special report Nature and technology drive smart city development Metering & Smart Energy International spoke with Anil Ahuja, author of the book Integration of Nature and Technology for Smart Cities, about the book and his perspective on smart cities. This book is an expansion of the original title Integrated M/E Design: Building Systems Engineering. Why the expansion on the topic? The original book was about building technologies and sustainable system operations. Nowadays, we integrate information and communication technologies into buildings and call them ‘smart buildings.’ However, in discussions with an international group of authors from the engineering, urban planning, and architecture fields around new trends and paradigms for smart buildings and smart cities, we rethought the concept and reached a common understanding that a smart, sustainable building is not just about the building itself. There are things happening in the inside of the building and on the outside. A smart building connects the inside with the outside, provides efficiencies on both sides, synchronises the outside infrastructure with its inside systems and integrates outside nature and its inside occupants in its design. What makes a city smart? Due to the breadth of technologies that have been implemented under the smart city label, it is difficult to distil a precise definition 30 of a smart city. A smart city not only possesses ICT technology in areas but implements modern ICT technology in a manner that impacts the local community, environment, and health. A city can be defined as “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic development. This leads to a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory action and engagement. i Why are smart cities so important? What are the benefits, challenges and reality of scale of expansion globally? Smart cities are a response to the need for cities and people to lower their carbon footprint; infrastructure is designed to meet these goals by enabling us to minimise our use of resources and recycle as much as possible. As urbanisation increases, we are putting more and more pressure on finite resources. It is important to remember that our resources are not infinite – we have no additional or new resources, other than sun, coming to earth. We are (technically) drinking the same water the dinosaurs drank. The challenges with the types of societies we have created is that we are not mindful of our limited resources. Developers Smart cities