smart cities essay in english

Essay on Smart City

Students are often asked to write an essay on Smart City in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Smart City

What is a smart city.

A smart city uses technology to improve the quality of life for its citizens. It uses data from sensors and other sources to manage resources efficiently.

Features of a Smart City

Smart cities have features like smart grids for efficient energy use, intelligent traffic management systems, and digital libraries. They also use technology for waste management and water supply.

Benefits of a Smart City

Smart cities offer many benefits. They reduce waste, pollution, and energy consumption. They also improve the quality of life by making services more accessible and efficient.

Challenges of a Smart City

Despite the benefits, smart cities face challenges. These include high costs, privacy concerns, and the need for digital literacy among citizens.

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250 Words Essay on Smart City

Introduction.

Smart cities represent the future of urban living, leveraging digital technology and data-driven solutions to enhance the quality of life for residents. They aim to foster sustainable and efficient environments, addressing urbanization challenges with innovative solutions.

Essential Components of a Smart City

Smart cities are characterized by their use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to improve public services. Key components include smart grids for efficient energy use, intelligent traffic management systems to reduce congestion, and digital platforms for real-time communication between the government and citizens.

The Role of IoT in Smart Cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a pivotal role in the development of smart cities. IoT devices collect and analyze data, facilitating decision-making processes. For instance, smart sensors can monitor air quality, noise levels, and traffic patterns, providing valuable insights to city planners.

Benefits and Challenges

Smart cities promise numerous benefits, such as improved public services, reduced environmental impact, and economic growth. However, they also present challenges, including data privacy concerns, the digital divide, and the need for significant infrastructure investment.

In conclusion, smart cities represent an exciting convergence of technology and urban planning. While they offer significant benefits, it is crucial to address the accompanying challenges to ensure these cities are accessible, inclusive, and sustainable. As we move towards an increasingly urbanized future, the concept of smart cities will continue to evolve, shaping the way we live, work, and interact.

500 Words Essay on Smart City

Introduction to smart cities.

Smart cities, an innovative concept in urban planning, are rapidly reshaping the way we perceive urban living. Leveraging digital technologies and data analytics, these cities aim to enhance the quality of life, improve sustainability, and streamline urban services.

The Concept of a Smart City

A smart city is a framework, predominantly composed of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to develop, deploy, and promote sustainable development practices to address growing urbanization challenges. A big part of this ICT framework is essentially an intelligent network of connected objects and machines transmitting data using wireless technology and the cloud. In a smart city, cloud-based IoT applications receive, analyze, and manage data in real time to help municipalities, enterprises, and citizens make better decisions enhancing urban services efficiency, reducing resource consumption and costs.

Key Components of a Smart City

Smart cities are built on a foundation of key components that work together to create a cohesive, efficient, and sustainable urban environment. These include:

1. Smart Energy: Smart grids, renewable energy resources, and advanced metering technologies ensure efficient use of energy. 2. Smart Infrastructure: This includes intelligent buildings and facilities that use ICT to enhance the reliability, performance, and interactivity of urban services. 3. Smart Mobility: Intelligent transportation systems, traffic management systems, and smart parking solutions reduce congestion and improve quality of life. 4. Smart Governance: E-governance and digital citizenship initiatives ensure transparency, citizen participation, and seamless access to public services.

Benefits of Smart Cities

Smart cities offer a plethora of benefits. They create a more efficient and cost-effective city management system, enhance the quality of life for citizens, and reduce environmental footprint. By using technology to streamline services, cities can save on resources, promote sustainable practices, and create a more interactive and responsive city administration. Furthermore, smart cities foster innovation and economic development, making cities more attractive to businesses and entrepreneurs.

Challenges and Future Prospects

Despite their potential, smart cities face significant challenges. These include data security and privacy concerns, the need for substantial investment, and the requirement for cross-sector collaboration. Moreover, the digital divide may exacerbate social inequalities if not properly addressed.

Looking forward, the concept of smart cities is poised to become even more relevant. As urban populations continue to grow, the need for more efficient, sustainable, and livable cities becomes paramount. With advancements in technology and increased emphasis on data-driven decision making, the future of smart cities is both promising and exciting.

Smart cities represent a bold vision for the future of urban living. By leveraging technology and data, they offer a powerful tool for addressing the challenges of urbanization and creating more sustainable, efficient, and livable cities. While there are significant challenges to overcome, the potential benefits make the pursuit of this vision an exciting prospect for the future.

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What is a 'smart city'? 

Shining a light on what it means for a city to be 'smart'. Image:  REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Gunes Basat

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• Participants in a World Bank event share their thoughts on what makes a city 'smart'?
• Technology, innovation and connection were key words associated with smart cities.
• Panelists also offered their thoughts on what makes a smart city.

What is a smart city ? We’ve heard the term in contexts as diverse as urban planning and governance, transport, energy, the environment, health, and education. We’ve also noticed that the notion of smart cities relies on a range of technologies—including the internet of things (IoT), mobile solutions, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain. Because of this connection with technology, we’ve had concerns about how smart cities will address issues such as data privacy and social exclusion. We see a risk that urban areas with poor web connectivity could be left out of the smart-cities trend. We’d like to continue an open dialogue on this trend.

Have you read?

Being smart about smart cities: a governance roadmap for digital technologies, how blockchain can empower smart cities - and why interoperability will be crucial, our alliance is creating smart city governance.

At the World Bank’s Global Smart City Partnership Program, we held a Virtual Knowledge Exchange Program on Smart Cities for Sustainable Development , jointly organized with the World Bank’s Open Learning Campus , to discuss the trend. At the event, we polled more than 260 participants from around the world to find out what they thought a smart city would be, what makes a urban area and its citizens smart, and what they wanted to see in their own smart city. As the word cloud shows, “technology,” “innovation,” and “connection” were the first words that came to participants’ minds when they thought of smart cities. “Citizen participation” and “data” make a community and its citizens smart , according to most of the participants. Around half chose “sustainability” as a priority in their vision for a smart city, and a quarter voted for “resilience.” We asked our panelists similar questions; here are five takeaways.

The Data for the City of Tomorrow report highlighted that in 2023, around 56% of the world is urbanized. Almost 65% of people use the internet. Soon, 75% of the world’s jobs will require digital skills.

The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Urban Transformation is at the forefront of advancing public-private collaboration in cities. It enables more resilient and future-ready communities and local economies through green initiatives and the ethical use of data.

