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While the promise of smart cities paints an exciting picture of the future, demons lurk in the shadows. The extension of the realm of cyber-security to include practically any electronic device is already underway. We have seen attacks on every type of system, including manufacturing facilities, processing plants, financial institutions, social networks, smart phones-the list goes on. The social network population is huge, numbering in the hundreds of millions.

Read more about https://axiomq.com/blog/how-will-smart-cities-change-our-future/ here. Lastly, the sustainable city pillar focuses on a target to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035. In parallel the focus lies on improving the quality of life, strengthening energy security and enhancing mobility. The last example that Marr provides is how smart cities are encouraging greater collaboration with citizens.

The centrepiece of their “future-proofing” strategy is a £90m international technology and renewable energy zone, which is due to be inaugurated next year. The city centre investment is designed to serve as a physical hub for renewable energy and smart infrastructure experts. All these responsive technologies “blanket” every surface of the urban fabric. Still, the future “sensing” city will not change significantly in appearance, much in the same way that the Roman urbs is not all that different than the city as we know it today. We will always need horizontal floors for living, vertical walls in order to separate spaces—sorry, Zaha—and exterior enclosures to protect us from the outside.

It’s this kind of resilience that Panasonic is hoping to achieve with its CityNow smart city project outside Denver, Colorado. The company previously completed work on the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town west of Tokyo, Japan, in 2015. The town’s 1,000 homes are all connected to a solar-powered smart grid, giving the neighbourhood the ability to run off-grid for up to three days. According to Panasonic, the Fujisawa project is a thriving community with 70% less carbon emitted and a 30% return of energy back to the grid.

Smart city technology allows city officials to interact directly with both community and city infrastructure and to monitor what is happening in the city and how the city is evolving. A smart city may therefore be more prepared to respond to challenges than one with a conventional “transactional” relationship with its citizens. Yet, the term itself remains unclear in its specifics and therefore, open to many interpretations. People, governments and industries won’t be able to make a lasting dent in emissions unless they work together and devise a common approach. Ultimately, we must build a completely connected ecosystem that incorporates smart buildings, homes and grids to create hyper-efficient, sustainable and scalable smart cities.

So, to get a better understanding, we spoke with industry experts and asked…. At the core, Smart Cities are leveraging Internet of Things and other emerging technologies to create cities that are well, smarter. Smart appliances, electric vehicles, and the smart grid will all play a vital role in consumer energy demand management. With different market cycles in mind, it can be helpful to leverage different asset classes to maximise risk-adjusted returns through a more balanced total return profile. We believe the thematic multi-asset approach is a good way to gain exposure to megatrends like smart cities, which helps investors to weather down markets and still participate in up markets. Mon 1st Apr 2019The need for deeper cross-sector collaboration is seen to be more critical than further technology development to deliver the ambition for autonomous vehicles.

“It’s very much inspired by things like Facebook, but then it’s applied, with all the confidentiality provisions, to a specific set of health issues,” explains Alex Ross, director of the centre for health and development at the World Health Organisation. A smart city must be economically viable, which means competing in the global knowledge economy. Achieving and sustaining world-class levels of performance requires a deep-rooted culture of innovating, learning, collaborating and partnering, along with attracting and retaining a diverse population of knowledge workers and entrepreneurs. In reality, a true smart city must be all three types integrated in a holistic and systemic way. That is where the real and virtual worlds converge, bringing greater efficiency and new opportunities, as well as new challenges. While reality has always been about physical necessity, tangible barriers and restrictions, virtuality brings the potential for greater freedom, immateriality and unlimited possibilities.

Such buildings could also be interconnected with walkways or transit systems. Already experiments of vertical gardens for growing food are taking place in such cities. Another future possibility is orbiting space cities, perhaps with elevators linked to the Earth. As new sites become available and new technologies develop, smart cities will become more revolutionary in design.