Dubai will be the world’s first city to assess the efficiency and sustainability of its operations using the key performance indicators developed by the International Telecommuncations (ITU) Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities.
The two-year pilot project will evaluate the feasibility of the indicators with the aim of contributing to their international standardization.
“ICTs have great potential to improve the quality of life enjoyed by city inhabitants,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “Dubai’s experience will assist ITU in developing a standard means to measure the success of smart-city strategies, and I commend Dubai for its will to promote urban sustainability at the international level.”
The collaboration between Smart Dubai, an initiative to convert Dubai into a smart city, and ITU is part of ITU’s efforts to encourage the adoption of master plans for sustainable urban development by city administrations.
The key performance indicators focus on the elements of a smart city that rely on information and communication technologies (ICT), offering a measure of progress relevant to ICT aspects of urban-development master plans.
The ‘Smart Dubai’ initiative’s extensive application of ICT makes the city an ideal test bed for the use of the indicators and their subsequent refinement.
“The Smart Dubai initiative is an ambitious one. We are transforming a thousand government services through innovative applications of ICT. The broad scope of the initiative makes for an excellent field trial of ITU’s key performance indicators as we have an opportunity to trace the efficacy of a wide range of ICT applications from root to maturity,” said Assistant Director-General of the Executive Office of Dubai, Member of the Smart Dubai Executive Committee and Team Leader of the Smart City Taskforce, Dubai, Aisha Bin Bishr.
“We will work hard to make a successful pilot to open the doors for other cities to learn from the Dubai experience,” he added.
Director General of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori, said the UAE is home to some of the highest ICT penetration rates in the world and is creating the conditions necessary for government and industry to capitalize on this ICT ubiquity to build smarter, more sustainable cities.
The Focus Group has offered an open platform to identify the standardization requirements of smart sustainable cities, concluding its activities with the release of 21 technical reports and specifications.