Ongoing urbanization is creating enormous challenges for cities. The world's population continues to grow, and more and more people are moving from rural areas to cities.
While such migrations have been taking place for centuries, they have been accelerating in our day, as rural job markets continue to shrink. It is now expected that two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities by the year 2050. Cities need to develop strategies for dealing with their continuing growth. This also means using available resources more efficiently, even as their budgets grow tighter and tighter. "Resources scarcities, demographic issues and climate change will become the key factors for cities," notes Prof. Elke Pahl-Weber in an article in the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel (TU Berlin, Institute of Urban and Regional Planning). For cities, more people means more traffic, increased energy and drinking water consumption and higher waste production. While cities have long been wrestling with such growth-related issues, digitalization is offering new ways of addressing them; for example, data generated via digital applications can be used in creating "smart" solutions. Cities that seek to incorporate smart solutions within their urban infrastructures are referred to as "smart cities."
A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology (ICT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets, as the relevant Wikipedia article notes. Deutsche Telekom views smart cities as ecosystems that use ICT-based systems to manage and provide public services efficiently. Furthermore, functioning smart urban ecosystems make cities attractive for residents and visitors alike and promote cities' economic development. With our competencies and know-how, we can contribute significantly to smart cities' development – we know how to operate, manage and enhance large-scale communications infrastructures. What is more, our leading position in the M2M sector, and our expertise in IT integration, enable us to integrate individual components in the ways needed to build functioning, complex smart-city ecosystems.
In Europe, the transition to smart cities is being actively promoted, and it is being financed by official institutions such as the European Commission, the European Investment Bank and local governments. In the area of infrastructures, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and intelligent road lighting systems are seen to have special promise. Smart street lighting systems, for example, can cut electricity costs by 30 to 70 percent, and maintenance costs by 10 percent. And they help to reduce accidents and crime.
Deutsche Telekom is already working with partners, throughout Europe, on a number of different smart-city-related initiatives. In all such efforts, we seek to work hand-in-hand with the competent authorities. It is especially important that the public and private sectors carry out projects on a collaborative basis, and integrate them wherever possible with existing funding programs and objectives. We are convinced that efforts that bring the public and private sectors together, and combine them with existing projects and concepts, are the key to successful, rapid and cost-effective introduction of smart-city applications in Europe and elsewhere. Our current focus is on the areas of smart lighting systems, intelligent parking-space-management systems and pertinent WiFi-network implementations. At the same time, we are also exploring applications in a number of additional areas as well.
We have also taken a number of efforts to the implementation phase; in fact, we have already implemented projects throughout Europe. In 2014, we implemented a smart parking-management system in the city of Pisa. In 2012, we launched a project in a context referred to as the "smart Port of Hamburg." Just recently, we introduced smart street-lighting and mobility systems in Croatia and Romania. In the Croatian system, which is located in the city of Dubrovnik, a smart street lighting system provides the basis for a system that collects relevant data such as data on temperature, light conditions and air pollution. That solution, which has been implemented by Hrvatski Telekom, in cooperation with Cisco, is a significant step toward the sort of open infrastructure that provides the necessary basis for the continuing emergence of the smart city. In Bucharest, a similar system has been installed that combines four smart-city services: smart parking, smart lighting, WiFi connectivity and "City Save," a video surveillance system. The system is designed to make citizens' lives easier and safer and to assist local administrations in enhancing efficiency and reducing their operational costs. In other countries, including Hungary and the Czech Republic, we are working on still other relevant projects. The need for such projects can only be expected to grow, since urbanization is going to continue.
Clearly, there are no "one size fits all" smart-city solutions. This is because every city is unique. Some cities are commercial hubs, while others are cultural centers. Smart-city solutions have to take account of the many different issues, requirements, limitations, challenges and objectives that cities face – and that their dominant political and economic groups define. While being "smart" can mean something different for every city, every city should make being smart a key priority, in light of the ways that "smartness" can improve cities' functioning and the services and conditions available for their citizens.
