Comedians proclaim, “Pretty soon, our homes will be smarter than we are.” Not just buildings but whole cities are embracing the “smart ethic” through digitalization and networking. But what constitutes a smart city? How far does it have to go in digitalizing functions? Where are smart cities found today and where will they bloom in the future?
The CTA (Consumer Technology Assn.) defines the goal of smart cities as “[using] emerging technology to create more efficient cities, address unique challenges, and create a better life for citizens.” As the United States joins other countries and cities in the mission to become smart — with 12 of the top 50 smartest cities in the world located here— innovators are using technology to relieve traffic congestion, improve mobility, accommodate the growing urban population, and more.
Smart cities include a number of different domains and application areas enhanced with technical advancements and their effective use in providing services to people. Grandview Research notes smart-city solutions have found their way in diverse areas of urban living. Rapid urbanization, obsolete infrastructure, adoption of new technologies, and need for improved quality of life are also driving industry growth.
Technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics, and IoT (Internet of Things) have enabled innovation by integrating the internet across routine human functions, and thus simplifying and improving life with technology. Over the coming years, advancements in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) are expected to lay the foundation for further development of disruptive technologies that would eventually enhance the human lifestyle to a significant extent.
The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to act as an inflection point for the digitalization of services. As many cities continue to struggle to recover from the aftermath, the long-term scenario remains favorable for smart-city development to manage any forthcoming pandemic or similar situation in a more efficient manner.
The smart-city concept addresses a multitude of requirements, such as efficient mobility, smart and enhanced buildings and homes, optimum energy utilization, and better administrative services. Soaring adoption of technologies that complement management of cities is a major catalyst in industry growth. The development of digital cities should benefit from initiatives taken by national and regional governments, residents, and local businesses to implement projects that focus on the unique problems plaguing their cities.
Smart City Considerations
Some considerations include communication infrastructure and web-based services, which are anticipated to play a major role in the consolidation of services. Improvements in infrastructure, data, and sensors will help in the creation of truly intelligent cities. The movement to digitalization of cities is marked with a growing number of collaborations between governments and companies to develop and implement pilot projects.
The European Commission notes the technologies used by smart cities to enable digital transformation include:
- Key infrastructures in public and private transportation and mobility; charging infrastructure of electric vehicle (mopeds and cars)
- Internet of Things to respond to high investment costs to build broadband networks
- Broadband connectivity to tackle challenges related to some IP networks, which are not yet IoT ready
- Smart personal devices to address a growing digital divide while guaranteeing data protection and security
- Cloud computing with challenges including security and privacy; complexity of managing cloud components and interoperability between clouds and vendor lock-in
- Big data analytics to address a shortage of talent
A strong “smart-city framework” can demystify the complexities of bringing smart technology to a city. Consultants at Deloitte believe such strategies should consider five key factors:
Vision: Before embarking on any significant smart city initiative, determine what being a “smart city” means and how to measure progress. Successful smart-city visions should be ambitious but specific, with clear criteria and timeframes for success.
Ecosystem: Public-sector stakeholders play critical roles in making cities smarter but embracing smart city principles while still operating within traditional government silos can be a recipe for wasted effort. The smart city of the future must convene problem solvers and think beyond traditional boundaries. This requires it to assemble an ecosystem of partners across government, established businesses, startups, the academic sector, and the nonprofit world.
Governance: Smart cities require clearly defined governance. City leaders, regional governments, transportation districts, corporate and nonprofit partners, and, depending on the funding model, state and federal agencies may all participate in establishing and executing a smart-city vision.
Stakeholders should be able to articulate their responsibilities, ensure that appropriate information flows to the right decision-makers, and give the people with the authority to make decisions a stake in the outcomes. Establish accountability up front and create mechanisms to drive timely decisions.
Technology underpinnings: The precise technology required for each smart city will differ, according to each city’s unique needs. However, all should integrate the technological foundation including system architecture, data governance, interoperability, and cybersecurity.
Funding: Traditional funding sources such as tax revenue and municipal bonds can be supplemented by public and private funding from sources such as joint enterprises and contractual partnerships. Crowdfunding or “green” funding may be worth exploring as well.
Some questions to ask: Can you think holistically and connect systems to get the most complete picture of municipal life at any given moment? Do you have the infrastructure to analyze that data and then take the appropriate actions? Are you thinking about privacy and security from the start? To find the answers, Cox Business offers keys that can help make the smart city a reality.
- Data is the key, but you need the infrastructure to effectively sort, store, and analyze it.
- Connectivity puts insights in the right hands at the right time.
- Security is of the utmost concern when connecting urban systems to a network.
- Consider privacy issues from the very start.
- Look at what other cities are doing to understand what kind of data you should be collecting.
- Focus on small wins to get your smart-city project off the ground.
