart services, further facilitating life for the inhabitants. Smart cities aim for social, economic, and environmental objectives, focusing on easy documentation and monitoring of residents while relying on clean energy that helps preserve the environment.
For the city’s residents, their lives become significantly better. Accessing digital services such as obtaining documents, voicing opinions to officials, and voting becomes much easier. They can also enjoy various digital services within the city, such as rapid transportation technologies powered by clean energy, contributing to a heightened sense of security through improved street and road monitoring, ultimately enhancing citizens’ quality of life.
Why the Shift to smart cities May Become Imperative in the Future
The transition to smart cities could evolve from being a mere luxury or an additional option to a pressing necessity. The primary reason for this shift can be summed up in one answer: improving the residents’ quality of life.
Moving to smart cities will elevate the standard of social services and enhance living conditions to satisfy everyone, providing a clean environment free from pollution and toxic emissions through the use of clean digital energy. Additionally, various areas in the city could transform into livable urban zones. Enhanced security within smart cities, enabled by advanced surveillance systems and different security services, allows for easier identification of criminals through comparisons of their images from surveillance cameras and pinpointing their geographic locations in real-time.
Strengthening connectivity between various services is also a significant advantage of smart cities. From your smartphone, you can book a train ticket, easily obtain a government card, or choose your preferred mayor or city leader. Through the internet, you will have access to all city services, albeit within a limited scope for ordinary users.
Understanding the Pros and Cons of smart cities
It is crucial to recognize both the advantages and disadvantages of smart cities. They are not ideal places where individuals live in total luxury; they come with their own set of drawbacks alongside their benefits, which can be outlined as follows:
Advantages of Smart Cities:
- Improved Quality of Life for Residents: The availability of numerous digital services and reliance on clean energy within smart cities significantly enhances the quality of life for residents.
- Development of Various City Services and Activities: Imagine automating industries, agriculture, digital security, and education, moving away from traditional methods with low success rates.
- Integration of All Services into a Unified Digital Network: This will enable residents to access advanced services from their smartphones, such as obtaining necessary information about any project or service within the city and benefiting from governmental documents.
- Automation and Digitization of All Services: Envision everything in your city now having an app for interaction. You can order food from popular restaurants or reserve a spot in top hotels with a simple click. Booking your train or flight ticket becomes incredibly easy.
Disadvantages of Smart Cities:
- Reduction of Human Services: Smart cities will showcase new technologies for automating tasks significantly, which may lead to sidelining some tasks traditionally performed by humans in favor of machines or computers. This could result in a reduction of public jobs for humans.
- Security Threats and Cyberattacks: Unlike smart homes that can be secured with a set of devices, smart cities require substantial infrastructure to protect each component. Failing to develop a robust security system could result in cyberattacks on the city’s digital services, potentially leading to real disasters.
- High Costs: Many practical models of smart cities could be implemented today. However, the cost of building them remains exceedingly high, which is why we have yet to witness any modern smart cities.
In Conclusion
Smart cities can be likened to a massive smart home filled with digital services, each aiming to improve the quality of services for residents in various aspects. Yet, due to significant development costs, we have not yet seen any modern smart cities.