| Abstract |
Japan’s policy calls for efforts towards zero-carbon while making the most of its characteristics in cities and areas towards the realisation of carbon neutrality. The key is to collect data created by people in the five core elements of urban infrastructure: electricity, gas, water supply, transportation, and communication, as they support people’s lives and social activities and integrate them with a wide variety of information. In addition, it is also crucial to construct a framework that enables quantitative analysis. It is expected that this will support effective decarbonisation policies and their implementation by local governments, and at the same time led to social activities through optimisation of urban infrastructure, improvements in the convenience and safety of citizens’ lives, and business innovation in companies. In this chapter, these five elements of infrastructure are named "5Grids”, and they are analysed in terms of data collection, data management, and data integration with external systems. Such functions are expected to form an essential basis of smart cities and areas to make full use of digital data to move towards decarbonisation. In this context, this chapter first overviews the history of Japan’s energy transition to date, and then discusses the 5Grids concept, which is expected to become the foundation of Japan’s future smart cities. © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Maciej M. Sokołowski and Fumio Shimpo; individual chapters, the contributors. |
