Smart city - what could it mean?

These days we hear a lot, especially from the government sector, about cities getting 'smart' or 'smarter' due to some of their initiatives. The ostensible aim of making a city smart is to make the lives of its inhabitants better through deployment and/or improved utilization of IT resources. To a lay man though, all this talk of 'smart' initiatives is confusing because seldom does he / she is told what does getting smart actually entail.

Given below is a link to an article that recently appeared in the CNET magazine. The writer took a trip to the Italian city of Sicily and experienced first hand what getting 'smart' meant. In a nutshell, it appears that through a modest budget outlay, the city government has managed to link a lot of IT sensors spread over the city to help with things like - identifying when garbage bins start overflowing, provide real time updates on potholes that come up on the roads, indicate parking spaces to drivers motoring along the city roads etc.

A fascinating read indeed!

https://www.cnet.com/news/sicily-smart-city-messina-catania-silicon-valley-to-shame/