Learn more about our impact:

• Net Zero Carbon Cities: Through this initiative, we are sharing more than 200 leading practices to promote sustainability and reducing emissions in urban settings and empower cities to take bold action towards achieving carbon neutrality .
• G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance: We are dedicated to establishing norms and policy standards for the safe and ethical use of data in smart cities , leading smart city governance initiatives in more than 36 cities around the world.
• Empowering Brazilian SMEs with IoT adoption : We are removing barriers to IoT adoption for small and medium-sized enterprises in Brazil – with participating companies seeing a 192% return on investment.
• IoT security: Our Council on the Connected World established IoT security requirements for consumer-facing devices . It engages over 100 organizations to safeguard consumers against cyber threats.
• Healthy Cities and Communities: Through partnerships in Jersey City and Austin, USA, as well as Mumbai, India, this initiative focuses on enhancing citizens' lives by promoting better nutritional choices, physical activity, and sanitation practices.

Want to know more about our centre’s impact or get involved? Contact us .

Michael Donaldson, Chief Technology Officer of the City of Barcelona , said that he has seen a shift in the understanding of smart cities from associations with data and technology to a layered definition embracing “citizen intelligence” and “humanizing technology.” Barcelona’s digital participatory platform enables citizens to help direct city management by suggesting ideas. “Citizens have a lot of experience about the city, and we need to gather this intelligence in order to make better decisions,” he said.

Alice Charles, Head of Cities and Real Estate at the World Economic Forum , noted the changing role of the private sector in smart cities from “selling widgets and gadgets to the cities” to “promoting an outcome-driven model.” Companies are focusing on technologies that help urban leaders achieve their goals. This model requires stronger partnerships among cities, the private sector, civil society, and academia. Examples include the Smart Cities Challenge by Infrastructure Canada; City Possible , by Mastercard; and the Helsinki Energy Challenge.

Martin Weiss, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh , sees an opportunity in the wake of COVID-19 to find out what alternative smart worlds would look like. Digital technology has stood out, as it facilitates remote work, private and public online service delivery, and contactless interactions. He said, “We will focus on different questions than before, like how we make access to high-speed services less dependent on heavy infrastructure investments.”

Pedro Vidal, Intelligent Transport Systems Coordinator at the Chilean Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications , said that the pandemic hit mobility and public transportation services hard. “We have made alliances with universities to understand behavioral trends and are convinced that there are some changes in mobility preferences,” he said. “We created lanes for bicycles and developed measures for using public spaces in a safe way. We have seen an increase in the use of public transport. This can be transformed into a big opportunity to have a more sustainable city.”

Rudi Borrmann, Deputy Director at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Local , emphasized the importance of openness and transparency in gathering and using data for public services, especially during the pandemic. He said that the first step toward creating a smart city is for local governments to improve the way they coordinate and communicate transparently with stakeholders. “Openness needs to be at the center of creating trust in bringing solutions to the citizens by using technology,” Borrmann says. OGP recently started the Open Response Recovery Campaign , in which the partnership developed a series of recommendations on how to better use open government as a way to strengthen trust during the pandemic.

All told, it looks as though a smart city is one that uses technology to efficiently engage citizens and meet their needs. In the post-pandemic era, we must prioritize measures to address inequality and digital divides, which leave many of the poor, and poor cities, behind. Data privacy and transparency must be protected. Cities become smarter when citizens and communities use technology to coproduce an environment where their digital rights are protected and their cities are made more sustainable.

Watch the recording of the full discussion here .

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Past issues, information, privacy policy, terms & conditions, jennifer gabrys, published on, feb 11, 2014, urban and urbanization, smart cities as sustainable cities: a visual essay.

A frequently referenced forerunner of the smart city is this proposal by the British architectural collective, Archigram, for a “Plug-In City,” which supplanted fixed buildings with a moveable network of spaces and interchangeable “programs” for urban inhabitations. 

February 11, 2014

Print this essay, latest from the magazine, latest journal issue, volume 41 issue 4.

Multiple information and digital cities emerged throughout the dot-com era. This example of the Cité Multimédia in Montreal documents the enfolding of imaginings of urban space with the capacities of computational rendering, which further inform actual development schemes. 

The diagrammatic quality of informational cities designs can be found in newer proposals for smart cities, including this sensor world by Libelium , an “internet of things provider” based in Spain. In this proposal, numerous urban services and operations, from lighting to shopping, become augmented and newly articulated through wireless sensor networks. 

The technology that is promoted as reconfiguring urban landscapes is computational sensors, relatively miniature devices connected to computational infrastructures of multiple different scales and generating an expanded array of command-and-control programs for making urban space more efficient. 

As part of the imagining and promoting of smart cities, numerous schematic designs have emerged that capture an apparently symbiotic fusing of technology and nature. This special focus on “Tomorrow’s Cities,” gathered together by the BBC , envisions “farmscrapers” and efficient infrastructures combining into a bucolic scene with delivery drones and sensor networks. 

The Connected Urban Development (CUD) initiative, formed through a partnership between Cisco and the Clinton Initiative, with MIT and the Connected Sustainable Cities project (CSC) joining the project as it progressed, is a clear example of smart cities developing into sustainable city initiatives, where sustainability–typically in the form of efficiency–becomes a guiding logic for reworking any number of urban services and operations.[vc_video title="#" link="http://vimeo.com/6145800"]

The perceived importance of reworking smart cities as sustainable cities is frequently narrated through the increasing numbers of people now living in cities, which have become dominant sites of resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This particular CUD video provides example scenarios for how smart city initiatives will realize more optimal urban functioning. Efficiency emerges here within a (gendered) logic of gamification, behavioral responsiveness and optimization. 

As discussed in the “ Programming Environments ” article, the scenarios developed by William Mitchell and Federico Casalegno as part of their Connected Sustainable Cities visioning document illustrate in graphic-novel style the ways in which everyday actions such as commuting, cooking and heating one’s home may be synchronized through ubiquitous computing to enable more efficient use of resources. 

Beyond the use of resources, smart cities might also provide new ways of understanding relationality. Here, an eco-love contest becomes the site where an increasingly competitive approach to environmental monitoring is meant to ensure optimal mating opportunities. 

Urban sensor landscapes are presented in this scenario as not just enabling more efficient transit options, but also as facilitating political participation here through making air pollution data more apparent. However, the steps from data to action remain an elusive proposition, and the more contested and conflicted practices of citizenship that might actually contribute to political change are absent in these data-to-action scenarios. 

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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

• Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
• Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
• They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
• I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
• They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

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Article Contents

What is a smart city, real-life applications, are cities being better resourced in the process of getting smarter, are users the winners, is the smart city movement capable of delivering better urban living, final thoughts.

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Thinking about smart cities

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Amy Glasmeier, Susan Christopherson, Thinking about smart cities, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2015, Pages 3–12, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu034

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How should we think about ‘smart cities’? This issue brings together a set of articles that examine current debates around the goals, ethics, potential and limitations of a concept that has become a metaphor for urban modernity. We also include an unusual addition, a short intervention that surfaces some of the controversial issues related to smart cities, as a conception and as a practical undertaking.

