Making Cities Smart

In my previous post, "What are Smart Cities? and Why?", I had provided some historical context into where and how the concept of Smart Cities fits into the overall narrative of cities, towns and urban developments.

In this post, I would like to discuss the opportunities and challenges in the middle of the second decade of 21st century, that are leading to development of Smart Cities. I will also introduce some of the Smart City initiatives that are being touted within the overall concept.

Modern Opportunities and Challenges

In some ways, Cities, both old and new can be made smart. From my perspective, the Smart Cities movement is a combination of technology and sustainable design practices that will be utilized to solve the biggest challenges for cities going into the 21st century. Let us start by understanding these opportunities and challenges at a deeper level.

Technology: An Opportunity

Within the sphere of Information and Communication Technology, independent developments have now started coming together and forming the basis for a set of "architectural forms" that will enable new living patterns. These developments can be grouped as

1. Realtime Status of Infrastructures
2. Scalable Networks
3. Scalable Computing Infrastructures
4. Ubiquitous Access

Realtime Status of Infrastructures

As sensors and embedded devices have become cheaper, it has become viable to deploy these sensors on a very large scale. With some level of power source that is either always available or can be continuously replenished (solar/ wind), a lot of the previous generation infrastructures can now be sensor enabled to understand in a realtime basis what is happening in the real world. Whether it is Smart Meters or Smart Buildings, this sensor enablement forms the first foundation of the initiative.

Scalable Networks

In addition to sensor enablement of many of the urban infrastructures, the next item was how do these devices communicate back to a server the latest status reports. The combination of IP based networks, and proliferation of cellular technologies (3G and 4G), has meant that devices can now communicate with a centralized location on a continuous basis.

Scalable Computing Infrastructures

As new devices are becoming sensor enabled, and networks can now be scaled to bring these updates back, the next bottleneck is infrastructure to handle this increased information flow as well as be able to process it under varying demand levels. Scalable computing infrastructures, aka Cloud computing, pioneered by Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo, provide the next building block. This additional computing power can be leased on demand, making it accessible to much smaller scale organizations.

Ubiquitous Access

Finally, Ubiquitous Access of information provided by Smart phones means that people at all levels of the society can now tap into these networks and infrastructures with relative ease. The Apps frameworks offered by most smartphone manufacturers means that developers and software engineers can combine these data into new ways to create new applications based on a user's needs. Next, we will discuss smartphones that now play a dual role.

Smartphones: Moving from a Consumer to a Publisher 

As mentioned, within the last decade a lot of aspects on how technology is accessed and deployed around the world, have been quietly but unmistakably revolutionized. While the Internet revolution started almost two decades ago, the primary interface was the PC. In the last 5 to 7 years, the access interface for Internet has become un-tethered from a wired connection at a fixed location, to a mobile one. More importantly, the access device, aka "the smartphone" has been embellished with a lot of sensors that allows the device to become a data source as much as it is an access device. This means that not only can people stay current with latest information wherever they are, but at an aggregate as well at an individual level, people can broadcast their current information to any body who would like to know.

Sustainable Development: A Challenge

The obvious challenge of 21st century is sustainable development. As mentioned in my previous post, the sprawl development of the 20th century is seen as something that needs to be fixed. This is in spite of the fact, that technology development in the recent past actually encourages sprawl. To explain, much of the social infrastructure in big cities can now be replicated in remote areas without incurring the same cost. However, its the external costs that are driving most societies to look for an alternate development model.

These external costs are in terms of some of the following issues, that go across developing and developed countries. These are

1. Congestion on roads
2. Demand for non-productive uses for scarce land such as on-street and off-street parking.
3. Costs in terms of traffic accidents
4. Increasing energy demand specially in developing countries.
5. Increasing costs in Energy extraction and generation.
6. Health costs of Transportation and Energy Generation Emissions.
7. External costs that are being incurred and will continue to accelerate due to climate change

Opportunities to make cities Smart

In order to make cities Smart, cities will need to focus on initiatives that make modern city living more sustainable and reduce the external costs as much as possible. Much of these initiatives are focused on the following areas.

1. Switching from personal automobile to shared or mass transit.
2. Encouraging alternate forms of energy production to reduce reliance on fossil fuels
3. Making energy generation and consumption more demand responsive.
4. Tele-commuting and Tele-shopping

In the next post, we will see how technologies can be combined to create enabling technologies for Smart Cities.



 

What are Smart Cities? and Why?

