Over the last decades, the world’s urban population has grown exponentially. In 1950, 30% of the global populace lived in cities and while we see rapid urbanization is happening around the world currently; by 2050, world’s population is going to touch 10 billion and about 68% of population will live in cities. As per predictions, urbanization combined with overall growth of the world’s population may add another 2.5 billion people in cities. Approximatively, 80% of this increase will be in Asia and Africa. As a consequence, this places immense pressure on urban infrastructures in terms of housing, energy, transportation, and waste management. For example, modern cities are responsible for three-quarters of all energy consumption – and this massive carbon footprint will only grow in the near future. Together, all of these factors make Smart Cities an imperative, envisioning a sustainable future for the global urban community. Advance city management platform, Rapid construction, economical housing & industry digitalization are the key game changers.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Smart City Sector

In order to meet the needs of rising urban populations, urban planners are looking to leverage next-gen technologies to remove traditional inefficiencies. Not only will this help address existing gaps in infrastructure, but it will also allow proactive design and development for long-term positive impacts.

To this end, City planners and administrators are considering five key catalysts:

• Building a sustainable, secure, and resilient future – The different stakeholders involved in developing Smart Cities must ensure access to the required resources (natural, human, and infrastructure) to continually revitalize themselves, respond to disasters, and preempt security threats.
• Respecting the art – Architecture models must use the latest tools to blend creativity with pragmatic utilization making sure the design process is fast, accurate, and geared for first-time-right.
• Modernizing craftsmanship – Fragmentation across design and construction processes must be addressed so that the original vision is translated into desired results.
• Maximizing project outcomes – AEC relies heavily on expert project management, making it difficult to operate when surrounded by multiple silos, manual dependencies, and poor visibility. Unlocking the best results from every project is key to building Smart Cities.
• Creating collectively – Frictionless collaboration will help maintain schedules, eliminate preventable costs, and minimize dissonance among contributors, helping Smart City projects achieve completion on time and on budget.

Clearly, it is important to use digital technologies to cut down barriers across disciplines, allowing cross-industry pioneers to work together seamlessly. That is why we believe that accurately simulating the final cityscape before commencing development, and implementing cutting-edge project management tools, can give enterprises that critical advantage they require to succeed.

Envisioning the Future, Today

Moving from complex, largely unplanned urban infrastructural patterns of the present to connected Smart Cities is a significant leap forward. Governments, agencies, operators, and construction enterprises must be able to understand current scenarios, visualize “to be achieved” conditions, and find a meeting ground between the two. 3D visualization technology lets these stakeholders test ‘what if’ scenarios, and plan the ideal roadmap for projects.

3DEXPERIENCity applies the power of Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform to combine a wide range of territorial data with advanced analytical, modeling, simulation, and lifecycle management capabilities. This means that different stakeholders can visualize optimized solutions for planning, logistics, and environmental adaptation, even before starting work on projects.