- Executing a big vision means getting all departments to come to the table.
Within the smart city concept are general and detailed elements. The Big Picture starts with the infrastructure. Cities consume more than two-thirds of the world’s energy, and there is immense pressure to transition to lower-carbon energy systems.
Analysts at Barclays Investment Bank believe investment in smart technology can speed the transition, while bringing economic growth and competition. They expect to see significant investment by smart cities in smart grids, next-generation energy transmission, and distribution networks that can automatically monitor energy flows and adjust to changes in supply and demand accordingly.
Other systems driving the adoption of low-carbon energy will include smart meters, which allow utility companies to introduce price differentiation; microgrids for local sources of energy; apps to encourage lower consumer usage; and cooperation between companies and governments to maximize the benefits from smart systems.
Access to clean water and the ability to treat wastewater are growing concerns for cities, along with how to better manage waste. Water losses and flooding are also an increasing threat, with the impacts of climate change and rapid urbanization. That need is bringing smart solutions, including leakage and pollution detection and predictive maintenance planning, greater attention.
On the waste side, Barclay analysts expect investment in just-in-time waste collection, which uses sensors to optimize the collections. The traditional waste management model of bin-to-landfill is being overtaken by circular waste management, emphasizing decreased waste at the source through improved use of packaging, strategic collection methods, and distributed waste-to-energy solutions.
Current cities are very much dominated by dense aggregations of economic and social life called microcities. ABI Research claims microcity clusters are found in and around airports, ports, international rail stations, venues, malls, corporate and university campuses, office parks, and other highly concentrated urban zones.
Common smart-city technologies used in microcities include smart cameras and biometrics, robotics and automation, digital signage, private Wi-Fi and 5G networks, and micro-grids. They allow the city to address specific challenges related to people flow management, access and security, overall citizen experience, and environmental impact while generating cost savings through maximizing operational efficiencies.
In the longer term, 5G will emerge across a wide range of smart-city segments, mostly centered around low latency, mission-critical services:
- Remote monitoring and control of unmanned assets like drones, robots, and driverless vehicles
- Applications like intelligent cooperative traffic lights and emergency vehicle preemption
- Remote healthcare services in ambulances
- AI-base surveillance and security monitoring
- Low latency edge cloud applications for demand-response and active security solutions
Among the current technologies that are making cities smart, connection is critical. Hence, the attention being devoted to the IoT. Tata Consultancy defines it as the connected ecosystem of consumer smart things. These include smartphones, health monitoring sensors, embedded systems, multipurpose sensors, and actuators that collect data in realtime. These devices are connected to each other through an underlying IoT-based architecture and collect and transmit realtime data that is then processed to generate intelligent information and insights.
Since smart things collect large volumes of data that cannot all be processed using traditional data processing systems and techniques, this data volume must be managed with improved big data type processing systems and smart analytics models to generate meaningful analysis and insights. New technology facilitates rapid data ingestions, fast extractions, improved processing, scalable storage, and efficient analysis of large volume data.
Network infrastructure—the routers, gateways, and other intermediate systems that connect the smart things to the IoT cloud—is the critical success factor of the IoT ecosystem.
A more commonly used technology today is CCTV. According to ABI Research, shipments of smart AI (artificial intelligence)-based cameras are expected to grow from around 33,000 in 2020 to more than 155,000 in 2025. AI-based cameras enable an increasing number of low latency mission-critical machine vision applications like pedestrian detection and alerting, and realtime surveillance in the ITS (intelligent transportation systems) in smart cities. Traffic management applications include adaptive traffic lights, vehicle prioritization and preemption, parking access and detection, and electronic tolling.
These cameras will feature deep learning models to automate and augment decision-making in applications such as intelligent traffic management, autonomous asset and pedestrian flow monitoring and management, physical and perimeter security, and preventive threat detection.
The range of applications include:
- Road Intersection Management– Cooperative adaptive traffic lights and remote traffic management.
- Safety and Security Operations– Crowdsourced hazard and security alerts and remotely controlled response management systems installed on light poles, buildings, and other street fixtures.
- Autonomous Asset Management– Remote control and operation of driverless vehicles, drones, and robots.
Closing the loop in near realtime between detection, alerting, and local emergency response will allow improving the resilience of cities. The application of flood lighting, following gunshot detection via audio sensors, and automatically closing off gas distribution networks via electronically controlled valves following gas leak detection via chemical sensors, are just two examples of next-generation urban safety and security solutions.
However, public trust and regulations related to adopting AI in public cameras is a big challenge to their implementation. The general public, and more specifically human rights advocates, are wary of misuse and have been pushing back against the adoption of facial recognition technologies, for example. The use of facial recognition is even banned by some city councils in the United States.
