The importance of smart cities: benefits and advantages

he benefits of a smart city technology include enhanced quality of life for its inhabitants, cleaner air, less pollution, savings on energy bills, and a reduced carbon footprint for the city as a whole, making it more sustainable and resilient.

What is a smart city?

Q: What is a smart city?

A smart city is an intelligent city that integrates digital technologies into its networks, services and infrastructure making it more efficient and livable for the benefit of its inhabitants and business.

Q: Smart city: characteristics and features

The characteristics of a smart city include digitalized buildings, infrastructure, mobility, homes, and energy.

Q: What are the differences between a digital and a smart city?

A digital city is connected to the internet, and is equipped with technological platforms for information and communications management that can enable objects to communicate through the Internet of Things (IoT). A smart city uses this digital connectivity to help cities improve the urban environment and quality of life through better management.

City Solutions

An ecosystem of electrified and digitalized urban infrastructure combined with innovative solutions

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A smart city is an intelligent city that integrates digital technologies into its networks, services and infrastructure making it more efficient and livable for the benefit of its inhabitants and business.

According to the European Commission , smart city means:

Smart urban transportation networks
Upgraded water supply and waste disposal facilities
More efficient ways to light and heat buildings
More interactive and responsive city administration
Safer public spaces

In other words, a smart and sustainable city uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve quality of life, efficiency and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations.

According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the smart city definition includes elements such as widespread home connectivity and Wi-Fi in public areas, intelligent infrastructure, smart electricity meters, open data, and e-government.

Smart city: solutions, characteristics and features

The characteristics of a smart city include digitalized buildings, infrastructure, mobility, homes, and energy. Unsurprisingly, given the breadth of fields involved, there are many examples of smart city applications, including:

Smart buildings: smart buildings are designed for optimal performance: they are energy efficient, fully electrified, powered by renewable sources, and integrated with advanced digitalized energy management systems.
Smart infrastructure: another characteristic is that their smart infrastructure — such as park benches, bus shelters and street lights — is embedded with digital technologies, interconnected, modular and multifunctional.

Smart Urban Design

Making infrastructure interconnected, multifunctional and modular

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Smart mobility: residents of smart cities get around thanks to smart mobility: electric cars, buses and other vehicles both public and private, powered by renewable energy distributed through digitalized charging stations that are networked together and accessible via an app.
Smart energy: enabling smart energy systems to power our cities is key to switching from fossil fuels to renewables. This means using smart power grids to bring renewable energy into our urban areas, coupled with battery energy storage systems run by software platforms to maximize efficiency.
Smart technology: because they are digitalized, smart cities can be managed for efficiency and energy savings. For example, city managers and administrators can use platforms such as Enel X’s City Analytics in order to plan infrastructure and services based on real demand. This has great benefits for the quality of urban life.
Smart homes: residents of smart cities live in smart homes that maximize their power resources and minimize their energy spending. Smart homes integrate intelligent domestic devices and appliances as well as heating, cooling and security systems that can all be controlled remotely by a single app.

How does a smart city work and what technolgies does it use?

Electric Public Transport

Zero-emissions mobility for sustainable cities

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Smart cities use Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as connected sensors, lights, and meters to collect and analyze data. The cities use this data to improve infrastructure, public utilities and services, and to make everyday tasks easier and more efficient while enhancing public safety, optimizing traffic flows and improving the environment. By using smart city technologies and employing strategies such as green urbanism that reduce urban ecological footprints, smart cities can more easily achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

What are the main benefits of a smart city?

The benefits of a smart city technology include:

Enhanced quality of life for the city’s inhabitants
Cleaner air
Less pollution
Savings on energy bills
A reduced carbon footprint for the urban area city as a whole, which makes it more sustainable and resilient

Smart city technologies, furthermore, are enablers of the virtuous circular economy model, which aims to make urban areas even more sustainable. The model - which applies to city administrations, product designers and manufacturers, and to individual citizens and consumers - is based on the following five pillars:

Recycle/reuse as much as possible
Make use of sustainable inputs such as renewable energy
Adopt product-as-a-service paradigms (whereby product manufacturers keep ownership of the products themselves, providing them to clients on a subscription basis)
Use sharing platforms (ie. car, scooter, bike sharing) so as to limit the purchase of new items
Work towards extending the life of physical products as much as possible

The Circular Economy

A new model for creating value

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A circular city uses smart city technology and recycled materials to build and manage its infrastructure, and it uses renewable energy to electrify its services. It doesn't waste precious finite resources, reusing them as much as possible. In short, smart cities that go circular are essential to meeting the Paris Agreement targets for climate neutrality and biodiversity protection to the benefit of present and future generations.

Which are the principal differences between a digital city and a smart city?

A digital city is connected to the internet, and is equipped with technological platforms for information and communications management that can enable objects to communicate through the Internet of Things (IoT). A smart city, on the other hand, is a complex system that uses digital and communications infrastructure to manage systems such as traffic control, parking, lighting and many others. The two concepts are closely connected: to be ‘smart’, a city must be digital, since it must integrate information and communications technologies (ICTs) into its networks, services and infrastructures. Therefore, a city cannot be ‘smart’ without first being digital. By making it possible to gather and process huge amounts of data and information, digital platforms furthermore enable offering new services to city dwellers as well as new functionalities for improving management of urban environments and enhancing quality of life.