United Nations expects world’s population residing in cities will rise to 68 percent by 2050. And such a transformation will introduce some key changes in the structure of the cities to ensure the continuation of their citizens to remain habitable and sustainable. “Projections show that urbanization, the gradual shift in residence of the human population from rural to urban areas, combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050, with close to 90 percent of this increase taking place in Asia and Africa,” the UN found in 2018.
As the unrelenting urbanization continues to raise concerns over the sustainability of municipalities all over the world , the leadership of the fore of the global thoughts has come to rise. Even though not having a standard for being called a smart city, it mostly involves the use of technology to improve various aspects of day to day life. That will mostly be information and communications technology (ICT) with which a city can harness to become more connected and boost its efficiency or even improve the quality of services offered and enhance its stability to become a sustainable economic development and this being few among many goals a city has. These cities are not failing in proving themselves to be tantalizing concepts: smarter, greener areas that can improve the efficiency of not only the cities but also the lives of their residents. While the urban zones continue to receive all the attention and investments , the exciting solutions are now being applied in smaller towns and rural areas too.
5G offers the most promising of the technologies that are tipped to be very crucial for driving the development of smart city. The potential of the 5th generation in delivering the telecommunication technology to transform the operational models are much higher compared to these 4G. The data delivery speed in 5G is 100 times faster than 4G. Services traffic-management systems that utilize sensors to provide authorities with real-time data on traffic flow, telemedicine services that make healthcare services such as patient visits more efficient or 5G that lies at the heart of such innovations, ensuring high-speed connectivity, minimal latency and support for a vastly greater volume of activity is paramount.
With that being said , even without the adoption of 5G a massive improvement can be seen making in smart cities already using the existing technology. With the internet of things ( IoT ) being used by almost all now is being leveraged from smart devices to improve operational efficiency. The smart waste management system of Seoul , South Korea is a perfect example of utilization of the technology to improve its city. They utilize sensors in public bins to notify workers when they are ready to be emptied instead of scheduling daily fixed cleaning. “Unlike the traditional way of collecting general waste and recycling materials, the new way of managing our bins…not only reduced our collection costs by 83 percent but also eliminated waste overflow as well,” the Seoul Metropolitan Government confirmed in 2017. Miami leads the way in this field, with more than half a million connected streetlights now operating in the city. And IoT Analytics, a provider of market insights for the Internet of things, estimates that global expenditure on connected streetlights will top $3.6 billion in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21 percent between 2018 and 2023. This gives a sustainable smart city. And this how the city officials and stake holders seem to be working on improving smart cities and its service usage as well as identifying their specific preferences to device strategies to future develop the cities.