Some of the seeds of today’s smart cities can be found in a series of conversations among scholars and practitioners in the 1980s, reflecting on the future of cities. In a book review, Phil Harris, describes a particularly significant intervention by Sheridan Tatsuno of NeoConcepts, a consultant connected to the Institute for Constructive Capitalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a think tank founded in the 1980s by George Kosmetsky, an entrepreneur turned academic. Like others at the conference, Tatsuno was writing at a time when Silicon Valley was the place to emulate and ventures such as the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina served as alternative examples of successful future industrialisation. He, like many others, was propagating the idea that any and every place could be Silicon Valley-like, if they simply followed a prescription:

As Harris (1992) describes:

Tatsuno calls out “the age of technopolis and the metamorphosis of traditional cities and even high-tech parks. One alternative is the global network city of dispersed, highly interactive economic nodes linked by massive networks of airports, highways, and communications. Another metaphor is the “intelligent city” featuring advanced information/communication technologies, complexes wired for satellite and fiber optics. These network cities are inhabited by “knowledge processors” engaged in rapid information exchanges ( Harris, 1992 ).

As Rob Kitchin lays out in his article in this issue, however, the origins of the smart city are not found solely in the search for technological utopias ( Kitchin, 2015 ). They also originate in the 1980s prescriptions for managed, entrepreneurial cities—whose speed and flexibility in adapting to global markets make them more efficient and competitive ( Logan and Molotch, 1987 ). Kitchin also raises the provocative question of whether another model of ‘smartness’, the digital or wired city, belongs in the ‘smart city’ genre. The wired city in fact offered a somewhat different vision, that of inclusiveness in access to digital technologies. These two competing visions of cities transformed by technologies have not been reconciled despite the recognition that the Internet and particularly, the Internet of things, is a central feature of smart city models.

Although the ‘smart city’ concept has emerged from long-persisting ideas about urban technological utopias and the perfectly competitive city, it also differs from these urban visions in some important ways. What is new about the contemporary smart city narrative is the emphasis on places transformed by the application of technologies rather than, as in the case of Silicon Valley, places where sectors such as microelectronics and computers drive the urban economy. Smart cities are not just where new technologies might be born. They are the receptacles for technology, the target of its applications. Although saturated as consumer markets, cities present opportunities for firms seeking markets for modern sensing, forecasting and management technologies. Although 1990s city policymakers sought to replicate the job base and innovative milieu of high-tech centres, the contemporary purveyors of smart city technologies see city governments as markets for the products of the last 40 years of technology development. At the same time, ambitious politicians and civil servants are ever on the search for the next ‘big idea’ to move their city to the top of the rank of attractive places. The race to get on the bandwagon and become a smart city has encouraged city policymakers to endogenise the process of technology-led growth, directing municipal budgets toward investments that bestow smart city status.

The public investments that confer smart city status are impressive. A recent report from a large Australian development company puts a dollar figure on the expected growth of smart cities. According to Ivan Fernandez, Industry Director for Frost & Sullivan, Australia and New Zealand, a consulting firm promoting growth through globalisation,

The global smart city market will be valued at US$1.565 trillion in 2020. Over 26 Global Cities are expected to be Smart Cities in 2025, with more than 50% of these smart cities from Europe and North America. By 2025, it is expected that around 58% of the world’s population or 4.6 billion people will live in urban areas. In developed regions and cities, the urban population in cities could account for up to 81% of total population. This will pose serious challenges for city planners, who will have to re-think how they provide basic city services to residents in a sustainable manner. Governments of smart cities are transforming from a traditional model of a silo-based organization to a more collaborative, integrated service delivery model. Cities will collaborate with each other to drive smart city innovation by entering into partnerships with each other. Technology and ecosystem convergence, collaboration and partnerships between stakeholders from different industries, such as energy and infrastructure, IT, telecoms and government will also expedite the delivery of integrated services http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/148711/Global-Smart-Cities-Market-to-Reach-US1.56-Trillion-by-2020-Finds-Frost-and-Sullivan/

Smart city advocates include not only large information economy businesses, such as IBM, Intel, Siemens, CISCO and SAP, but also academic and philanthropic organisations. Each has a distinctive sense of what smart cities can accomplish. Academics are attracted to technology applications that offer the ability to ‘sense’ and track human use of urban infrastructure. They are drawn by the potential that these applications offer to remediate urban problems such as snarled traffic, the lack of parking spaces, and inefficient energy use and waste disposal. Philanthropists see solutions to urban ills with an eye toward greater equity, improved quality of life and citizen empowerment. The large information firms see the vastly expanding market for management applications in an urbanising world as an opportunity to develop stable revenue streams in the form of continuous contracts. These firms are, however, selling different visions of ‘smart’ and products to achieve the vision. Competing and sometimes contradictory stakeholder goals contribute to the inevitable conclusion that the smart city is a chaotic concept.

What the smart cities movement has done, albeit perhaps inadvertently, is to reignite interest in cities as engines of growth. This has been perhaps most evident with the model cities created on greenfield sites. A few have gone beyond drawing boards and taken shape on the ground. Each of these cities is unique and hence an unlikely candidate for reproducibility as ‘the’ smart city model. The distinctiveness characteristic of Song Do in South Korean or Plan IT in Portugal belies one of the most common complaints about smart city applications, that they espouse only a single development model. What they do have in common, however, beyond encompassing expansive views of ‘smart city’ development, is acceptance of urban competitiveness and the primacy of economic goals as intrinsic to the smart city concept.

Looking closely, there are a dizzying array of attempts at smart city formation and membership. As Hollands’s contribution to this special issue highlights, there are all manner and scale of potential candidates. He highlights eight well-known examples.

Singapore’s iN2015 (intelligent nation) project, Songdo, South Korea’s purpose built, globally competitive, high-tech, environmentally sustainable, business city, or Guangzhou Knowledge City in China are designed to attract talent, skilled manpower and knowledge-based industries. Masdar City, in the UAE, is currently being designed as an ‘oasis of the future’ (quite literally as it is built in the desert) and intended to become the world’s first sustainable, renewable, energy-powered cleantech cluster ( Kingsley, 2013 ). In Scandinavia and Europe, Helsinki and ‘Intelligent’ Thessaloniki (Greece) are held up as examples of encouraging the development of new mobile applications utilising open data and using IT to increase competitiveness and sustainability, respectively ( Komninos et al., 2013 ). In Europe, Barcelona, continues to be renowned for its Smart City Model and in November 2014 hosted its fourth Smart City Expo World Congress in as many years (see http://www.smartcityexpo.com/ ), while the Amsterdam Smart City initiative is held up as the example of how to retrofit a city to improve living and economic conditions and reduce carbon emissions ( Hollands, 2015 ; Kirby, 2013 ).

