What Makes a Smart City Truly Smart?

It’s easy to get fixated on all the “smart” innovations out there—roads that talk to you, cars that talk to the road, and all kinds of sensors. But if it’s not the gadget that makes a city smart, then what does?

The heart of a smart city is actually the data and the brain is using that data to change your decision-making process, to make you react faster in cases where the city needs to react, to make you predictive where you can be to save money or provide a better service, or to give you a better appreciation of what's happening in your city. 85 percent of the data that you need to run a smart city, you’ve probably already got. Any city can be a smart city, or a smarter city, just by getting better control of their data and by understanding what it's saying to them. And it's going to say something different to every city, because every city has different needs and requirements, and different governance structures.