Examples of smart cities around the world

The phenomenon of smart cities does not belong one country or region. In fact, smart cities are emerging all over the world from North to South America, throughout Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, to Asia, Africa, and Australia. Smart cities take many forms from master plan new cities like King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia to making a range of modest infrastructure improvements such as improved wireless broadband in San Francisco, California. To get a better sense of the smart city movement, here are two detailed city examples. We begin with Amsterdam, the beautiful capital city of the Netherlands. Of course, Amsterdam is an established built environment. Their smart city efforts focus on improving their capabilities. For them six themes have been established. Number one, infrastructure and technology. This is related to adopting new technologies like drones, smart grids, and the intent of things to improve lives. Two, energy, water, and waste. Three important areas that we've discussed in a previous video. Number three, mobility, this area covers transport. They are interested in reducing congestion and pollution and increasing safety. Number four, circular city. This area is about minimizing waste and pollution by recycling, reducing, and reusing. Number five, governance and education. These areas are related to ensuring decision makers have good tools to make the right decisions. It's also about ensuring that Amsterdam attracts and retains bright talent. Number six, citizens and living. Finally, this theme is focused on ensuring that citizens are engaged and have a way to contribute and participate in new ideas. Each of these six themes has generated a large number of projects. All of them are focused on making Amsterdam more livable, workable, and sustainable. Next we'll take a look at Konza. This is a yet to be built smart city sixty kilometers south of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya on the central east coast of Africa. In 2008, the government of Kenya approved the creation of Konza technology city as a flagship Kenya Vision 2030 project. Vision 2030 aims to create a globally competitive, prosperous Kenya with a high quality of life by the year 2030. To that end, their smart city goals are highly focused on economic opportunities. These smart city goals are supported by focusing on four areas using technology. Number one, infrastructure services. These include technologies in support of transportation, utilities, public safety, and the environment. Number two, citizen services. Within this area, the focus will be for easy access to services and for citizen engagement in the city. Number three, city services. This will be technology to support access to city information and for good city planning and development. Four, business services. This area includes a range of services to support enterprises and local commerce. As with Amsterdam, a large number of projects accompany each of these goals. In Konza, they have the opportunity to build all the foundational, technological infrastructure without any consideration for legacy challenges. In other words, they don't have to support existing services while implementing and replacing with new services. Anyone who has run an IT project knows how liberating this is and how difficult the former is. What these two major examples illustrate is the considerable diversity in the smarty city definition. We must not let ourselves be constrained to any single city design and implementation strategy. What has become abundantly clear is that a smart city strategy is largely focused on local challenges. We must both recognize some core overlap areas in the big themes, transportation, energy, environment, et cetera, but also the uniqueness of a solution in a specific city context.