Smart Cities in Focus: Enabling Individuals and Communities to Improve their lives
When a few noted individuals share their invaluable insights on cities — the past, present and hopeful future in changing these urban conglomerates into the “smart cities” trend that seems to be going about these days — a question does arise in the mind of an unsuspecting 26 year old sitting in a class filled with the best and brightest pondering on and striving to absorb everything that every noted individual talks about. The query is this — What makes a Smart City ? And how can an existing city get “smarter” ?
Extensive research and sleepless nights later, I can try and start to understand the abyss of this broad topic that, in some humanly possible way can (and hopefully I succeed at this!!) be put into a quantitative perspective to be understood as I have understood reading about this in so many research papers, all of which mind you say the same thing at the end (somewhat, otherwise if they did, then what would be the point of publishing as new research then).
A Smart City is not all about Technology
A common misconception in the world today is that a smart city entails this very heavy usage of technology.
A city explores how to create, share, collaborate and use information to better itself everyday. At the end of the day, the essential aspect to making a city better and smarter is still people. Using people and the openness of data as the center of a city’s design, operations and implementations. People are still responsible to create their unique identities and to bring to the table their different cultures and experiences that make a city stand out. People are the main factor in judging the city’s rhythm, its sense of community and more importantly its diversity.[1]
Open culture creates better cities for everyone
Open data is data that anyone can access, use and share. Whether it is data on local housing from government, real-time train times from rail companies, organising family events, or finding supermarket locations from retailers, open data can help us all better understand, and interact with, our cities.
Reference section — [1]
The above quote makes a pretty good case in boiling down to perspective, how an open culture when taken in regards to data can help create a better urban lifestyle and environment in cities for each citizen associated with it.
Cities need to Scale Out, not Scale Up
The new age of open data and its culture has helped shape a new generation called ‘Generation Open’, which consist of millenials who can use open data, its tools and systems to transform our architecture, our environment and our society for the better[1].
Using open data to analyze, visualize and tell a story has to be the most exciting thing in today’s world. The fact that individuals can use data given out by processes and using that to help shape the way we look at a city, and to change the way these processes might work in the future is what cities need to harp on now more than ever.
Why smart city development relies heavily on relationships ?
Politics, social status and economic advances today is the key to differentiate the way smart and connected cities develop when compared to other cities that exist right now (cities here, in the more traditional sense of the word).
Internet of Things(IoT) has perched itself onto every fence in the world thus helping nearly every futuristic application rely heavily on the IoT. Some examples of this can be seen in Singapore, where a smart nation is being built using data and its technology with the aim of improving urban lifestyle and in turn creating opportunities for the communities and thus making the nation as a whole stronger. Another instance where this change can be noticed is Dubai, where a smart city strategy recently launched aims to include stakeholders and constituents in order to help shape the city’s efforts for the better[2].
This is the new future, a new world, where a city is more modern and integrated, and lifestyle is not decided by boundaries and separate entities but are simply and smartly connected with each other. Here, data on events and happennings that occur all around the city is collected and analyzed to find a method, a way, a lifestyle change in order to make a city better for businesses and residents alike (examples of this include Transit Optimizations, Water Cleaning Systems, Water Tracking Systems, Traffic Congestion Solving Systems)[2].
What does all of this mean ? Where are we headed ? And more importantly are we sure that this is all we need ?
With a brief glimpse into the world portrayed by Eric Lee and Andrew Rasiej during a discussion panel that morphed into a gripping movie-like screening, one thing is for sure — cities have evolved, they have been evolving and will continue to evolve in ways we cannot possibly begin to fathom.
Putting these ideas into perspective, there are ways in which evolution takes place and the direction it takes can never be quantified or stated for certain. Yet it is these very same ideologies that lead to, and are born from, that very same evolution process and, can be stated in certain aspects (some of which I have stated above to the best of my ability).
