The Song of the Streets, and some IoT sensors.
The city of Babylon, acknowledged as the ‘the city of cities’ is a true architectural marvel, not only in the planning but also splendour; the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Great Library of Ashurbanipal stood as the testament to the technical and intellectual prowess of ancient Assyrians. It was, at that time, a perfect utopia.
So when the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys conceptualized a new utopian city, he decided to name it ‘New Babylon’ and proceeded to cite that the current technical innovations humanity has in its disposal today, will definitely play a vital role in constructing ambiance-cities of the future.
His application of Situationist idealogies into the concept city, although prophetic, makes it only intriguing as to how his idealogies of a place where new technologies replace the drudgery of manual labour by automatic processes, and leads us to think what is our position as a technologically advanced civilization and it’s scope for the future.
Mankind’s ideas for deep urbanization and technical advancement have always been bounteous, and it’s a blessing we are being led to a new era, even if not exactly by the Dutchman’s vision. Frontiers were given to explore, and true exploration we are doing.
I remember hearing about a friend’s trip to Amsterdam, Netherlands, and his experience interacting with society there. With his descriptions, one thing is clear: there definitely is a societal conciousness for smarter, and more greener cities, and the race is on.
Amsterdam, as a city ranked 30 on the WAQI, is one of the cleanest cities of the world, and the reason: embracing technology to one with nature. So simple of a reason, isn’t it?
The Amsterdam Smart City Initiative, a milestone in the field of Data Analytics and IoT, is a interconnected platform of over 160 projects running, and they collectively influence the city’s decision making system. Not the street, nor the neighbourhood, it’s the entire city!
With incentivized smart energy meters, enhanced parking space rentals, flexible smart street lighting technology and traffic monitoring, they truly are a benchmark in technology adoption and actual, productive use.
Not just Amsterdam, but Spain with its CityOS which tracks gardening data to optimizing green lights in traffic signals to devise bus routes, and Copenhagen for it’s strategized air quality optimization methods on transit (they coveted the prestigious World Smart Cities Award!), there is just another two dozen cities that improved citizen life and the environment jointly, by simply making their streets smart.
GIFT City in Gujarat, rightly described as ‘A Cutting-edge Landmark’, is truly a technological masterpiece, paralleling world cities in infrastructure and innovation. Being the first South Asian City which has a Centralised District Cooling Centre and Automated Solid Waste Collection System, let alone the foreign countries, our own streets are turning smart now!
Pleasant and promising are the tunes of Smart Cities being conceptualized and put into action, and their harmony assures us that we are a future-committed race, and recognize technology as the final frontier which we will limitlessly explore, dwell and innovate upon.
