Smart cities lookout, components of a smart city

This is the eighth post in a series on Smart Cities, Dana Cary and Julie Claar are with our Firm as interns in the summermonths and will deliver their findings on our blog. 

   Dana Cary, HOLTROP S.L.P. Transaction & Business Law  

The global movement toward refurbishing inefficient, polluted cities into “smart” cities has grown dramatically within the past decade. Simply put, a smart city is one that has six primary components—a smart economy, smart mobility, smart governance, smart living, smart people, and smart environment. In short, the smart city movement is striving to transform dirty, energy inefficient, economically unstable cities into fast moving, energy efficient, environmentally safe, metropolises.  And while the benefits of creating smart cities are endless, the final goal of creating a smart city is to lay the foundation for a more efficient and brighter future.

While smart cities have several components, one essential component is energy efficiency.   Striving to reduce a city´s overall energy consumption is a relatively straightforward goal, however it has proved to be one of the most daunting steps in the movement toward a greener future. Why? Because motivating people to save energy can be a long and arduous process.   

Today I stumbled upon a very interesting blog post that discusses various ways to motivate building occupants to reduce their energy consumption. These steps include educating building tenants before they move in about the importance of decreasing our energy use and the clarifying the impact this will have toward our future, among others.