Life in a Smart City: A Resident’s Point of View
Aspern Smart City in Vienna is a living laboratory for research into the future of urban energy. The residents of this smart city play an important role in the project – because in addition to being efficient, the city of the future has to be worth living in. We visited one of the residents. Here's his story.
Learn about Siemens global expertise and solutions to:
Address four key areas critical to the success of urban centers, review examples of implementations, and meet our team of experts.
Unlocking the Potential of Cities
The innovations made possible through digital technology enable cities to magnify their true essence and boost their competitive strengths in ways they’ve never done before.Developing and maintaining livable, high-quality, financially sound cities, however, is a major test of our city leadership, taking great planning and effort. As cities are often limited in resources, they must engage the private sector to meet the infrastructure and planning needs to ensure equity, environmental sustainability, and economic prosperity.
Planning for and Powering the Future of eMobility
Digital transformation has already disrupted urban mobility with on-demand car services and transport apps availing some of the fastest and cheapest ways to move around a city.
Cities can expect to see even more new mobility services and business. These changes are coming at a time when many cities are facing gridlock and worsening air quality, and yet technology can create opportunities to meet the need for cleaner air for more people. Chief among these technologies are:
- Autonomy:
Vehicles that leverage sensing technology to interact automatically with their surrounding environments, thereby reducing the need for drivers and increasing the safety of travel - Connectivity:
Digitally connected infrastructure that provides information, and sometimes commands, to anything or anyone on streets
- Electrification:
Battery-powered vehicles, which have near-zero tailpipe emissions
- Shared Mobility:
Vehicles in which ownership and/or use is shared among individuals
Individually, each of these technologies offer benefits of improved safety, travel time, and experience alongside reduced environmental impact. Combined, they promise to overhaul significantly our urban mobility networks as we know them— dropping traffic incidents to very low rates, improving local air quality by upwards of 50 percent, making travel more efficient by up to 70 percent, and unlocking millions of miles of streets and parking lots for new development.
As a global player, Siemens is ready to overcome the challenges of a mobile future. Backed by our extensive experience in the energy sector, we can support you and accompany you on the journey to the future of your city. Our portfolio is proof that we are making a vital, functional contribution to the migration to e-cars, enabling a secure and reliable charging infrastructure.
Our goal is to push eMobility further with holistic concepts and solutions--and make a continual impact. Siemens wants to ensure that eMobility becomes part of a smart and sustainable urban lifestyle, driving individual and community success. We estimate, however, that most cities will need significantly more electricity to transition to electric vehicles. This means a major rethinking of how we power our cities. But if we are successful, then our cities will be both mobile and healthier as a result.
Making eMobility Work
Creating and Maintaining Resilient Cities With Energy Technologies
Citizens and businesses depend on the effective and reliable operation of infrastructure systems to deliver energy, mobility, water, sanitation, shelter, information, emergency response, and other critical services. Cities therefore need a new way of thinking about how they plan, design, build, and manage this essential infrastructure under increasingly challenging conditions. Resilience is the answer.
Resilience is the ability of a system to survive and thrive in the face of a complex, uncertain, and ever-changing future. It is a way of thinking about both short-term cycles and long-term trends; minimizing disruptions in the face of shocks and stresses; recovering rapidly when they do occur; and adapting steadily to become better able to thrive as conditions continue to change.
A resilient energy approach enables a proactive and holistic response to risk management and a way for cities to maintain global competitiveness. It is also a powerful companion to sustainable development thinking. Resilience is about inter-linkages of systems and the specific methods of boosting technical performance. The following framework can help promote resilience in design and decision making.
Siemens’ technologies can help cities create such a framework for resilience through innovative solutions and our expertise in the areas of electrification, automation, and digital technology.
Siemens has deep experience in deploying new energy solutions while maximizing existing infrastructure to promote resilience.
People, Process, and Technology Converging to Create an Adaptable Environment
Building in Resilience
Building and Maintaining Smarter Cities
Siemens has a highly tailored approach to smart cities that derives from our core expertise in technology and infrastructure hardware. Our work has grown to include cities because over time cities have been the beneficiaries, users, and sometimes owners of many Siemens technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart City-type technologies are creating opportunities for cities to meet some incredible challenges cost-effectively, from improving social equity and air quality to reducing congestion.
Siemens understands the base technologies because we made these “hard” technologies, delivered them to our clients, and even used them ourselves in our own manufacturing facilities and buildings. Over time, and as technology improved, software became an ever-larger component of our hardware packages because it allowed the users to better manage and optimize the systems or processes. This software has been critical to our own manufacturing plants and the assembly processes that involved connecting hundreds of different components to improve the manufactured products.
Now, the growing Siemens software business is more and more combined with our hardware technologies and is one of our key offerings across our core business areas, including energy, transport, buildings, and healthcare.
Siemens is working with cities and partner organizations to develop the use cases that resonate with city leaders and citizens alike.
This is the co-development process, and one that very much has the citizen at the forefront. A key hurdle for delivering infrastructure, both the hard technology as well as the digital, is achieving the correct degree of scale because meeting the needs of our cities will require scale. We’ve figured out the key elements to starting the scaling-up process and making the move from pilot to city service.
7 Essentials for Moving Data-Driven Decision-Making to Scale
Build Better, Maintain Smarter
Cities Driving Innovation and Digital Transformation
Infrastructure development in urban spaces embraces many different aspects, including passenger transportation, smart grids for energy distribution, security systems and cloud-based apps. Learn more about or portfolio through cities that are driving innovation.
Technology is powering the rise of smart cities, transforming everything from traffic management to waste collection. The digital revolution is giving rise to cities that are more connected, sustainable, resilient and efficient. Read about cities making the successful transition and explore what the future of urbanization might look like.
