The connected future of smart cities starts with smart buildings

Today, smart city plans are constantly being launched around the world. According to a recent IDC report, cities from Seattle to Singapore to London are expected to spend nearly US$124 billion on smart city plans this year, an increase of 18.9% from 2019.

In order to build a smart city, it is important to understand the most basic part-smart buildings. They are the basic "cornerstones" that will make our cities truly transform, and through smart buildings we will provide a safe, sustainable, and connected environment for most of the world's population. However, as buildings become more and more intelligent around the world, driving broader and measurable progress requires a missing element, namely a universal, holistic approach to assess the intelligence or “wisdom” of buildings.

Although there are some existing building plans that can track specific issues such as energy use, so far, there has not been a complete assessment of smart buildings. We must focus on the building in multiple ways, linking technology to the safety and health of the people in the building, while reducing operating costs. All these combined will increase the value of the city building where the owners are located. .

As cities seek investment and formulate sustainability policies and attract citizens and workers, smart buildings will play an indispensable role in their development.

TIA, through its members and partners, meets this need by establishing a set of common standards. To succeed, these standards require the participation of stakeholders throughout the smart building ecosystem. To this end, we bring together real estate, construction, engineering, construction, security, and information and communication technology (ICT) professionals to help define the framework required for the evaluation criteria.

The first challenge is to define how to evaluate smart buildings and identify gaps in the current plan. Our working group found that smart buildings ultimately have six key categories that need to be considered in the assessment: connectivity, health and well-being, life and property safety, electricity and energy, network security, and sustainability.

Having a common smart building assessment framework will effectively provide a roadmap that enables current building owners and investors to determine which smart building advancements will produce the desired results, such as increased property value, higher occupancy rates or more productivity and attractive working environment, and comply with the safety regulations of relevant departments.

As buildings develop and become more intelligent (whether in the design stage or in the post-construction renovation), cities will be able to use them to implement their own plans. As the Smart City initiative takes root, applications such as smart transportation and parking, autonomous vehicles, drone delivery, and enhanced emergency response will require low-latency 5G networks and infrastructure. As part of the network infrastructure, data centers used to calculate and process the large amount of information generated are pushed to the "edge", closer to the end user, to meet latency requirements. Smart buildings in the city will become the natural starting point for hosting these new edge data centers.

Promoting smart buildings through common standards, best practices and evaluation standards will be the first step in advancing a truly smart city. A comprehensive evaluation framework will provide the smart building community with the standards needed to define investment strategies and operational priorities. In turn, as buildings become smarter, city and state governments can work with them to better manage shared resources, reduce pollution, and predict infrastructure maintenance requirements.

Even now, in a pandemic, smart building applications are being evaluated to plan how employees and other building residents can safely return to the workplace. Solving these problems will help ensure that the government has a good plan and supports its residents.

Remember, it is important that buildings and cities do not become “wisdom” overnight. A wide range of stakeholders need time and planned effort to make progress. Now, promoting the development of smart buildings will ensure a safer, healthier and more prosperous future for us and future generations.