Smart City

The pressure to redesign city infrastructures is strong, since climate change and the problem of allocation are defining new requirements, which will not be met through cosmetic and maintenance repairs. In particular, energy infrastructures like water, waste or recycling are affected by this issue.
The following description draws a picture for future smart cities.
Innovative infrastructures will be characterised through digital management systems based on real time data processing. Infrastructure components and communal rooms are interconnected due to innovative communications systems. Decentralised systems are connected with central networks and buildings will produce energy as decentralised energy providers. Traffic will be resource saving through emission-free individual, economical and public transport and new mobility concepts will be established. The public administration will be evolved to an open government, which provides open data and services and develops new governance structures with respect to participative communications, stable health care structures and public safety strategies. [1]
The European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities has identified the need for an approach of more integrated infrastructures, which have led to the creation of a reference architecture with the view to provide a vendor agnostic, interoperable, and standards-based orientation for an open urban platform to cities and communities. [2]
In a broader context, the term Smart Government has been arisen to address not only the local level, but rather all levels of government. In accordance to smart cities, it addresses an intelligently networked governance, which uses the opportunities of interconnected smart objects and cyber physical systems for the efficient and effective performance of public tasks. [3]

[1]    TU Berlin (n.d.), Smart City Definition, http://www.smartcity.tu-berlin.de/smart-city-definition-an-der-tu-berlin-smart-city-platform/, retrieved March 20, 2018.
[2]    DIN SPEC 91357:2017-12, Reference Architecture Model Open Urban Platform (OUP)
[3]    Von Lucke, J., Grosse, K. (2017), Open Approaches for smart government: Impulses from Germany, International Journal of Digital and Data Law, 3, 1-18.