DEEPINDER UPPAL
Adding Resiliency into Smart City Initiatives
TOPICS TO BE COVERED Smart City Framework Resilience Framework Layered Response to Resilience Resilient Global Supply Chain
Bijou Solutions, Inc. | 2020
Smart cities encompass the transformative spirit of this evolution: from a number of small discrete initiatives which sought to leverage technology to improve the lives of their citizens, smart cities have evolved to a sizable market opportunity that encompasses investments in government transparency, large-scale IoT integration projects, and public safety. With the notion that common frameworks may increase efficiency, promote inter-agency data sharing, and reduce IT spend for common projects tied to smart missions, smart city components have become an essential part of urban critical infrastructure. Smart initiatives notwithstanding, urban areas with high population concentrations are still particularly vulnerable to predictable disasters and catastrophes, including diseases and epidemics, along with earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, sea-level rise and flooding, food shortages, wildfires, extreme heat, hurricanes, tropical storms and typhoons, terrorist attacks, civil unrest, cyberattacks, war, nuclear or chemical contamination, or extreme air pollution. Additionally, as the COVID-19 crisis has shown, cities are not only vulnerable to loss of life, but also to a loss of economic output and value. To combat these unknowns, cities have focused on emergency management and redundancy. But with integrated technology and AI-driven analytics, a smart city framework should evolve to include discussion on urban resilience.
SMART CITY FRAMEWORK On a global scale, smart cities are the most densely populated areas in the world. With some major city locations being home to more than 10 million people, research shows that they take up more than 60 percent of the world’s energy consumption. In fact, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 68 percent of the world’s population will inhabit cities by 2050. Initiatives to make city programs “smarter” are on the rise, and some cities have already begun the intricate process to develop and deploy a framework that supports smart initiatives and help them align with urban strategic objectives. Strategic urban objectives in themselves are often focused on the intractable challenges urban development initiatives commonly face, and smart projects find themselves in unique positions to solve. For instance:
Urban redesign due to increased populations More than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, requiring urban planning and redesign to support transportation grids, housing programs for the masses, and rethinking the distribution of freshwater and utilities for an exponentially increasing population.
Polarized economic growth The 600 largest global cities will contribute 65 percent of global GDP growth from 2010–2025. However, much of this growth is contingent on a stable, resilient infrastructure that can survive natural or manmade disasters and provide assistance to emergency management.
An increased focus on green projects Support for sustainable energy initiatives and the decreased greenhouse-gas emissions are forcing cities to develop sustainability strategies for energy generation and distribution, transportation, water management, urban planning, and eco-friendly (design and construction).
Decreased budgets Whether the effect of emergent situations, such as the global pandemic, or competing projects, the economic climate continues to place huge budgetary constraints on cities, which are becoming limited in their ability to respond to these pressures or provide financial assurance to new smart projects despite their promise.
These issues, and others, can be mitigated through the adoption of smart, scalable solutions (S3) that take advantage of smart technologies. At its core, a smart city framework is a simple decision methodology that enables both the public and private sectors to plan and implement smart urban initiatives to respond to the above and provide an increase of efficiencies for future projects, reduction of costs for ongoing initiatives, and to full-fill the primary promise of smart cities: to enhance a citizen’s quality of life.
Thank You For Reading Check back for part II
Deepinder Uppal |deepinderuppal.com