Consolidating Smart Cities Through Data
In this powerful, ever-evolving era of innovation, technology has the ability to facilitate simpler, better-optimized lives for individuals and communities alike. Today, smart apps based on big data can track, scan, measure, and monitor anything from your physical activity, heart rate, or stress levels to traffic flow in cities or the concentration of pollen particles in the air.
The beauty of big data resides in the opportunity to create better strategies with the aid of valuable insights. When applied to smart cities, this creates a chance to greatly improve urban development while ensuring that the benefits are there to be felt by its residents.
In cities, personal data can provide a wide range of information that allows for a better and more efficient overview of urban conditions, from traffic behavior to noise pollution or air quality levels; key factors which affect city residents and greatly impact their overall quality of life. At an individual level, accessible, wearable tech designed to monitor an individual’s health, can easily be used in conjunction with big data to analyse these urban factors in order to see which of these have a greater influence - such as monitoring allergies during times with greater levels of dust particles in the air.
When it comes to smart cities, data proves itself essential for further developments. In many parts of the world, cities either still operate on paper or use obsolete software that doesn’t make use of collected data in the right way - which stops them from unlocking the solutions to most urban-related problems. And while different city departments are in charge of different competences, they can all share common data to improve the interconnectivity of them all. However, and that’s the biggest caveat of big data, cities need to be prepared to securely and adequately collect, store and make use of its citizens’ personal information; a key factor which is ever so relevant in the age of GDPR.
Luckily, the world now abounds with all manner of apps and services that measure valuable insights at both personal and collective levels, while keeping the information on the user’s side secure. Using big data for city strategies in this way has already been translated into infrastructure such as smart urban transport, smart lighting, optimisation of water and energy supplies, improving public safety and so on, allowing cities to create sustainable growth and provide their residents with improved quality of life. For tech adopters in the cities, this also means an opportunity to better understand the environmental conditions that impact their everyday life.
At the end of the day, and to reiterate, collecting data only proves itself fruitful if it translates into tangible solutions. So if you collect data on traffic but don’t use it to reduce emissions, you’re missing the point.
This creates urban compatibility and brings us back to the same key point: we make better cities for people to enjoy them.
