More than half the world’s population already lives in urban areas, and that share is projected to reach 66% by 2050, according to Bernard Têtu, Founding President of Dimonoff. As cities grapple with that growth alongside mounting environmental pressures, smart city technology has emerged as a practical way to manage services ranging from transportation and water systems to public lighting.
Smart cities are, at their core, an application of the Internet of Things, and their dense populations and complex systems make them well suited to it. As BCC Research puts it, these projects “leverage the array of connected sensors and analytics platforms to drive stronger coordination within departments and across city agencies and community groups,” tying together lighting, surveillance, traffic, and environmental systems to boost productivity and service quality. Navigant Research has forecast the global smart city market could exceed $94.2 billion by 2026, reflecting how quickly the sector is expanding.
Street lighting stands out within that broader shift because the economics are so compelling. Remote control over fixtures allows cities to cut power consumption through selective dimming, improve safety by directing light where it’s needed, and catch malfunctions in real time rather than waiting for a resident to report an outage. The ongoing move to LED, which lasts more than 15 years compared with under five for older fixtures, gives cities a natural moment to add this control equipment during routine retrofits, cutting costs immediately while opening the door to other applications such as environmental sensors and parking systems.
That opportunity exists largely because street lights make such a strong backbone for urban IoT: they blanket the city, mirror where people actually are, and come with independent power, unobstructed sightlines for wireless transmission, and reasonable resistance to tampering.