Smart City & Safe City

Smart City & Safe City – The Opportunity to Establish a New Standard of Living

Today, cities are a symbol of change and progress and thus a “space of the future”. As a highly complex entity, they offer their inhabitants new, unimagined possibilities: Whether you travel to work every day on an autonomous bus, or do away with the need to search for a parking space with an app that leverages near real-time information from an intelligent traffic control system – the concepts for the city of the future seem to know no limits. Many cities are actively preparing for the future. They plan the most diverse habitats with a digital twin, and use geographic information systems (GIS), building information modelling (BIM), artificial intelligence and neural networks, as well as traditional risk analysis and risk management.

Sustainable urban development is essential as urbanisation continues to increase. The proportion of the world’s population living in cities is growing steadily – up to 6.7 billion people by 2050, according to United Nations World Urbanization Prospects. As their size increases, so does the economic importance of urban areas and their contribution to the global gross domestic product, made possible by deep integration of different areas of life and work. Cities that are intelligent and connected  – in other words, smart cities – can offer their citizens a high quality of life and companies global competitive advantages.

Digitisation is increasingly defining all urban living spaces. In addition to the organisation of urban processes, it is increasingly important to react to the ever more pronounced natural hazards such as floods, storms or heat, and to improve resilience. Digital information is used to simulate future scenarios and determine the degree of preparedness.