SMART CITIES FEATURE
ON THE ROAD TOWARDS SMART CITIES We find ourselves approaching science fiction at ever-higher speeds, as cities grow ever more intelligent. There will be doomsayers but there are also serious, tangible benefits to living in connected cities magine a highway that knows you’re travelling on it or a street that knows where you’re going. Imagine shopping in a store without human staff. Imagine never having to own a car because you can just get into an autonomous vehicle at any time and be taken to your destination. Imagine emergency services able to respond to your location because your vital signs have dipped – all without human intervention. That’s the promise of the so-called ‘smart’ city, an interconnected environment designed to change that way that people live, work and interact. Self-driving cars have their place here, as do the wholly contactless Amazon Go stores that dispense with human staff and use cameras to tell what you’re buying. Apple’s newest Watch, with its ECG and ability to alert emergency services in the States? Or Huawei’s Kirin-based NPUs (neural processing units) currently being turned towards the field of medical diagnostics? Those are also a part of the burgeoning smart city. It’s a bit like a smart home, except those can be constructed by anyone with a set square. A city needs a little more planning, smart cities require considerably more of a runup.
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Where to, buddy?
There’s an end-goal in mind for connected cities – they’d be able to account for citizens’ needs, alter themselves in response to 70
weather or natural disaster and confer the most benefit on most of the population in order to succeed. But that sort of technical achievement doesn’t just fall out of the sky – it’s the result of buy-in from all sectors of society, from tech-makers to governments to industry to the average person in the street. And these cities have the potential to make life much simpler.
Living in reality
This futuristic vision is closer than you’d expect. Projects are in full swing in Dubai, London, San Francisco, Seoul, Shenzhen and Tokyo, hoping to be the first to develop fully self-driving cars. The reality is that LIDAR and cameras, while multifunctional, can only do so much. A connection to a fully integrated city would make self-driving cars a tangible reality a whole lot faster. But that means we need to change how we design cities. Which is on the go in several parts of the world. Google was involved in a recently-shuttered project called Quayside in Toronto, Canada, that serves as an example of how not to build a smart city. Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai are experimenting with robotic assistants. Oslo, Norway, now features intelligent public lighting and eases traffic congestion via smart license plate readers. New York is in on the action via initiatives driven by the city’s Office of Technology Innovation. Barcelona, the home
of Mobile World Congress and a mecca for smartphone users, features heavy Internet of Things integration, wide-spread (and free) internet access and also has buy-in by the city’s administration to keep the public informed using a series of hyper-local apps. All of which are ideal candidates for actions to be carried out here in South Africa, most likely starting in Cape Town. It sounds like something they would do. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg, which might make some folks uncertain.
Rightfully nervous
It’s quite normal to be hesitant about connected cities. They call for a level of intrusion into private lives that has never been seen before – though the likes of Mark Zuckerberg reckon that personal privacy is a thing of the past. You might already be carrying around a tracking device (you call it a cellular phone) but offering up biometric data and bank account data in order to facilitate convenience can quite easily backfire. It’s a question of power and who is wielding it. A fully integrated city, reporting to a single authoritarian government, is a dystopian nightmare. Every citizen’s location and activities are constantly known and any dissent from the ruling norms can easily be met with overwhelming force. Once that sort of power has been given away, it’s not very easy to get back. Entire genres of popular