An important takeaway from this list of smart cities is the tailored nature of their approach. The objective is not just as technology users but as shrines of economic development practice. Some are using the smart city title to gain status by offering annual events to newcomers wishing to take up the mantle of smart city development ( http://smartcitiesportugal.net ).

There is frequently an alliance between the prototype smart city builders and scholars discussing the phenomenon. Their perspectives come together under the umbrella of cities as machines for living. Both promote at least somewhat utopian visions based on technological fixes for those aspects of urban settlement and the concentration of human beings that make for human frustration and slow the flow of goods and services. The authors in this special issue are all aware of this perspective although some emphasise it more than others.

A special issue on such a nebulous topic can never be comprehensive, but authors in this issue place the smart city in historical context, provide concrete examples of smart city applications and point to arenas where the concept and practice differ from prior urban technological fixes. The authors also indicate where the urban technological fix, in both its historical and contemporary forms has failed—for example, in addressing equity concerns. They demonstrate that there is a difference between what we can measure and what we need to know. The limits of the smart city are created both by the absence of data applications that could drive collective rather than individual solutions and by the inability to address intangible qualities of cities that both improve and detract from the quality of urban life for city residents. These critiques have been part of the discussions on the closely related topic of ‘big data’.

Although the authors in this issue approach the subject of smart cities from very different angles, they generally agree that smart city technologies are ill-suited to solving the problems that lie at the heart of improving the quality of urban life. Poverty is not on the agenda of smart city planners. They may solve traffic problems, but it is not clear how they will regenerate failing schools or find ways to include neighbourhoods facing disinvestment. The contradiction between the promise of smart cities and its limited policy scope is aptly demonstrated in one of the most celebrated smart cities, Rio de Janeiro. The city, with its control centre filled with wall size computer monitors, can perhaps use forecasts of threatening weather to send out warnings of storm intensity thus leading to speedier evacuation. What it does not address is the question of why people build housing in such high-risk environments and what it would take to change this behaviour. In this instance, at least, smart city technologies deal with symptoms rather than the disease.

Several themes are evident in the eight papers composing this issue. They answer some important questions about what the concept of smart cities is and isn’t and what it can and cannot do.

What do people mean by the term ‘smart city’? A casual search of the web turns up thousands of references to the term. Some define the smart city as an urban environment that is elegantly efficient, grander than the messy urban environments we live in today. For firms in the business of selling controllers, sensors, and servers—the technology to drive smart systems—the smart city is a new market for urban management. It is an urban form to be sold, resold, modified or augmented to make money. Many analysts and practitioners, however, are more modest in their definitions, limiting ‘the smart city’ to a few approaches that use publicly available data to solve discrete problems, such as waste management and traffic control.

The authors in this special issue have different perspectives but define the smart city by two essential attributes. First is the use of technologies to facilitate the coordination of fragmented urban sub-systems (for example, energy, water, mobility, built environment). Becoming ‘smart’ by subsystem improvement is assumed to be associated with new employment opportunities, wealth creation and economic growth. In a second and more futuristic definition, smart cities are urban places where the lived experience calls forth a new reality.

There are, in fact, few finished examples of greenfield sites that represent full deployment of the idea. As Carvalho (2015) details, even the less encumbered greenfield models such as Songdo or Masdar City, took so long to roll out that the political will deteriorated and the original impetus slackened across political cycles. As Shelton, Zook and Wiig describe, the fully formed greenfield smart city will be the great exception ( Shelton et al., 2015 ). Most smart cities are about fixing things by adding off-the-shelf technology to existing functions such as transportation planning to make existing systems more efficient, predictable and, in rare cases, redeployable with re-programming. In the vast majority of cases, smart cities are about renovation rather than about building wholly new urban environments and, as such, they will all be different because of the exigencies of municipal budgets and political choices.

From the ethereal to the pragmatic, Rob Goodspeed suggests smart city definitions bifurcate, with one strand emphasising urban and economic development, while the other focuses on government’s use of technology for public sector operations ( Goodspeed, 2015 ).

The limits of agreement around the concept arise in part because, as with prior moments when the rate of economic growth has stumbled, economic actors look for new markets to deploy existing technology. They grope for a synthesis that will kick off a sustained round of job generation and capital investment. For example, one progenitor of the smart city, the ‘intelligent city’ dates back to the 1980s, another period of sluggish economic growth, when, following on the heels of the early 1980s banking crisis, economic development professionals searched for another source of lift in the economy.

Putting aside the attention-getting greenfield projects and leaving for the moment the realm of critique, there is something new and potentially game changing in the technologies and interventions this phase of urban development provides. Unless economic turmoil and instability stops urban growth in its tracks, over the next 50 years we will live on an increasingly urban planet. According to research reported in the New York Times and supported by the Shell Oil Company and Singapore University’s Urban Lab, by 2050, the United Nations projects that more than 65% of the world’s population will reside in cities. This means that another 18 cities of 10 million or more population will be added to today’s 23 megacities. Of the 41 mega cities over 10 million, projected by 2030, 13 will be over 20 million in size ( New York Times and Shell Oil, 2014 ). Considering these startling projections, what do the papers in this issue have to say about the pragmatics of smart city experiments? Following the lead of Shelton et al. (2015) , this collection of papers points toward “a more nuanced, situated understanding of how and from where these policies have arisen, and how they are taking root in particular places around the world” (14). The implication is that although data applications and technological innovations are exciting, their success will be measured in cities whose infrastructure systems are non-existent and where the governance capacity and funds for collective goods are minimal.

From mundane functions such as waste disposal and pot-hole patching to crisis hotlines and homeless sheltering, cities are finding new ways to use IT infrastructure and data. What makes smart city programmes different? As Rabari and Storper note in this issue, many of these new endeavours link cities with outside actors. One type of link is with foundation-sponsored initiatives, such as Code for America in the USA ( Shelton et al., 2015 ). In another model, a quasi-governmental entity set up by the EU provides funds for technology implementation around energy and transportation. However, it is important to ask whether the new interventions are being funded by new resources? Is smart city technology diverting or augmenting public budgets ravaged by austerity?

CJRES’s special issue on Austerity in the city particularly papers by Betsy Donald ( Donald et al., 2014 ) and Mildred Warner ( Warner and Clifton, 2014 ), highlighted the many ways that city funding was declining and functions were being subcontracted out to reduce costs. Where do the funds come from for smart city investment? It could be argued that, in a pre-austerity era, such interventions would have arisen and been paid for through normal budgetary processes. But these types of investments have to be examined in the light of municipal budget oscillations over the last decade of financial crisis, encompassing periods of severe austerity and those of abundance. Smart city interventions have to be interrogated in terms of whether they are true innovations and provide new capabilities such as wiring districts for public Internet access. Or, by contrast, do they merely pay for deferred maintenance and what would otherwise be normal upgrading of existing public services, such as signage and automated notifications of transit schedules. How and in what ways do data-enabled interventions such as those to catalogue and address residential abandonment in cities, such as Cleveland, New Orleans and Detroit add value and potentially speed the process of re-investment? Following the money would provide a more complete picture of smart city benefits.

