Smart city
A city that uses connected sensors and data platforms to run services such as lighting, parking, waste collection, traffic and environmental monitoring more efficiently.
Smart city projects apply IoT to municipal infrastructure. Street lights that dim when no one is around, bins that report fill level, parking bays that signal occupancy and air-quality stations on lamp posts are typical starting points. Low-power wide-area networks such as LoRaWAN and NB-IoT make it affordable to cover a city with battery-powered sensors.
The value is in operational savings and better services, but projects stall when each department buys its own platform and data cannot be combined. Open data standards and a shared platform matter more than any single sensor. Privacy is the other constraint, especially for cameras and location data. The Smart cities guide looks at what actually gets deployed, including smart parking and smart lighting.
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