By 2050, more than 65% of the 9 billion people on Earth will live in cities.
Smart Cities: The Key to Solving Urban Problems at Low Cost and High Efficiency
| Classified into smart city technology, platform technology, and 5 major technologies

There is a proverb that says, "Send a horse to Jeju Island and a person to Seoul." Perhaps because this proverb was firmly adopted as a family motto, half of South Korea's population has come to reside in Seoul and its surrounding areas.

In fact, this is not a story unique to Korea. According to the UN, the global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, with more than 65% of them projected to live in cities. Along with climate change, urbanization is cited as the factor causing the greatest changes on Earth in the future.

Countries around the world are pursuing smart city projects to minimize the damage caused by urbanization. A smart city can be defined as a future city that enhances urban efficiency, improves the convenience and quality of life of citizens, and realizes sustainable innovative growth through intelligent ICT technologies and networks that allow connection to everything anytime and anywhere.

In the United States and Europe, there is growing interest in urban regeneration projects that can overcome the aging of urban infrastructure and the decline of urban areas, and various policies such as energy and transportation are being promoted for sustainable urban development in preparation for climate change and resource depletion.

In emerging economies such as those in Asia and Latin America, infrastructure shortages—including housing, water, energy, and roads—are becoming a serious problem due to rapid population growth and migration to cities; consequently, major development objectives include responding to rapid urbanization and the surge in energy demand resulting from industrialization.

Smart cities, becoming a reality alongside the advanced ICT industry, are expected to become a part of everyone's daily life. In line with this trend, global companies around the world are accelerating their entry into the smart city market and actively pursuing related research and solution development.


Smart cities overcoming climate change
The reason smart cities have garnered attention is that they are recognized as a low-cost, efficient means of solving urban problems, as well as a suitable model for responding to climate change.

The reason smart cities are key to solving urban problems with low cost and high efficiency is that the level of technology has advanced to the point where the convergence of ICT, represented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, can be practically applied, and in particular, the development of IoT has made it possible to provide or collect necessary information in real time.

These characteristics were considered the driving force that enabled the city to be managed very efficiently.

Although the goals of solving urban problems and responding to climate change may appear different, since most climate change-related carbon emissions originate in cities, resolving urban issues often functions simultaneously as a means of responding to climate change.

The transportation and energy sectors fall into this category.

Traffic congestion is the biggest urban problem caused by the rapid increase in urban population, and at the same time, carbon emissions on roads resulting from traffic congestion are also the most significant factor in climate change. Solutions to alleviate traffic congestion using ICT serve as a solution to urban problems in developing countries, while simultaneously providing an effective means to address climate change by reducing carbon emissions.

As smart cities have been adopted as a means to address the most important global issues of urban problem-solving and climate change response, discussions on smart cities have become a global phenomenon attracting the attention of both developing and developed countries since 2010. Consequently, the global smart city market is also predicted to expand rapidly, leading to increased interest in its industrial aspects.


Why are smart cities smart?
A world where natural foods such as fruits, vegetables, and meat have disappeared. People suffer from hunger and disease due to overpopulation, and the only food sources are water and a food called 'Soylent'. Released in 1973, the film 'Soylent Green' is a dystopian movie set in Manhattan in 2022, a time when climate change and urbanization problems have not been resolved, and it explores what Soylent is made of.

Although the year 2022, the setting of the movie, is not far off, unlike in the movie, humanity does not eat Soylent. This is because they recognize the problem of urbanization and are constantly striving to solve it. The culmination of those efforts is the smart city.

Smart cities fundamentally aim to improve the quality of life for residents by achieving low carbon emissions through the utilization of renewable energy and eco-friendly technologies, and by optimizing urban transportation and IT infrastructure.

The difference between smart cities and conventional cities is also evident in the way urban problems are resolved. Conventional urban management methods primarily involved solving problems by constructing new infrastructure or deploying additional resources, such as manpower.

Smart cities are different. They solve problems by collecting and analyzing information from across the city to allocate resources where needed or to facilitate the efficient utilization of existing resources.


Types of Smart City Technologies
According to the Korea Institute of Construction Technology, smart city technology is classified into platform technology and technology for five key areas.

Platform technology is a technology that integrates, manages, and controls technologies (devices) across different fields, and includes hardware, operating systems, and interfaces, as well as technical standards such as protocols and rules that define them.

