The connected future of smart cities starts with smart buildings

Smart City initiatives are emerging here in the U.S. and around the globe. Forward leaning cities from Seattle to Singapore to London are expected to spend nearly $124 billion this year on smart city initiatives, an increase of 18.9 percent from 2019, according to a recent IDC report.

In order to have smart cities, it’s important to understand the most fundamental part of them – smart buildings. They are the foundational “building blocks” that will enable a true transformation of our cities through which we’ll have safe, sustainable, connected environments for the majority of the world’s population. But as buildings get smarter across the world, there is a missing element needed to drive wider and measurable progress – a universal, holistic approach to assessing a building’s intelligence, or “smartness.”

While there are a few existing building programs that track specific concerns such as energy usage, up to this point there has been no complete assessment for smart buildings. We must look at the building from multiple aspects, connecting technology with the safety and health of the people in the building while driving operating costs down – all of which, when combined, will drive up the value of the building for both the owner and the city in which it stands.

As cities look to invest in and establish policies for sustainability and to attract citizens and workers, smart buildings will play an integral role in their advancements.

TIA, through its members and partners, is addressing this need by working to establish a common set of criteria, which, in order to succeed, requires the buy in of stakeholders across the smart-building ecosystem. To accomplish this, we are bringing together real estate, architecture, engineering, construction, security and information communications technology (ICT) professionals, among others, to help define the framework needed for the assessment criteria.

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