Smart Cities
Smart city is an urban area where things and people are all interconnected to create a better place to live.
Transportation hubs link your center areas together seamlessly, autonomous vehicles, eScooters or city bikes covers your last mile home. Smart buildings and infrastructure, both public and private are all fitted with smart lighting, climate control and other IoT innovations. Cameras prevents crime and provides safety in all urban areas. All public and private services are available with mobile applications that we are so accustomed already. 5g is coming and making this all available, video on demand, IoT, self-driving cars; all needs more bandwidth. This is all happening now, or wait; is it? We have seen glimpse of it, but in reality this is still pretty far away.
Smart City & Buildings
I’m attending a conference in Helsinki, “Smart City & Buildings 2019”. It’s been an interesting 2 days. Smart city is all about making life better, that was the keynote, as I understood it, by Renato de Castro. It’s not the technology that matters but the value to the citizens. Homeless entrepreneur dude, Andrew Funk probably does better in countries where homelessness is bigger problem, but smart city can help people to be more involved in the society. I would bet that we can prevent the problems even before they escalate into difficult problems like homelessness.
I’ve seen solutions that are real life and I’ve seen visions of the future. Smart building and access control is already available, the disruption for it is well taken even by the old lock companies with their smart locking and access control systems. Electric vehicles and the infra they require is coming and there are a lot of players wanting to have share on that. No doubt that will fly, at least until we get hydrogen fuel cell cars. Buildings with their IoT lighting and climate control is there, it just takes a bit long to build entire neighborhoods with connected smart infrastructure and buildings. Autonomous vehicles seem to be struggling, they are coming but only to closed areas such as campuses or industrial areas. Even 5g is pretty far away, heck that’s probably why Nokia is in trouble again.
One of the most entertaining features was by Mr. Andrew Keen, “How to fix the smart city”. He’s not very convinced by the tech making our lives better. I can’t blame him, platform economy like airbnb, uber and multinational (American) social media companies have received a lot of controversy. Privacy might be one of the key elements that needs to be taken into account when creating a “smart” city. Can I escape the cameras, sensors or social media?
Smart in 2020s
The most interesting keynote was Social Smart Cities by Jorge Saraiva, Leader of the European Network of City Policy Labs. Quote from Jorge, which stayed in my mind, was to focus on policy and regulations.
The smartest thing a city should do is to act according to why it was elected… Focus on policy and regulations.
There are a lot of smart things a municipality can do, smart-education, -mobility, -healthcare, -buildings, -utilities and -governance. Smart governance is the most interesting area as it is the key functionality of all city functions. This is the data driven decision making and the best part of this is, that it is already available. We don’t need to wait until the technology evolves to support this. Well the IoT is obviously part of this but there is plenty of traditional data available to make this happen. Not just traditional BI but also advanced analytics has been there for few years. You can think of AI or machine learning to support your decision making. I wouldn’t actually like to use term artificial intelligence, it’s rather an intelligent algorithm or just machine learning algorithm. Smart governance and decision making is reality in most private organizations, data platforms and analytical tools have evolved in cloud systems to make them available with relatively low cost and with easy adoption.
Smart decision making should not just be based on what happened, but also to prevent from something to happen or guide things to happen in a favorable direction. Let’s think about the homeless entrepreneur, he’s helping the homeless in person, but could we prevent social problems by analyzing social or health data? In fact I know we can do that, we are doing that already. Some of this needs to be done on an phenomenon or on population level due to privacy requirements but could be extended to provide personal services. There are many applications more, in fact shouldn’t all decision making be based on some data?
Conclusion
Someone thinks smart city is an utopia, someone might think that it’s a dystopia. I think it’s somewhere in between, however, the goal is to make life’s better.