Smart City Case Studies
Among the world’s cities, a growing competition to become the most connected, most intelligent city is taking shape, not only among existing cities but among cities still on the drawing board. A government/commercial project has the advantage of being funded by a major company while benefiting the local government. In Japan, for example, Toyota has broken ground for Woven City.
In the shadow of Mount Fuji, Woven City will be equal parts prototype Smart City and community science lab, represents Toyota’s efforts to connect its mobility research and solutions more fully with an increasingly digitized world. The name, Woven City, is a reference to Toyota’s origins as a textile machinery maker.
Woven City was envisioned as a smart city with about 2000 residents and researchers who would make the city a living laboratory. In this lab, engineers and scientists will develop and test new technologies in shared mobility, autonomous vehicles, robotics, smart home connected technology, and AI to build the community from the ground up.
The defining feature of the city is its streets:
- A road devoted to autonomous vehicles.
- A road for personal mobility vehicles.
- A road solely for pedestrians.
- An underground road for the autonomous transport of goods throughout the city.
Applying sustainability factors, the design of the city will combine traditional Japanese wood joinery with renewable energy technologies to minimize the carbon footprint. It will rely on a combination of Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cell technology and the installation of photovoltaic rooftop solar panels on each building to power the community.
Existing cities are retrofitting smart city technologies at various stages. For example, Chicago began smart-city initiatives in 2016 with the launch of Array of Things, a city-wide sensor deployment effort.
The city installed data-gathering boxes on light poles, with the goal of setting up 500 boxes in the 227-sq.-mile city. The boxes include cameras and sensors to detect hyperlocal data—such as unhealthy airborne gases, temperature, and traffic conditions via vibrations—then transmit that data to the Dept. of Assets, Information and Services in realtime.
Much of this information can be viewed on the city’s open data portal, which was first launched in 2011. Officials are using the city’s data sets, such as street-sweeping schedules and planning department applications, to make data-informed decisions on everything from preventing traffic jams to helping people avoid pollution-induced asthma.
Chicago’s 81 public libraries have made more than 3,000 computers available to the public, improved Wi-Fi access at city facilities, and let residents borrow mobile hotspots. The city’s departments have teamed up to organize more than 100,000 one-on-one mentoring sessions on internet navigation, and they continue working on closing broadband gaps.
Meanwhile, 6,525 miles to the West of Chicago, Seoul, Korea is a state-of-the-art city that boasts the world’s best information and communication network, allowing people free high-speed Wi-Fi, even in moving buses and subway trains. Seoul has significantly enhanced the convenience of public transportation through “Seoul’s Intelligent Traffic System,” Smart Transportation Card, and Bus Information System. Seoul is also supporting other cities by exporting smart city solutions including TOPIS (Transport Operation and Information Service), IoT-embedded LED streetlights, and smart garbage processing systems.
Korea is the first country to commercialize 5G communications, and Seoul is taking a step further to become a “free data city” by 2022, where anyone can use public Wi-Fi free of charge anywhere in the city.
Seoul is also actively operating the “digital communication system” that connects the smart infrastructure to smart citizens to expand citizen engagement. Some of the examples are “Democracy Seoul,” a citizen participation policy proposal platform; “M-Voting,” a mobile voting system; and “Seoul Online Civil Complaints,” an online/mobile window to register and process civil complaints.
Going further West, Shanghai, China’s largest city, had a long-term smart city plan, running from 2016-2020, that focused on the development of an intensive digital infrastructure, e-government services, and a “City Brain.”
Shanghai deployed Alibaba’s City Brain, which uses machine intelligence to solve problems of transportation, security, urban planning, and more. Biometric facial recognition cameras, drones, and satellites help to capture millions of images and artificial intelligence systems then identify issues such as illegal parking, traffic infractions, crowds, and illegal garbage dumps. The system can also adjust traffic light timing or alert emergency services.
Shanghai’s e-government portal has registered more than 14.5 million users within a population of more than 24 million. Before the system launched, processes such as applying for a business license would take days and multiple stops to various departments.
The one-stop portal helps simplify such processes into one of online shopping. Through the portal, citizens can complete business registrations and other regulatory needs, pay utility bills, provide emergency-response information, and more. Realtime maps and updated emergency information allow city officials and citizens to react and prepare for times of crises.
Another part of the four-year plan was the deployment of infrastructure needed for Shanghai to become the first dual gigabit city—a city with both wired and wireless gigabit broadband. Shanghai has achieved 99% household coverage, covering 9.6 million households. The city can also boast numerous outdoor and indoor base stations.
Typifying today’s connected and efficient smart city, Shanghai and Seoul are set to meet the needs of their citizens, keeping them more informed, secure, and surrounded by an environmentally friendly city.
Original Article: https://constructech.com/defining-and-building-the-digital-city/
