Smart City

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Smart Cities
Readiness Guide

SMART CITIES READIN
The planning manual for

ESS GUIDE

building tomorrow’s citie
s today

The Quick Tour
Information and communications technology
offers solutions to the challenges cities face.
To help public officials envision and apply these
“smart” solutions, the Smart Cities Council
created a groundbreaking resource called the
Smart Cities Readiness Guide. This Quick Tour
explains why the Readiness Guide belongs in
your virtual library.

The Readiness Guide can help your city ...
"The Smart Cities Council
Readiness Guide offers
us new ideas and has
helped set the foundation
for our 2030 planning. It
is the tool that will help
Hartford move forward.”
Hartford, CT Mayor Pedro E. Segarra

Develop a smart cities “wish list”
With more than 50 case studies from
pioneering cities around the world, the Guide
showcases what can be done – and how cities
are doing it.

Get ideas for “starter” projects
Experts suggest starting with a smart city
project that has a small upfront investment, a
quick turnaround and a rapid payback – and
the Guide provides examples.

Build your projects on 27
foundational principles recommended
by the world’s leading experts
Use the Guide’s checklist to gauge your
progress. Then move forward with confidence
by following its 27 essential best practices.

Connect all the dots
A smart city is a “system of systems” with
numerous dependencies, which is why the
Guide covers eight city responsibilities in
depth – transportation, public safety and water
among them.

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

Introducing the
Smart Cities
Readiness Guide
In this Readiness Guide “Quick Tour” you’ll see
how cities around the world are enhancing
operations and improving services for their
citizens with the implementation of smart
technologies. Most importantly, you’ll see how the
Readiness Guide can help your city do the same.

What’s a smart city?
A smart city applies
information and
communications technology
(ICT) to solve problems.
Broadly speaking, ICT enables
cities to do three key things:
collect data, communicate
data, and analyze (or “crunch”) data. So
the short answer is: A smart city is an ICTenabled city.
Here’s a quick example from the Readiness
Guide that shows how ICT capabilities
provided a solution to a serious problem in
South Bend, Indiana. The city had wastewater
spilling into the St. Joseph River and welling
up in residents’ basements. One proposed

remedy was to spend $120 million to expand
the city’s wastewater capacity. City leaders,
however, went another direction. They
deployed electronically controlled valves and
sensors to proactively monitor and control the
wastewater system in an entirely new way. At
a budget-friendly price tag of $6 million, the
city was able to use smart instrumentation
and controls to manage the problem. How
South Bend overcame its wastewater woes
is just one of dozens of real-life smart city
successes featured in the Readiness Guide.

THE THREE CORE FUNCTIONS OF A SMART CITY

Collect information
You can download the complete 281-page
Smart Cities Council Readiness Guide as a
PDF file at the Smart Cities Council website.

about current conditions
across all responsibility
areas (power, water, transit,
buildings, etc.).

Communicate

information, sometimes
to other devices, sometimes to a control center
and sometimes to servers
running powerful software.

Crunch

data, analyzing
it to provide information, to
optimize operations and to
predict what might happen
next.

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Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

Pulling it all together

The Readiness Guide
provides expert advice for the
“intersections.” Where energy
intersects instrumentation,
for instance, you have
devices such as smart
meters. Where it intersects
data management you have
meter data management
systems (MDMS). Where it
intersects computing you
have outage management
systems and dozens of other
cutting edge applications.
When you take this view,
it becomes easier to
understand why and how
to share infrastructure,
share policies, share costs
and share data between
departments.

Let’s look at both enablers
and responsibilities in more
detail to understand how
their intersections can bring
amazing benefits to cities.

Payments

Public Safety

Health and Human Service

Water and Wastewater

Transportation

Telecommunications

Energy

Built Environment

realize that all departments
will eventually need
connectivity — and they
will — it becomes easier to
cost-justify a multi-purpose
communications network
that can be used for many
applications. Consider
Corpus Christi, Texas by
way of example. Originally
installed to support smart
meters for water and gas,
its city wide network now
supports public safety
personnel and building
inspectors while also
providing public Internet
access on buses and in
public spaces. Likewise,
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
operates more than 200
municipal applications on a
single network.

