7 minute read
Smart City as a Perennial Conversation
“Everything is interrelated, and smart cities is an evolving conversation. I always tell people that you don't build a railroad or a highway twice, instead you improvize, making it better, faster, and more efficient through the use of technology”, says Sergio
Fernandez de Cordova, Chairman, PVBLIC
Foundation, and a Permanent UN observer, in an exclusive interview with Geospatial World.
Post the pandemic disruption, there have been a lot of socioeconomic transformations, as well as individual and collective behavioral adaptations. Now the talk of the town everywhere is designing resilient cities. What role do you think geospatial technology can play in this? Resilience means understanding your environment and being ready to act, not just through data, but also figuring out how climate impacts our communities, cities and critical infrastructure. Look at how Singapore's Land Authority is using geospatial to not only look at resiliency, but also for education and transforming how people live, how they engage with the city, how they are actually buying new homes or moving, or how they are finding their next job.
Singapore is an incredible example of how we all aspire for our communities and our cities to be. In order to build resilience and smart and intelligent communities, we need to have multi-stakeholder engagements. We need public-private partnerships to ensure that we are not leaving anyone behind. There’s a need to build infrastructure to advance how people engage with each other, and how a city listens because a city is not just about what it's creating for its habitants, its residents, and its visitors, but also, how it listens, learns, and interacts.
City planning has undergone many underlying transitions over the years. Earlier, the focus was on just designing infrastructure, but now, there has been a conscious shift towards a human-centric city, an urban sphere that would prioritize human needs and aspirations above all. How do you think can this be synchronized with the sustainability imperative? The evolution of the conversation on smart cities is about smart digital infrastructure. As I said, cities need to absorb information and listen to improve the services for people, create security, and advance services.
What we have witnessed in the first world countries is that the disparity between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ has become greater, because the infrastructure's only been focused on the people that have the ability to afford it – the affluent communities and the taxpayers.
Again, when we relook at this evolution of smart communities and smart cities, a vacuum has been created in the last ten years. There are communities that have nothing: no infrastructure and no intelligence inputs to secure a better life for themselves.
We have retrofitted and built this infrastructure for the first world users. And I think that, from our perspective, this is one of the greatest opportunity areas to work upon and ensure we become totally inclusive and utilize sustainable development goals so that no child misses education, and with the right access to information we are able to build a better future for everyone.
To me, everything is interrelated. Smart cities is an evolving conver-
sation, and I always tell people that you don't build a railroad twice, instead, you improvize, making it better, faster, and more efficient through the use of technology.
Unfortunately, some government leaders, civil society leaders, and entrepreneurs lack the foresight in terms of evolution, constant improvement, and ensuring that no one is left behind.
As population explodes and the trend towards urbanization and the migration to urban hotspots continues, we see mega cities everywhere in the world getting more cluttered and congested. This means declining opportunities, shrinking spaces and lack of inspirations that were offered to the previous generations. How can we solve this conundrum? Well, it's an excellent point, because what you are talking about is a lot like what we call the hub and spoke model.
We have seen people make that shift. The reason why everybody is flooding to mega cities is because they offer an opportunity to make more money and secure a better living for their families.
If we start to unpack the dynamics of why people migrate from say Central America to live five people in a bedroom in the United States, it is to dispatch money back home. But on the other hand, some of the beachside places where they come from, are those where many Americans plan their retirement.
Where we're seeing this technology evolving is that, as long as we have good infrastructure, and we are not building it in a mega core, it's what we call the hub and spoke model, like a bicycle wheel.
So there’s a hub that can afford the most expensive infrastructure, but then, at the same time, we have spokes that create these communities where people could live their own life, they could drive a car, go play in the park and not be in a smog city and actually live healthily.
There are GIS-based tools and applications that enhance the efficiency of municipal services, law enforcement, and delivery of goods to the public. Can there be integrated digital applications that will make municipal decision-making easier and cities more participatory, inclusive, democratized, and decentralized? What we've seen with the evolution of Android and Linux, is that open architecture has allowed us to upgrade and create all these solutions that we use today– although some of them are more successful than the others.
At the city level, we have the opportunity to give all this geospatial information on economic development opportunities, education opportunities, and give people the tools to build at the local level. That's what we are doing with the SDG Data Alliance.
For instance, we all mostly use Uber, but why can't there be a local alternative, or why can't there be a local platform that's used for only those people in the city, for bicycles, for all transportation? Over the past decade, a lot of these developments have happened, especially in India. Then there are different elements peculiar to different countries, be it India, Kenya, Chile, Brazil, or America. When we aggregate them all, then the conversation starts.
We are seeing more young people now realizing that they can be a part of that change where
we need the technologies at the government level to allow that open architecture to access that data.
Sometimes it takes enormous disruptions like a pandemic for people to sit at home and realize. I am really excited about the next generation, especially in the global south, because people there are seeing the real world and coming up with solutions.
Which cities, in your opinion, have made tremendous progress in the smart digital transition? What Singapore is doing is just fantastic. Maybe some of the cities in China as well, but that's not open architecture. What we are referring to is how a group of us can come together and create additional layers on top of that infrastructure. Singapore is really the leader in this.
Governments like Singapore and Dubai have done an amazing job. Australia launched the National broadband network. Due to it, everybody in the country has access to connectivity.
Throughout Africa, they are building these sort of connected villages and metro parks. In Latin America, a lot of work is being done in such connected areas, but ultimately, they are not areas where you want to live, just areas where you want to work.
What we need is smarter political leaders. I think we've reached the precipice where there are a lot of innovators, but public and private are not coming together. If you're the Minister, and you don't have time for me, and you don't understand what I'm trying to say to you, then there is a big gap.
There's a disparity between political leaders and where the future is heading. A lot of the work that we do is to try to help bridge that gap to bring the innovators, multi-stakeholders, civil society groups, and NGOs together. They might have a different view, but that doesn't mean that you have to shift things. It means that you're listening. That's why accurate data is important because it gives us the ability to listen at a geospatial level.
Interviewed by: Aditya Chaturvedi
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