Smart and Sustainable Cities in Collaboration with IoT: The Singapore Success Case

Abstract

AbstractA smart city is an urban space focused on improving the quality of life of its citizens through the intensive use of technology to support social and economic development, where multiple areas cooperate systematically to achieve sustainable collective results at all levels. In this sense, Internet usage has reached a point where it has become essential in everyday life: the need to have information at hand in the shortest possible time has generated a technological revolution around the constant connection with this tool. Thus, personal life and everyday objects have created the need to continuously monitor and understand what surrounds the human being, hence the birth of the Internet of Things (IoT); and the convergence between the environment, human interaction and technology has given rise to the concept of smart and sustainable cities (SSC). However, given the current state of these concepts, it is necessary to apply for an introductory contextualized conceptual review on Smart and Sustainable Cities, and then characterize them from the establishment of broad categories with their respective subcategories: Smart Mobility (Mobility Integration, Sustainable Public Transport Service, Electric and Autonomous Vehicles); Energy Efficiency (Renewable Energies, Natural Resources Management and measurement of environmental parameters—Emissions, Water Consumption Efficiency); and Smart Health (telehealth and solutions provided by information and communication technologies (ICT); and the use of ICT for generation, transmission, and processing of information (Machine learning, IoT, sensor grids, Cloud Computing, Big Data). Based on the above, this chapter comparatively addresses concepts on the present of SSC in collaboration with IoT: advantages and disadvantages, reception, adaptability, and vulnerability in data. The city-nation of Singapore is assessed through a quantitative evaluation in terms of GMSDIL (Governance, Mobility, Sustainability, Economic Development, Intellectual Capital and Quality of Life) as a successful city, concluding from the qualitative description under this model, an urban resilience that has allowed the improvement of the quality of life of its citizens, even in traumatic circumstances and catastrophic effects such as those of the current pandemic.KeywordsICTInternetIoTSmart and sustainable citiesUrban resilienceSingapore