This study highlights the standardisation activities that are being carried out by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) via its Study Group 20, the United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) initiative and other venues, in supporting the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in smart sustainable cities (SSCs). These standards include common terminologies for the Internet of Things (IoT) and SSCs, the requirements for high performing ICT infrastructures, and the interoperability between different ICT or IoT networks. The work of ITU has encouraged the integration of ICTs into SSC, promoted sustainable and inclusive growth, and supported cities worldwide in reaching the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.

The International Electrotechnical Commission is using its systems approach, honed in the development of international smart grid standards, to identify the requirements of cities and smart city solution providers for tried and tested solutions to common challenges and is working with the wider international standards development community to develop the coherent and interoperable packages of standards needed. This study discusses such developments and provides insights into the current state-of-the-art.

The smart city movement has been growing internationally, but it will take another couple of decades for smart cities to realise their game-changing potential. At that point, empowered by data, a political tipping point will begin, giving cities around the world an exalted role in the leadership of society, creating the ‘century of the city’. This study reviews progress in the UK using the four foundations of smart cities: information and communication technology; data; governance; and citizen engagement, and what to look out for in the next two decades.

The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region published its first Smart City Blueprint for Hong Kong in December 2017 with the vision to embrace innovation and technology to build a world-famed Smart Hong Kong characterised by a strong economy and high quality of living. The blueprint maps out development plans covering six major areas, namely ‘smart mobility’, ‘smart living’, ‘smart environment’, ‘smart people’, ‘smart government’ and ‘smart economy’, in the following five years (up to 2022) and beyond. With over 70 initiatives set out in the blueprint, Hong Kong aims to be better equipped to address urban challenges, enhance the effectiveness of city management and improve people's quality of living as well as Hong Kong's sustainability, efficiency, and safety.

A city is an aggregate of a huge amount of heterogeneous data. However, extracting meaningful values from that data remains a challenge. City Brain is an end-to-end system whose goal is to glean irreplaceable values from big city data, specifically from videos, with the assistance of rapidly evolving artificial intelligence technologies and fast-growing computing capacity. From cognition to optimisation, to decision-making, from search to prediction and ultimately, to intervention, City Brain improves the way to manage the city, as well as the way to live in it. In this study, the authors introduce current practices of the City Brain platform in a few cities in China, including what they can do to achieve the goal and make it a reality. Then they focus on the system overview and key technical details of each component of the City Brain system, from cognition to intervention. Lastly, they present a few deployment cases of City Brain in various cities in China.