Smart Cities – Transportation: How intelligent urban surroundings help us to be more flexible
Over the years, people have come up with many names for a new urban planning movement: smart city, intelligent city, learning city, digital city, smart growth city… By reflecting new ways of evaluating our urban environments, smart cities acknowledge how residents live, feel, and grow – they „think“ about their inhabitants. As part of our series on smart cities and their advantages, Bettery magazine kicks off with a brief definition of „smart“ and what this means for transportation.
Defining the term – what exactly is a “smart city”?
Cities are networks: they host a variety of agents that interact on very complex levels. In order for cities to “grow” and “live,” they need to be attractive to residents, businesses, and visitors alike. And they require efficient future investments to remain competitive with other urban centers. To retain and enhance their competitive edge, cities can deliberately engage and connect their different networks, helping them to achieve sustainability and identifying previously overlooked areas of growth: Cities need to become “smarter.”