The concept of a smart city itself is still getting shape, and establish definitions and concepts it’s an ongoing work.
A brief summary of the smart city’s concept could be “A developed urban area that creates sustainable economic development and high quality of life by excelling in multiple key areas; economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and government. Excelling in these key areas can be done so through strong human capital, social capital, and ICT infrastructure.”
Before we continue, to help us understand this definition and see the relevance in it, we should give a better look in how we live nowadays.
Starting with an overview, today, 54% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and the forecast is that this rate will rise up to 66% by 2050. Estimations show that urbanization together with the overall growth of the world’s population could bring another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050.
We don’t need too much to know that this mix of migration from rural to urban areas with lack of planning ends up bad: just remember the messed up development of the cities during the Industrial Revolution, with bad sanitary conditions and poor quality of life for most part of the people.
Therefore, this huge and complex proportion of people leads to chaotic and disorder places, with cities and megacities causing many sorts of problems, such as: waste management crisis, dearth of resources, air pollution, human health concerns, traffic jam, and improper infrastructures.
And here we mentioned only the technical and material problems, but we might think about the social and organizational set of problems as well.
With this background in mind, the urban population growth worldwide requires a deeper understanding of the smart city concept, in order to provide livable conditions and to find smarter ways to manage all these challenges.
The starting point of the concept is that a city may be called ‘smart’ “when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory government”. In summary, a smart city is an icon of a sustainable and livable city.”
To reach this sustainable and livable standard, smart cities evolve towards a strong integration of the 3 dimensions of intelligence available in a city: human, collective and artificial.
The first dimension is about the people: intelligence, inventiveness and creativity of individuals who live and work in the city. This perspective was described by Richard Florida (2002) [7] as ‘creative city’, which adds the values and desires of the ‘new creative class’, constituted by the talent and knowledge of scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and other creative people that have huge impact in determining how the workspace is organized, and therefore if companies will succeed and the city will develop or not.
The second dimension stands for the collective intelligence of a city’s population, the capacity of human communities to cooperate intellectually in creation, innovation and invention. Which means that this dimension is based on the city institutions that allow cooperation in knowledge and innovation.
Finally, the third dimension is related to the artificial intelligence in the physical environment of the city, and available to its population: the communication infrastructure, digital spaces and public tools available for the city’s population.
In these terms, the combination of these three dimensions describes a territory with:
- well-developed activities related to knowledge;
- routines of social cooperation, allowing the adaptation of the knowledge and know-how acquired;
- a set of communication infrastructure, digital spaces and innovation tools; and
- Skills to innovate, manage and solve problems that came out, since the ability to innovate and manage uncertainty are critical factors to measure intelligence.
ICT: The key to a well succeed mkt
ICT – Information and Communication Technology – allows a direct interaction with the community and the city infrastructure, in order to tell what is happening in the city, how the city is evolving, and how to enable a better quality of life. All of this by using real-time systems and sensors, which means that data are collected from citizens and objects and then processed in real-time. Therefore, ICT can be used to increase the performance of urban services, to cut costs and resource consumption and to improve the relation between citizens and government.
Obviously, the brands and marketers that want to succeed in this context has to adapt this products, communication, advertising to be truly engaged with ICT, because this concept is becoming more and more important and stands for all sectors of life nowadays: social, economics, mobility, work, entertainment, and so on.
With regard to advertising and more widely to marketing and branding, one of the best examples of the concerns with ICT is the progressive increasing of brands’ presence in social networks. Most part of marketers knows that, to a brand be relevant for its target-market, it is very important the presence in social medias, in order to establish a closer relation with consumers and engage with their needs.
Some of the most popular Facebook fan pages have millions of followers and feature popular artists, athletes and other media figures. As of July 2014, Coca-Cola ranked among the leading product brands with more than 81 million Facebook fans. Other popular product brands include Red Bull, Playstation, Starbucks and Nike Football.
Also, we might mention that a smart city is a fertile territory for concepts such as: Crowdsourcing; Collaborative Softwares, Online Collaboration, Collaborative Innovation Network, Collaborative Learning and Innovation. Brands must keep an eye on this tendency.
All of this is supported by the strong growth of the social media users – you can check it on the charts below:
Other companies such as Cisco, Schneider Electric, IBM and Microsoft have developed new solutions and initiatives for intelligent cities as well. IBM announced its SmarterCities to stimulate economic growth and quality of life in cities and metropolitan areas.
In other words: smart cities require smart brands and smart communication.
Want to know more about it? In the links below you can see examples of cities that are doing serious efforts to reach the ‘smart city’ label
Check the 10 smartest cities around the world
Santiago – Chile, in South America
Other related links:
Red Española de Ciudades Inteligentes
Webgraphy and Bibliography
http://go.worldbank.org/NXEK3FGIR0
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_inteligente
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/smart-city.html
Feu clic per accedir a 4525c289.pdf
Feu clic per accedir a FIA2011t.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/33-social-media-facts-statistics-you-should-know-2015-jeff-bullas
Social Media Demographics for Marketers
http://www.statista.com/statistics/265657/leading-product-brands-with-the-most-fans-on-facebook/
Deixa un comentari
Heu d'iniciar la sessió per escriure un comentari.