A smart City and the Smart Buildings therein are not a marketing campaign, slick sales technique nor an amusing political catch phrase. It is a series of solutions to a serious and urgent situation the world faces today. Smart Cities are emerging as a civic action due to a "perfect storm" of the convergence of market conditions, technology innovation, social wants, government needs and the migration to urban environments that has accelerated on a global scale which dwarfs any previous mass movement of people in history.
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One striking example is found in a report by McKinsey & Co. in 2009 that stated 350 million people in China would move to cities throughout China by 2025. In the three years since that report was published, the numbers of migrating Chinese to cities within China is proving this prediction correct. Existing Chinese cities, already overpopulated and struggling to maintain public services, are bracing for this onslaught of humanity by preparing, planning and implementing large scale urban projects, designed to transform from industrial urban environments to Smart Cities with smart buildings. Not because they want to, because they have to.
A smart City has many emerging definitions. The flexibility of this definition provides cities the opportunity to define its programs, policies and procedures according to its own local set of priorities and needs. Smart City definition frameworks are being designed and marketed by academics, companies, urban associations and the media, as well as the use of technologies like smart buildings. Through this cacophony of frameworks, a foundation has emerged that help define areas of Smart City interest, action and measures. Most frameworks use the word SMART as an acronym to mean Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based goals. These same frameworks provide the definition of 10 Smart City elements:
The interesting thing about Smart City initiatives is the closely integrated way that seemingly disparate elements work together. As cities begin their transformative process into Smart Cities, it helps to consider the manner in which cities will need to address the social, economic, engineering and environmental challenges. And this manner will center on Knowledge.
As we identify the challenges of living in a highly connected, Information age world, it helps to relate to our cities as organisms. If the city is a body, then we have seen its evolution from the Agrarian Society to the Information Age through the development of systems. Each city has its own cardiovascular system (traffic, mass transit), skeletal system (infrastructure), respiratory and digestive systems (energy, waste) and even a primitive nervous system (telecommunications). In order for a city to provide access to its intelligence behind the knowledge and become a smart City, the development of the Intelligence System that connects the central nervous system to a brain is required--enter smart buildings.
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