Universal Aspects

The blue columns are the
city responsibilities. Universal
aspects common to all
responsibilities are in orange.
The green rows are the
enabling technologies that
can make those responsibility
areas smart and sustainable.

The Smart City
Framework
Instrumentation and Control
TECHNOLOGY ENABLERS

The Smart Cities Framework
is the key to understanding
the big picture and how the
different pieces relate.

CITY RESPONSIBILITIES

Connectivity
Interoperability
Security and Privacy
Data Management
Computing Resources
Analytics

For instance, when you

3

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

What types of smart technology are used?
Okay, so smart cities take
advantage of today’s rapidly
improving information and
communications technology
(ICT). But what comes under
the ICT umbrella?
The Readiness Guide identifies seven
technology categories that enable smart
cities. And, no surprise, it calls them enablers.
One enabler, for example, is instrumentation,
which refers to smart meters, for instance, or
roadway sensors. Another enabler is a highperformance data management system.
These enablers can apply to any area of
city responsibility. For instance, an enabling
technology can make buildings more efficient,
water more affordable, transportation quicker,
or neighborhoods safer. Moreover, enablers
push cities toward overarching goals we call
targets, that every smart city should aim for.
The Readiness Guide references 27 important
targets.

Enabler

Technology function

Instrumentation
& Control

Examples include smart meters for electricity, water and gas; air quality
sensors; closed circuit TV and video monitors, and roadway sensors.
Switches and control systems operate equipment remotely.

Connectivity

Enables a smart city’s devices to communicate with each other and with a
control center. Connectivity ensures that data gets from where it is collected
to where it is analyzed and used. Examples include citywide WiFi networks,
RF mesh networks and cellular networks.

Interoperability

Ensures that products and services from disparate providers can exchange
information and work together seamlessly. It prevents the city from being
“locked in” to just one proprietary supplier and allows cities to buy from any
company that supports the city’s chosen standards.

Security & Privacy

Includes technologies, policies and practices that safeguard data, privacy
and physical assets. Examples include the publishing of clear privacy rules
and the implementation of a cybersecurity system.

Data Management

Includes storing, protecting and processing data while guaranteeing its
accuracy, accessibility, reliability and timeliness. Data is king in a smart city.
Proper management is essential to maintain data integrity and value.

Computing Resources

Refers to 1) computer processing power 2) storage of data and 3) special
capabilities needed for smart cities. A geographic information system (GIS)
is one essential capability, since it allows the smart city to know where
everything is located.

Analytics

Creates value from the data that instrumentation provides. Analytics can
identify new insights and unique solutions to delivering services. It can even
predict problems while there is still time to prevent them.

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Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

What problems can smart technology solve?
Cities are responsible for a variety
of functions that impact the wellbeing of a community. ICT impacts
all of them. The Readiness Guide
identifies eight of these functional
areas, or responsibilities.

!

Built environment
The built environment
includes a city’s buildings,
parks and public spaces.
The city of Bremen, Germany
wanted to unify more than

control stations across the
city were running a variety of
proprietary building control
systems. After analyzing the
options, the city’s property
services company settled on
a vendor-agnostic BMS. That
approach allowed the city
to consolidate the various
legacy systems into a single
operator interface. Now
regional supervisors working
from any location can log
onto the system and troubleshoot problems in real time
at any of the city of Bremen’s
buildings. Energy consumption in the buildings is down
15 percent to 18 percent.

