Today the world population is around 7.4 billion people, almost half – 3.6 billion – live in cities, although 10 years ago the share of urban population was around 35%. At such a high rate of urbanization, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage services to citizens. And not only.
To solve this problem, the concept of Smart City was designed, a topic of discussion for many years. At present, Smart City has been implemented in one way or another in 2,500 cities around the world, which are taking more and more strategic approaches to move to smart status.
Smart City is a holistic concept of intelligent integration of information and communication technologies for the monitoring and management of urban infrastructures. The concept is characterized by three fundamental parameters: manufacturability, intellectualization and focus on lifestyle. A “smart city” should be environmentally friendly, safe, energy-intensive, offer ample opportunities and ensure the most comfortable life.
The main tasks of the smart city
Among the main advantages of this system are the improvement of the standard of living, as well as the minimization of the costs that arise in the work process. Achieving such positive results is a consequence of automated work, which does not require the use of analytical skills.
The ultimate aim is to improve people’s lives by increasing the level of comfort and safety, the quality and efficiency of services in the various areas, optimizing the costs of some highly exploited resources. Smart City can be compared to a living organism that works smoothly and for the benefit of the public.
Smart City infrastructure implies a whole range of very different solutions that are implemented through the introduction of smart technologies. As a rule, these are alternative approaches to energy supply and water supply, the ability to convert sea salt water into fresh water, the introduction of modern systems for sorting and processing waste, putting into service of non-motorized vehicles, the installation of a large network of video surveillance and video analysis and control of air purity.
How does a Smart City work?
According to research by the consulting agency Navigant Research, today Smart City includes the following key components:
• Smart Energy: presupposes a series of solutions applied in the energy supply and energy saving sectors (demand management, energy efficiency and renewable energy integration programs);
• Smart Water: concerns the management of water resources (modernization of water systems, monitoring of water consumption by sector, environmental safety and flood control systems);
• Smart Buildings: involves the construction or arrangement of individual buildings that accumulate all the engineering and information systems and are integrated into a single management system (BMS – Building Management System). Such a system allows, for example, to heat the building in the required period of the working day, depending on the number of people in the premises, to adjust the power of the ventilation units and the purity of the air, and also to automatically switch to the energy saving mode in the absence of people in the building;
• Smart Transportation: involves the creation of a transport system and intelligent logistics systems that monitor and control traffic, control the payment of road tolls, respond to emergencies and manage traffic lights. Within this direction, intelligent parking and the signaling service at public transport stops are usually also taken into consideration;
• Smart Government: involves the use of information technology to provide public services to a wide range of people and makes it possible to optimize the work of the various departments.
Latitudo 40 for Smart Cities
To create smart, sustainable and inclusive cities it is necessary to have historical data and continuous monitoring available. Through easy access to satellite image processing and with the use of analysis and classification algorithms, developed in our R&D laboratories, we are able to provide direct information to improve citizens’ lives, looking at cities from space.
Every day we put our passion into creating new tools that allow people to monitor any place on our planet, without technical skills.