What makes a smart community?

As the ranks of urban dwellers balloon, communities will face no shortage of challenges — from natural disasters and congestion to pollution and resource management. An increasingly important set of tools in their arsenal, however, harnesses the Internet of Things, or IoT. These solutions will be instrumental in helping planners and public officials adapt, optimize and revolutionize the communities they serve.

This isn’t a silver-bullet proposition. Rather, a smart community is built from a series of interconnections — where a vast network of IoT sensors and cameras can analyze the cityscape and feed back to officials in real time.

“We want to know what a city’s precise needs are; we’re not looking for problems,” Kim English, Solutions Architect Business Development at Verizon, says. “We have this technology, and it’s a matter of applying it in a way in which everyone sees a benefit.”