The Role of Smart Cities or Regional Hubs
Smart Cities are a rising concept in the area of urban and regional planning. We begin with a working definition of a Smart City and continue into the ways in which Smart Cities can be built so that they more fully support the innovation ecosystem.
- PDF / 160,401 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 20 Downloads / 163 Views
The Role of Smart Cities or Regional Hubs
Defining a Smart City “Smart city” – really smart regions – is one of those phrases bleached white from redefinition. It has become part of the lexicon of marketing where the phrase is used as a synonym for “good.” As in “our product will turn your city into a smart city.” There are several definitions of “smart city.” Those definitions generally include the same key elements: • Integration of information technology into the operation of urban services. • Electronic monitoring and control of shared resources such as power and water giving the operators the ability to manage those resources efficiently. • Leveraging of information technology to enhance the life and living standards of the citizens of an urban area. • Adoption of practices that use information technology to encourage innovations and the knowledge that the information and communications technology can bring. • Integration of information technology into all aspects of the urban structure in order deliver information and services to the people. A smart city can integrate local schools and local industry and bring internet connectivity into the urban area. It can then leverage these tools to transform the urban space from just an area of dense construction into an actual community. Some planners envisage a world where the infrastructure of a smart city can reduce the economic factors that spawn crime and make urban policing more effective in catching the criminals that do appear. From the perspective of an innovation ecosystem, smart cities offer unique opportunities. Constant innovation must be an element of the smart city ecosystem. Initially, while we may have a vision of smart cities, we simply do not have any way to know all the ways that the smart city infrastructure can be used to improve life and the ability to live in the urban scape. Certainly, in the initial stages, considerable © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 S. K. Sharma, K. E. Meyer, Industrializing Innovation-the Next Revolution, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12430-4_15
163
164
15 The Role of Smart Cities or Regional Hubs
innovation will be needed simply to evolve the older city infrastructure into the smart infrastructure. And, most critically for our purposes, smart city infrastructure is deliberately built to encourage innovation ecosystems. Innovation ecosystems are included as part of the ability build the new technologies to meet the ever-expanding demands of the smart city universe. Planning for all the elements of Smart Cities is a topic for other works. The ability to foster the role in those plans for innovation infrastructure that utilizes that infrastructure is an obvious and compelling opportunity. Planners for a Smart City create innovation zones that are served by the technology infrastructure of the Smart City. Within that space, the innovation hub and innovation ecosystem must create a web of community integrated innovation accelerators, education and outreach. Smart City planners may create the infrastructure of
Data Loading...
