The city is one of humanity’s biggest cultural and technological achievements—a part of civilization that provides infrastructure for often millions of people in a very small space. These vast constructions of human presence need a great deal of tuning, planning, management, and maintenance; to an extent that governments and communities are often taxed to their limits to keep them working in good order. Advances in communication continue to push ahead, cities and their governance are being pulled along with them.

For an idea of how the Internet of Things—how communication and sensor technology in general—can be leveraged to make better cities read Kyt Dotson’s “The City of Paradigm: The Internet of Things” for a short story and examples from IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative. For developers and information geeks, look into what frameworks and APIs are being brought to bear to make the Internet of Things work with Saroj Kar’s round-up.

In the meantime, AT&T and IBM are still pushing the envelope of what communication technology and the burgeoning paradigm of the Internet of Things can do for cities and the people that live in them.

AT&T and IBM team up around smarter cities

Big Blue and the U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T (who is also has a foot in the area of connected cars) announced a few days ago a partnership on IoT technologies. The two companies intend to combine their analytics platforms, cloud and security technologies in order to gain more insights on data collected from machines in various industries.

The new alliance will initially focus on the creation of new solutions for municipalities and medium-sized utilities. These government agencies want to integrate and analyze very high volumes of data that arise from the records of facilities such as transport vehicles, utility meters and security cameras. Here, IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center, Mobile First Platform and IBM MessageSight MQTT Appliance will come into play. Cities could benefit from an analysis of traffic data, utilities of a precise measurement of energy consumption in households and many more.

“Smarter cities, cars, homes, machines and consumer devices will drive the growth of the Internet of Things along with the infrastructure that goes with them, unleashing a wave of new possibilities for data gathering, predictive analytics, and automation,” said Rick Qualman, Vice President, Strategy & Business Development, Telecom Industry, IBM. “The new collaboration with AT&T will offer insights from crowdsourcing, mobile applications, sensors and analytics on the cloud, enabling all organizations to better listen, respond and predict.”

This could be important opportunities for urban planners in create better connected cities, such as – better allocation and distribution of operation and maintenance resources based on information from events; analysis of the movement of commuters to improve the management of traffic, parking areas, location and number of rescue forces. Urban planners can prepare better and respond to prevent or mitigate potential bottlenecks and other difficulties in the event of an emergency.