On Nov. 17, representatives from governments, trade groups and industry gathered in Barcelona, Spain, for the Smart City World Congress Expo. Attendees discussed and examined various technologies that could become cornerstones of urban planning and city management in the 21st century and beyond. So what exactly makes a smart city smart?
What is a smart city?
A smart city, like its encompassing phrase “Internet of Things,” is a popular buzzword in the wireless industry, but it’s still such a new concept that there are numerous definitions and applications. Even the primary U.S.-based trade group dedicated to advancing smart cities, the Smart Cities Council, notes on their website, “The smart city sector is still in the ‘I know it when I see it’ phase, without a universally agreed definition.”
The lack of definition is not due to a dearth of available examples or prototypes, but simply the sheer number of possibilities smart cities create. Smart cities’ systems have been touted as being able to help do something as mundane as increase utility efficiency, while also being able to do something as vital as enhance public safety.
How does it work?
The brilliant part of smart cities technology is that it’s, for the most part, not new technology. Smart cities are built around two things: collecting data through sensors and using that data to make the urban environment more efficient and livable.
This can be accomplished by layering sensor networks throughout the urban landscape, then using big data analytics, real-time insight and automated systems to shift resources accordingly. For example, if traffic is getting bad on a particular street, sensors can alert the computer controlling the city’s traffic lights and decrease the amount of time the lights on the busy thoroughfare stay red.
Antony Townsend, research director at Silicon Valley-based Institute for the Future, said, “Unlike in the past, when urban upgrades called for large-scale physical changes – laying rail lines, plowing expressways through neighborhoods – getting smart entails fitting out tiny gadgets by the millions, that mostly work invisibly, behind the scenes.”
What are the benefits?
Despite the low-key nature of these systems, building them out is costly, though not prohibitively so, yet getting any municipality to spend money is often a slow process marked by lots of give and take. So why spend millions of dollars deploying intelligent systems across the world’s urban landscape?
For one, it will save more money in the long run. The city of Detroit, which has shrunk from 1.8 million to 700,000 residents as its manufacturing sector has continued to decline, has lost billions of dollars in wasted water.
As residents decamped for greener pastures, their homes were often taken over by squatters or picked over by scavengers who would bypass the water meter and rip out pipes. This has left the city’s municipal water department pumping thousands of gallons into vacant structures causing flooding and associated damage. Think of the money that could’ve been saved if smart sensors recognized the problem and automatically initiated a solution. There’s no flood damage, there’s no waste of water resources and the city doesn’t have to send an employee out to the site.
Another reason smart cities are gaining momentum is that most urban areas are growing rapidly. The United Nations estimates that in the next 15 years the number of people living in cities globally will reach 5 billion, the first time in all of recorded history the urban population has reached this high. It will also be the first time ever that urban populations outnumber rural ones. All those people will need services and strain municipal resources, so now is the time to leverage technology to distribute these resources effectively.
How does wireless fit in?
How does the wireless industry factor into all of this? In short, the wireless industry is the whole ball game for smart cities. Without the wireless industry, smart cities will never reach their full potential.
Glenn Lurie, CEO of AT&T Mobility, said that he sees massively scaled smart cities and IoT as the natural evolution of the wireless industry.
To make a smart city smart, it’s necessary to link sensors together and keep them talking to each other without running out of power or interfering with existing wireless systems.
According to a 2015 Nokia White Paper, IoT optimization changes the “requirements for connectivity significantly, mainly with regards to long battery life, low device costs, low deployment costs, full coverage and support for a massive number of devices.”
One of the companies providing this new connectivity system is Sigfox. Communications director Thomas Nicholls told RCR Wireless News, “[The old systems] were all built around use cases that require high bandwidth multimedia data transmission. In order to enable connectivity of the physical world, we need something that is much simpler and cheaper.”
This need to build a better network has led wireless companies to either start designing systems around these parameters or leveraging their existing systems.
Chris Volinsky, AVP of AT&T Labs, said earlier this month: “By leveraging data from our networks, we can make cities more sustainable.” He was referencing AT&T using the signal pings from its cell network to look at the movement of people from residential to commercial areas of San Francisco during peak driving hours, which provides invaluable data for city planners and administrators when considering development of new infrastructure.
Pushing quality-of-life for the masses
Smart cities are the inevitable result of the global progression toward fully realizing the IoT, which might be more accurately described as the Internet of Everything. Smart cities researcher and expert Anthony Townsend said, “Inside my pocket, my phone has become a viewfinder and remote control for the entire city. Like the Marauder’s Map from Harry Potter, I watch as the dots that mark my friends and family scurry around. With other apps I can adjust the thermostat back at my apartment, summon a taxi to the corner where I stand, or send a noise complaint to my local government. And as swarms of food delivery boys summoned via apps like Grubhub and Seamless cycle past, I realize I’m not the only one to figure this out.”
He made those comments two short years ago. Imagine what will be available by 2020.
