There’s No Place Like Home
The need for a sustainable infrastructure for technologies of tomorrow
The need for a framework
What is smart infrastructure and why is it important? What can be done to achieve it on a large scale in our home- Earth? The current population of the world is 7.8 billion and it is projected to be 10.9 billion by the end of this century. Currently 55% of people live in cities, which is projected to rise to at least 84% in 2100 [1]. Hence designing a sustainable infrastructure is crucial for the future of mankind. No wonder it finds its place amongst the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the United Nations [9].
Another significant challenge is climate change and its interaction with the biosphere. Gunasingh, et. al. argue the importance of building climate resilience in all future designs of our smart cities [2]. The authors pointed out the need for modifying the methods used to evaluate climate data with emphasis on climate variability. This was truly surprising as one might assume that builders would already have accounted for these variabilities to improve the energy efficiency of the buildings! This is especially important as buildings make the majority of any urban infrastructure and their designs would have a huge impact on our climate.
A massive percentage of a city’s building infrastructure consists of workplaces- the site where people work together for corporations/ public entities. Deloitte’s proposal [3] for building digital workspaces is hence very interesting. This framework recognizes the importance of building the digital infrastructure for such smart buildings around connection, collaboration, control and conservation as shown in the figure below.
Though a really well thought out design, the true resilience of such a framework would be tested in unforeseen circumstances for example the current pandemic. The current pandemic brought to the collective attention of all corporations that work-from-home is in-fact a viable way to conduct business. This will require the designers to put greater emphasis on “space conservation” from a new angle: How can you design workspace structures that could be easily modified per demand? The same holds true for ideas put forth by Song, et. al. [4]: When the workspace area itself could become a variable how do you design the cyber physical systems (CPS) to adapt to that? This would also need modification to the building zoning codes by the local government to allow/explore such implementations. I believe for this to happen engineers would have to closely work with architects. The concept of using AI to control a multitude of agents as proposed by the authors is a very good proposition. But for more resilience the left side of the information model might need to be re-studied as shown in figure 2. It is to be noted that this was proposed in 2017 when the far-reaching implications of high interference (like the current pandemic) to behavior and resources of corporate management could not have been predicted easily.
Song, et. al. also expressed that CPS developed for industry could be transposed to smart home setting with possibly minor modifications. In comparison, the approach taken by Darby appears to be more balanced [5]: The author explored the need for “smartness” by approaching the residential context as a “wicked problem”. Apologists of smart home technologies refer to improvements of efficiency and environmental sustainability as the core reasons to promote such a development. But turns out the real problem is how to intelligently manage the “demand response” because sustainable energy management is the predominant problem in the scope of a residential environment. Darby argues that the focus seems to be on solving individual smart home boundaries which raises the question- are we defining the problems correctly? This is a very curious study when we realize it was published in 2018, when conditions of urban residential living were different from now, but still holds true.
Hence I believe, when approaching any “smart city problem” it always makes sense to reason from the basic principles of interactions to arrive at a hypothesis. This makes the conclusions more resilient because then we can only focus on or modify unknown parameters and arrive at better conclusions without changing the entire ontology. This also holds true even if the technology keeps changing with time.
Quixotic?
As design of a smart city is, by nature, a wicked problem [6], experimentation is the way to progress. This problem is further exacerbated by our inability to predict the future of technical innovation. Wright [1] acknowledges this challenge and shows us glimpses of projects that might be crucial to build sustainable cities of tomorrow. The dual-use car parks in Cincinnati [7] clearly shows how to design solutions for current needs with an eye for future innovations.
Building any city infrastructure project is a huge economic and time investment, hence adventurism in any upcoming technologies would be difficult. But, the digital infrastructure landscape still has massive scope for innovation. Fortunately, the threshold for realization of innovation in this space has been tremendously reduced. Many factors have played into it: the simplification of electronic hardware, access to the internet and the rise of open source projects. This has shifted the focus from ‘engineering’ to ‘impact’ [8], this is a prime outcome of the malleability of digital infrastructure . Case in point- the Botanicalls project. The core problem was- how to collaboratively succeed in taking care of house plants. This was solved creatively leveraging the social network and cheap off-the-shelf sensors. There was no business model to implement a proof-of-concept. The ensuing dialog was more concentrated on the nature of the problem and generating a platform for making a change rather than being bogged down by the nitty gritty of actually building the sensor network.
A more large-scale example is that of NYCwireless. Implementing a public wi-fi to enable free access to citizens is a noble goal and in fact ‘was’ a wicked problem till a group of “city hackers” decided to solve this. Not only did this succeed, but it also inspired change locally as well as internationally. Setting up public wifi at Bryant park in New York, impacted the role of this park in the city transit- the subway commuters starters spending more time in the park when waiting for their ride; globally, other regions were inspired to set up similar systems. As Townsend mentions — “cities thrive when they create opportunities to interact for commerce, learning and entertainment” [8]. A smart city infrastructure not only caters to the needs of the citizens but also their creativity- the hope for a better future is not impossible after all.
Agents of change
We can take away two things from the discussion- the current infrastructure around the world is not sustainable; and respecting the variability of socioeconomic status around the world guarantees that a hail mary approach is not going to solve the problem. Because in the end, these infrastructures are going to affect the only home we have- Earth.
- Decide on the principles of sustainability- Corporate entities like Deloitte have already initiated putting forth interesting frameworks [3]. But what we need is to develop a widely accepted standard or certification so that any economic entity (corporations, public enterprises, etc.) at a large scale know what they have to work towards. The standardization process is in the purview of local governments working together to agree on the most pertinent problems that face them.
- Agents of change theory- The current digital revolution has democratized innovation. The central idea put forth by Townsend in “The open-source metropolis” [8] is that this accessibility of ‘makerspace’ can be harnessed by citizens to do their bit and set off a domino effect to change the world for good.
The open question hence is: how to lay down an incentive structure to encourage the above? By that I mean, how can the forces of capitalism and free-market be used to propel development of smart infrastructure and buildings.
[1] “The Global Population in 2100,” Ensia. https://ensia.com/infographics/the-global-population-in-2100/ (accessed Oct. 01, 2020).
[2] S. Gunasingh, N. Wang, D. Ahl, and S. Schuetter, “Climate Resilience and the Design of Smart Buildings,” in Smart Cities, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2017, pp. 641–667.
[3] P. Wellener, J. Michalik, H. A. Manolian, and G. James, “Four considerations for creating people- centered smart, digital workplaces,” Smart Build., p. 12.
[4] H. Song, R. Srinivasan, T. Sookoor, and S. Jeschke, Eds., Smart cities: foundations, principles, and applications. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
[5] S. J. Darby, “Smart technology in the home: time for more clarity,” Build. Res. Inf., vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 140–147, Jan. 2018, doi: 10.1080/09613218.2017.1301707.
[6] H. W. J. Rittel and M. M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning,” Policy Sci., vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 155–169, Jun. 1973, doi: 10.1007/BF01405730.
[7] E. Wright, “The smart infrastructure that will save us from our dumb cities,” p. 3.
[8] A. M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.
[9] “Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities,” UNDP. https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals/goal-11-sustainable-cities-and-communities.html (accessed Oct. 01, 2020).
[10] Image reference: https://i.insider.com/57e1a3cfb0ef97eb018b709b?width=1900&format=jpeg&auto=webp
