Moving with the times

Members and regular visitors to our site won’t need to be told that SmartCitiesWorld has undergone a major redesign. Much like the cities and the technology featured on the site, we recognise that we ourselves must also evolve and react to changing times.

One of the aims was to make the site more intuitive and improve the navigation so we hope the new approach won’t require much explaining. But to make sure visitors can extract maximum value from our content, here are a few pointers.

Firstly, we’ve updated the six vertical sectors. ‘Connectivity and Data’ have been combined while ‘Transport’ becomes ‘Mobility’. To underline the importance of citizens and the role they play in the development of smart cities, we have incorporated a ‘Governance & Citizen’ channel. Similarly, to keep pace with the changing face of cities and the built environment, we’ve introduced a section called ‘Urban Space’. This is where you will find all content relating to buildings with the addition of some key topic areas that have become particularly pertinent in the pandemic such as ‘Pedestrianisation’, ‘Cultural Space’ and ‘Parks & Green Space’.

When we launched five years ago, climate change was already high on the agenda but to reflect the critical part cities play in tackling it, the section called ‘Energy & Environment’ will make it easier to find coverage in this area. Each section now has a drop-down menu with a list of topics and clicking on these will take you to a landing page which features all of the site’s content (news stories, reports, opinions and research) in these areas.

Our in-depth City Profile and popular City Lights section can still be found under ‘Cities’ in the top navigation bar and all white papers, reports, videos and podcasts can be found under the ‘Research’ menu.

Most of all, we hope the new design will help to convey the smart city message and share timely and insightful content to an even wider global audience. Significant progress has been made in the smart city space since the site was launched but it is clear from the news today that there is still much work to be done. In the UK, home to some of the world’s leading smart cities, more than half of people don’t know what a smart city is, according to research. The survey by Milestone Systems also found that half of people would like to hear about smart city technologies before implementation and three-fifths do not feel informed about smart city developments but would like to be.

This underscores the importance of clear communication, collaboration and inclusivity. These traits are all reflected in the values of SmartCitiesWorld which you can read more about here and will help us ensure no citizen or sector of society is left behind on the smart city journey in the months and years ahead.

We hope you approve of the changes we’ve made but are keen to hear what you think so please use the email us with any feedback at membership@smartcitiesworld.net.