Page 14 - Digital solutions for integrated city management and use cases: A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

ICT-based urban services in smart sustainable cities provide some benefits related to :
3

• Improving energy efficiency. • Efficiency of water distribution systems.
• Operation and transparency of the urban • Wastewater management.
infrastructure.
• Security.
• Resilience of mobility networks.
• Other services.

Moreover, ICTs should not only establish defined urban functions in smart sustainable cities, but
also help foster engagement during the designing and planning process for cities among citizens,
governments, enterprises, and other stakeholders. This engagement is expected to facilitate
participation and shared knowledge for urban governance, which is essential for keeping the
city’s future designs for economic, social and environmental development in line with a credible
smart sustainable vision.

Even with this definition and understanding of a smart sustainable city, the manifestation of it varies
by city, country and region, depending on the city’s level of development, cultural attitudes to
change, financial resources, technical landscape and capabilities, and overall aspirations. A smart
sustainable city in Africa would be unique to that country and the region’s context in comparison
to its counterpart in the Latin American, South Asian or North American context.

ITU-T helps to build Smart Cities in many different ways as show in Fig 1:

• Internet of Things (IoT) to enable the coordinated development of interoperable technologies.

• Big Data to define the specific capabilities required to manage massive and complex data
streams.
• 5G systems as critical infrastructure to handle the demands of fast data in real time.

• Technical Standards to harmonize and protect key ICT infrastructure investments.
• Spectrum allocation to assure interference-free wireless telecommunications.

2 U4SSC: Digital solutions for integrated city management & use cases