Energy
1,200 municipal properties under a single building
management system (BMS)
to optimize the efficiency of
heating systems and reduce energy consumption.
The challenge was that six

The infrastructure to produce
and deliver energy, primarily
electricity and gas.
In 2011, Chattanooga,
Tennessee’s Electric Power Board installed a smart
grid that has achieved a 55

percent reduction in outage
time. The area’s businesses will save an estimated
$40-$45 million a year, while
the overall savings are likely
to be $600 million over the
first 10 years of deployment.
The project included many
smart city functions: a WiFi
network for the city and the
utility, street light controls,
surveillance cameras, ultrahigh-speed Internet, voice,
and video access to all residents. In addition, the project
included a high-speed grid
monitoring and control
system along with circuit
reclosers at key points along
the power lines. Those smart
switches allow operators to
pinpoint the location of an
outage, cutting down on the
need for physical inspectors
and saving hours or even
days.

Telecommunications

greener urban environment.

Some cities build a citywide
communications network
for both people and devices (sensors). But many do
not build, own or operate
their telecommunications
infrastructure. This responsibility pertains to providing
the policy environment
and incentives to achieve
high-quality telecommunications necessary to be globally
competitive.

It teamed with a large ecosystem of private and commercial partners to deploy a
citywide broadband network
that forms a strong foundation for the delivery of smart
services and a wide-open
marketplace supporting economic growth.

Amster­dam, for example, is

the financial and cultural capital of the Netherlands and
strives to be one of Europe’s
greenest, most sustainable
cities – all while continuing to maintain economic
growth. The city developed
a plan for collaborating,
envisioning, developing and
testing connected solutions
to pave the way to a smarter,

Transportation
A city’s roads, streets, bike
paths, trail systems, vehicles,
railways, subways, buses,
bicycles, streetcars, ferries,
air and maritime ports.
Bucheon City is a bustling
area that promotes itself as
the cultural hub of metropolitan Seoul, Korea. The city
lacked the insight it needed
to reduce traffic congestion
and minimize emergency
response times. The big
problem: Traffic data from its
existing solution was highly
inaccurate. For areas where
a vehicle detection monitor
was not installed, the city
was monitoring traffic flow
and counting manually from
closed-circuit television
video, a time-consuming
task that often resulted in
inaccurate data. Without
better traffic monitoring,
the city struggled to reduce
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Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

congestion, manage traffic and meet the needs of
its citizens. To overcome
the problem, Bucheon City
implemented a solution that
Increased accuracy of traffic
volume data from 50 percent (or less) to 90 percent,
ensuring that drivers receive
more accurate reports on
traffic tie-ups and suggested
route changes. It increased
the speed of collecting traffic
data by over 1,200 percent,
enabling the city to deliver
traffic information to drivers,
law enforcement and emergency responders in real
time.

Health and human
services
The health and human
services responsibility is
about providing essential
health care, education
and social services for a
city’s residents to enhance
livability. Even when a city
isn’t directly providing
education or human services
it should advocate for them.

Tainan City Education
Center is responsible for
the technology needs of
the Taiwan city’s 275 public
K–9 schools. Each school
traditionally hosted its own
server infrastructure. The
many, widely dispersed
schools made it challenging
and costly to provide quality support. The education
center is migrating to a new
centralized IT infrastructure
based on a private cloud
model. Education center
officials anticipate that the

new infrastructure will save
the city US$344,000 per
year in hardware and support
costs. It will also reduce the
district’s carbon emissions
by 2,610 tons annually. In
addition, teachers can take
advantage of cutting-edge
technology to improve classroom materials, and students
have increased access to
educational resources.

