Smart cities are better cities

A smart city uses modern digital communications technology to monitor, manage and enhance key infrastructure and public services. This can include transport and traffic management, energy, water and waste management, healthcare and other community services. The goal of making existing cities smarter is to improve the experience for residents, workers and visitors alike, while at the same time reducing costs and resource consumption.

Technology can play an important part in tackling many of the challenges facing our cities. Data from real-time systems and sensors can be an enabler to discovering what is happening in a city and can help to identify opportunities and challenges that may improve the delivery and efficiency of services which meet the needs of the public.

Around the world, we are already seeing autonomous vehicle (AV) taxis in operation, as well as drones being used to police traffic and carry medical supplies. Data analytics and AI are being used in smart health, and real-time sensor data and AI are saving lives by predicting natural disasters. “However, the smart city doesn’t magically happen all at once,” Chai says. “It takes shape progressively and incrementally.”

When asked to define the smart city, the co-editor-in-chief of the IET journal Smart Cities and creator of the UK Smart Cities Forum quotes the International Telecommunications Union, which describes the concept as an urban development using info-comms technologies ‘to improve the quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services.’

But for Chai, the smart city is more exciting than the integration of digital gadgets. To him it works more like a human being. This is because the smart city has a brain, nerves and a body comprising interconnected sensors and infrastructure. By ‘smart’ he means more than simply internet enabled. “The ‘smart’ here means intelligent,” he explains. “We become more intelligent in the way we operate things, live, work and commute, and our civilisation advances as a result.”

Senior fellow at the University of California Berkley, and fellow of the IET and the Royal Academy of Engineering, Chai has a background in smart technologies going back at least two decades. Having contributed to smart transport, living and health projects – as well as publishing a book on mobile ad hoc networks – he started to develop a realisation of ‘the importance of smart cities to global nations’ and approached former IET President William Webb with the idea of starting a new journal in this field, which they co-founded. Smart Cities provides “a focused outlet for researchers and engineers to publish their latest work”, and in 2022, Chai received the IET Editor-in-Chief Award.

Chai believes that “smart cities are better cities”. This applies not just to the smoother functioning of areas such as transport, but also for citizen safety. He believes that smart cities will have the early detection, prevention and isolation techniques in place to minimise the impact of future pandemics. “Humans cannot undo a hurricane, but we can be better prepared to protect lives and assets. Without IoT, AI, data analysis and cloud computing, accurate prediction would be very difficult, if not impossible.”