Who is benefitting from smart city investments? Although smart city technology investments are mainly comprised of upgrades rather than true innovations, on the citizen user side, they potentially offer access to information on local conditions. They can afford communities and interest groups the opportunity to identify negative conditions and the potential to improve the urban experience. Realising these potential benefits, however, depends on the intent of the intervention. Offenhuber’s contribution alerts us to the fact that the design of an intervention has significant implications for its usability and accessibility and that each design gesture has an intended community. For tech-savvy city dwellers, the design of an intervention can be open and mutable; knowing your audience is an important design consideration. By implication, what Offenhuber’s paper also highlights is the degree of know-how and collateral resources required to use smart city interventions. The assumption behind many of these innovations is that everyone owns a smart phone and knows how to operate it at maximum performance. Technology audits are necessary to reveal just how flexible, usable and accessible these technology designs are.

And then, there is the mundane. In some of the biggest cities of the world like Dhaka, Bangladesh something as simple as a transit map is missing. Although certainly not cutting edge technology by today’s standards, the innovation described in Zegras’s paper highlights how something like a map ‘opens up a city’ giving life to spaces that are otherwise obscured. The absence of something as basic as a map of the transit system tells us how far we have to go to make technology available for the purposes of basic navigation. It also tells us that the smart city innovations being developed for high-prosperity cities are light years ahead of the fundamental needs of most of the world’s urban populations ( Zegras et al., 2015 ). For, to have a map is like having a light. You can do things and go places otherwise unattainable.

So, to really understand and gain insight from smart city interventions, we need more than the paucity of comparative work upon which much of the smart city narrative currently rests. If we are to avoid wasting scarce resources and propagating one size fits all policies and programmes, we need thoughtfully designed, rigorous comparative research. Only this will enable us to venture seriously beyond a level of understanding that consists of snippets from iconic places. Several of the authors in the special issue caution against generalisations based on the incomplete written record about smart city interventions. Perhaps, Carvalho goes the furthest in his critique of the existing record. His interviews with key actors in South Korea and Portugal reveal the initial naivety of smart city planners who assumed that the meaning and consequences of the technologies could be understood in the absence of human engagement at the phase of design. His case studies highlight the myriad impediments arising out of the design process and reinforce the idea that technology implementation requires user interaction in order to match conception with user experience. In other words, design without the user leads to interfaces that do not address reality.

As both Carvalho and Kitchin suggest, we need more thoughtful comparative work in order to reveal the discursive and material realities of actually existing smart city developments. The authors in this special issue make significant progress toward this goal and demonstrate what we can learn from opening up the discussion about smart cities. These efforts could be built on through a series of comparative studies that contrast the experiences of different cities—both cities in which we might expect similarities in initiatives and effects (for example, cities of roughly the same size in the same jurisdiction) and those that we might expect to differ but are presently discussed as if they are similar (for example, cities in the Global South and North, or greenfield and retrofitting developments). The former would enable the particularities of smart city initiatives and their effects on economic development and regimes of governance to be teased apart. The latter would reveal the ways in which smart city rhetoric and implementation are being produced and grounded in quite different contexts and the ways in which the concept travels and mutates.

Although we can debate what ‘better urban living’ means, clearly the commercial side of the smart city movement is promising a great deal. Companies like IBM initially claimed that investing in sensing technology would yield safer, cleaner and more efficient urban areas. Their marketing was directed at an upper middle class, experiencing losses of time and income from urban inefficiencies and urban policymakers desiring to make points for urban innovation. However, more recently, recognising that their class-based appeals were endangering smart city marketability, companies including IBM and CISCO have “started to alter the discursive emphasis of some of their initiatives from being top-down managerially focused to stressing inclusivity and citizen empowerment” ( Kitchin, 2015 , 133).

Commercial interests are also taking more risks with and stepping out in critiquing urban suitors’ unbridled desire to be selected as the next Intel, CISCO, IBM or other purveyor of smart city development. In an Economic Times of India interview with Intel’s South Asia Debjani Ghosh, vice president, sales and marketing group, Mr Ghosh (2014) cautions that

execution, which has been a challenge in India, will be crucial. India is going to have multiple Smart Cities and different models for each city. For Smart Cities, we should not look at technological modernization, rather look at how to enhance the culture and heritage so that more people come to these cities. Greenfield is the more practical approach. But again you need to look at the problems. For instance, Varanasi, which is a tourist place and should be clean, but it is not. There is huge problem with the entire waste disposal system. You also need a local industry because people need to have employment. A Smart City is something when young people don’t want to leave the city for employment. So, you have to ensure that there’s enough local opportunity available to keep them engaged ( Economic Times of India , 4 December, electronic edition; accessed 7 December 2014)

Thus, even the strongest advocates and primary beneficiaries of smart city technologies perceive the limits of unbridled enthusiasm.

However, looking beyond the commercial to the social, political and economic implications, citizen movements have demonstrated the ability to successfully adopt and adapt the core of smart city technologies to engage in public debate and to advocate for urban improvements. Community and non-governmental organisations also have been adept at utilising the vast amount of data now available from myriad sources of government, private and not for profit organisations such as “Open Plan, a group that provides community-edited directories of public meetings; open-source platforms for local news gathering; applications to help agencies ‘crowdsource’ streetscape improvements; and forums for city transportation officials to share best practices for urban bikeway design (OpenPlans, nd)” ( Rabari and Storper, 2015 ). Cities are being approached by technology companies in the hope that the cities themselves can identify the uses for smart city technology interventions (Carl Spector, Director of Climate and Environmental Planning for the City of Boston, 5 December 2014, personal interview). Thus, as is often the case with technological change, the producers can’t dream users into existence, but instead uptake requires learning by doing through collaboration and risk sharing. Beyond making cities more liveable because their inner political workings are more accessible, local organisations are building tools to make ‘sensibility’ real, using devices such as Carlo Ratti’s City Lab’s algorithm, which integrates crowd sourced data from cell phone users who are seeking to track night life hot spots.

