New global platform to help cities become sustainable and smart
Geneva, Switzerland, 2016-01-15 - While we often hear about smart, sustainable cities, adding smartness to an existing urban environment or developing a Smart City from scratch is a mammoth undertaking.
To help city stakeholders worldwide make their cities smarter, the first World Smart City online community will launch on 18 January. This new community aims to identify top pain points that are holding city development back.
Given that by 2050, an estimated 66% of the world's population will live in urban areas, supplying these populations with basic resources like safe food, clean water and sufficient energy, while ensuring overall economic, social and environmental sustainability, will be a major challenge. Cities need to substantially increase the efficiency in which they operate and use their resources.
Major efficiency improvements could be achieved by horizontally interconnecting individual systems such as energy, water, sanitation and waste management, transportation, security, environmental monitoring or weather intelligence.
However, many of the systems used today in cities originate from different suppliers and they are maintained by various agencies, sometimes working in isolation. To connect them both physically and virtually, standardized interfaces need to be put in place.
The community launch is part of the lead up to the first World Smart City Forum, which is organized by the IEC, in partnership with ISO and ITU. The Forum will be held in Singapore on 13 July 2016, co-located with the World Cities Summit www.worldcitiessummit.com.sg/ and Singapore International Water Week www.siwww.com.sg.
Says Frans Vreeswijk, IEC General Secretary and CEO: Cities are giant systems with countless subsystems. All of them depend on electricity and hardware to move people and things, collect data and exchange information. Already now, IEC work impacts all of them. More than ever before, many different organizations will need to collaborate to help make cities smarter; technology integration is a special challenge that requires partnerships and alliances. That's what the online community and Forum is trying to achieve.
Says Kevin McKinley, Acting ISO Secretary-General, Smart cities make sense: they waste less, offer better quality of life and ensure a brighter future for the next generation. But cities face many challenges in their quest to improve. ISO Standards help cities measure and improve their performance, for example with standards for city indicators, sustainable communities and city infrastructures. These Standards provide best practices and harmonized solutions that can be used everywhere, and allow city planners and decision-makers to benefit from global expertise.
Says Chaesub Lee, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau: The information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure of a Smart City should ensure openness and interoperability, achieved by coordinated adherence to common standards. Smart cities will employ an abundance of technologies in the family of the Internet of Things (IoT) and standards will assist the harmonized implementation of IoT data and applications, contributing to effective horizontal integration of a city's subsystems. ITU collaboration with city leaders builds on cities' requirements to develop standards that leverage IoT technologies to address urban-development challenges.
About the World Smart City community www.worldsmartcity.org
This online community will gather relevant city stakeholders globally and engage them in value-add discussions and high-level networking. This will help to crystalize some pain points of Smart City development in areas such as mobility, water, energy, cybersecurity and privacy. The community discussions aim to both break down barriers and encourage communication to support faster Smart City development activities, as well as shape the final programme of the World Smart City Forum in Singapore. In addition to high-level VIPs, the community aims to attract professionals such as city planners, architects, consultants, utilities, transport planners, safety/security/data specialists, standardization specialists, and industry (solution providers). Register here.
About the World Smart City Forum, 13 July 2016, Singapore
Everybody wants to build Smart Cities but what is needed to make them come true? Which city pain points are hindering Smart City development and how can they be best overcome? The Forum will explore how this can be accomplished and point to some of the tools that are already available to help cities reach their objective faster, more efficiently and with better outcomes.
The Forum is free of charge for all people who register on the www.worldsmartcity.org website, members and invitees of IEC, ISO and ITU, as well as registered participants of the World Cities Summit and World Water Week.
IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and ITU (International Telecommunication Union) are the three global standards bodies.
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New global platform to help cities become sustainable and smart 
