Smart Cities Of The World

As cities scale larger and skyscrapers grow taller, smart technology are being developed to address urban issues to give us Smart Cities.

As cities continue to bring people together to live, work and play, they amplify their ability to create wealth, to generate ideas and to drive innovation. But as cities scale larger and skyscrapers grow taller, these concrete jungles are becoming more compact, bringing about a new set of acute challenges: How to move people and things around more efficiently; how to manage resources effectively; reduce waste from an increasing population, improve safety.

Smart city technologies are being developed to address these urban issues which incorporates key technology advancements in areas such as wireless communications, sensor networks, data analytics, and cloud computing; all of which come together in the Internet of Things (IoT) movement. Cities and national governments around the world are investing in the potential of smart cities at an ever increasing rate: in China and India alone almost 300 smart city pilots are currently planned, and Arup predicts a global market for smart city technologies and services worth $408 billion by 2020.

The growth of connected devices and sensors inside the industrial Internet of Things has led us to coin the term ‘smart cities’. But what exactly are ‘smart cities’?

At the most elementary level, a smart city is a new concept defining a city that works to improve the quality of its citizens’ lives by guaranteeing sustainable social, economic and urban development; all done by integrating information technology to manage a city’s assets more efficiently. But really, there is no universally accepted definition; the concept varies from city-to-city and country-to-country, depending on the level of development and the willingness of the governing body to change and reform. What all cities that aspire to the ‘smart city’ brand want to achieve is to improve sustainability and efficiency by integrating digital technology into traditional methods of doing things. Connected devices and the wider networks that support them manifest themselves in everything from intelligent road signals and traffic monitoring systems all the way down to sewer and water supply systems. These devices are fitted with sensors that can detect changes in real time, harnessing data and feeding it back to the network to bring about real-time actions. The ability to gather data, analyse it and leverage it to bring about dynamic changes in real time is what makes the ‘smart city’ concept so exciting, and is also what coins the term ‘smart’ in this urban city movement.

Starting more than a decade ago, but only becoming a target of innovation recently, cities around the world are beginning to leverage smart technology to speed up the flow of things around the city and reduce the physical frustrations of urban life. One of the pioneering ‘smart’ cities of the world is Barcelona, who was named the Global Smart City in 2015. As one of the countries hit hardest by the 2008 recession, Spain faced a slow recovery. In the face of these economic changes, however, Barcelona set to begin its transformation to a technology driven city, harnessing data and sensors to reinvent its urban system. Under the watchful eye of Mayor Xavier Trias, Smart City Barcelona was born to smartify every corner of the city.

Five years on from the project inception, the city of Barcelona has become a hub of innovation. The council now provides open access data to anyone so innovators can make use of it to create services and products that enhance the city’s social and economic value. This has given life to new apps such as App&Town: an app that acts as a guide from your point of departure to your destination using Barcelona’s metropolitan transport services. The app offers the best routes and indicates where the nearest stop or station is, as well as advising when you should get on and off. Barcelona has a solid foundation of fiber-optic cable within the city spanning 500km across the city. This extensive network was initiated 30 years ago when the city connected two municipal buildings with early fiber technology. The fiber network now provides 90 percent fiber-to-the-home coverage and serves as a backbone for integrated city systems. The fiber network serves as a direct link to the Internet for Barcelona’s residents and visitors. The city draws on the fiber infrastructure to provide citywide WiFi. Since 2013, the number of hotspots is up 62 percent to 670 WiFi hotspots at a maximum distance of 100 meters from point to point, and the number of WiFi users has doubled.

Built upon this are myriad IoT systems across urban services, for example, to improve energy efficiency the city installed 19,500 smart meters that monitor and optimize energy consumption in targeted areas of the city. In waste management, households deposit waste in municipal smart bins that monitor waste levels and optimize collection routes. These sensors can be further enhanced, and plans have been developed to integrate sensing for hazardous or offensive waste material. In transportation, Barcelona has pursued a multi-modal strategy, advancing the use of electric cars and bike sharing, while investing heavily in improving the bus and parking systems. The new digital bus stops turn waiting for buses into an interactive experience, with updates on bus location, USB charging stations, free WiFi, and tools to help riders download apps to help them learn more about the city.

The city simultaneously pursued the implementation of the Barcelona Lighting Master Plan, which uses smart technologies to enhance the efficiency and utility of city lampposts. By 2014, more than 1,100 lampposts had been transitioned to LED, reducing energy consumption. The lampposts sense when pedestrians are in close proximity; when the streets are empty, lights automatically dim to further conserve energy. The lampposts are also part of the city’s WiFi network, providing consistent, free Internet access throughout the city. They are also equipped with sensors that collect data on air quality, relaying information to city agencies and to the public. Cumulatively, the improvements produced 30 percent energy savings across the urban lighting system.

New York City, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, has been at the forefront of adopting smart city technology for a number of years, although progress has been pretty shy. To revitalise aging public infrastructure, the City of New York collaborated with Cisco to launch City 24/7 in 2014 — an interactive platform that integrates information from open government programs, local businesses, and citizens to provide meaningful and powerful knowledge anytime, anywhere, on any device.

