Smart Cities – the way to maximum quality of life with minimal need for resources

News, 09/05/2018

Smart Cities is a topic that has been affecting the quality of life in cities worldwide for several years. This concept tries to make appropriate use of modern technologies to help save energy, increase the standard of living in cities and save the environment. CTU UCEEB perceives Smart City as a modern approach to city administration.

In recent decades, the big trend is to move to urban agglomerations, and this contributes to the increase in the number of inhabitants. This fact is also the answer to the question why recently a large number of scientific institutions are engaged in research in the field of Smart City.

The contribution of the Smart City concept is, among other things, that it helps effectively connect city management across departments and their agendas, such as transport, energy, building management, logistics, etc. Czech cities are gaining new senses in the form of sensory platforms from which city management flows new data so that cities can effectively manage traffic, energy consumption, map the environment in the streets, including thermal comfort and local pollutant emissions. For example, a car or a mobile phone simply becomes an intelligent sensor. Information technology is gradually becoming a necessary tool for managing a smart city in real time.

Currently, among the world's metropolises that are introducing innovations to achieve and build smart cities are, for example, Amsterdam, Vienna, Barcelona, Stockholm and also Prague. The development of smart technologies in the Czech capital is also dealt with by the Czech Technical University UCEEB, which developed the Smart City concept for the Prague 3 district and last year became the winner of the first annual Smart Cities for the Future national competition in the Model Smart City category. CTU UCEEB also cooperates on Smart City projects with Prague 2 in the area of energy management implementation, or with Prague 7 and the ICT Operator on the design of a technological and organizational solution for home care for the elderly.

Outside the capital, ČVUT UCEEB implements projects in the Central Bohemian Region (e.g. the Attractive Village project) and cooperates with regional innovation centers in the Ústí Region and South Bohemia. At the national level, UCEEB is preparing the Methodology for the Evaluation of Urban Intelligence and Sustainability for the Ministry of Regional Development.

In addition, the Center and a number of municipalities are preparing energy projects in the Ecoinovation program, which falls under the State Environmental Fund. In addition to the city-wide scale, the Center also focuses on specific selected buildings of urban importance, where it helps municipalities with construction or streamlining their operation (Buštěhrad, Dobříš, Litoměřice, Mnichovice, Podolanka, Postřekov, Slaný and others).

The University Center provides independent support especially where the situation requires a solution that is not yet commonly used on the market or is completely new. It also uses new methods for this, for example the participatory design of technologies and public buildings (more in the article zde). The CTU University Center for Efficient Buildings has experts involved in the construction of smart cities, ranging from architecture to urban planning, building materials, energy, technical building management, to psychology and biomedicine.