The Future's Smarter Cities: A Look at the Industry's Projected Growth Opportunities

From 2023 to 2030, the swelling global market for smart cities is expected to register a compound annual growth rate of 25.8%. Moreover, by 2050, it is projected that up to 70% of the world’s population will live in urban environments; markedly healthier ones in terms of livability, one would hope, but urban environments nonetheless. And on a personal note, as my first foray into IoT was researching developments regarding one of the U.S.’s first smart cities, I’ve come to relish the deep dives that sustainably smart urbanization merits.

This brings us to recent analyses from market research and consulting company Frost & Sullivan. Their studies indicate, at a glance, that the smart city solutions market is on its way, indeed, to experiencing another boom as urban IoT investments ferry us closer to fully digitized, smart-tech-supported services and infrastructure.

A long-story-short synopsis: As we know, smart city solutions empower myriad regional governments to be at the forefront of stimulating institutional changes as they acquire distributed smart city data. The stimulation and utilization of this critical data has had an evolution; smarter transportation (via smart traffic management and public parking) is superb, but it hasn’t stopped there. Smart city fruits still ripe for the picking include lighting, heating, smart grids, improvements to renewable energy production, waste management, manufacturing and retail, to name a handful. (Not to forget solutions in BFSI sectors, a.k.a. banking, financial services, and insurance).

“In every smart city project,” reported Avishar Dutta, Mobility Senior Research Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, “one of the most important layers to consider is the city-wide network infrastructure that facilitates the data flow between interconnected devices and the central monitoring platform. So to reduce the cost such a network’s setup, we’re seeing low-power, wide-area technologies being adopted to make all aspects of smart city projects feasible for different urban areas.”

Frost & Sullivan also spoke to other lucrative growth opportunities, including vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle devices, smart utilities, healthcare, e-governance and more. So despite an unpredictable future, smart city insights are certainly on the rise.