UK - Glasgow awarded £24 million to become a smart city

The BBC reported that the UK government had awarded Glasgow a £24m grant intended to make it one of the country's first smart cities.

It will use the money on projects to demonstrate how a city of the future might work.

They will include better services for Glaswegians, with real-time information about traffic and apps to check that buses and trains are on time.

The council will also create an app for reporting issues such as potholes and missing bin collections.

Other services promised by the council include linking up the CCTV cameras across the city with its traffic management unit in order to identify traffic incidents faster.

It will use analytical software and security cameras to help identify and prevent crime in the city and monitor energy levels to find new ways of providing gas and electricity to poorer areas where fuel poverty is a big issue.

Scott Cain, the project leader for Future Cities at the UK Technology Strategy Board said:

Glasgow has some quite extreme challenges - it has the lowest life expectancy of any city in the UK for instance - and the hope is that if we bring together energy, transport, public safety and health it will make it more efficient and a better place to live.

The thinking behind it is to have somewhere in the UK where firms can look at the efficiencies, the investments and how you can address the challenges of a city

Councillor Gordon Matheson, Leader of Glasgow City Council:

This is a huge boost to Glasgow’s ambitions to build a better future for our city and its people. This investment and the work we will be doing will put us at the forefront of innovative and smart cities not just in the UK but in Europe and beyond.

Professor Sir Jim McDonald, Principal of the University of Strathclyde:

We are delighted to welcome this major investment in Glasgow. The University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre will host the revolutionary City Observatory. This will allow academic and business and industry researchers to analyse more than 200 information feeds about Glasgow – its health, economy, transport, energy use – to map the relationships between them and to understand how a 21st century city operates.