Vision: Smart City

The rapid development of information technologies changes the image of modern cities profoundly. In order to ensure a normal urban life, an infrastructure, which is essentially different and uses intelligent networks, is necessary. Smart technologies will become the foundation for the construction of future mega cities. In 10 years, many infrastructural measures will have been implemented.

Smart Cities and Smart Homes will then be benefiting from the introduction of a digital ledger technology such as IOTA. By combining sensors, smart contracts and high security in Tangle, the management of mega cities will be able to visibly improve the quality of life of the population.

McKinsey’s predictions demonstrate that in 2020, there will be at least six hundred cities with smart technologies on this planet. Until 2050, these urban clusters will provide for around 70 percent of the GDP. The market for those cities will amount to around 400 billion per year. We assume that in 10 years, all big cities in this world are interconnected and linked with IOTA in many aspects. Of course, it’s still a way to go, but following visions may already be reality in 10 years’ time.

Intelligent buildings: Locations where information networks and technological communication are administered in a unified control system. This enables interaction between different service systems. For instance, an office building can be heated before the workday begins and the climatization can be adjusted to the current temperature of the rooms. The control system considers the amount of people in the building and rates the quality of the air in order to enable a pleasant stay. After everyone has left, the building automatically turns on the energy-saving mode. It’s true that the Smart City requires a considerable technological capacity, in order to enable millions of Smart Homes to work.

Intelligent infrastructure: Intelligent networks monitor traffic, gather traffic regulations and immediately react to incidents. There’s no need to worry about the innovative parking lot, since the system calculates the most logistic route.

Appropriate consumption: Innovation in energy and water consumption. This could refer to progressive programs, which manage the consumption of water and technologies in relation with renewable energies. They make for control the water consumption and improved communication networks in order to provide environmental safety of the system.

In the next few months, all IOTA projects that have been started today will become pilot projects for the beginning of countless new Smart City projects. To name a few:

Haarlem

Last year, the Netherlands were the first country to implement IOTA (MIOTA) in their governmental organizations, starting with the city of Haarlem.

Commissioned by the municipality of Haarlem, ICTU and Xurux developed a Proof of Concept to administrate and verify legal documents regarding housing within public registers via the open source network “Tangle” created by the IOTA Foundation.

Taipei

Taipei signed a partnership agreement with the Germany-based IOTA Foundation to explore Smart City solutions based on Tangle. The city has already launched a number of projects including digital identification and air quality monitoring systems. Taipei has become one of the first cities in the world to test out IOTA.

“A lot of people probably have the notion that blockchain technology is universal, but it’s not,” said Lman Chu, the co-founder of Biilabs, a start-up looking for a better Smart City solution than blockchain. The Taiwan start-up is collaborating with the Taipei City government and working with the IOTA Foundation to provide the core technology for the smart city projects.

+CityxChange

The consortium/syndicate +CityxChange, which the IOTA Foundation belongs to as well, received financial help for a lighthouse project as part of an EU research and innovation program.

In order to try out smart energy innovations, seven EU cities have been given a total of 30 million euro. 25 companies and organizations including the distributed ledger technology IOTA form the consortium “+CityxChange”. The group lead by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) competed with 11 other suggestions for the development of energy-independent cities. The blockchain technology will be used to improve the quality of life in European cities.

In the next five years, the European cities Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru will be testing digital services in order to improve the quality of life and to generate more energy than is being used. They will share their experiences with cities in all of Europe in order to drive forth the further development of the “Smart City”.

Funds of 20 million euro will be provided by the European research and innovation program Horizon in 2020. Some of the project partners will provide 10 million euro in kind for the local implementation of display projects in Trondheim and Limerick. The project +CityxChange has been praised by independent experts for contributing to a further diffusion in the future.

All submitted energy solutions include local authorities and residents who will “include the entire energy supply chain of the district and doesn’t extend to profit organisations, but to high-ranking political decision makers, cities, universities, large businesses, distributed network operators and KMU”.

Based on IOTA

Wilfried Pimenta, Head of Business Development of the IOTA Foundation describes the project as “based to 100 percent of the IOTA Foundation”:

Smart Cities belong to the fastest growing innovation areas across sectors for IOTA. Basen on our work and our partnerships in mobility, energy or the data market, the smart urban ecosystems unite everything.

The Norwegian co-founder of the IOTA Foundation, David Sønstebø, is looking forward to the project and cooperation with Norway’s biggest university, the NTNU:

“The opportunity to explore and showcase IOTA’s potential in the context of Smart Cities in numerous European cities will be of high value to the future.”

The Future of Smart Cities Belongs to IOTA

The time has come where an increasing number of Smart Cities will come into existence. IOTA may be the key for a future concept of data transfer and payments.

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