Tag: smart cities

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute today released a briefing paper that illustrates how cities are using technology to enhance access to services and quality of life for their residents. As cities become home to the majority of the world’s population, leaders must ensure that urban infrastructure and services can accommodate growth, and that no one is left behind. Increasingly, they are turning to cloud technology for solutions to the challenges they are facing – from problems like traffic, parking, and waste management to public health crises and natural disasters.

Transportation and traffic management are hot topics when city planners and administrations think about ways to make a city smarter and more livable. Recent statistics tell us that drivers in the U.S. spend an average of 42 hours per year in traffic in cities and lose $1,400 on gas, while idling. In Europe, cities like London and Paris show an average of 74 and 69 hours spent idling per year respectively. Researchers in England found adding an additional 20 minutes of commuting per day has the same negative effect on job satisfaction as receiving a 19% pay cut. These statistics and an increasing desire to be more environment friendly are reasons why city leaders are looking to tackle this problem.

Recife, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is distinguished by its many rivers, bridges, islets, and peninsulas. The municipality of Recife, with an estimated population of 1.62 million, is at the center of a metropolitan region formed by 13 municipalities and around 94 neighborhoods. The cost to maintain such a large metropolis is great, requiring a complex public-cleaning operation with thousands of vehicles and employees, which was consuming nearly 10% of the city’s budget. Before implementing a new technology solution, supervising contractors and controlling the quality of street-cleaning services throughout the city was challenging.

Cities worldwide are improving citizen services and economic and environmental outcomes through technology, while also seeking to create a vision of what a smart, connected, and sustainable city of the future will look like. While you can start building and experimenting today, it’s important to have a long-term vision and a set of principles to guide you in building cost-effective, adaptable, secure, and low-risk solutions during a time of rapid technological change.

Cities relying on smart city solutions find value in core technologies, such as compute, storage, databases, and data warehouses; and advanced technologies like big data analytics, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence. A critical ingredient for any smart solution is data. It offers insight into the status of municipal processes, and the changes required to meet local government objectives.

With sensor technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning capabilities, smart cities are coming online. Cities can use technology to quickly and effectively identify areas needing government attention. Sensors can measure things from noise pollution to the fullness of public trashcans. As these technologies become more common, policymakers around the world are proving that the path to a smart, connected city begins with its residents.

Amazon is collaborating with teams participating in the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) – a program led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST), a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce – to allow global cities access to smart city solutions directly from AWS. GCTC helps communities partner with innovators […]

Motivated on behalf of their citizens, mayors across the country are looking to be more agile and continue to innovate to make cities smart, connected, and sustainable. In many ways, mayors look to solve problems and overcome challenges through the use of new technologies, like connected intersections, gunshot detection, water quality monitoring, and energy management. […]

Future Cities Catapult (FCC) has simplified the “smart city” concept into five imperatives to help get you started on your digital journey to citizen innovation.  Following the AWS UK Region Launch, we have collaborated with Future Cities Catapult to bring you the Future Citizen Innovation Series. In January in London, we hosted the first week […]

Smart cities around the world are collecting and using data to make decisions in real or near real-time to better serve citizens, protect our environment, and lower costs. For example, smart technology is helping to lower congestion in streets, reduce pollution by optimizing transportation infrastructure, lower energy consumption by employing real-time analysis sensors to optimize […]