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Urban authorities around the world are collaborating with stakeholders and making the most of advances in technology to create a cleaner, smarter, more efficient environment for their residents and workers.

[This article is an extract from "Innovations #3"]

Urban development has come a long way since Haussmann introduced neat and elegant boulevards to the Paris landscape. Since then, various styles and theories have come and gone, and we have reached a point where we now have “megacities” outgrowing their own geography, while even medium-sized cities struggle with congestion, outdated infrastructure and environmental concerns. The challenges facing city planners and local governments now cover all the great trends of the 21st century: mobility, sustainability, security, privacy, transparency, efficiency and energy.

And that’s before considering the competing factions: local authorities, businesses, community groups, transport operators, health providers and so on. The dizzying set of different inputs and the attendant technology creates both risk – that cities become more fractured and complicated – and opportunity: the developments in data, analytics and digitisation can be tied together to address the challenges and create a smarter, safer, cleaner, more pleasant city environment. If grasped, the opportunity to develop smart cities may mark a turning point in urban design for better and more sustainable living.

Understanding the basics

“A ‘smart city’ is one that uses information technologies in a much more intensive and applied way, not only to connect different components of urban management to one another – for example, when managing large events – but also to engage citizens more closely with their cities and the services they offer. This also renews the way individuals take part in their communities,” explains Pierre Cunéo, director with the strategy, research and technology department at Thales.

The smart city concept encompasses a wide range of different players, inputs and interests – government, education, security, health, economic life, energy and waste. All of these critical aspects of urban life and development have to be considered when addressing the next set of challenges. In response, there are now numerous examples of cities introducing smart solutions. The most groundbreaking of them tend to be found in existing cities seeking to improve and update their management systems as opposed to planned cities such as Songdo in Korea and Masdar in Abu Dhabi. Indeed, smart city theory is moving away from developing cities along the lines of a mainframe computer towards something more akin to a network, or web.

For instance, planners in Amsterdam have designated the city’s western suburbs as the location of a smart grid, which links to the city’s overall power infrastructure but manages demand and supply intuitively. The grid saves energy while developing and improving the city’s energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, in Strasbourg, Thales has worked to build an integrated transport network that employs more than 800 control points, delivering real-time traffic flow metrics from individual junctions and crossings, allowing controllers to prioritise public transport vehicles, improve flow and cut congestion. Both these schemes are intuitive, real-time and flexible. It’s less “command and control” and more “go with the flow”.

All together now

For some, smart city solutions are simply individual schemes designed to improve one specific aspect of the city that then becomes connected to the whole; for others, they are part of an overarching strategy to “upsmart” the city. An example of the latter is Singapore. One of the key features of the city’s development is its intelligent and integrated city planning. The Urban Redevelopment Authority develops land use plans that will guide Singapore’s development for the next 40 to 50 years.

As part of that land use, traffic management, public transport, housing, security, infrastructure and links to other countries and cities are all considered holistically, each part contributing to the success of the other. “In Singapore, particularly at the moment, we are preparing the future by brainstorming with different stakeholders,” says Jean-Noël Stock, country director for Thales in Singapore.

“Most of all, I believe that the city will become smarter when we start not only to address issues on a project-by-project basis, but manage to have projects that encompass security and mobility at the same time. If we want to design and build a truly smart city, we also need to take into account the environmental impact of what we do: we need to optimise the use of energy and therefore have partners providing smart grids. “It might sound over-ambitious, but until we’re able to deal jointly with several agencies – transport authority, information and environmental development agency – as well as partnering with other industries including telecoms, environment and energy, will we be able to restructure and really deliver 21st-century smart solutions?”

This is indeed an ambitious goal, but Singapore has significant advantages over other cities as it tackles its challenges: a heritage of strong, central government planning and good execution; many international companies operating there; a clear vision of what its future should look like; the resources to finance a range of hi-tech solutions; and, given its geography, a clear limit on future population size, making the task of planning and projecting the future a little clearer. At the other end of the spectrum, Stock cites Mexico City’s efforts to solve its crime and security problem within a wider urban context.

Thales partnered with Mexico’s telco, Telmex, to upgrade the city’s security infrastructure, deploying 8,000 cameras, optical sensors, drones and other types of detectors along with existing surveillance systems and concentrating all that information into four command centres. “Look at the outcomes,” says Stock. Car theft has been cut tenfold, the number of people being attacked or murdered has reduced between 10 and 20 per cent annually over the past three years and “companies that had decided to move out of Mexico because of security now are moving back in”.

Change and collaboration

Of course, every engineer and planner has great faith in the technological solutions they design and deploy. But the most successful solutions, says Stock, move beyond simply installing new technology and integrate both the mechanical and human into making a city smarter – “Every city has got its own way of being smart,” he says.

Lee Woodcock, director of Intelligent Mobility at urban solutions consultancy Atkins, agrees: “For cities to be smart or more integrated, it’s not just about new solutions. It’s about change, and specifically behavioural change. If you take driverless cars, for instance, the issue around deployment is not technology or even legislation. It’s trust and privacy. When we embark on city-related programmes, we must embrace change management and excellent communications – not just think about development and deployment.”

Woodcock says that city authorities – and contractors – must ask themselves whether, on smart city projects, “they really have aligned objectives, shared operations, joint risks, measures for delivery and for behaviours, creation of value and mutual benefits”. Clearly, given the multidisciplinary nature of the challenges facing cities across the world, all planners need to recognise the need for collaboration. “Collaboration is key – there is no single agency or organisation that can ‘deliver’ smart cities,” says Woodcock.
“We often think we are collaborating, but really we are coordinating. The maturity of true collaboration needs to increase if we are going to realise the potential and meet the opportunities ahead of us.”

Cunéo agrees. He says that while Thales can bring its unparalleled track record of innovation and excellence in security and communications, “it must, as part of the solution, aim to work in tandem with – and complementary to – energy suppliers, police authorities, rolling stock manufacturers and waste managers, to name just a few”. But everyone involved in smart city work – from mayors to police chiefs, technologists to futurologists – accepts that cities exist first and foremost for those who live in them, and that the “smart” part is the human factor. “Technology today, and particularly IT, can provide only so much benefit,” says Stock. “Everyone wants to be smart. Everyone wants to see how much smarter they could be thanks

to the use of that IT, but the best option is to have the city contribute to that intelligence. “A robot that syncs everything for everyone is not as smart as a solution that connects citizens and allows them to contribute to the wellbeing of the city,” he says. “For example, the Waze app allows users to share information about traffic jams. The system synthesises the information but citizens are more important than simply collecting data from sensors. A citizen will always be smarter than a camera.” And once you create a smarter network of citizens and technology, the possibilities for smarter cities seem endless, as Cunéo points out: “One could easily conceive of ‘smart agriculture’ built around geolocation, species selection, chemistry, weather models and biotechnology. One could also include security for networks that inherently have ramifications far beyond the city, and create ‘smart countries’ with integrated, secure operations both inside the country and at its borders.”

Pioneering an e-future: Vienna