AI-generated summary
Smart infrastructures in 21st-century cities leverage advanced technologies like IoT sensors, Big Data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to comprehensively manage urban systems. These systems enhance quality of life by automating routine tasks and enabling governments to focus more on citizens’ needs. Examples include intelligent traffic management that reroutes vehicles after accidents to alleviate congestion and improve safety, smart sanitation systems that use AI to handle stormwater efficiently and prevent flooding, and smart energy grids that optimize consumption of renewable resources and household energy use.
The intelligence of smart cities lies in their ability to make decisions that genuinely benefit urban life, not merely in data collection but in deriving actionable insights that improve services and citizen participation. While automation handles operational tasks such as waste collection and traffic control, human decision-makers remain essential for strategic governance. Smart infrastructure thus frees officials from day-to-day responsibilities, allowing them to focus on overarching city strategies and citizen engagement.
Crucially, smart infrastructures also play a vital role in addressing climate change challenges by enhancing urban resilience to extreme weather and environmental threats. They support ecological transitions through data-driven urban greening and resource management, helping cities adapt and thrive in the face of environmental uncertainties. Ultimately, smart infrastructure integrates technology and human creativity to build sustainable, responsive, and livable cities.
Connectivity and sensorisation are going to be the pillars to "read" the behaviour of the cities of the future in the challenge of improving the quality of life of citizens
Cities in the 21st century need smart infrastructures that help improve quality of life, dodge the challenges of the climate crisis and allow municipalities to be automated so that government officials and city council staff have more time for citizens. What is smart infrastructure and how can it improve the quality of people? What is your relationship with technology? Is the city going to make decisions for the citizens?
What are smart infrastructures?
Smart infrastructures are nothing more than a type of infrastructure that, supported by technological integrations based on sensors (IoT), data (Big Data) or advanced analytics (Artificial Intelligence and machine learning), have the superpower to comprehensively manage the elements that make up the system. And when it comes to cities, with the complexity that this entails, smart infrastructures are highly versatile and complete systems.
Some examples of smart urban infrastructures
Smart cities already use intelligent systems connected to their infrastructures, although in the coming years we will see complete integration.
Intelligent Traffic, Road and Vehicle Systems
One morning, in the middle of rush hour, there is a road accident, a collision between vehicles. Immediately, both cars send a signal to the emergency devices, which are preparing to leave with firefighters, police and health services. Seconds after the collision, the GPS of thousands of vehicles that were going to use that road redirect traffic along alternative routes, whose traffic lights change their operation to make room for the new flows. Thanks to the history of collisions, the system ‘understands’ that the point of the road accident is a black spot, and reduces the maximum speed by 10 kilometers per hour to improve safety. The operators who will place the new signs the next day receive the work order.
Smart sanitation systems
The storm is crossing the city. Global warming has made them more frequent and violent, but the city is prepared. Surface runoff moves down the street and ends up in rain gardens and infrastructure designed by artificial intelligence thanks to data from thousands of storms over decades. The city has never been so green. Under these gardens, a classic gray concrete infrastructure collects the surplus water and redirects it to the treatment plants. To avoid saturating them, a system of locks redirects much of it to storm tanks under buildings, which send real-time information on filling speed and capacity. Where a possible flood is detected, residents are notified by mobile messages.
Smart Grids
The sun is about to reach its midday zenith and homes are in full energy consumption. They have been configured to charge devices with battery at these times of the day. Dishwashers and washer-dryers are turned on. Cleaning robots are charged. Likewise, electric cars connected to homes act as batteries and are filled with solar radiation. Hours ago the awnings of half the city have been lowered to prevent their facades from heating up, they will rise again once the sun has gone down to help release the heat from the façade, when the wind turbines located a few dozen kilometers away come into play and the house uses that car battery.
How smart is the smart city?
Defining intelligence is complicated, even more so when trying to apply it to sets of objects and systems such as a city. A very conservative way of alluding to the smart city is one that makes decisions that benefit the quality of urban life or that, as opposed to the concept of intelligence, does not choose the silliest options. The city, or the system of elements that make it up, chooses those options that improve people’s lives, either because the garbage truck passes before the bin overflows or because they launch notifications from the citizen participation portal so that people can be part of the decisions.
If ‘smart’ is digital and technological, cities have gone through several phases of intelligence. First came the sensors. Then, with its information, came Big Data, although it was generally isolated in islands of data that were grouped into the verticals of the city (economy, government management, citizenship, environment, habitability, mobility, etc.). For example, the waste department knows where there are full containers and the bus department where there are more traffic jams, but without sharing information that would improve garbage collection without penalizing the mobility of neighbors. Intelligence would come later.
To speak properly of smart cities, it is imperative that they have transcended the concept of “analysing data” and have replaced it with that of “drawing valuable conclusions for the well-being of citizens”. Something similar to knowledge derived from experience, a quality over which machines do not yet have competence.
Smart infrastructures will not be without human decisions
To achieve the “wise city” it is still necessary for people to be the ones who make the decisions, even if they are informed by intelligence distilled from urban data collected by machines. However, the fact that the city is more autonomous in many of the operational powers (giving warnings, collecting waste, changing traffic lights, etc.) does not come to replace the humans who govern them. In fact, the opposite is true.
Thanks to smart infrastructure, and freed up from some of the day-to-day operations, local governments in cities will have more time for the city’s strategy in the future. In a sense, many of the time-consuming functions in day-to-day politics can be automated to let leaders listen to citizens, share more internal information, or simply study success stories to replicate.
It is not a question of relegating our human autonomy to machines, but of putting them to work in all those tasks in which they can help (because in fact they perform better than people). People aren’t particularly good at analyzing gigantic data sets or extrapolating events, but they’re good listeners, inventive, and driven by creativity.
Smart infrastructure in the face of the climate crisis
As has already been anticipated previously through some examples, smart infrastructure will form a layer of technology that will help humanity to overcome the risks (and if possible, avoid them) of the worst consequences of the climate crisis. In urban matters, smart infrastructure will help build cities that are more resilient to heat waves, cold spells, tornadoes and other natural phenomena, but also to challenges of a human nature such as responding to arson, epidemics, the collapse of cities after extracting water from the ground or local drought.
Smart infrastructures are already positioning themselves as a GPS for cities to travel along the path of ecological transition. Although it is not necessary to use AI to understand that cities need to be greened, optimizing urban greening with a limited budget and the complexity of a city (conduits, local ecology, allergies, transmission of diseases between species, etc.) does require a huge volume of data and analysis.