After perhaps a decade, the term "Smart Cities" is back in vogue. Promoted by IT vendors like IBM, Hitachi and others, IT vendors are trying to bring the concept of instrumented and automated systems into the paradigm of cities and urban living.

Smart Cities are urban design and urban development approach that leverages recent Information Technology and Communication Technology advancements to provide a higher standard of living and more environmentally conscious and energy efficient city developments.

In the first post on the series, I will put on my rosy glasses and see what makes "Smart City" a good pitch.

Historically, cities have been the grounds where different political powers and social systems have arisen, and have faded away within the context of a settlement. As they say "Rome was not built in a day", most cities around the world are actually layers of cities built on top of one another, as a patchwork of different systems and sensibilities of different times and eras. In that context, Smart Cities are another flavor and style being crafted out of recent and modern technological advancements, as well as to solve some of the problems of previous city models. To understand how Smart Cities fit into the overall narrative, let us start with how cities came into being.

Understanding cities before they became Smart

In the beginning of human cities, these were market towns, or trading ports, where the cultivators and traders of their time came to buy and sell their wares. They slowly morphed into seats of political power as their wealth and influence grew leading to an age of empires. As empires grew, cities became fortified entities that could defend themselves from invading armies. The loot in these cases was taxes collected from the hinterland and armies raised from that capital to invade and protect.

Industrial and Imperial Advancement

During renaissance, cities like Florence became seats of cultural and artistic revolutions and also scientific discoveries funded by benevolent rulers. This growth in learning cities in Persia, Middle East and India preceded  the development of learning cities in Europe.

Eventually the scientific discoveries of renaissance led to Industrial revolution and funding of expanding navies and trading routes to develop resource and raw material supply chains. Cities during the Industrial revolution evolved from markets to a combination of trading and production centers. As a result they became polluting slums where the workers migrated from hinterland to find economic opportunities. The living conditions also gave rise to several epidemics due to prevalent living conditions, but eventually led rise to development of modern public health systems.

Automobile and Suburbia

As the societies understood the perils of Industrial revolution, as well as the horse carriage gave way to mass produced automobiles at the turn of the century, a movement started to reduce densities and provide more countryside style of living through development of modern sub-urbia. The development of electricity, modern water and waste water systems, telephone, radio and television allowed sub-urban dwellers to stay in single family residences and yet be part of the urban economy in some shape or form.

Modern communication revolution

While the Industrial revolution and Automobile were the foundation technologies of previous re-configuration of cities, the Smart City moniker definitely relies on TCP-IP networks. Starting from wired connections, TCP-IP based networks owe their popularity to an amount of scalability as well as some resilience. TCP-IP networks now bridge the high bandwidth networks found in many western homes and businesses with broad-band, as well as mobile networks such as GPRS, 3G and now LTE (4G). The ubiquity of TCP-IP networks has made "getting connected", a lot cheaper and easier.

The digital connection and sensor revolution

As modern TCP-IP networks have evolved, it has become possible to start connecting many of the sensor-based systems that have been deployed in many modern systems. Sensors can be connected to automation systems that can take decisions based on simple decision trees or algorithms. With these changes, many cities have realized these computerized systems can now be used to make urban systems more efficient and resilient.

The earlier transition of TCP-IP communication to Smart phones and wireless computing devices has also meant that people can now access many urban services and information from wherever they are.

But why the demand for cities to get Smart?

Many cities in the developed and developing world realize that the modern cities require a large amount of resources to serve and maintain them. In developed world, the demographic realities and operational budget constraints imply that cities do not have the resources to provide the quality of living they aspired to. They are being increasingly asked to do more with less.

In developing world, increased connectivity and exposure to western living standards through social and traditional media now has made a new generation of population, hungry of a standard of living that was only previously in the west. However, they are in a position to chart their course to a more efficient urbanization model instead of an energy and resource intensive development model.

Reducing the resource foot print for 21st century living.

The energy and resources needed to sustain sub-urban development can now be more optimally utilized to allow smarter development models. Automating these aspects of urban development, maintenance and operations is where the so called "Smart City" initiatives make the most sense.

Making the Pitch and the Sale

However, there are some challenges that make these not such an easy sell. While the pitch is becoming easier to understand, the sale is not that straightforward. This is primarily because it is perhaps not very clear, who is the customer that will pay for these roll outs. In subsequent posts, we will see how these may have an impact on the eventual realization of Smart Cities around the world.

In the next post, I will expand on the opportunities and challenges for Making Cities Smart.