Smart Buildings Lead to Smart Cities

Resource consumption reduction, operations efficiency gains, environmental improvements, sustainability, and enhancing the quality of life for all stakeholders are just a few of the smart city goals that match the goals of smart buildings. Buildings often operate as small cities within themselves, having to address nearly all the same systems in a complementary manner.

Buildings are a microcosm of cities with similar needs to manage resources, water, energy, lighting, emergency services, security, and other services. Along the same line of reasoning, smart buildings are a microcosm of smart cities and therefore serve as the ideal launching point to grow and develop smart cities.

Smart cities contain complex layered systems and an ecosystem of networks. These network foundations may be built with individual buildings that each use IoT smart building solutions to address building automation, energy optimization, and numerous other smart outcomes...

The elusive smart city

There has been much talk about smart cities over the past decade but much fewer results have been delivered than were promised. Even prior to the pandemic in 2020, smart city initiatives fell short, with single-purpose projects merely centered on reducing city lighting costs, delivering neighborhood Wi-Fi, or providing bike-sharing services. To be fair, there are a few exceptions, and we will discuss a couple of these later in the chapter, but otherwise, many smart city initiatives have tended to fall short of their intended goal.

Google’s Sidewalk Labs in Toronto was a billion-dollar smart city grid loaded with sensors and cameras envisioned to revitalize the post-industrial shoreline. While many will claim the project was shut down due to COVID-19, Bennat Berger summarized in his article Sidewalk Labs’ Failure and the Future of Smart Cities that the real reasons were the residents’ fears of data privacy and the inability to make the...

Smart buildings create the smart city

A building is a microcosm of a city in many ways. Like connecting systems within a building and using the data collected to deliver actionable insights, connecting buildings across a city takes this a step further to identify inefficient use patterns across several buildings. Cities already exist and buildings already exist; therefore, they will just need to be upgraded with IoT technologies to collect data to make insightful adjustments.

Smart building technology deployed across the city can help streamline operations and improve the overall infrastructure to deliver the smart city. Smart cities use the same advanced digital technologies and analytics as smart buildings, with a focus on similar outcome areas, such as the following:

• Energy: Cities are establishing goals to provide more efficient use of the power grid, something that is already occurring in many buildings. Buildings are a large part of a city’s energy use, and...

Framework for measuring smart city impact

A successful smart city initiative may be measured based on several different potential outcomes. Similar to a holistic smart building, a holistic smart city will implement smart programs that generate positive outcomes across many different performance factors, and they need a framework to measure and report these outcomes.

A holistic key performance indicator (H-KPI) framework has been developed by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This framework is used to measure the return on investment and community impact of certain technology or projects across an entire smart city ecosystem.

The framework involves assessing data across three main levels of analysis:

• Technologies layer: This level includes the city’s sensors and actuators, networks, data systems, and computational hardware and software systems
• Infrastructure services layer: This includes the communication...

IoT helps buildings give back to the grid

Integrating buildings and the electricity grid is a fundamental method for increasing energy efficiency across smart cities. Smart sensing, metering, monitoring, and management are helping building owners to locate efficiency opportunities and to increase the grid operator’s situational awareness. The energy savings by using demand-responsive devices are augmented with potential savings from not having to build new energy generation and transmission infrastructure.

A transactive approach to energy allows millions of meters, sensors, and smart appliances to seamlessly communicate and coordinate with energy loads and distributed generation sources. Decisions for allocation and use are made based on the value, which may use non-energy criteria, such as the power’s greenness, comfort, and asset valuation.

To build integrated building-grid ecosystems, cities and buildings should do the following:

• Use the built environment...

Government buildings are smart city starters

Nearly every city has numerous buildings that are owned by the city and therefore present opportunities to build the foundation for a smart city. These buildings include courthouses, jails, city halls, libraries, police stations, tax offices, farmer’s markets, and city operations. Cities will often also contain provincial, state, territory, and federal/national buildings.

A government building operates the same as a private building, and therefore, all the efficiency and cost-cutting initiatives we discussed for buildings apply to these buildings as well. Cities wishing to implement smart city initiatives should consider their own buildings as launching points. These government-owned and managed buildings will require all the same IoT devices and smart technologies that have been discussed throughout this book.

The US General Services Administration (GSA) is the US government’s largest civilian landlord. They have built...

World’s top smart cities 2022

As mentioned earlier, there are some cities that have been very successful with their smart city initiatives. The Smart City Index is an annual report developed by the Institute for Management Development and the Singapore University for Technology and Design (SUTD), which ranks cities using technological and economic data, along with a perception rating from the citizens on how smart they perceive their city to be.

The top-ranked cities and smart buildings in 2022 were the following:

• Singapore: This city-state launched its smart city initiative in 2014 in both the public and private sectors. Citywide smart programs include a digital health system that uses IoT wearable devices and video consultations, a contactless payment system for public transportation, and a portion of the city designated as vehicle-free.

Smart buildings include Capital Tower, a 52-story building and winner of the Green Mark Platinum Award for design, energy...

Summary

Cities continue to evolve and grow, and they have an enormous impact on the people who live and work in them. Buildings and cities have similar goals around resource consumption reduction, operations efficiency gains, environmental improvements, sustainability, and enhancing the quality of life for all stakeholders. Since buildings and cities are working toward the same outcomes, using the same IoT smart technology will have positive and complementary impacts for both.

A building is a microcosm of a city, with many of the same needs, such as managing water, energy, and lighting to delivering emergency services and providing security. With this in mind, it makes sense to consider smart buildings as the building blocks of scalable smart cities.

The next chapter will focus on building smart from the start using the latest smart building technology in the design and construction phases. We’ll explore the impact smart buildings are having on the commercial real estate...