But does this constitute better urban living? Along with technologies that allow us to track concentrations of like-minded people on a Friday night, how much of the smart city research is being directed toward questions of groups in society unlikely to be consulted or enabled to use the sophisticated facets of a cell phone? What of the elderly, the disabled, the economically and socially isolated? Offenhuber’s maps of Boston and the use of the 311 data clearly highlight the absence of cell phone signalling from the city’s lower income neighbourhoods. Is it just that low-income neighbourhoods don’t have trash or pot-holes or is it that residents don’t care about trash on their streets, the presence of broken street lights or the existence of pot-holes? Or are they in need of transit service extended in their community or frequently available buses to get from home to work and back ( Offenhuber, 2015 ). In other words, do they need different data altogether? Rabari and Storper (2015 , 32) point out: “The core, underlying promise is that more information will improve the experience of urban social life and lead to the creation of many useful and efficient services”. The question is, is that promise made to everyone, is the conception of the ‘smart city’ inclusive or does it, by the very nature of the data it relies upon, exclude important groups in society?

In the smart city case, the intention is all important. Adding to Kitchin’s call for research on smart city interventions themselves, we would add that there is a profound need to form research around the multiple user communities of our future-‘sensored’ cities. Although the promise of inclusivity is showing up in the reconfigured rhetoric of commercial proponents, such as IBM and CISCO, they are only one promulgator of smart city rhetoric. City leaders are as involved in producing the narratives that promise the moon as are commercial interests. Given their civic responsibility to create and apply programmes targeted toward the diverse array of urban social groups, city leaders are also accountable and should be held accountable in the pursuit of the status of ‘smart city’. They are responsible if designs for the future city have only the most skilled, most tech-savvy residents in mind and ignore citizens who may not own the necessary technology or who use it solely for functional purposes. Research on broadband technology demonstrates that the technology is pervasive, that there are few places in the USA where a cell tower hasn’t penetrated. In a parallel example, in the USA, what limits effective broadband penetration is not the technology itself, but its cost and the capacity of the user community to explore and fully utilise the technology ( Glasmeier et al., 2003 ).

In conclusion, we offer a word of advice to armchair critics. As Kitchin rightly suggests, if we academics wish to see smart city development and rhetoric take on bigger questions and pursue more socially relevant uses of new technology applications, then it is incumbent upon us to conduct the collaborative research that helps us the practitioners understand: (i) what the technology can and cannot do; (ii) what the application deployment conditions are (scale; proximity; density; market size) and (iii) how far off applications are from widespread marketability. These three are surely minimum conditions. The point is that we can’t just lend critique to the situation. We have to be willing and able to get in, roll up our sleeves and discover how new applications and technologies can be used to genuinely improve the quality of urban life. Otherwise, we can’t complain we were locked out of this moment.

Estimates are that 2.6 billion people will move to or be born into urban centres by 2050. Two-thirds of these residents will live in Asia or Africa. Left untouched, many of these cities will emerge out of or swallow-up squatter settlements ( New York Times and Shell Oil, 2014 ). Water, sewer, transportation, electricity, telecommunications, housing, health care, education—all of these functions—will have to be built from the ground up. Smart city discourse is largely looking into the immediate future and at places already known and functioning. How and whether the scholarly community contributes to the evolving discussions of the city of the future will rest on our ability to produce solid, detailed and effective empirical studies of this process of urban transformation. Are we up to the task? Is the current characterisation of smart cities going to inform our understanding of the real cities of tomorrow? The pace of change is forecast to be so swift that unless efforts begin now to provide solid research findings, the opinions and advice of scholars are likely to have little effect or impact on these cities of the future. Perhaps this issue can serve as a jumping off point to an intelligent discussion about the cities we want in the future and whether and how smart city technologies are likely to provide them.

Carvalho L . (2015) Smart cities from scratch? A socio-technical perspective , Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , 8 : 43–60.

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Offenhuber D . (2015) Infrastructure legibility – a comparative analysis of open311-based citizen feedback systems, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , 8 : 93–112.

Rabari C. Storper M . (2015) The digital skin of cities: urban theory and research in the age of the sensored and metered city, ubiquitous computing and big data , Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , 8 : 27–42.

Shelton T. Zook M. Wiig A . (2015) The ‘actually existing smart city’ , Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , 8 : 13–25.

The Economic Times of India. (2014) Intel looking to partner in India’s Smart Cities initiative: Debjani Ghosh, VP & MD, Intel South Asia . The Economic Times of India . 4 December.

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Zegras C. Eros E. Butts K. Resor E. Kennedy S. Ching A. Mamum M . (2015) Tracing a path to knowledge? Indicative user impacts of introducing a public transport map in Dhaka, Bangladesh , Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , 8 : 113–129.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Urbanization — Smart cities concept

Smart Cities Concept

• Categories: Urbanization

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Published: Oct 31, 2018

Words: 427 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

• addressing privacy and data protection concerns that could arise from UAV monitoring and surveillance applications;
• collision avoidance and conflict resolution in highly populated residential areas;
• optimizing path planning, flight scheduling and utilizing shared airspace;(transition) analyzing the current standardization efforts for each of the three aspects in order to identify and prioritize future research questions with the aim of making a contribution towards narrowing the gap between research and technical standardization.

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PTE EXAM PREPARATION

PTE Academic Exam Practice Material

Smart City Essay

Smart City Essay – Hello Students today we are going to learn Smart City Essay for all classes. The essay was asked in SSC exam and in 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 class. Sometime you may get a question like “Essay on Smart City Mission” and “my city smart city essay”.

Learn Smart City Essay in English

Smart City mission, is an urban renewal and retrofitting program by the government of India. On 25th June 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched this mission with an objective to develop 100 cities across the country having core infrastructure, harnessing technology and a clean and sustainable environment.

This mission works under the guidance of the Ministry of Urban Development a total of 48000 crores has been approved by the Indian Cabinet for this po mission.

Cities accommodate 31% of India’s population and contribute 63 per cent of GDP (census 2011). Urban areas are to house 40% of India’s population and contribute 75% of India’s GDP by 2030. This required comprehensive development of physical, institutional, social and economic infrastructure. The core infrastructure elements of the mission are adequate water supply, assured electricity supply, sanitation including soil waste management, efficient transport, good governance, sustainable environment, safety and security of citizens, robust it connectivity and health and education. The strategic components of a smart cities mission are city improvement (retrofitting) City renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (Green Field development) plus a pan-city initiative.

There are some challenges too, like low allocation of budget, lack of centre-state coordination, less number of skilled manpower and advanced technology, corruption at centre and state level etc.

However, this problem can be solved only by the active participation of citizens, funding from International bodies like World Bank, the participation of private players and Independence to local bodies to recognise the need of cities in a decentralised way.

In this way, Smart City mission, an innovative and new initiative by the government of India will drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people.

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Smart City ESL Lesson Plan

Welcome to smart cities of the future, student level.

Downloads: 1790

Video Length: 3:45

Updated on: 11/28/2023

Lesson Time: 1–2 hrs.

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Smart City ESL Lesson Plan Description

Objective & overview.

