The launch of this community is part of the preparations for the first World Smart Cities Forum, organized by the CIS in partnership with ISO and ITU. The Forum will be held in Singapore on July 13, 2016.
“The development of smart and sustainable cities has become a key policy issue for governments worldwide and for organizations within the United Nations system,” stated ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “Recognizing the potential of smart cities goes hand in hand with recognizing that infusing an existing city with intelligence, or developing a smart city from scratch, is a complex undertaking that requires better collaboration and a more integrated decision-making process among diverse urban stakeholders and global standards bodies such as the ITU, IEC, and ISO.”
By 2050, it is estimated that 66 percent of the world's population will live in urban areas. Urban leaders face a major challenge: providing these populations with basic resources such as safe food, clean water, and sufficient energy, while simultaneously ensuring economic, social, and environmental sustainability on a global scale. Cities must achieve significant improvements in the efficiency with which they operate and consume their resources.
Significant efficiency improvements can be achieved by horizontally interconnecting individual systems such as those for energy, water, sanitation and waste management, transportation, security, environmental monitoring, and weather intelligence. A key challenge for this horizontal integration lies in the fact that many current urban systems come from different vendors and are maintained by different agencies, which sometimes operate in isolation. Interconnecting these systems, both physically and virtually, will require standardized interfaces.
Frans Vreeswijk, Secretary General and Executive Director of the CIS: "Cities are gigantic systems with countless subsystems. They all depend on electricity and IT equipment to move people and goods, collect data, and exchange information. The CIS's work already has repercussions across all of them. Now more than ever, many different organizations need to collaborate to help make cities smarter: integrating technology is a specific challenge that requires partnerships and alliances. This is what the online community and the Forum are trying to achieve."
Kevin McKinley, Acting Secretary-General of ISO: “Smart cities make sense: they produce less waste, offer a better quality of life, and ensure a brighter future for the next generation. But cities face many challenges in their quest for improvement. ISO standards help cities measure and improve their performance, for example, with standards for urban indicators, sustainable communities, and urban infrastructure. These standards propose best practices and harmonized solutions that can be applied anywhere, enabling urban planners and policymakers to benefit from expert technical knowledge from around the world.”
Chaesub Lee, Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau: "The information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure of a smart city must ensure openness and interoperability, achieved through the coordinated adoption of common standards. Smart cities will utilize a plethora of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and standards will facilitate the harmonized application of IoT data and applications, contributing to the effective horizontal integration of a city's subsystems. The ITU's collaboration with urban leaders is based on the need for cities to develop standards that enable them to leverage IoT technologies to address the challenges of urban development."
