The future of Cities is smart

How smartness is shaping the future of our urban landscapes.

Darryl Huet
Nov 3 · 4 min read

I recently had the opportunity to go on a group study with the University of Calgary. Our group travelled to Asia, looking at emerging technologies, and smart cities. Throughout a month, we visited Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo, and here’s what I learned.

Gardens by the Bay in Singapore

Why should we transition to smart cities?

What defines Smart? And what makes a smart city? Smart technologies use instruments like sensors and cameras that use data to understand their surrounding environments better. Building a smart city requires taking new approaches to existing problems. The goal is to provide more efficient use of city resources. Leveraging these technologies can help create cities that innovative, grow revenues, and improve the quality of living for their residents.

By the 2040s, 60% of the world’s population will be living in cities. One in three of those individuals will live in a city with more than half a million people. Urban Planners have to have a better understanding of a city’s efficiency and resource uses. In our future, data is the currency of building cities. And we need lots of it. When you have sensors analyzing their surroundings, information is collected and studied. By studying this data, we can better understand the relations between residents and city resources. Thus, in turn, helping make better long term decisions.

What aspects of a city are in this Smart Revolution?

Sensors and ambiguous data aren’t going to help us organize our cities. Making our cities smart will need us to look at our existing systems of operation. What could change in governance, construction, transportation, and healthcare? Changing our cities is going to be hard and transitioning to smart tech means upgrading what currently exists and creating new solutions. Certain aspects, like transportation, need residents to get involved. Even how we interact with city planners, and the government is starting to change. Other technologies will play essential roles like Artificial intelligence, Big Data, and Blockchain.

How this change will happen?

There are quite a few principles that help in building our cities in the future. When changing aspects of a city, there needs to be feedback. Some of the ways to ensure feedback is through collaboration, engagement, inclusion, and transparency.

First, the collaboration between residents and businesses can help ensure innovation. Engagement is also incredibly important. Suppose a city introduces a new NFC transit card, but without engagement with transit users, there aren’t any gains. A challenge is how to incentive and engage all the needed parties to see the intended benefits. It’s hard to reach long term benefits without engaging in today’s initiatives. Inclusion is also crucial in building smart cities; they create environments where a vast majority can benefit.

What will a smart city look like?

Taipei 101

Each metropolitan is different and will evolve independently from each other. Every region is faced with a unique set of challenges to overcome with their cultures, environments, and resources. Some solutions will foster innovation, build ecosystems, and connect cities and regions. Taipei and Taiwan is a good example. Due to its geographic location to natural disasters, Taiwan uses smart technologies to monitor areas across the country.

Transparency and accountability also play a significant role in public sectors. Taipei has open data that creates an ecosystem in communities and across industries. With this initiative, startups, social enterprises, education institutions all collaborated to create innovation. Walled gardens of data could also work depending on the structures of government and industry. While not everything has to be open, collaboration can only happen with open systems.

In some cases Taiwan’s data system provided data on services, transit, and pollution. People were coming up with some creative uses for data like apps, analytics, and live data on services. For downtown Taipei, there is a live view of where parking slots are available through a phone app. For most cities we visited, there were transit cards that worked as debit cards for restaurants, laundry, and convenient stores. South Korea has a vast infrastructure set out for 5G connectivity. They are creating a wide range of data and network possibilities throughout the city.

Conclusion

There are a lot of changes that are going to happen over the 21st century. Our cities are going to get bigger, smarter, and more efficient. The best we can do in our cities is to help start conversations. Promoting smart initiatives, communication between industries and the government could be a great start. This is just the beginning. The age of data is coming, and preparing for it will help us build cities of the future.

Darryl Huet

Written by

Crypto, Entrepreneurship Follower & Writer

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