Do You Want to Live in a Smart City?

Everything in our lives seems to be getting “smarter.” More and more people are carrying around smartphones; we have in-home systems that learn from our repetitious behaviour in order to provide the perfect ambience for us to live in; and we have smart medicines that can target diseased cells without ravaging the healthy ones around them.

It therefore seems fitting that our cities also get smarter.

Around the world, new developments are helping our cities become smarter and, therefore, safer for its residents. As with other “smart” advancements, the development is driven mainly by technology (and interconnectivity or the internet, in particular), with systems that help residents and their various tools interact more safely with each other.

These “smart cities” are popping up on the outskirts of, or adjacent to, existing cities around the world, with technology taking a front seat from the early planning stages. Computer modelling allows developers to very early on see how the residents will interact with the infrastructure in the most efficient way, though the final success won’t be realized until real people actually populate the city and interact with their surroundings, and real-time schedules allow materials to be delivered where they’re needed at the precise time in which they’ll be used.

In a smart city, communication between the infrastructure and individual smartphones will help buses get where they need to be at the most opportune times, minimizing the time a commuter stands waiting for public transportation to arrive.

At the heart of the Living City (as some companies refer to it, to convey how it learns and adapts on an ongoing basis) is an operating system similar to Windows on your computer or Apple’s iOs on your iPhone or iPad. It gathers information from a number of sources (real time weather reports, emergency response systems, etc.) and not only conveys the information to every other source of information (including pedestrians and motorists) but also changes the dynamics in real time for more efficient action.

For example, the traffic light grid would be adjusted according to the flow of traffic at any given time, not according to an “ideal” schedule of peak and off-peak times (as it is currently in many cities). That means that emergency responders would have the benefit of improved traffic flow as they attend to an emergency. And finding (and perhaps even reserving) that closest possible parking space would be accomplished with a minimum of fuss for you and other road users who would normally be held up as you crawl along a busy street.

Energy management would also benefit from the learning-behaviour of the smart city, with street lighting coming on when warranted and dimmed when it’s not needed, and moisture sensors in parks and gardens dictating when to turn sprinklers on. Security systems would integrate directly not just into first-response systems but also into other necessary systems to facilitate evacuations, if the need arises, or to aid in quickly resolving criminal investigations.

The technology would even stretch to health issues, with air-quality sensors on buses, outdoor structures and in buildings able to detect high levels of pollutants and warn citizens of air-quality advisories, or even modify the re-circulation of air inside to minimize air-borne particles to the benefit of people with respiratory issues.

Now naturally, there are going to be sceptics who say too much private information is going to be shared, with the potential for abuse and the “Big Brother” control over private citizens. But will you really be any less private than you are right now, with your Smartphone basically able to pinpoint your exact location on the planet and street cameras able to see where you are and with whom?

Private companies such as IBM, Cisco and Enel (a leading European power company serving some 61 million customers in 32 countries on four continents) are important partners in the development of smart cities, and will play an important part in North America if smart cities take off here as they are taking off in countries such as Portugal, South Korea and Ecuador.

And they will. Could a part of downtown Toronto or the GTA be extended to become a new smart city in the near future?