Page 45 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

data from social networking services (SNS) (e.g. Twitter), web archives, and scientific databases,
which are collected and accumulated via the Internet from various individuals and organizations.

A smart city should have carried out risk assessment with respect to its susceptibility to various
natural disasters and should have a strategy in place to deal with natural disasters to which it is
highly susceptible.

Cities worldwide are placing increasing importance on building up resilience to natural disasters.
These include flooding, extreme weather, as well as heat and water stress, all linked to climate
change. Sophisticated ICT infrastructure combined with analytical capabilities aid smart cities
confronted by natural disasters to manage the information flow. This may be between multiple
public agencies, such as transport authorities, emergency services and energy providers, and
citizens. City municipalities may rely on mobile networks to reach the majority of its citizens at short
64
notice.
The Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) published a study in 2010
estimating that major coastal cities including Miami, New Orleans, Tokyo and New York, would rely
65
on flood defences to protect as many as 150 million people by 2070.
A smart city's disaster resilience solutions should cover observation systems, information gathering
capabilities, data analysis and decision‐making aids. These components matched with an intelligent
and interoperable warning system will enable cities to respond effectively to natural disasters. This
heavily depends on the municipality's uses of ICT infrastructure, including mobile networks, to
efficiently receive, process, analyse and redistribute data, and mobilize various city services.

4 Conclusions

The end goal for a smart sustainable city is to achieve an economically sustainable urban
environment without sacrificing the comfort and convenience/quality of life of citizenry.
A smart sustainable city strives to create a sustainable living environment for all its citizens through
the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The various attributes of a smart
sustainable city need to be identified and can be used as part of the metrics and reference points
for defining the smartness and the sustainability of a city. This will help contribute to a better, more
in‐depth understanding of what constitutes a smart sustainable city.
While the actual development of key performance indicators (KPIs) for a smart sustainable city is
outside the scope of this Technical Report, The latter does provide however some background
towards the identification and development of such KPIs. A separate detailed report on such KPIs
has been prepared by the ITU‐T FG‐SSC Working Group 3.
What a smart sustainable city is depends on the "lens" or viewpoint from which one looks at a city.
There are three key dimensions for a city, each of which has a number of attributes:
 Environment and sustainability – Related to city infrastructure and governance, energy and
climate change, pollution and waste, and social, Economy and health.
 City level services – Viewing through an "urban" lens, there are multiple aspects and indicators
including: technology and infrastructure, sustainability, governance and economics.

____________________
64 http://www.gsma.com/connectedliving/wp‐content/uploads/2013/02/cl_SmartCities_emer_01_131.pdf
65 http://www.rms.com/publications/OECD_Cities_Coastal_Flooding.pdf

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 35