Informatics Practices · Ch 2 — Emerging Trends
Smart Cities
Smart Cities
Rapid urbanisation is loading cities beyond what traditional management can handle, and the smart city is technology's answer: run the city itself on computing, communication and connected sensing, so that resources are managed and distributed efficiently.
The pressure comes first. As populations concentrate, city administrations face mounting challenges in managing resources — land, water, waste, air pollution, health and sanitation, traffic congestion, and public safety and security — on top of the overall city infrastructure: road, rail, bridges, electricity, subways, disaster management, sports facilities and more. These strains are pushing city planners around the world to look for smarter ways of managing cities, with the goal of keeping them sustainable and livable.
The smart city idea applies computer and communication technology, together with IoT and WoT, to that goal. The section illustrates it with three connected examples of intelligent infrastructure:
- A smart building uses sensors to detect earthquake tremors and then warns nearby buildings, so that they can prepare themselves accordingly.
- A smart bridge uses wireless sensors to detect any loose bolt, loose cable or crack, and alerts the concerned authorities through SMS.
- A smart tunnel likewise uses wireless sensors to detect any leakage or congestion inside it.
What ties the examples together is the flow of information. The readings gathered by these sensors travel as wireless signals across a network of sensor nodes to a centralised computer, where further analysis takes place. Each structure is not merely instrumented in isolation — building, bridge and tunnel feed one monitoring fabric, and in the earthquake example one structure's warning becomes its neighbours' preparation time. …
The figure is an annotated illustration of a city scene, drawn to show how sensing technology can be woven through urban infrastructure. Against a city skyline it presents three showcase structures. First is a smart building whose frame carries a grid of sensors; from this grid the artist draws radio-wave arcs spreading outward to the neighbouring buildings, picturing the moment the building detects earthquake tremors and broadcasts a warning so that buildings nearby can prepare themselves. Second is a suspension smart bridge, fitted with wireless sensors along both its cables and its deck — positioned exactly where a loose bolt, a loose cable or a crack would appear, the faults such a bridge reports to the concerned authorities through SMS. Third, below ground, is a smart tunnel shown with an excavator, its length monitored by sensors that watch for leakage or congestion.
Scattered across the whole scene are small geometric marks — squares, dots, diamonds and triangles — indicating the sensing infrastructure embedded throughout the city, and a key strip at the bottom decodes them: a square stands for central computers, a dot for wireless sensors, a diamond for sensor nodes, and triangles for wireless signals. …