Water and wastewater
Pipes, distribution centers,
catchment areas, treatment
facilities, pump stations,
plants and even the water
meters at private homes are
all essential components of
the water and wastewater
responsibility. Water purity
and cleanliness are also
addressed here.
The Long Beach, California
water department is responsible for keeping the city’s
487,000 residents supplied
with clean, good-tasting
water. It is also responsible
for the safe delivery of wastewater to its nearby sewage
treatment facilities. It’s a
complex system consisting
of nearly 30,000 different
data points. Operating its remote facilities and treatment
plants efficiently requires
Long Beach Water to use
sophisticated technology
to help maintain communi­
cations over the entire system in real time. To enable its
control room staff to effectively monitor and manage
more than 90 remote telemetry units and a groundwater
treatment facility, the water
department uses a comprehensive PC-based solution
with human machine interface (HMI) software. The
system provides real-time
visualization capabilities to
monitor and control different
sites. The department polls

remote sites an average of
once every minute to ensure
efficient operations. The data
is stored, enabling the water
department’s main office to
have simultaneous access
to multiple data inputs from
pumps, valves and equipment throughout the city.
Operators have a complete
picture of the city’s water
system processes at any
given time, thereby improving
overall performance.

day in the field. Their cars are
now like mini-offices. Their
routers mounted their in
vehicles, officers have highspeed access to criminal records right in their cars. Within seconds they can perform
a background search from
a laptop computer or pull up
mug shots and fingerprint
profiles to quickly identify
a suspect. They can also
create and file reports from
their laptops. Likewise, Rock
Hill fire department vehicles
are equipped with mobile
routers enabling firefighters
to download documentation
such as building blueprints

Public safety
Cities are responsible for the
infrastructure, agencies and
personnel to keep citizens,
and visitors safe. Examples
include police and fire
departments, emergency
and disaster prevention and
management agencies,
courts and corrections
facilities.
The city of Rock Hill, South
Carolina has deployed a wireless mesh communications
that allow police officers to
spend two more hours per

and hazmat data on their
way to an emergency call
so they are better prepared
upon arrival.

Payments
Payments link a payer and a
payee and reference all the
key contributors involved:
merchants, consumers,
businesses, banks, payment
6

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour
instruments providers, and
payment schemes. Cities can
support the development of
a widespread, safe banking
system, and encourage
residents to use smart
NFC-enabled cards, mobile
phones linked to banking, and
electronic payments.
Toronto needed to streamline
the disburse­ment of social
benefits. And to reduce the
cost of collecting the funds
for those recipients, since
one in four do not have a
bank account to receive
direct bank deposits. To address this challenge, the city
developed the Instant Issue
City Services Benefits program. The program included
a new prepaid card that can
be instantly issued with secure printing, personalization
and encoding, at any one of
the 15 Toronto Employment
and Social Services offices.
Funds are loaded on the
prepaid card, which is then
usable anywhere by the recipient. Switching from direct
deposits and check cashing
services generated huge savings for both recipients and
the city. Published estimates
claim more than $250 a year
can be saved for a single client receiving $600 a month.
The city itself expects net
savings of at least $2.5 million annually by eliminating
the cost of issuing checks.
Finally, this new digitalized
instrument also provides the

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7

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

The power of smart technology “integration”
Cities often tackle challenges in a
piecemeal fashion, due to short-term
financial constraints and long-term
traditions that divide city functions into
separate, “siloed” departments with
little interaction. As a result, many projects are built
to solve a single problem in a single department,
creating “islands of automation” that duplicate
expenses while making it difficult to share systems
or data.
The Readiness Guide emphasizes that building a smart
city requires a system-wide
view and an integrated approach. Such holistic thinking and collaborative work
are hard, but it can save time
and enable new services
that were not possible in an
isolated, siloed model. For
instance, a city department
can drastically cut the development time for a new application by re-using data and
software modules already
created by other departments. Or a municipal water
utility can drastically cut the
cost of a communications
network by using one already
built out for an electric
utility. A city can sometimes
reduce overall information
technology (IT) costs by as
much as 25 percent just by

implementing a master IT
architecture and technology
roadmap.
A city becomes truly smart
when it takes a holistic,
big-picture, integrated view.
When it shares infrastructure
rather than duplicating functionality in each department.
When it creates citywide policies for crucial aspects such
as cybersecurity and data

privacy, rather than hoping
each department will get it
right on its own.

