Page 229 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

Overview of smart sustainable cities infrastructure
Executive Summary

The goal of this report is to provide a technical overview on infrastructure related to information
and communications technology (ICT) and specifically, to develop smart sustainable cities (SSC). This
document is divided into five sections.
The world is facing a structural change process associated with the development and application of
the ICT. ICT have the capacity to provide intelligence to traditional infrastructure, turning it into a
smart infrastructure. Here, it is important to note that traditional infrastructures also facilitate the
deployment of communications networks.

This development and innovation in the ICT sector along with its potential to upgrade traditional
infrastructure, enables the construction of SSC as envisioned by ITU. According to research
conducted by FG‐SSC, there are multiple stakeholders who can contribute meaningfully to the
establishment of SSC in the future. These stakeholders are actively involved in the development and
deployment of the required infrastructure for SSC.
This document on SSC infrastructure elaborates on the architecture of SSC. The architecture of SSC
is divided into four layers namely: sensing, communication, data and application layer. For the digital
infrastructure of SSC, there are different telecommunications networks required for data centers,
specialized software, sensors etc.
While planning the national deployment of ICT infrastructure, there are two aspects to be
considered. First is the deployment of new ICT infrastructure and second is the improvement of the
current infrastructure. These deployment strategies should focus on boosting both supply and
demand.

As mentioned in this document, evolution to SSC may start from varying degrees of urbanization
(depending on the current development of each urban area. Existing cities which have embarked on
the SSC journey, can help other upcoming cities by providing with valuable lessons to be learnt for
the SSC transition.

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 219