Five articles to become an expert in APIs for Smart Cities

Smart cities, apart from smart containers where the lives of millions of citizens are developed, are big business. According to this study, it is a market that will increase from $465 billion last year to $1.2 trillion by 2022 globally, which entails an annual growth of around 23%.
2 min reading
19 September 2019
Five articles to become an expert in APIs for Smart Cities
Five articles to become an expert in APIs for Smart Cities

BBVA API Market

Smart cities, apart from smart containers where the lives of millions of citizens are developed, are big business. According to this study, it is a market that will increase from $465 billion last year to $1.2 trillion by 2022 globally, which entails an annual growth of around 23%.

In this rapid development, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have reserved a fundamental role on several fronts. For example, as connectors in the Internet of Things (IoT) for the hundreds of new physical devices that do and will populate cities. Or as a bridge to access the thousands of public datasets managed by the city councils and whose opening and access by the public and the companies results, in turn, in new services and technologies being developed that reinforce the city’s “smartness”.

We’re bringing five articles to you here that will help you understand the weight of APIs in the development of smart cities:

This article is based on the Internet of Things (IoT) and how municipal authorities are using an architecture consisting of microservices, APIs and visual interfaces to make use of this connectivity to collect, sort and visualize key data. By analyzing the patterns and trends in these data, you can obtain information about a wide range of problems affecting the city and use that vision to make it securer, more productive and, in general, a better place to live.

This interesting article by API Academy goes in depth to detail this inseparable elationship. Its author, Amy Vujanic, says bluntly that for each item on “a smart city’s wish list,” you need “a small army of APIs to enforce it.” And she gives a practical example of this, and at the same time, a clear case of success, the Spanish city of Zaragoza, of which its citizen card stands out. Citizens can use this to access the free Wi-Fi in the city, take out a book from the library, unlock a public bicycle or validate public transport tickets.

FIWARE is an open source framework promoted by the European Union – although it operates as an independent foundation – for the development of smart solutions with great projection (but not only) in those focused on smart cities. In this article, Héctor García maintains that it is a very intuitive and powerful platform that offers a set of APIs for the development of smart city-focused applications and details up to nine concrete benefits offered by opting for it.

In this full report published here we explained in great detail the role of APIs in the exponential development of smart technologies in the framework of cities, in addition to focusing on specific cases such as Barcelona and New York, of which we detail several concrete APIs and their functionalities. 

Adriana Valdez, a city planning researcher who is an expert in smart cities based in New York, writes in this post in a very clear way why APIs are so important in the development of smart cities and she gives some examples of her company’s pioneering developments, through which the city can use the APIs to send and receive data, creating an APIendpoint to receive data from multiple sources and a public API key so that other agencies in the city, third parties and developers can also know where they are and how to access said data. 

Are you interested in financial APIs? Discover all the APIs we can offer you at BBVA

It may interest you