Page 16 - International Standards to Shape Smart Sustainable Cities: The Case of Moscow

Implementing ITU-T International Standards to shape Smart Sustainable Cities - The case of Moscow

United for Smart Sustainable Cities

On 18 May 2016, ITU – together with UNECE – established the United for Smart
Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) Initiative, which serves as the international platform for
sharing knowledge and developing best practices linked to smart sustainable cities. The
U4SSC is now a United Nations initiative coordinated by ITU and UNECE and supported
by 14 other United Nations agencies and programmes.

This global platform was created in response to United Nations Sustainable
Development Goal (SDG) 11: “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe,
resilient, and sustainable.” Unlike other smart city platforms, this initiative is open to
all interested parties who wish to contribute to its work.

Since its inception, U4SSC has been endorsing the adoption of public policies to
encourage the use of information and communication technologies in establishing
smart sustainable cities.

This initiative completed its first phase in April 2017 with the development of three
publications on Connecting cities and communities with the Sustainable Development
Goals; Enhancing innovation and participation in smart sustainable cities; and
Implementing SDG11 by connecting sustainability policies and urban planning practices
through ICTs. Each of these reports was prepared in line with the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs). More than 100 participants contributed to these U4SSC
publications.

The U4SSC is currently working on the following deliverables:
 Guidelines on tools and mechanisms to finance SSC projects
 Guidelines on strategies for circular cities
 City science application framework
 Guiding principles for artificial intelligence in cities
 Blockchain 4 cities
 Thematic Group on "The Impact of Frontier Technologies in Cities"
 The impact of Sensing Technologies and IoT in Cities
 The impact of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing in Cities
 The impact of Data Processing and Computation in Cities

Box 1: United for Smart Sustainable Cities initiative

Moscow’s experience in piloting the U4SSC KPIs for SSC will help to refine and improve these
KPIs. Data collected for these KPIs will also be used to develop the Global Smart Sustainable
Cities Index, which is a tool intended to display the effectiveness of a city’s SSC initiatives and its
progress in reaching the SDGs in comparison to other cities. For more information on the Global
Smart Sustainable Index, see Box 2 below.

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