THE ROAD AHEAD: SMART CITIES & THEIR EFFECT ON OUR FUTURE

BY PAUL DOHERTY

Join us for a journey into the future, where human-centric, data-driven urban environments provide a safe, secure, and sustainable lifestyle for you and your family. Far from Utopian, this session will provide views into your future through practical, pragmatic, and inspiring real-world examples from around the world.

The migration of humans to urban environments is occurring at an unprecedented rate around the world. New and existing cities are urgently developing smart city planning and implementing projects and programs to accommodate citizens with safe, healthy, and sustainable environments to live, work, play, and learn.

With a heightened awareness of sustainable economic, environmental, and healthy lifestyles, smart cities are emerging as woven ecosystems providing next-generation experiences and services. The main source of economic growth and productivity in our world, cities also account for an enormous amount of resource consumption and carbon emissions. Smart cities strive to use their ecosystems to limit the use of traditional resources and lower their carbon footprint, providing a path forward to an overall well-being experience for the human race.

Smart cities are not a marketing campaign or a political catchphrase. They are a series of solutions to a serious and urgent situation. Smart cities are emerging as a civic action due to a “perfect storm” of market conditions, technology innovation, social wants, and government needs and the migration to urban environments that has accelerated on a global scale.

Our company has created a smart city framework that consists of 10 guiding principles. Within each principle are solutions and, in certain cases, products. These principles are: citizen services, education, energy, green/sustainable buildings and environment, health care, information communications technology (ICT), safety and security, transportation, water, and waste.

This list is meant to assist in identifying the priorities for each urban project. We have found that this stack shifts and shuffles even within a single urban environment due to competing priorities. What works on the north side of a city does not necessarily work on the south side.

For a city to become smart, developing an intelligence system that connects its central nervous system to its brain is required. By interconnecting each guiding principle and implementing them as ecosystems, the organism for each urban development will take on its own shape, culture, and operational processes. In other words, there are no cookie-cutter solutions. In smart cities, some solutions create a domino effect. Each guiding principle has numerous solutions and products, acting as ingredients to each urban development’s wants, needs, and desires.

The interesting thing about smart city initiatives is the closely integrated way seemingly disparate elements work together. As cities begin their transformative process, it helps to consider how they will need to address the social, economic, engineering, and environmental challenges. And this centers on knowledge.

As we identify the challenges of living in a highly connected internet age, it is comforting to relate to our cities as organisms. If the city is a body, we have seen its evolution from the agrarian society to the internet age through the development of systems. Each city has its own cardiovascular system (traffic, mass transit), skeletal (infrastructure), respiratory and digestive (energy, waste), and even a primitive nervous system (telecommunications). Smart city initiatives like 5G network programs and free citywide wireless broadband are the beginning salvos in meeting these challenges and moving cities forward as healthy organisms. Therefore, we should focus our collective efforts on two areas of immediate action: data and digital DNA.

Due to the implementation of vast IT solutions, the world has created a cornucopia of data. This data comes in all shapes and sizes and enables an enormous amount of tasks to be conducted. The issue is not if the city has the proper data to become a smart city but how.

Traditional IT solutions treat data as a captive element inside its own software, creating silos of data within every city. Attempts to extract and share this data with other systems have been complex and expensive. With the emergence of cloud technology, cities have a highly potent solution that mixes performance and technology. Add in the recent innovation of distributed ledger technology (DLT), a database of information that’s shared and duplicated across a network of computers in different locations, cities have tools to decentralize data to work in many layers of solutions. DLT is the basis of blockchain technology and its solutions.

As CEO of The Digit Group, Paul Doherty is one of the industry’s most sought-after thought leaders, strategists, and integrators of process, technology, and business. A senior fellow of the Design Futures Council, he is an awardwinning architect, author, educator, analyst, and advisor to Fortune 500 organizations, global government agencies, prominent institutions, and the most prestigious architectural, engineering, and contracting firms in the world. His current work is focused on smart city real estate developments that include financing, design-build, and innovative technology solutions.

Strong evidence reveals how the places and systems we build affect how people move, live, and feel—and, by extension, how they treat each other. Smart city design principles can reinforce happiness and promote healthy lifestyles if implemented correctly. Research shows that happiness matters and that there are objective ways to measure how people feel. The question being explored is how to incorporate happiness into policies and designs and how to measure outcomes.

These high-level design solutions are not meant to imply that if you design dense and connected neighborhoods, the outcomes are automatically happy people. The buildings and their layouts can only provide the spaces where humans will choose how to live. Smart cities can only enhance the environment and give the opportunity for people to discover their own happiness.