This week, I attended an event in Luxembourg about Smart Cities. The Smart City concept results from the convergence of disruptive technologies in communication, energy management, connectivity and mobility to improve daily lives in cities. One important goal is also to manage cities in a perspective of sustainable growth.
When we speak about smart cities, let’s talk about smart communities
stated Emile Eicher, President of Syvicol. According to him, the Smart City results from an intelligent combination of communication, IoT, smart mobility, waste management, shared economy, smart living … and must lead to a better access to education, health and information.
Nina Wilson, CEO of Vodafone Procurement, based in Luxembourg, which was one of the event’s sponsor, said
Live a Better Today and Build a Better Tomorrow
So, what would drive the development of smart cities is the willingness to transform our lives and business within the perimeter of the city, which is the place where everyone wants to live in this age of acceleration. Indeed, the rate of urbanization has increased everywhere, and especially in emerging countries. For example in China, where the rate of urbanization increases massively in the last decades. India, with a rate of 30%, is still low, but will increase hugely in coming years.
As a matter of fact, in developed countries, the rate of urbanization is very high, and the Smart City concept is then aiming to improve our daily lives and better use the city resources.
Ludovico Fassati, Head of IoT Vertical Market Development at Vodafone, stated that
Smart City is a IoT Ready City
He also presented the 3 levels of a Smart City
- Building the Smart Infrastructure
- Creating Smart Spaces
- Empowering Smart Citizens and Lifestyle
This requires to use the digital tools and data to improve efficiency, control security and citizen engagement.
The challenges are multiple but the following 3 ones are the most urgent ones:
- Data management is complex and requires a high level of investment
- IoT and access to data requires a high level of security
With respect to both challenges, Luxembourg is already going in the right direction with the creation of a HPC (High Performance Computing) centre facilitating data storage and date access through the cloud. They have also recently announced the creation of a fund of 200m€ dedicated to cybersecurity.
No doubt that Luxembourg will then play an important role in Smart Cities in the coming years.
