Smart cities are a long-term project

It’s 2021. Smart cities develop and expand all over the world and this has become the future of urban development. But this mission demands constant work and a long-term vision, as well as a strategy that can put a new smart urban environment on the global map. There are no shortcuts to creating life value for the people living or aspiring to live in such places.

One of the smart city pitfalls resides in short-term strategies that can, most often, create a bang, but not a long-lasting effect. This of course can be attributed to a number of factors, such as political projects that aim to deliver their promises within a limited established term, timings, budgets, and others.

But when you’re committed to getting real results, you need to secure a long-term strategy. In addition to that, you need a plan that can easily expand and have an element of flexibility; able to accommodate to changing circumstances, regardless of what political factors may come into place during its implementation.

As multi-award-winning tech and business leader Jonathan Reinchental says in Smart Cities for Dummies: “A smart city strategy typically has bold and ambitious goals. It requires a lot of individual projects, many of which are interdependent and require new, complex software, hardware, and process requirements.”

Surely enough, you may be tempted to achieve a successful outcome in just a few years’ time, but you ultimately need to look at a city plan from short, medium, and long-term perspectives. Only in this way, you can be guaranteed to deliver value as you go along.

When planning short-term, a lot of elements in the mix can go wrong, such as poor communication of long-term budget requirements, incorrect expectations, putting an excessive focus on technology, or sprinting for deadlines, rather than understanding that the effort behind a smart city is a marathon.

While there are shortcut ways to make your city shine in the press, start here: build a vision and a strategy for your community. Check with city stakeholders, estimate budgets and expectations, get the population excited and involved, go from small to big with your plans, and constantly analyse results and your direction. Sure, it’s easier said than done, but smart cities are about the people who will love living in them, so make sure you give them somewhere constantly amazing to live in.