The Arrival of Smart City Living
The Arrival of Smart City Living
Check out my previous posts that build up to this one — starting with “A Prelude to Smart City Privacy”
We find ourselves rapidly approaching the 2020s. One Hundred years go, in 1920, the world had just about shaken off the effects of the influenza pandemic. The residents of cities in the U.S. and many parts of the developed world in the 1920s were witness to the wider adoption of technological developments such as electricity, indoor plumbing, and telecommunications. These prototypes of the smart cities to come were improvements but far from perfect. As the twentieth century unfolded, urbanisation become the norm. In 1969, the United Nations produced a report which looked at the growth of cities from 1920 to 1960 and then extrapolated the findings out to 2000. The reports talked about the rise of the ‘megalopolis’, made up of a string of metropolitan areas along major arterial routes. It also looked at the urbanisation across the decades with an impressively precise prediction, that by 2000 “one half of the world’s population may be urban”. In the year 2000, 47% of the global population was urban-based.
Of particular resonance in the report is this statement — as written in 1969:
“ Those now in their active years were born in an economic, social, physical and cultural environment which differs enormously from the one they may still live to see. They were taught by teachers who had been raised in a world whose features are now fading rapidly; and they are called upon to instruct a new generation whose future living conditions are still shrouded in mystery. Basic human nature remains the same, but the necessary adaptations between man and his increasingly man-made environment are now changing with a greater speed than ever before”
So, we find ourselves, almost 50 years after this report was written, with the same drivers in place: Increasingly urbanised areas, that need to be carefully managed, to enable an exploding population to live a decent life.
Smart city culture and the age of data promises to achieve what our parents and grandparents started. Cities that can offer the type of sustainable lifestyle we all want, are achievable. We are at a juncture in our city living, caught between a need to sustain human life on a planet too small to cope, with technological advances that can give us the tools to do so. In our rush to put the pieces in place to achieve this smart living — can we trust ourselves to think about the whole picture?
In the next series of posts I’ll look at the data that is at the heart of the smart city. And, I will explore the privacy issues inherent in the use of these data to drive our cities to ever smarter systems — bearing in mind the basic human need for privacy which I have explored in previous posts.
Before embarking on the next post — somehtng to bear in mind:
Article 12 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
“No one must be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation.”
Next up…”Smart City Factors”