Sensors: Supporting Cities and Citizens in Achieving Resilience and Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

COVID-19 has brought with it a stark wake-up call. A shared global realization that the very "local” places we live in, where we work, and visit, are, in fact, extremely fragile. They will not survive, nor will we, the majority of the world’s population that call cities their “home”, without firm grounding in a truly sustainable and resilient framework. Today, the goal of creating sustainable resilient cities is still, for the vast majority, an unrealized dream and very much an uphill struggle. The lessons we can learn from this tragic pandemic must include how best to nurture our cities, develop the policies, strategies, and solutions needed to safeguard our social wellbeing and protect us against what the future may hold in store.

Whatever terms or definition we use for “Smart Cities”, we know that technology and access to intelligent data is at the core of providing sustainable and resilient cities—not simply to provide efficiencies for a city’s limited resources, but also to stimulate local economies, provide social wellbeing to citizens, and to define the type of city we want for future generations.

This year, according to a report by Juniper Research, the number of IoT devices in operation globally will reach 46 billion, and by 2030, this figure is expected to jump to a staggering 125 billion (source: Martech Advisor, 2021). Sensors play a core role in IoT solutions that are now deeply rooted in our everyday life. Our need for connectivity, smart devices, and real-time data extraction for our businesses, industry, and cities determined this, and sensors make it possible to collect a myriad of data everywhere from our environment, infrastructures, businesses, and even us, generating a new ecosystem of opportunities for smart city solutions in medical care, the environment, water and waste, elderly care, industrial control, logistics, transportation, agriculture, emergency and disaster prevention, retail, cultural heritage, and tourism, and many more.

This Special Issue of Sensors, which stems from the 2021 IEEE World Forum on IoT, will provide in-depth accounts of active state-of-the-art city projects that have implemented IoT sensor solutions and applications for smart city solutions to drive digital transformation, digital intelligence, and efficiencies and which provide key changes to our social wellbeing. City stakeholders, from government, industry, academia, and community organizations worldwide, will showcase the results and impact achieved, the lessons learnt, pain points, and identify best practices that can be shared globally. Analysis will assess how sensors can and have already improved our lives in cities, indicate the new technologies to look out for, and provide some possibilities of what sensors can provide to our future cities and people and how they can help us to resolve common urban priorities to achieve far greater resilience and sustainability.

Dr. Joel Myers
Dr. Tao Zhang
Guest Editors

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