Smart Live in Smart Cities

Cities are the world’s centers for creativity and economic engines. They are places where people, infrastructure, institutions, innovation assets, policies, and regulations come together and create an environment that attracts or discourages global investment, business activities, and job creation. These elements also form the platforms from which cities compete and create economic opportunities for their citizens.
We want to live in cities that are smart, safe, clean, healthy, inclusive, and resilient, cities that provide economic opportunity and high quality of life, and cities that are crossroads for the most creative and innovative minds.

Reaching for these goals offers tremendous opportunities but also difficult challenges. We live in an era of turbulence and transformation. Amid such transformations and uncertainties, practitioners worldwide explore how we can continue growing, developing, innovating, and competing.

There has never been a more urgent need for this discussion. We are seeing and living through the largest wave of urban growth in history. Urban dwelling is expected to increase by 60% by 2050, from 4 billion people to 6.3 billion people, two-thirds of the world’s population.
Today, there are 28 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants. By 2030, we could have as many as 41 of these urban giants.

We will have to feed the world’s urban centers with fewer rural farmers; provide clean water, power cities with cleaner energy; provide energy-efficient mobility; sustainably deal with waste, and create platforms for economic opportunity for a population of socio-economic diversity.

Moreover, about 1.8 billion people today are middle class. By 2030, the middle class is projected to grow to about 5 billion. These new middle-class consumers will raise demands on all sorts of city-centric infrastructure. Cities need to be prepared to meet that challenge.

Big data and data analytics offer more insights into the atoms and physics of the city and its society and the performance of city services than has ever before been possible. When we combine data analytics with technologies like sensors and the Internet of Things, we have a tremendous opportunity to optimize the city’s performance. Yet, we have only begun to exploit the potential.

Networks, digital platforms, and social media provide new ways for the city to connect with its citizens. For example, citizens are the eyes and ears of the city. We can use technology to harness the power to observe millions living in the city and use those observations to improve city services.

But the solution for citizen engagement and the improvement of city services is not just about technology. New engagement models are needed and can be turbocharged by technology.

Cities and metros are complex agglomerations of time, places, people, geographic boundaries, systems, public and private establishments, routine events such as commuter traffic and non-routine events such as major sports events, extreme weather, or natural events disasters, all connecting and interacting with each other in dynamic ways.

New models are underway to take on these issues. Practitioners focus on sharing data about cities, funding cross-jurisdictional and cross-functional projects, engaging new technologies that can reveal new views of cities, and using new technologies to help provide needed skills.
Technology and the use are the fuel that will propel cities into the future. We see massive digitization of physical infrastructure and the emergence of new critical infrastructure in the form of sensors, networks, and the Internet of Things.

The ongoing integration of new technologies offers cities new ways of doing things. However, the city must also accommodate others’ use of technology.

For example, there is a dynamic relationship between electric vehicles in a city and the electricity supply. We know that growing e-commerce impacts traffic congestion and pollution due to more delivery vans moving through the city.

Now we have the prospect of driverless cars, drones, and artificial intelligence technologies that may get ahead of societal readiness and regulatory frameworks, causing new challenges and problems.

Cities are constantly evolving to react to internal and external pressures, adopt and adapt new technologies, and respond to new challenges, needs, opportunities, and societal patterns. And as cities grow in size and population, the market for such development will only grow as they experience increased strain on their systems and resources.
That’s why the role of technology, inclusive economic growth, and the other issues being addressed are so critical. This month’s first Smart Cities conference was only the beginning as we seek the most sustainable path forward with the highest chance of success for our cities and their inhabitants.

Further change is not just coming; it is already here. The challenges we face and the opportunities that arise will push us to greater innovation, greater competitiveness, and greater prosperity as smart living and smart cities lead us into the future.