Buildings

When the city of Honolulu
took the holistic approach, it was able to
save 30 percent on
its software licensPublic
es. When the city
Safety
of Chattanooga
shared a fiber-optic communications
network between its
businesses and its power
utility, it got not only
a state-of-the-art
smart grid, but
also a source of
Water
income. By providing Internet access
to residents, the city
brings in more than $50
million per year.
This does not suggest that
cities must finance and
implement dozens of investments at one time. It’s often
appropriate to begin with just
one or two projects. What is
critical is that these projects
all fall into a larger, integrated
plan so that city investments
are not redundant.
Glendale Water and Power
(GWP), located in Southern
California, went for an integrated technology approach

Energy

Telecomm

Payments

Human
Services

when it implemented a
smart grid in which a single
communication system
integrates both electric and
water meters. This smart
grid system features a meter
data management solution
to manage the huge volumes
of data the system generates
and enable other smart grid
programs and applications.

Transport

Other components include
distribution automation,
in-home display units that
provide electricity and water
usage information, and
even electric vehicle smart
charging.

8

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

‘Smart’ is about more than technology
Cities leverage ICT not only to fix broken
systems, but to enhance a city’s overall
livability, workability and sustainability.

Livability
Smart cities improve
livability in numerous ways.
For one, they revolutionize
people’s relationship with city
government. By providing
instant, electronic access
to the information people
need, the services they
require, and the interaction
they want, cities build citizen
trust and satisfaction. Smart
cities enable citizens to
fully visualize their city’s
traffic, energy, gas and water
networks. Real-time alerts
and real-time monitoring
promote health and public
safety by quickly notifying
citizens about fires, floods,
air quality issues, public
disturbances, pipeline leaks,
downed electricity lines,
chemical spills, snowstorms
and snow plows, and more.

Workability
Smart cities accelerate
economic development by
creating a high-performance
infrastructure that attracts

businesses and protects
them from cybercrime.
Smart cities that institute
data via Open Data or similar
programs unleash their data
sets to be used by clever
developers to build hundreds
of “apps” for citizens and
city employees. Both the
Readiness Guide and
SmartCitiesCouncil.com
Apps Gallery provide many,
many examples from the
thousands that have already
been built for cities around
the world. Increasingly mobile
businesses and professionals
are attracted to cities that
have a strong, compelling
vision for a better future.

Sustainability
Smart cities reduce resource
use through optimization.
The gains from optimization
and improved planning mean
that cities, their businesses
and their residents
consume less water, gas
and power.. Smart cities
also reduce duplication of
effort and reduce costs

through infrastructure
sharing. Here are a few of
the elements that can often
be purchased or designed
just once and reused
many times: geographical
information systems (GIS);
communications networks;
cybersecurity designs and
implementations; database
management systems;
enterprise service buses;
workforce and field crew
management architecture,
and operations centers.

One way cities are helping
improve their citizens’ lives is
by opening up data for apps
development to disseminate
timely information about
public safety, public health,
transportation and other
services that impact the public.
For instance, the INRIX Traffic
app shown here on a Windows
Phone helps users decide
which route is the best choice
to get around traffic.
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Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

How smart cities change the game
What
makes a
smart city
different
from
what might be called a
“traditional” city? Here’s
a quick summary of
how problems inherent
in traditional cities are
addressed with a smart
city approach.

The Problem

The Smart City Solution

Planning

• Ad hoc and decentralized
• Cost savings aren’t realized
• Limited potential for scalability of investment







Infrastructure

• Runs inefficiently
• Costs more money and resources to run

• Optimized with cutting-edge technology
• Saves money and resources
• Improved service-level agreements

• Guess at infrastructure conditions
• React to problems
• Can’t deploy resources efficiently to address
problems







Enjoy real-time reporting on infrastructure conditions
Predict and prevent problems
Deploy resources more efficiently
Automate maintenance
Save money

• Piecemeal and siloed
• Deliver suboptimal benefit
• Don’t realize economies of scale






