Comm. Smart Cities and IoT supplement Smart Cities and IoT | Seite 38

smart views
markets are piloting smart grid projects.
The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority
(DEWA) had already installed around
120,000 smart meters at the end of 2014
and aims to reduce energy consumption
by 30 per cent by 2030 through smart
technologies.
Other smart city projects are melded into
broader large scale infrastructure deployments. The Dubai World Expo 2020 and the
Qatar World Cup 2022, for example, are

driving an acceleration of smart cities, by
integrating digital concepts natively into
new infrastructure build out. Pioneer cities
such as Lusail in Qatar or King Abdullah
Economic City in Saudi Arabia are further
leading the way with a more comprehensive approach to smart city deployment.
Positive but uneven growth
While the progress towards smart cities in
the Arab world has been broadly positive,

it must be noted that it has been uneven,
with pockets of growth and large-scale
prominent cities somewhat obscuring
slower development in the rest of the
region. For example, we estimate that less
than 10 per cent of the urban addressable
urban population in the MENA region is
directly impacted by the dozens of smart
city projects identified in the region. Of
the 10 largest urban centres in the Middle
East and North Africa, only three have a

Increasingly, Arab world governments understand that
making their infrastructure and cities smart is not a matter of vanity
or mere ambition – it’s a critical part of the long-term infrastructure
build process

Dubai Municipality’s
Makani Digital
Address app has put
a digital address onto
more than 125,000
buildings in the city

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