Exploring US Smart Cities: Unveiling the Latest Trends

during the smart cities connect in denver we talked to many vendors and city representatives but also with organizations like us ignite you may remember them from previous videos but in case you don't remember let me refresh your memory us ignite is a non -profit that spun out of the white house to be sort of a matchmaker in the smart city industry bringing together municipalities smart city technology vendors and researchers to find solutions to community challenges. So it's kind of like the Tinder of the US smart city industry. Since they know how to make matches happen, we talked to US Ignite program manager Jikyasa Sharma to know more about the smart city industry trends in the US and how vendors from outside the country can enter the market. This is what she had to say. Communities are becoming more people -centric and are realizing that technology is only one side of the smart city story and that there is a big people element to it. And so there has been sort of, I've started seeing shift in attitudes where people are more willing to talk about things like community engagement and equity. There is a lot of like uptick of like smart streets, a lot of... stuff related to traffic management. We are also focusing a lot on EV. I think there is sort of this big push to create an EV infrastructure, which again, you know, like in America, we don't hear a lot of conversations around climate change. And that is why we need to be thinking about more renewable energy options. But I think the approach is more towards being energy efficient with the there is a significant amount of money that has been allocated to climate change but even then like if you know if you talk about climate change it would probably not get as much traction versus if you are talking about innovation or scaling solutions because I do feel a lot of like smart city conversations in America tend to be more market driven and I think scaling is one of the biggest challenges or sort of the problems that cities are trying to solve for, because interestingly, there was a CISA report that was released in 2020, and there was a statistic there that about 80 % of prototypes fail to scale, and about two -thirds of smart city projects fail. So I think scaling continues to be sort of this big question mark that entities are like really trying hard to find answers to that. So any, any technology, or anything that would support broadband deployment and adoption, I think it's going to go a long way and we'll see a lot of investment in. The other big item is actually EV infrastructure. I think there are some seven to eight billion dollars that has been marked to build EV infrastructure, right? Like I'll give you a very simple example, like right now, as of now, very few people own EV cars or EV vehicles because we don't have the infrastructure right now so it is great to see that there's so much money coming in and cities are like really hard at work uh to sort of you know plan charging like essentially building up that infrastructure within their cities so that they can encourage adoption of evs the other big one is the smart grant which is i think it's strengthening mobility and revolutionizing transportation grant it's a 500 million dollar grant which is dedicated to smart city initiatives right so these include all sort of like smart traffic technologies sensors pretty much anything and everything within like the smart city there is a significant amount of money also dedicated to water treatment air quality has been a big one we we work with communities that are focusing a lot on air quality sensors we have a lot of vendors come up in that area as well disaster management or resiliency hubs is another big one you know extreme weather again you may not hear the word climate change being used much here but everyone wants to talk about resiliency right like and resiliency starts from climate resiliency and then you also talk about economic resiliency and and then resiliency is a whole different topic but in fact the infrastructure bill also marks a lot of fun I think some 50 billion plus funds in climate change, and it's focusing on things like extreme weather management, wildfires, you know, major storm events that actually quite a few of them happened in 2021 and 2022. So, yeah, I think those are some of the areas that I've been seeing a lot of investment into. smart cities strategy being focused towards finding use cases and pilots in those areas and trying to pilot it in a smaller area or neighborhood and then finding strategies to scale it. I was at the Smart Cities Connect conference and there's a vendor from Italy actually. It's a smart bench that they were exhibiting and I think one of the strengths might be for someone coming in from Europe, they must have thought a lot about privacy. and privacy concerns related to it uh to to collecting the data that the bench is going to collect um and as well as the security concerns and now that there is like there's a shift in attitude where communities are thinking more about how to protect their citizens if those vendors come in from that approach that hey the technology that we are are selling is privacy preserving and it's going to put your resident first i think that's likely to get a lot of attention I would also say the second thing is partnering with anchor institutes right be it universities be it like community colleges or like you know chamber of commerce and really understanding what is the need of the community is like really important. I think vendors you know need to understand and I've said this point before that America is a country of small towns right so don't just focus on big cities. there is so much that can be done with the smaller communities here with the states that don't get much traction right unfortunately I have like yet to like really come across examples that have been very successfully scale scaling continues to be a big challenge but it is very encouraging to see a lot of successful pilots right a lot goes into scaling you have to think about sustainability you have to think about funding um so nothing immediately comes to mind when i'm thinking about like very successful scalable project but i have very high hopes from all the pilots around like mobility and especially ev that was us ignites jigyasa sharma with insights from the us smart city industry Stay tuned because we're going to bring you more smart city strategies in the upcoming weeks, only on Current.