The aim of City24/7 is to deliver the information people need to know, where and when it helps them most. By incorporating touch, voice and audio-technology, City24/7 delivers a wide array of hyper-local information received from connected sensors, monitors and intelligent data tools, in real-time. Information is displayed on Smart Screens that replace unused and often out-dated public furniture such as pay phones located at bus stops, train stations, major entryways, shopping malls, and sports facilities. Similar to Smart City Barcelona, New York is creating a diaspora of Wi-Fi hot spots dotted around the city. The city is currently working with CityBridge to replace thousands of its out-dated payphones with 9 foot tall Wi-Fi hot-spot boxes that will deliver broadband speeds of up to 1,000 megabits a second — about 100 times the typical speeds of wireless carriers. Of course, initiatives like this aren’t new; many cities have tried installing free public Wi-Fi, but these often don’t work well enough to draw many users because speeds were slow or the experience was bogged down by requiring users to watch an ad before connecting. Instead, the CityBridge project plans to make money via advertising on the billboards on the panels of the hot-spot boxes.

Though the hustle and bustle of New York, the 6000 miles of streets, 5000 public buses, 13000 yellow cabs on top of ubers and private and commercial vehicles, congestion has become an all-too-common occurrence for New-Yorkers. Midtown in Motion is a smart city initiative that has been employed by the council to manage its traffic system using networks of sensors and traffic video camera. All the data harvested in real time is transmitted to the Department of Transport that uses the information to quickly identify congestion issue as they arise and adjust signal timings then and there. This not only eases congestion and unplugs bottlenecks on the road in real time, but improvement in traffic flow also reduces vehicle idle time which in turn eases carbon emissions.

Across the Pacific, you’ll find the tiny island city-state of Singapore who is also beginning to make strides to become a smart city. As part of its Smart Nation program, the wealthy financial center that is known for its cleanliness, tidy streets and tight social controls is deploying an undetermined number of sensors and camera across the nation. It is a sweeping effort that will likely touch the lives of every single resident in the country, in ways that aren’t completely clear until the system is fully implemented. Realistically though, with the amounts of data than can be harvested, and the fact government-owned companies control many aspects of daily life, including public transport networks and more than 80% of housing, the potential applications are limitless.

Already, for instance, authorities are developing or using systems that can tell when people are smoking in prohibited zones or littering from high-rise housing. But the data collected in this next phase — and how it’s used — will go far beyond that. Much of the data will be fed into an online platform, Virtual Singapore, that will give the government an unprecedented look into how the country is functioning in real time, allowing them to predict, for example, how infectious diseases might spread or how crowds could react to an explosion in a shopping mall. The government also plans to share data, in some cases, with the private sector in order to facilitate further smart innovation. In another case, the government has started testing systems using citizens’ smartphones to measure the bumpiness of bus rides, which could indicate road maintenance requirements. Other initiatives include mandatory satellite-linked devices that will be placed in all Singapore-registered vehicles — including those of private citizens — to charge tolls more precisely, based on precise distances driven. It also would permit dynamic pricing throughout the day, depending on road conditions.

The question here now becomes when does a ‘Smart City’ become a ‘Surveillance City’? At what point does using smart technology to improve the running of a city start to invade into our personal privacy? Promoters of smart cities generally do not acknowledge the central place of ‘surveillance’ as such within smart city projects, but the intensive management of urban flows requires information about everything that moves in the city, including its people. As cities add more sensors, analyse more data, and use opaque software operations to run traffic lights and even vehicles, they’re increasingly confronting new ethical, legal and security questions that can’t be ignored.

With the right controls, these smart city systems work and consequently the population enjoys a more pleasant existence — but what about when they fail, or worse still, when they are hacked? The root of the problem with malicious smart city hacking lies in the fact that sensors typically collect ‘raw’ data and then merely pass it on. No analysis is performed on the data at its point of origination, so consequently, we rely on that data source being accurate before we move that data onwards for analysis. But what if a malicious actor were to alter that raw data? The users of the data streams would start to perform analysis on incorrect data that could be fed into change and development plans for urban IT infrastructure in the real world. Smart city technology brings to the table the debate of personal privacy and exposes infrastructure and potentially personal data to computer malfunctions and hackings. The more data cities collect, the easier it’ll be to aggregate a detailed picture of the lives of citizens that make up a city, right down to the individual level.

Over the next few decades, it will become the norm for every developed city to undergo reinvention of conventional infrastructure to become a ‘smart city’. Many of the smart innovations that we see coming to fruition today will at their best, oil the future wheels of the metropolises across the world. Every aspect of city life will be reshaped by far greater flows of data and communications. But in order to truly engage and connect residents with each other and with the infrastructure around them — which is what a smart city should do — advocates must realise a fine balance between privacy and data collection. They must build a safer city without causing more security issues in the form of urban systems being hacked. They must reinvent city life without alienating the residents and communities that make a city, a city.