Smart City Living: The rise of a new Digital Urban Landscape
The rise of digital technology, has taken place faster than any other historical innovation- reaching 50% of the world’s developing populations. Such growth has prompted the onset of smart city emergence. Defined as cities incorporating information and communication technologies (ICT), smart cities aim to bolster quality of urban living.
From efficient transport systems, sustainable buildings to integrated planning and knowledge sharing, smart cities offer a multitude of innovations and opportunities, allowing them to represent a bold vision for the future of urban living. However, as with any transformative idea, their rise is accompanied by several challenges, threatening the value digital technology adds to our urban lives.
This blog, will explore both sides of smart city evolution, assessing whether they are indeed a high-tech utopia or just an urban fairy tale?
Unlocking Urban Potential: Advantages of Smart Cities
INCREASED COMMUNICATION: The United Nations expects 70% of the world’s population to be living in cities/ urban areas by 2050, in turn this builds the need for efficient and reliable communication — particularly in times of crisis management, economic development, and overall community engagement. Smart cities certainly tick each of those boxes.
Their well-known deployment of 5G networks across vast city radius’ provides residents exceptionally faster internet speeds and seamless connectivity across several digital applications/ software’s. So much so, compared to 4G’s 2,000 devices per square kilometre (km2), 5G is able to connect 1 million devices per km2.
Critically this means the internet can now exceptionally provide a vast repository of knowledge at our fingertips at impressive speeds, even in the comfort in our own homes. Subsequently, research institutions and large-scale companies can collaborate and thrive with an ease like never before. This reinforces smart cities’ apt curation of an effective environment fostering innovation and emergence of new opportunities.
SERVICE ACCESSIBILITY: Alongside communication improvements, smart cities simultaneously enhance accessibility of different services.
From electric transportation, digital train tickets, allowing you to avoid long queues, to showcasing exactly how many free sparking spots there are in a car park, smart cities provide an inclusive solution to everyday problems. Essentially, these accessibility advancements allow residents to live more comfortable and easy lives- something we would all appreciate in our busy lives.
Significantly, these improvements are inclusive of a diverse range of individuals as research, assessing quality of life in smart cities, found a large range of services to be disability friendly. For instance, the integration of remote accessibility for a wide range of services (reducing the need for physical travel) and more adaptive public transport i.e., buses with automatic ramp vices. Collectively, these reiterate the transformative inclusivity of smart cities, as they adhere to the needs of all their residents.
ENVIRONMENT SUSTAINABILITY: Increases in urban population come with increased pressures on the environment, exacerbating widely known environmental issues such as climate change- to such an extent cities have become responsible for 70% of worlds greenhouse gases.
Smart cities have been demonstrated to be critical forces in tackling such issues, offering a step to more sustainable urban practices.
Their incorporation of energy savings, as a minimum of 10% of energy in smart cities is solar powered, has the potential to save up to 20% of energy costs for residents. Sustainable transportation options i.e., more cycle lanes help decrease number of cars on roads. Even development of sustainable infrastructure incorporating urban green space, which in some cities has been found to be included in 75% of buildings, helps lower greenhouse gas emission. Collectively these innovations, enable smart cities to push urban living into becoming healthier, cost effective and more sustainable. This has allowed smart cities to extensively contribute to global efforts regarding environmental challenges- reinforcing their extensive advantages.
Nevertheless, despite such valuable contributions, smart cities have also been found to prompt challenges.
Navigating the Complexities: Addressing Challenges in Smart Cities
IMPLEMENTATION LOGISTICS: Such substantial benefits reaped by large smart cities, certainly come at an equally large monetary cost- something not every country may be prepared for. Statistics have shown smart city development may cost anywhere between $30 million and $40 billion. These costs not only take time to fundraise, but even longer to effectively allocate to different elements of an emerging smart city. For instance, the smart city of Songdo (South Korea) has been subject to slower migration of businesses and residents to the city than was initially planned . Subsequently this casts doubts whether smart cities are truly the right solution for a more sustainable and digitalised way of living, as there may be quicker and more cost-effective solutions instead.
