Populations in cities across the world, and in the UK especially, are growing. London is currently home to more than 7.5 million people, and that figure is expected to grow by more than a million by 2029, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Unsurprisingly, this growth further burdens municipal infrastructures, which are already creaking with over-use and under-investment. So how do we arrest the decline, especially in these austere times?
Perhaps one answer is to make them work smarter. There are estimated to be one billion transistors in existence for every person on the planet. Many of these exist in smart sensors, which infest every aspect of the modern city’s infrastructure.
That’s an awful lot of information gathering, but what use is it?
Defining his company’s “Smarter Planet” campaign, John Bentley, partner at IBM, said: “We can bring that information together to get a real-time picture of the way things are working, and make more intelligent decisions about the way that we optimise our infrastructure.”
But before we can work out how valuable a smart city is, we must first determine what it is.
“A smart city is the integration of many services and departments. It integrates commodities such as electricity, water, gas and waste as well as security and emergency infrastructure and transport,” said Bastian Fischer, vice president and general manager of the utilities global business unit at Oracle.
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