Smart solutions on a balanced budget
With growing urbanization, often critical financial conditions and the challenges of climate change, cities carry a crucial part of development as a whole. What then does intelligent infrastructure mean for buildings, mobility solutions and energy management?
The challenges of constant growth
Infrastructure has a profound effect on quality of life, but one that we only really appreciate when things do not work as well as they should. Anybody who has experienced power blackouts or stuck in traffic jams knows that things could, and should, be better. Urbanization complicates matters further. Each week, cities are growing by 1.5 million inhabitants, and by 2050 more than two thirds of the global population will be city dwellers, up from just one third in 1950. As cities grow, the way we build and manage urban infrastructure has never been more critical to global economic and social development. Digitalization is changing our world. Today the number of connected devices has surpassed the number of humans on the planet. These intelligent devices generate massive amounts of data transforming life and business across all sectors. However, much infrastructure has yet to be transformed by the information age. Instead, in most places, trains, power systems, buildings, buses, and roads have hardly changed in nature. Some digital systems have been incorporated but we have only just begun to unlock the potential of fully digitized, electrified, information-enabled, intelligent infrastructure. Doing so will be key to meeting the world’s present and future sustainable development challenges. Siemens is a trusted partner offering solutions across all infrastructure domains making cities more efficient, sustainable and resilient. We help you meet the challenges that cities of the future face: maintaining, modernizing and upgrading an ageing urban infrastructure.
With more than half of the global population living in cities, there is no doubt that we live in an urbanized world and the global challenges of the 21st century are in urban areas.Joan Clos, Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (source: Interview with Joan Clos by the UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service on the "Rio+20" conference, June 2012)
Innovative traffic management systems optimizes road and rail capacity, while information systems help passengers find efficient travel routes. Fully automated metros can be flexibly adapted to passenger volume – and dynamic traffic control systems guarantee an optimized traffic flow. The result: Optimally networked conurbations that flexibly adapt to changing requirements.
Our specialist knowledge includes comprehensive domain and turnkey expertise that enables us to service the entire mobility spectrum. Integrated mobility platforms from Siemens integrate diverse transport providers. As a single source provider, we offer high quality rail products and solutions for urban and interurban transportation and logistics. We help optimize the overall performance of transportation networks
Buildings consume more energy than industry or mobility
41% of worldwide energy consumption, responsible for one third of greenhouse gas emissions: Buildings are one major part of the worldwide environmental footprint. If we’d like to succeed against climate change, sustainable, and energy-efficient buildings need to be part of a global answer.
Beside buildings’ environmental impact, there are also economical aspects: Real Estate often is the 2nd largest expense on most organizations’ income statement. So buildings can be a critical factor for a company’s success and in the end for the employees’ job security.
But buildings are far more than that. People spend about 90 % of their lives indoors – starting with our birth in hospitals, learning at schools, developing at universities, succeeding in jobs in office buildings. Buildings are not just a place for working and living. It’s the place where we spend our lives.
Ingenuity for life creates perfect places
We all begin our lives in a perfect place: In our mother’s tummy. A place where it is never too cold, never too warm, never too loud; a place where we can always feel safe and secure. Why shouldn’t all our lives be lived in perfect places?
So improving buildings, working on perfect places, means working towards better lives. Our goal is: Creating perfect places for every stage of life.