OVERALL DATA MANAGEMENT: With a smart city of 1 million, expected to generate 180 million gigabytes of data per day, the need for a comprehensive data analysis and organisation system is paramount.
However, implementation of such an extensive system proves more difficult than what one may think. With challenges arising regarding discerning truth from misinformation, having modern algorithms for data analysis and increased security to prevent cyber threats, the efficiency of smart city software systems is questionable. Even if there are newly developed algorithms for data analytics these may be subject to social biases and inequalities leading to exacerbation of social inequality.
Therefore, although smart cities certainly possess potential to transform urban life, more robust steps should be taken to ensure this data is collected and stored in a reliable and transparent way.
DATA PRIVACY CONCERNS: Indeed, whilst residents may enjoy the benefits of feeling safer in neighbourhoods due to more robust CCTV or highly personalised app experiences, these advantages certainly raise privacy concerns.
Critically, the widespread deployment of surveillance and tracking across smart cities calls into question controversies surrounding safeguarding, as they minimise the extent of anonymity in public spaces whilst also sparking worries regarding privacy violations i.e. identity theft. So much so, in Toronto (smart city of Canada) a partnership company of google, was forced to abandon its quayside smart city project last year amid concerns over intrusive surveillance plans.
Resultantly, this information calls for the revaluation of how much trust and confidence can be put in smart city systems.
“Striking a Balance: Are Smart Cities our Future?
Smart cities certainly offer immense potential in terms of convergence of technology, more accessibility, and a greener living as they offer a palpable promising future for our increasingly digitalised world. However, their drawbacks, as mentioned above, reflect smart cities still need to develop more proactive measures to eliminate such issues.
Overall, this highlights the need for any future smart city developments to navigate a balance between reaping valuable benefits and mitigating negative impacts, in effort to foster a more inclusive, sustainable and data protected urban environment.
COURSE SELF-REFLECTION
As a psychology student I have never given much thought to living in a digital society. Whilst yes, I have always been interested in technology itself, always buying myself a newly released Apple product, I have never truly understood what it added to my life. In fact, I didn’t even realise what the rise in technology meant for our population, it was just a new norm which I had come to accept. Well, that was all until I started the digital society course.
From learning about the extent of the digital divide in our society to ethics surrounding AI, each week has been a valuable and insightful learning experience. The course timeline allowed me to explore subjects that had never crossed my mind.
I was highly interested in week 7: Rise of simulated spaces as due to its information on brain-computer interfaces which I was keen to learn more about and even did subsequent research on it in my own time. Looking back at it now, all the topics have made me look at our digitalised society in a new light, as I’ve come to appreciate the significant amounts of data, information, analytics etc needed to uphold it.
The format of the course was something I really liked, making it even more enjoyable for me. The remote learning feature, interactive blogs and inclusion of podcasts made learning ideal since it accommodated my busy university and part time job schedule, giving me flexibility time wise for completing each unit.
I particularly liked the polls as it allowed me to consider other students own views whilst also allowing me to re-evaluate mine as often, I found the responses in the polls to highlight views I would have not thought of myself.
Admittedly, I did struggle with the assignments. The less formal, more engaging writing style and different formatting was a completely new experience for me, compared to my usual scientific lab reports and research essays. This at times led me to being frustrated- especially when I had not received the grades I anticipated. However, now reflecting on it, the feedback was very valuable as it was able to broaden my overall writing skill set which I know will help me as I excel in any future career. In fact, future wise, the feedback will also be very useful for me as I am planning to start writing my own blog (part of the reason I had also chosen this unit)!
Overall, I am glad I chose this unit! It has offered me insights into modern topics, the emerging rise of technological developments whilst also being able to consider issues technology presented- which I have never thought of (and definitely caused me to check all my privacy settings on my laptop).
I am confident all the skills and knowledge I have gained from this course I will utilise in my future.