Centrally planned
Deployed across city departments and projects
Deliver optimal benefit
Provide maximum value and savings

• Limited, scattered online connection to citizens
• Citizens can’t make optimal use of city services
(or easily find them)








Complete and singular online presence
Citizens can easily find and use services
Citizens can participate in smart city initiatives
Two-way communications between government and people
Specialized services focused on the individual citizen
Citizens can both contribute to and access real-time
intelligent city data

• Departments and functions are siloed
• Departments rarely share data and
collaborate on initiatives

• Departments and functions are integrated and/or shared
• Data is shared between departments and better
correlated with other data services
• Results are improved
• Costs are cut

System operators

ICT investments

Citizen
engagement

Sharing data

Coordinated and holistic
Resources are shared
Cost savings are fully realized
Investments are scalable
Improved city planning and forecasting

10

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

How to get started
Becoming a smart city is a long
march. It requires planning. It requires
leadership. It requires financing. It also
requires seeing the barriers that may
stand in your way.
The Readiness Guide warns
how these lurking obstacles
stand can impede any smart
city initiative. It also provides
advice on how to overcome
them.

Siloed city departments.

Cities are often prone to tackling challenges in a piecemeal
fashion, due to short-term
financial constraints and
long-term traditions that
divide city functions into separate departments that have
little interaction with other
departments.

Lack of financing. Tax rev-

enues are shrinking in many
cities, making infrastructure
projects increasingly difficult
to finance.

Lack of ICT know-how.

Industry has developed highly
sophisticated ICT skills, yet
few city governments have
had the budget or the vision
to push the state of the art.
Since smart cities are essentially the injection of ICT into

every phase of operations,
this lack of ICT skills puts
cities at a unfortunate disadvantage.

Lack of integrated services. To the extent cities

have applied ICT in the past,
they applied it to their internal,
siloed operations. The result
has been a grab-bag of aging
applications that only city
employees can use. There is
no reason that citizens who
want, for instance, to open
a restaurant should have to
make multiple applications to
multiple city departments.

Lack of citizen engagement. The smart cities

movement is often held back
by a lack of clarity about
what a smart city is and what
it can do for citizens. As a
result, many stakeholders are
unaware of the smart city options that have found success
already.

Lack of a smart city
visionary. Every parade

SILOED CITY FUNCTIONS
Apps

Apps

Apps

Apps

Platform

Platform

Platform

Platform

Data

Data

Data

Data

GIS

GIS

GIS

GIS

Communications

Communications

Communications

Communications

Electric

Water

Transport

Emergency

Apps

Platform

Data

GIS

Communications

INTEGRATED CITY FUNCTIONS
needs a leader. Sometimes
that leadership comes from
an elected official – a mayor
or council person who acts
as the smart city champion.
Smart city leadership can
also come from elsewhere in

the administration or it may
come from outside city hall
altogether.
The Readiness Guide examines all of these hurdles and
suggests best practices cities

can use for citizen engagement, policy and leadership,
finance and procurement. It
also points to smart city projects that can generate “quick
wins” to gain civic support.
11

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

Creating a smart city roadmap
A critical tool for translating your smart city initiatives into on-the-ground
realities will be development of your roadmap. A roadmap is a simplified
outline of the major steps to becoming a smart city. It’s important to have
one because the path to a smart city is a long one.
It can easily take 5, 10, even
15 years to make smart
technologies pervasive. You’ll
need to keep the high-level
view in place that clearly
tells citizens where you’re
headed and serves to guide
the course corrections that
will be needed along the
way. The Readiness Guide

discusses roadmap develop­
ment in depth. It covers the
elements of a roadmap, the
process of building your
roadmap, and success strategies for your roadmap.
Dubuque, Iowa is becoming

