How a City Can Become a Smart City One Apartment at a Time

By Alexander Landa

The good news regarding smart cities is that like many other cities, they can form one building – or even one apartment – at a time. We don't need to demolish an entire city and start from the grid up just to future-proof our environment.

CNET is taking a unique approach to designing a smart city by starting with a smart apartment. Similar to their Smart Home, the smart apartment is a bit of a testing grounds for smart technology – a playpen of sorts for futuristic gadgets that play well with one another. All devices and technology they used in this design are available for the average Joe – so don't look at this pad and think to yourself “I can never afford this,” or “Is this even physically possible to install?”

Their ideas are rather simple, yet genius. They ditched the idea of smart light switches in favor of lamps, since lamps are much easier to control and can be used with their phones, like talking to Siri. For security, CNET installed a motion- and sound-detector that enables you to watch your apartment in real-time. 

They put a lot more into the apartment, but the big picture is how it connects to the city. The light bulbs used talk to the city of Louisville where it's located, by changing color based on the air quality in the city. Amazon's Alexa is pretty neat in that you can ask it for updates from the city (a daily report from the Mayor), or asking when the next garbage pickup date is.

Right now, this is still in the ver early stages of development. Though, it's already showing progress with residents from around the city all working towards pushing Louisville to the future.

Interested in learning more about smart cities? Attend our upcoming Building Tech Forum to see how the future of architecture and sustainability is changing.