New Delhi: The top five smart cities globally for 2015 are Barcelona, New York, London, Nice and Singapore, according to UK-based analyst firm, Juniper Research Ltd.

Juniper Research’s smart city rankings were compiled following an analysis of each city’s “smart” capabilities, with particular focus on their use of smart grids, smart traffic management and smart streetlighting, alongside aspects such as technological capability and social cohesion, the firm said in a 17 February press statement.

“Barcelona performed consistently well across all metrics and serves as an exciting model of success from which others can learn, bolstered by strong environmentally sustainable initiatives. Other leading cities such as New York and London still require greater emphasis on implementing environmentally positive projects, despite excelling in areas such as technological capability and a willingness to engage with citizens through open data,” the statement said.

The success of Barcelona as a smart city, according to a 2014 case study by Cisco Systems Inc., lies in the fact that in 2012, the city government structured its smart city projects under the umbrella of “Smart City Barcelona”.

Barcelona, the study notes, structured the various projects in three technological layers. The first comprised sensors that were deployed throughout the city and are being used to implement projects like smart water, smart lighting and smart energy management systems. The city’s sensor platform called Sentilo is fully open source, which means other cities or organizations can use it for similar purposes.

The intermediate, or second, layer of the technology architecture is the City OS (operating system), a platform created by the Barcelona city government to aggregate and analyze all data gathered from various city applications. This includes modelling for data analytics and predictive analytics applications. The third layer involves sharing of data and analytics provided by the City OS with both clients within the city government and external data users.

There is no standard definition of what constitutes a “smart” city, and terms like digital city, wireless city and future city are used as synonyms.

Government funding and support is critical for smart city initiatives to succeed.

China, for instance, selected 90 pilot cities for smart city projects over two years ago. The plan was announced by the ministry of housing and urban-rural development on 30 January 2013 in a bid to provide fast and effective information services in areas such as traffic management, healthcare and environmental protection by using advanced information and communications technology, or ICT.

The China Development Bank said it will lend as much as 80 billion yuan (about Rs.70,000 crore) for the projects between 2013 and 2015.

The UK government, through the Technology Strategy Board, began investing in ‘Future’ cities three years ago by holding a competition, similar to the city challenge contest through which the Indian government is planning to select its 100 smart cities.

In January 2013, it awarded £24 million to Glasgow City to showcase how UK cities can grow their local economy and improve the lives of their citizens by making the most of new technologies and by integrating and connecting city systems.

Experts point out that cities such as Seoul, Singapore, Yokohama and Barcelona are considered to be ‘smart’ because they have an intelligent transport system.

Stockholm and London, for instance, have zones where an additional fee is collected from vehicles entering a congested city centre.

This toll is charged automatically using electronic toll collection or automatic number plate recognition, since stopping the users at conventional toll booths would cause long queues and delays.

Singapore has a programme for dynamic road pricing to adjust incentives in real time.

Cities such as Chicago in the US use audio sensors attached to rooftops and telephone poles that can detect when a gun is fired and pinpoint the location, enabling the police to respond without the need for citizen intervention.

Regardless of how speedily, or slowly, it is executed, the smart city concept is here to stay.

Research firm Gartner Inc. predicts that “1.1 billion connected things will be used by smart cities in 2015, rising to 9.7 billion by 2020”. Connected things include smart light emitting diode, or LED, lighting, healthcare monitoring, smart locks and sensors for motion detection or carbon monoxide. Smart LED lighting will record the highest growth of Internet of Things (IoT) consumer applications—from 6 million units in 2015 to 570 million units by 2020, forecasts Gartner