By Deutsche Telekom

If cities are to remain worth living in, they must organise their traffic, supplies, waste disposal or healthcare more intelligently. Many companies are already at work on solutions to make cities smarter. Machines that communicate with each other or a control centre hold the key to success.

The turning point came in 2008 when, for the first time ever, more people lived in cities than in the country. This is a continuing trend. In 2050, according to United Nations estimates, more than two-thirds of humankind will live in an urban environment. Scientists see the world’s 20 megacities as just the tip of the iceberg and their number is certain to increase. Megacities, or conurbations with populations of more than 10million, must organise themselves differently than small towns.

Without smart planning, conurbations like Tokyo-Yokohama, the world’s largest metropolitan region with a population of 37million, will mutate into utter juggernauts. They face many challenges: traffic, supplies and waste disposal, education and healthcare, plus public safety. For all these areas however, connected solutions are at the ready. The Smart City is one of the hottest growth trends in the ICT market.

M2M makes cities smarter, and more sustainable

These trailblazing cities, which include Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro, use Smart City solutions in many areas already. A key technology on which these solutions rely is machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. M2M is automatic data interchange between machines or between machines and a control centre. First used in industrial application scenarios, M2M today connects large areas of urban infrastructure – from street lamps and traffic lights to parking spaces.

Smart grids are a good example. For the electricity grid to become smart, connected meters must be installed in households to coordinate feed-in and consumption. When bottlenecks occur, utilities can switch on extra power stations at short notice or control consumption by means of price incentives. Ideally, customers will switch on their washing machines when the wind is blowing briskly or the sun is shining on the solar panels.

IT and telecommunications keep traffic gridlock at bay

M2M can protect cities from traffic gridlock and reduce smog. Ninety per cent of emissions is generated in urban areas, with traffic one of the main culprits. Day by day millions of cars drive through narrow thoroughfares, and 30 per cent of them are just looking for somewhere to park. Cities such as Washington, Reno and Los Angeles are already using smart parking solutions that direct motorists to available spaces. This presupposes that all public parking spaces are equipped with wireless sensors to register whether they are free or in use. The sensors communicate by radio with a data collector that relays all data to a server via a mobile network. The data is analysed and made available via an app.

But, if the many strokes of urban genius are really to usher in a Smart City, solutions must be integrated across departments and the mass of data generated needs to be analysed in real time and then put to use. How smart a city really is, and how sustainable the benefits its technology advances will be, depends on the analysis of this Big Data and the resulting automation of processes.