This smart city ESL lesson plan contains activities, PDF worksheets, and digital materials for C1 advanced students. By the end of the lesson, students will be able to describe a variety of aspects of a future smart city and understand the technological elements of smart cities. They’ll also be able to talk about, ask questions, and use the interrogative modal passive formation in the context of a town hall meeting about smart cities and urban development.

PREVIEW & DISCUSSION

This smart city ESL lesson plan begins by students describing how they expect smart cities of the future (year 2040 - 2050) to look. They’ll imagine and describe certain elements of the city — such as office buildings, public spaces, transportation, food, health, government, and public safety. After that, students discuss some questions about smart cities. There is an activity containing some adjectives in which students can categorize into boxes, depending on whether they describe positive or negative characteristics of smart cities.

VIDEO & LISTENING COMPREHENSION

Students watch an animated video about an imaginary, future smart city . The video covers the technological components of smart cities and how everything will be synchronized. This includes components such as hydroponics, inbuilt sensor technology, CCTV, HD cameras, and more. The listening activity consists of writing and discussing notes about each part of the smart city. There are also some questions asked at the end of the video, and students should complete the questions as they hear them.

DISCUSSION & GRAMMAR

The post-viewing exercises consist of discussion questions, mainly on the ones the video poses at the end. Then, in one of those questions, students analyze the interrogative modal passive voice. This structure is found in the following question:

“Can governments and corporations be trusted with such huge data sets?”

Students answer some questions about the grammatical structure of this quote. Then, there is an activity for students to convert and rewrite some more sentences using this same grammatical structure.

URBAN DEVELOPMENT: PLAN A SMART CITY

The communicative activity featured in this lesson prompts students to choose any city and imagine it’s year 2040. They’re the leader(s) of an urban development team , and they must discuss what exactly they would develop about 5 aspects of the city, and how. The second step of this activity puts everything in context — they present their city development plans and ideas to the public at a community town hall Q&A meeting and respond to the residents’ (other students / teachers) questions and concerns.

BONUS READING

This lesson plan on smart cities contains a bonus reading activity featuring a letter written by a concerned resident of a future smart city. Students read the letter, and then discuss some questions about it for comprehension.

Benefits of using this ESL lesson plan about smart cities:

Interaction : The lesson plan incorporates imaginative and engaging activities such as envisioning and describing smart cities, watching an animated video, and participating in a town hall meeting simulation. This keeps students actively involved in the learning process.

Grammar Focus : The lesson plan addresses advanced grammatical structures, particularly the interrogative modal passive voice. This provides students with an opportunity to analyze, understand, and practice a more complex language structure.

Bonus Reading : The inclusion of a bonus reading activity adds variety and depth to the lesson, allowing students to explore the topic further through the perspective of a resident in a smart city. This enhances comprehension skills and provides additional discussion points.

Video Description

Lesson activities.

Smart Cities, Technology

Aspects Of Smart Cities, Finish Writing Questions

Adjectives (describing positive/negative smart city aspects)

Interrogative Modal Passive Voice

Urban Development: Town Hall Meeting, Quiz & Review, Lesson Reflection

Lesson Topics

Smart Cities, Technologies

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Empowering Urban Energy Transitions

Smart cities and smart grids

About this report

In the context of the recent agreement at COP28 in Dubai and the current state of play of urban power systems – from G7 countries to emerging markets and developing economies – this report analyses the steps needed to achieve net zero emissions from electricity, and considers the wider implications for energy security, sustainability and affordability.

The decarbonisation of cities is a global priority, and local governments are instrumental in achieving national commitments and objectives. Improved access to and use of data for decision making can support faster and more targeted implementation and help align city and power system planning. Digital solutions and systems can be particularly powerful in cities, where high-density environments create economies of scale and can optimise infrastructure and create new opportunities. Exploring a wide range of projects and initiatives implemented in power systems and cities around the world, the report provides insights on emerging best practices, innovative approaches and how barriers and challenges can be tackled. Our focus is on ways national governments can help cities accelerate clean, affordable and inclusive energy transitions, and ensure resilience and an ability to adapt to climate change.

The report also underscores how G7 members can foster innovation through international collaboration, creating enabling environments at the city level to deploy scalable pilot projects, support integrated planning and promote data sharing, all while maintaining electricity security and placing people at the centre of clean energy transitions.

Online table of contents

1.0 executive summary.

Read online

2.0 Urban energy revolutions

3.0 cities and grids on a heating planet, 4.0 community at the heart of the city, 5.0 systemic approaches for a sustainable urban energy future, 6.0 creating the conditions for implementing smarter urban energy systems, 7.0 new approaches to pilots and experimentation for large-scale implementation, 8.0 conclusions.

The IEA gratefully acknowledges the Italian Ministry of Environment and Energy Security for its support of this project as part of its contributions to the IEA’s Digital Demand Driven Electricity Networks Initiative (3DEN) on electricity grid modernisation and digitalisation and to the Clean Energy Transitions Programme. 

Cite report

IEA (2024), Empowering Urban Energy Transitions , IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/empowering-urban-energy-transitions, Licence: CC BY 4.0

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CBSE Library

Essay on Smart City | Smart City Essay for Students and Children in English

Essay on Smart City: Smart cities are defined as the concept of rapid urbanization and its contribution to the development and improvement of socio-economic activities of the society.

The idea of smart cities requires some specific elements and highlights some models of implemented smart solutions in the world.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Smart City for Students and Kids in English

We provide students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on Smart City in English.

Long Essay on Smart City 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Smart City is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

The concept of a smart city aims to investigate the implications of smart solutions for sustainable development and smart solutions in the city. These solutions mainly concentrate on the core area of the city’s administration, education, health, transportation etc.

The idea of a smart city has been introduced to highlight the importance of Information and Communication Technologies ( ICT’s) in the past 20 years for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of industrialization. In literal terms, the smart city is used to specify a city’s ability to cater to the needs of citizens. Development of city and quality of life are profoundly influenced by the core systems of a city: transport, education, and government services; public safety and health. Research has focused on these four areas, which identity having high priority.

The literature review highlights that various criteria referring to improve life in a city are mentioned in connection to the terms of a smart city. The most important area for starting to transform a city into a smart one in the system of communication; thus, this area prioritizes the use of modern transport technologies. Smart transformation system works as a highway between the development of city and modern technologies.

The term smart city is also used in the literature regarding the education of its citizen. Therefore, a smart city has smart inhabitants in terms of its educational criterion. The intelligent system represents the future processes of education. This system will affect how the information is received, used, understand, and learned by users. In other, the literature the term smart city is also referred to the relation between the city’s governance or public administration and its citizen.  Good governance is a communication for the citizens, e.g. “ e-governance” or “ e- democracy”.

