The 'smart' way Barcelona is cutting costs and improving the quality of life

Barcelona was honored as the world's smartest city this year, beating out London, Singapore, and New York in connected infrastructure, citizen engagement, technological capability, and use of open data sources.

Barcelona's pilot program, which launched in 2011, has since developed into 22 different programs encompassing more than 200 projects and implementations under the umbrella of the city's Municipal Institute of Information Technology, the department that handles the city's IT environment. Many cities are already connecting their infrastructure to IoT devices like sensors and smart meters. But few cities are as far along in that effort as Barcelona.

In a new report, BI Intelligence examines how other municipalities can learn from Barcelona's development into a smart city, how cities' investments in IoT technologies will grow over time, and how those investments will impact urban economies worldwide.

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Here are some of the key findings from the report:

• IoT deployments will create $421 billion in economic value for cities worldwide in 2019. That economic value will be derived from revenues from IoT device installations and sales and savings from efficiency gains in city services.
• Globally, cities' investments in IoT technologies will increase by $97 billion between 2015-2019. This will make up the bulk of government investment in IoT technologies, dwarfing the amount of money spent on other government IoT use cases like military drones and robots.
• The number of IoT devices installed in cities will will increase by more than 5 billion in the next four years, creating a massive opportunity for IoT hardware manufacturers and software vendors.
• IoT technologies will deliver a broad range of benefits for cities including reducing traffic congestion and air pollution, improving public safety, and providing new ways for governments to interact with their citizens.

In this report we will also:

• Define the difference between connected vs smart cities.
• Identify key challenges for municipalities in developing smart cities and illustrate how some cities are already solving those obstacles.
• Provide key takeaways from Barcelona's IoT strategy, which has earned it recognition as the world's smartest city.
• Illustrate how the benefits of connecting legacy infrastructure can be magnified through data aggregation and analysis.

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