the model of a sustainable
midsize city thanks to the
60,000 citizens of Dubuque
who worked to establish a
unified vision of what sustainability means to them
as a community. One key
question in the Dubuque
process was where
to start. After
the first few
months
of planning,
several ideas
made it to the table,
reflecting the wish lists
of a variety of groups. The
filtering process took the
form of a two-day workshop
that dove deeply into issues
of payback, practicality and
timing. Moderated jointly by
technology consultants and
key city officials, and involving no fewer than 83 people
with diverse perspectives,
the sessions produced both
a clear consensus on where
to focus and a roadmap for
action. The decision to lead
off with a water conservation

initiative was in many
ways an outgrowth
of Dubuque’s
existing efforts

to revitalize its Mississippi
waterfront areas. But another
key factor was the pragmatic
desire to take advantage of a
water meter replacement program that was already in the
works, which would effectively lower the risk and cost of
implementing it.

12

Smart Cities Readiness Guide: The Quick Tour

Readiness Guide FAQs

?

Who
created the
Readiness
Guide?

The Smart
Cities Council
is an industry coalition that
includes more than two
dozen of the world’s leading
smart city practitioners,
big and small. It is advised
by more than six dozen
independent experts from
national laboratories,
universities, climate groups,
standards bodies and
technolkogy associations.
They collaborated to
provide objective, vendorneutral information to help
leaders make educated,
confident choices about
the technologies that can
transform their cities.

What’s the purpose of
the Readiness Guide?
The guide has two
purposes. First is to give
you a vision of a smart
city. Today’s information
and communications
technologies offer exciting
and realistic “smart” solutions
to the challenges presented
by urbanized environments.
Mayors, city managers, city
planners and their staffs can
learn and understand what’s

possible by consulting the
Readiness Guide.
The second goal is to help
you construct your own
roadmap to a smart city
future. You’ll find goals to
which your city should aspire,
features and functions you
should specify, and best
practices that will gain you
the maximum benefits for
the minimum cost. The guide
also provides an array of case
studies that show what many
cities are already achieving.

Does the Readiness Guide
information only apply
to cities?
No. Real-world smart city
examples are rarely “a city” in
the strictest term. Many are
more than a single city, such
as a metropolitan region, or
a regional coalition. Other
examples are less than a fullscale city, such as districts,
neighborhoods, townships,
villages, campuses and
military bases.

city development and then
moves into separate chapters
that detail how individual
city responsibilities – power,
transportation, public safety,
payments, etc. – can be
transformed with ICT. Two
final chapters cover how to
translate the guide’s theories
into a roadmap. Scattered
throughout the guide are reallife vignettes showing how
cities are applying smart city
solutions in real life.

How can a city determine
where to apply smart
technologies first?
Because every city is
different, every city must
decide what it will pursue
first and what goals it
hopes to achieve. Some
cities may choose to tackle
transportation first, for
instance, while others may
feel that a more reliable
electric grid is most urgent.

How is the Readiness
Guide put together?

Isn’t smart city
technology changing
rapidly? What’s the shelf
life of the Readiness
Guide?

The Readiness Guide is
comprised of multiple
chapters. It starts by
examining universal
principles that apply to smart

Change is continuous, and
technology advances are
famously unpredictable.
The goals discussed in the
Readiness Guide are the

SMART CITI
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The planning

manual for

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DINESS GU

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s today

IDE

Click
here to
download
The Smart
Cities
Readiness
Guide

best recommendations we
can make today, as informed
by a large contingent of the
world’s top experts. They will
put cities on the right path,
but cities will still need to
make periodic evaluations
and course corrections as
technology evolves.

as a PDF file at the Smart
Cities Council website. You
can optionally gain access to
other resources, such as the
Smart Cities Financing Guide,
eBooks, case studies and a
free email newsletter.

The Smart Cities Council
is here to help cities make
those corrections. The
Readiness Guide is a
“living document” that will
be updated frequently to
ensure the latest and best
technologies and best
practices are included.

How do I get the
Readiness Guide?
You can download the FREE
281-page Smart Cities
Council Readiness Guide
13

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