The health system is like a good solution for a smart city snd this implies to use modern technologies to better the results. The smart health system ensures timely diagnosis thus improving the life of the patients. The concept of the ubiquitous city has been developed into huge international research. It is also known a U-city . a model of a smart city is based on the usage of computer systems to exchange data such as cloud computing, open data etc.

The term smart city has attracted a lot of attention in these recent years. Since the end of the last century, many cities have initiated smart city planning. The first step for the establishment of the smart city is based on the physical telecommunication network infrastructure. The second layer constitutes applications that improve operation in the city like traffic control, etc., the third is based on connectivity and unity of all.

There are a lot of advantages to this new system: energy and other natural resources are spent more efficiently, and the tasks of synchronization are much easier to accomplish. We are now able to identify a lot of smart city in different levels of development, and this concept can be used to define urbanization based on modern technologies.

Short Essay on Smart City 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Smart City is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The useful definition of a smart city is when investments in human and social capital and traditional and modern infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through the participatory government. The idea of the smart city includes a new model of a sustainable economy based on more efficient use of communication solutions, transportation, public administration and natural resources.

The analysis of the smart city highlights the universe of smart applications of technology and infrastructure, which in turn are empowering citizens in innovative ventures. The strong concept is that a smart city is a strategy and an objective for every urban area and in some parts of the world is a reality. All the cities which implemented the concept of smart solutions had in view to improve the everyday life of citizens.

10 Lines on Smart City in English

• The concept of a smart city increases the rate of employment for men and women.
• Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, thus increasing the share of renewable sources in final energy consumption is achieved.
• The idea of a smart city has increased energy efficiency at a higher rate of usage.
• Improved education levels have resulted in the reduction of dropout rates.
• The concept of a smart city has increased investments and stimulates research, development and innovation of new indicators.
• Promotes social inclusion by reducing poverty and eliminating the risk of poverty.
• Smart city interconnects the world’s systems and makes the world more intelligent.
• Smart city enables advanced services, helping to bridge the digital divide and provide a better quality of life.
• Their high speed and well-planned infrastructure define smart cities.
• The concept transforms cities into vibrant socio-economic communities.

FAQ’s on Smart City Essay

Question 1.  What is a Smart City?

Answer: Smart cities are defined as the concept of rapid urbanization and its contribution to the development and improvement of socio-economic activities of the society

Question 2. How is Smart City helpful?

Answer: The concept of a smart city increases the rate of employment for men and women. It has increased investments and stimulated research, development and innovation of new indicators.

Question 3. How can Smart City be created?

Answer:  It is essential to develop a city to have a strategy for a smarter city. This strategy will help to determine where and when to invest, will articulate key milestones and paybacks on investment and can help define an optimization calendar across the system.

Question 4.  What are the important criteria for a smart city?

Answer: Smart city promotes social inclusion by reducing poverty and eliminating the risk of poverty. It interconnects the world’s systems and makes the world more intelligent.

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Essay on Smart City

Smart City essay for Class 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. Find a paragraph, long and short essay on Smart City for Students.

Essay on Smart City Mission in English

Smart City Essay In English

Essay on Smart City 250 Words

Smart city is an urban area that uses different types of electric date collection sensor to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently. This data is collected is processed and analysed to monitor and manage traffic and transportation system, power plants, schools, hospitals law enforcement etc.

Smart city mission was launched by our honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi in 2015. This mission was launched with a vision to transform 100 cities across India to smart cities making them citizen friendly and sustainable.

As a part of this smart city mission, cities from different states compete among themselves to be a part of the mission. As of January 2018, 99 cities have been upgraded and made a part of this mission. This is a five-year program in which all the states and UT’s except West Bengal, nominate at least one city in their respective states.

Each city creates a corporate company to implement smart cities mission. Centre and state government will provide rupees 1,000 crore fund to the company, rupees 500 crores each. Remaining funds must be raised by the company through joint ventures, Public-Private Partnership etc. This is one of the greatest thoughts of the current government to develop our country in all aspects.

In conclusion, the success of this project those aids must be utilised effectively by the low-level officials, a complete and continuous motoring of the work should be done by officials and ministers concern.

Essay on Smart City 300 Words

Smart city programme started on 25 June 2015. This project will make 100 smart cities in India in the next five years. The objective of Smart City Mission is to develop cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment. Today’s cities face significant challenges like increasing populations, environmental and regulatory requirements. Cities accommodate nearly 31% of India’s current population and contribute 63% of GDP (Census 2011). Urban areas are expected to house 40% of India’s population and contribute 75% of India’s GDP by 2030.

Development of Smart Cities is a step in the direction of providing comprehensive development of physical, institutional, social and economic infrastructure. The government has allotted around Rs. 48,000 crores for this project. A Special-purpose Vehicle has been created for each city to implement Smart City action plan.

The core infrastructure elements include adequate water and electricity supply, sanitation, public transport, robust IT, affordable housing, safety, health and education. Countries like the US and Germany have decided to contribute to this initiative. Coordination with states, the participation of people, fund allocation, policy-making and proper implementation are some of the challenges before the scheme. Providing clearances in a time bound manner is also a challenge.

Smart cities will need smart people as well. Universities, students, private and government institutions should be encouraged to actively participate in the process of eradicating the shortcomings and upgrading the system. The government should focus on proper implementation of policies and rapid allocation of funds to make this project a success. With proper planning and dedication of all stakeholders, the dream of Smart Cities Project can actually turn into reality for millions of Indians.

Smart City mission is a plan of our current PM. The mission is to develop 100 smart cities across the country. “100 smart cities mission” was launched by our PM Narendra Modi on 25 June 2015. Ministry of Urban Development is responsible for implementing the mission in collaboration with the state government of respective states.

The objective of the smart city mission is to provide the best facilities in the city which is citizen-friendly and sustainable. Smart City has some basic facilities available in the city like –

1. Adequate water supply 2. Assured electricity supply 3. Sanitation includes solid waste management 4. Efficient urban mobility and public transport 5. Affordable housing, especially for poor 6. Robust IT connectivity and digitisation

The government has taken many steps to promote smart cities in the country. The emphasis is to build smart urban mobility like a metro train, monorail. The government has launched Swachh Bharat Mission to promote cleanliness in the country. Government is investing in affordable housing. The vision of the digital city, information city, the ubiquitous city will also help to make cities smart and sustainable.

However, there are many challenges faced by smart city mission. Government do not have finance, so many approvals are needed, planning is not so good, growing population, traffic congestion, climate change, ageing infrastructure etc are some of the challenges.

Smart city mission is a good initiative taken by the government. It will improve the life of the people and make environment-friendly spaces for the children and the old age people. The success of smart city mission requires smart people who actively participate in governance and reforms.

Hope you like our Essay on Smart City.

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