Technologies in the five key areas refer to a type of device technology encompassing smart buildings, smart transportation, smart energy, smart water, and smart government. While the transportation, energy, and water sectors have traditionally been managed as independent technologies, integrated management among the five key areas through a platform is necessary to realize smart cities.

Regarding platform technology, global IT companies are conducting standardization discussions on smart city platform technology centered around the international standardization council (oneM2M). Since 2010, IBM has been working to establish market-dominant standards through a social contribution program called the 'Smart Cities Challenge'. Cisco is pursuing the 'Smart Connected Communities' initiative, which focuses on the intelligentization of urban infrastructure networks, while domestic companies, led by telecommunications operators, are jointly developing smart city demonstration complexes with local governments and partners.

Smart buildings, also known as intelligent buildings, refer to a form in which ICT is integrated into a building. IoT sensors are applied to the building's key facilities to monitor all situations, and based on this, they autonomously determine their status to support optimal operation. Among the five major smart city technologies, they utilize the largest number of IoT devices.

Among smart building technologies, the global market size for Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) is expected to reach $5.6 billion in 2020, and it is evolving beyond merely measuring and optimizing energy usage to becoming 'Zero Energy Buildings (ZEB).' Companies such as Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric are leading the global smart building market, and domestic companies including POSCO ICT, LG CNS, and Hanwha S&C have entered the market since the early 2010s.

Smart transportation refers to a system in which a city itself systematically collects traffic information, detects the traffic environment, and monitors it in real time by connecting it to a network. Korea is evolving from existing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technology into a concept where stakeholders exchange their respective traffic information through mutual cooperation, as it is integrated with smart city platforms.

Smart energy refers to technology that minimizes unnecessary power consumption through power monitoring and creates eco-friendly cities. As smart energy aims to increase the city's own energy supply ratio, the expansion of renewable energy facilities is expected, and the demand for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for intelligent power management is projected to continue increasing.

Smart Water refers to technology aimed at water resource management that streamlines the management of water supply and sewage systems and urban water, and prepares for environmental changes such as floods and droughts; at its core is the 'Smart Water Grid,' an intelligent water resource management platform that applies ICT to exchange information between suppliers and consumers.

Smart Government establishes an intelligent urban infrastructure by linking sector-specific information systems, such as crime prevention, disaster management, and transportation, through the Smart City Integrated Platform, which serves as foundational software. Through this, it supports the integration of various smart city services, information systems, and central centers operated by individually managed local governments, and refers to technologies that simplify public administrative services and reduce processing times.


The Path Forward for Korea's Smart City Industry
Recently, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport established and announced the 3rd Comprehensive Smart City Plan.

The government has selected smart cities as one of the eight leading innovative growth projects and is concentrating its policy capabilities on them. First, as new projects related to smart cities increased, financial investment was significantly expanded, and related regulations were significantly relaxed through two amendments to the 'Smart City Act'.

In addition, participation by local governments that recognize the value of smart cities as a means of solving urban problems is expanding. 78 local governments nationwide have secured dedicated smart city organizations and are implementing projects, and a total of about 67 local governments are carrying out government-supported projects.

Bae Seong-ho, Head of the Urban Economy Division at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, stated, “We hope that smart cities can become a platform for innovative growth that solves urban problems and improves the quality of life for citizens, while simultaneously attracting diverse investments in new industries and creating knowledge-intensive jobs.”

In a survey study titled "Smart City, the Comprehensive Platform of the 4th Industrial Revolution," Han Sang-mok, an analyst at the Industrial Research and Technology Center of KDB Industrial Bank, viewed smart cities as the ultimate goal of future industries where new technologies such as AI, big data, 5G, and cloud are applied to reality based on IoT.

Expanding the user experience is an important task for the widespread adoption of new technologies and innovative services. Smart cities are expected to create related demand and contribute to the formation of an initial market by providing opportunities to experience new technologies and services in daily life.

Therefore, countries around the world are gradually expanding their investment in smart cities to secure new growth engines through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and are striving to create and secure new markets.

Platform technology, a core technology of smart cities, is being led by global ICT companies, while the technological level of domestic companies remains in the early stages. As latecomers, domestic companies do not have many instances of platform technology development; however, they can secure competitiveness in device sectors such as smart buildings and smart transportation by utilizing existing network and IoT technologies.

As smart cities are services composed of integrated platforms and devices, fostering the domestic smart city ecosystem will require the development of a revenue-sharing model involving large corporations' platform technologies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) possessing multiple device technologies.