Portraits of the World's Smart Cities

Certain smart cities around the world are leading by example. By examining the solutions that are delivering the highest impact, these best practices can be more widely adopted to replicate their success.

This city portrait is in two parts. The first part, Seoul Smart City: The Power of Citizen Participation, described the reorganization of the Seoul Municipal Government in order to empower citizens and create a stronger climate of citizen participation at all possible administrative levels. This second part takes a closer look at some of the specific smart solutions being implemented by the city.

ICF Top 7 Intelligent Communities – Chiayi City

The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) releases an annual selection of seven different communities which it considers to have achieved a certain level of intelligence in the way they respond to the challenges of globalization and urbanization or, as the ICF prefers to call it, the Broadband Economy.[1] The selection of communities for 2018 was released in February, and can be found listed on the bee smart city website.[2] The Intelligent Community of the Year was chosen from among the Top 7 and announced at the ICF Global Summit in June.

Chiayi City, Taiwan - an incredibly 'smart' city!

In Chinese, 'Chiayi' means 'awarded for loyalty'. The city was given this name in 1787 by the Chinese emperor after a 10-month siege, to reward the bravery of its citizens during that time.[3] Chiayi City, now a provincial city of around sixty square kilometers in south-central Taiwan with a population of roughly 270,000 people, is being recognized once again for a very different sort of achievement.

Certain smart cities around the world are leading by example. By examining the solutions that are delivering the highest impact, these best practices can be more widely adopted to replicate their success. This smart city portrait provides an overview on the smart city strategy and intelligent solutions implemented in the Austrian City of Vienna.

Vienna – A Collaborative Smart City

Vienna has placed a strong focus on the collaborative nature of growing smarter. In 2014, Austria’s capital decided to adopt a strategy generated with the help of businesses, research institutes, public servants and private citizens to decide on the directions the city should take as it develops.

The preservation of resources, productive innovation and new technologies, and improving the quality of life were the top three things people wanted the strategy to focus on. The areas identified for long-term improvement were then broken down and specific goals were set to help the city “achieve growth while reducing resource consumption”,^[7] right through to the year 2050.

Certain smart cities around the world are leading by example. By examining the solutions that are delivering the highest impact, these best practices can be more widely adopted to replicate their success. This smart city portrait provides an overview on the smart city strategy and intelligent solutions implemented in the City of Barcelona.

Barcelona’s Smart City Strategy

Barcelona is no newcomer to the smart city scene. In 2011 it launched a project designed to make the city more innovative, listing the sustainability of energy use and of mobility, open data initiatives, flexible smart services and social initiatives as key areas for development, and it encouraged connections among researchers in both the public and private sectors with a focus on these topics.

One major early step for Barcelona was to establish new technological infrastructure on a massive scale to support and improve upon the city’s services. It created citywide networks of different types of sensors, providing real-time feedback on everything from air quality to noise, energy and waste management. Coupled with free WiFi around the city, this new level of connectivity and data collection allowed Barcelona to become a testbed for smart projects driven by the Internet of Things.

Barcelona was officially recognized as a smart city back in 2014 by the European Commission, taking the very first European Capital of Innovation prize for "introducing the use of new technologies to bring the city closer to citizens".^[1] The city had indeed pursued the application of technology to generate smart solutions for the problems most relevant to its citizens – but with mixed results.