3. Building the Smart City

These days, every city wants to be Smart, but it is not that simple. Many cities invest in technology to become a Smart City without first considering their needs and what they wish to achieve with all this.

Cities sometimes define a platform, or several platforms, only to discover that they have isolated, independent systems, from which they cannot gather and integrate data in order to be able to obtain valuable information.

A Smart City is capable of capturing the useful data generated in it, transporting them through communication networks, centralising them in a balanced scorecard and being able to provide an appropriate response in real time, enabling proper operation of infrastructure and services. Additionally, it can anticipate possible incidents and offer appropriate urban solutions.

The design of a Smart City is necessarily a shared work at three levels. Public authority leadership, from the party responsible for city design and management, is as necessary as the collaboration of private companies as service providers. And of course, the active involvement of citizens as end users is just as important.