Smart Cities: Digital Transformation of Cities and Communities
Shorter innovation and product development cycles at even shorter intervals are putting cities’ ability to act to the test. Despite financial, administrative, regulatory and technical uncertainties, municipalities and communities should nevertheless strive for a sustainable development in the sense of the Leipzig Charter and guarantee services of general interest to their citizens.
Key topics for municipalities
Confronted with these uncertainties, local governments face numerous challenges. The keywords are eGovernment processes, high investments in new infrastructures, digital planning, procurement law, data collection, data protection, knowledge management, climate change adaption, resilience and many more. Over the past decades, standards have made it possible to ensure sufficient planning certainty in technical matters and to minimize the risk of bad investments, in some of the aforementioned areas.
Technological requirements
The technology convergence of the Smart Cities theme, especially the fusion of information technology with formerly analog sectors, requires a holistic view and calls for greater interaction between technology provider (industry) and user (community). These new linkages result in new challenges in the organization of interfaces, technical responsibilities, and interdepartmental communication. In the context of this discussion, DIN working groups developed the following definition:
Smart City refers to a settlement area in which systemically (ecologically, socially and economically) sustainable products, services, technologies, processes and infrastructures are used, usually supported by highly integrated and networked information and communication technologies.
DIN and Smart Cities
With the Smart City Standards Forum (SCSF), DIN brings together the relevant stakeholders and looks at a range of highly topical issues such as artificial intelligence (AI), building information modeling (BIM), Circular Economy, Cybersecurity and resilience, or the measuring of the impact of climate protection measures.
DIN also orchestrates the development of standards, workshop agreements and specifications such as DIN SPEC 91387 “Communities and digital transformation – overview of the spheres of activity”, or the DIN SPEC 91377 Data models and protocols in open urban platforms (under development), provides publications on the topic of Smart Cities, and is actively involved in Smart City research projects to transfer the project’s results to standardization.
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Collaboration on Smart Citiy Standardization
All interested experts are welcome to participate in the exchange on current smart city topics and further work in the field of smart city standardisation.
Opportunities for this are provided by the DIN DKE Smart City Standards Forum and the standardisation committees DIN NA 172-00-12 AA Sustainable development in communities in the DIN Standards Committee for Environmental Protection (NAGUS), DIN NA 043-02-03 AA Smart Cities in the DIN Standards Committee Information Technology and IT Applications (NIA) and the DKE/K201 System Committee Electrotechnical Aspects of Smart Cities.
