The mention of a smart city usually brings to mind imagines of flying cars and science fiction-like landscapes. But as city governments begin to experiment with using technologies like the cloud, big data, and internet of things, what are smart cities really trying to do — and what are they accomplishing?

“Governments exist so that they can provide better services, they can provide better quality of life,” said Hardik Bhatt (pictured), leader of smart cities and mobility business at Amazon Web Services Inc. “And smart cities is just, I’d say, a trend where … you’re using multitudes of technology to kind of help the government get its mission accomplished in a smoother, faster, better, cheaper manner.”

Bhatt spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed smart cities, technological use cases, and smart city trends that governments are implementing. (* Disclosure below.)

Smart cities creating better governmental solutions for cities

Cities who are interested in becoming a smart city are ones that are just trying to solve problems for their citizens, according to Bhatt. “This is an age-old problem, but new technology can help you solve that,” Bhatt said. He went on to describe multiple use cases of governments and what they’re doing to implement technology into becoming smarter cities.

For example, cities are using big data for public safety issues like emergency response situations. They’re doing this across multiple departments by pooling together a virtual informational sharing environment to help detect traffic incidents and respond to public safety threats. Another customer that Bhatt has worked with is looking for on-demand microtransit solutions.

“The public transit agencies … are looking at, ‘Can we build an on-demand microtransit?’ So you can pool your friends and jump into a transit van, as opposed to a private car, and then you can go from point A to point B and in a much of more affordable manner,” Bhatt said.

Public health is also a sector that is implementing smart technologies. For example, the State of Georgia is using Amazon Alexa to help with the state’s food stamp problem. “So we’re seeing a large volume of data now coming on the cloud where the governments are looking to move … the needle. But you’re also seeing this nimble, quick solutions that can start going out,” Bhatt concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE