By Yrineu Rodrigues July 31, 2023
While this is an easy selling term, properly implementing a smart city plan requires a high degree of technical and geographic knowledge (space, climate, customs and needs).
There is no “cake recipe” for the implementation of a smart city, the solutions applied in Australian cities do not apply to the context of Brazilian, Canadian or US cities and vice versa, all regions have different contexts and needs that require union between the different areas of study, making technology just a means that will provide integration between the sectors that move the urban environment.
A city cannot be called smart without adequate investment in software, hardware and data storage, sensors are basic elements for data collection in a city, but the adequate network structure is necessary to carry out and support the connection between them. . Among the essential steps for the implementation of smart city projects, we can mention: listing social and environmental needs, definition of: priorities, devices involved, interfaces for data availability and capture, software architecture, data modeling, team allocation, scope and budget, deadlines, project methodologies and maintenance planning. These elements are a “watershed” between fallacies and real projects.
It is very important that the base plan is aligned with the municipality’s management proposal, in this way the development of projects is not limited (and should not) to private initiatives, which as we all know, in the capitalist environment the goal is financial profit. It is worth mentioning that we must be based on social inclusion and adaptation of man-machine interaction, but the machine serving the man and not the other way around. City dwellers should not be required to adapt to the elements that will make up the “Smart City”, because, as previously mentioned, technology should work in a transparent and adaptive way to the environment being implemented, since intelligence in this context is linked to the harmonious interaction between inhabitants and urban elements.
On the other hand, initiatives to turn cities with disorderly growth into smart cities bring with them an entrepreneurial bias, capable of fostering integration between the different areas it covers, but it is not limited to the world of software development, which ranges from the management of projects, development of open source tools, information security, data mining, even urban studies. The transforming power of projects of this nature becomes greater than the initial purpose, and this is what we can call urban intelligence.
The title of this text brings an important reflection on the term connectivity. In the context of smart cities, connectivity should promote better interaction between man and public space and not between devices, in other words, the city should not create mechanisms that depend exclusively on personal objects (smartphones, tablets, etc.) .