The ITU therefore called for international standards to help achieve smart-city ambitions noting that city leaders face a major challenge in the need to supply these populations with basic resources, such as safe food, clean water and sufficient energy, while ensuring overall economic, social and environmental sustainability.
Speaking during the launch of the first World Smart City online community, ITU Secretary-General, Houlin Zhao said that the Cities need to achieve substantial improvements in the efficiency with which they operate and use their resources saying that the new community aims to identify the top ‘pain points’ presenting challenges to city development.
“The development of Smart Sustainable Cities has become a key policy point to administrations around the world as well as to UN organisations,” said Zhao.
According to Zhao, the recognition of the potential of smart cities comes in parallel with recognition that building smartness into an existing city, or developing a smart city from the ground up, is a complex undertaking.
He called for improved cooperation and more integrated decision-making by a variety of city stakeholders and global standards bodies, such as ITU, IEC and ISO.
He explained that major efficiency improvements could be achieved by horizontally interconnecting individual systems such as energy, water, sanitation and waste management, transportation, security, environmental monitoring or weather intelligence.
However, he observed that a key challenge to this horizontal integration lies in the fact that many of today’s city systems originate from different suppliers and are maintained by various agencies, sometimes working in isolation adding that the interconnection of these systems, both physically and virtually, will demand standardised interfaces.
The community launch is part of the build-up to the first World Smart City Forum, organized by IEC in partnership with ISO and ITU. The Forum will be held in Singapore, co-located with the World Cities Summit.
Frans Vreeswijk, IEC General Secretary and CEO: “Cities are giant systems with countless subsystems. All of them depend on electricity and hardware to move people and things, collect data and exchange information. Already now, IEC work impacts all of them. More than ever before, many different organizations will need to collaborate to help make cities smarter; technology integration is a special challenge that requires partnerships and alliances. That’s what the online community and Forum is trying to achieve.”
Kevin McKinley, Acting ISO Secretary-General: “Smart cities make sense: they waste less, offer better quality of life and ensure a brighter future for the next generation. But cities face many challenges in their quest to improve. ISO Standards help cities measure and improve their performance, for example with standards for city indicators, sustainable communities and city infrastructures. These Standards provide best practices and harmonized solutions that can be used everywhere, and allow city planners and decision-makers to benefit from global expertise.”
Chaesub Lee, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau: “The information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure of a Smart City should ensure openness and interoperability, achieved by coordinated adherence to common standards. Smart cities will employ an abundance of technologies in the family of the Internet of Things (IoT) and standards will assist the harmonized implementation of IoT data and applications, contributing to the effective horizontal integration of a city’s subsystems. ITU collaboration with city leaders builds on the requirements of cities to develop standards that leverage IoT technologies to address urban-development challenges.”
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