This white paper examines the fundamental shift in information and communications technologies that is enabling the deployment of Smart+Connected Communities. In addition, this paper discusses the strategic information and communications technology investments that businesses and governments are making to transform the manner in which services and products are delivered via Smart+Connected Communities.
Watch: Intelligent Cities / Smart Cities
Smart Grids are critical components of Smart Cities. Looking to the future, Brazil is currently making smart grid investments to help improve the reliability of electric infrastructure, and enable economic growth and environmental sustainability.
The global drive towards the establishment of Smart Cities is well known. This drive could prove to be the only viable solution to the overwhelming tendency towards urbanisation which is predicted in the following decades, with demand for hundreds of new cities or communities within existing cities, especially in Asia.
The current trends of demographic change, with world population growing rapidly and moving en masse to major urban centres, are set to continue and change the urban landscape in the next few decades.
Smart Cities can change the urban way of life in Africa providing safer neighbourhoods, very low traffic-congestion, a low carbon environment and houses that run themselves. All these futuristic-sounding innovations will be available not at some point in the far future but in the next five years according to the upcoming Smart Cities summit in South Africa.
The global drive to invest in Smart Cities opens new opportunities for the contruction sector, especially in particular areas. Despite the reduction of public infrastructure spending there are other areas of smart development that can provide great opportunities for construction
The rapid urbanisation currently underway in Asia means that there is an equally rapid growth rate not just for the construction market in general, but for smart buildings in particular.