BANKOK, THAILAND - Making cities smart and sustainable is an imperative in a world where over 70 per cent of the population will be urban citizens by the middle of the century.
Rapid urban growth is placing tremendous stress on public services and the infrastructures of cities, stress which can be relieved by a smarter approach to delivering vital services such as transport, healthcare, education and energy.
But what makes a city smart, and how do we go about it The answers are as many and varied, it seems, as the number of cities in the world. The unifying factor is the reliance on ICT infrastructure behind every vertical sector, aiding city planners in building more efficient and sustainable services. “With co-ordinated thinking and a regional approach to maximising the benefits of ICTs, increased migration can be matched by increased quality of life in cities all over the world,” said Malcolm Johnson, Director, TSB, ITU.
Moderator John Defterios from CNN introduced representatives of three differing examples of smart cities at varying stages of developments and in very different environments. For Mr Al Ghanim, Director General of Dubai’s regulatory authority TRA, the smart city focuses on five main areas: technology, making smart cities more efficient and less expensive; a legal framework, fundamental to make business work; engineering capacity; interoperability; and finally , perhaps most importantly, society.
To ensure a city is smart, “you can build the latest systems and best roads, but you need to educate people,” said Al Ghanim. Transforming public services to be delivered by mobile phone, as Dubai has done, would not be possible without the buy-in of the people.
Jean-Philbert Nsengimana, Rwanda’s Minister of ICT and Youth, emphasized the regional particularities of each city – Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, is a commercial hub in a largely rural nation, so smart cities may in fact be translated into smart towns or villages. A smart city is a connected city, and in Kigali this has meant enabling citizens to remain connected at home, at work and also on the move, through free WiFi hotspots in bus stations, hospitals, commercial and public buildings, and through an ICT policy which establishes broadband as a utility.
Smart cities are sustainable and green, he said, outlining the zero tolerance policy on plastic bags in Kigali – if you arrive at the airport with a plastic bag, you will be asked to leave it here. “Some things are very costly, such as central networks or smart buildings requiring high capacity human resources and data analytics; but some elements just require a small change of mindset on the part of citizens”, he continued. “The whole administration in Rwanda is paperless – being a smart city does not have to be complicated.”
The need for leadership, vision and commitment at national and local government level is paramount. As the Russian Minister, Mr Andrey Mukhanov, stated, “A smart city is a complex of infrastructure, gadgets and customers. The balance between these three elements and movement towards smart cities lies in government policy, regulated by the ICT minister.” The complexity is not found in the individual actions or policies necessary to establish a smart city, but in co-ordinating all the different elements. And “success in these projects depends on state support first of all.”
For Professor Sekhar Kondepudi from the National University of Singapore, the roundtable discussion served to confirm his current research into smart cities as a cross-continental phenomenon, with each city different and culturally subjective. The combination of physical and digital infrastructure has to be reliable and sustainable in a planet with finite resources. Asked whether there was a danger in rushing to build smart cities on green field sites where there is no demand, Konedepudi stated that, “the danger is rather that there may be other macro economic factors which could suddenly occur and slow down projects.”
For Bosco Fernandes, a consultant from Germany, smart cities are all about improving the quality of life of citizens – and new models, whether in emerging or developed markets, are not good enough without that support and belief of the citizens. The common theme of the discussion was reemphasized here: in some regions, smart cities mean smart transportation, in others, energy and water are the central issue, in yet others, it is all about M2M. There is no single definition of what a smart city is or should involve.
A final important aspect of a smart city is that it is predictive, not reactive, said Rob van den Damfrom IBM in the Netherlands. There is competing demand for the big pipes of social media and a strain on capacity, as this is what citizens really want. So the challenge is managing the data surges on devices, whilst making the data work for society in general. Any city asking for help will always, he said, focus on three questions: how to manage data and get actionable insight into the city and its residents; and how to use that data to predict, for example, where heavy rains could cause flooding, enabling the city to reroute traffic and avoid congestion.
Balancing quality of life, privacy and security in a big data world is just as important an element in smart cities as in the world in general. The citizen, like the industry end user is at the centre: social expectations need to be met. This is the new reality of the smart city where, according to Nsengimana, “Cyber identity is more important than tribe or ethnicity; young people don’t care, don’t belong to the past. The new emerging identity is much stronger than any division.”
