For the past two decades, the world has seen its population increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Urbanization and megacity are two “hot topics” in the 21st century and these trends speed up rapidly. More than 2.5 billion people are expected to add on the world’s urban population by 2050. From two megacity (New York and Tokyo) in 1950s, the number have emerged to 33 megacities across the planet in 2018. Megacity – a city with a population of 10 million or more together with the growth of urbanization have leads to unprecedented problem: lack of energy and water resources, air pollution, wastes disposal safety, threat of food shortages, pollution, insufficient education facilities, inadequacy of infrastructure failing to cope with increasing flow of citizens. Clearly, the capacity of the current cities can not sustain the pressure of urban population growth and raising a new concern for the government. An attempt to find the solution to these problems is triggered since the 1990s and a new concept so-called “Smart City” was established.
What is smart city?
Smart city is concept indicating the use of information and communication technology (ICT) as well as Internet of Things (IoT) solution to improve operational efficiency, share information with the public and provide a better quality of government service, managing city’s asset and citizen welfare. The primary goal of smart city is to optimize city functions, boost the growth of economic and at the same time improve the quality of life for citizen by using smart technologies and data. The value of how these technologies is used lie at the heart of the smart city concept.
Stage of smart city
There are three stages of smart cities identified:
- Stage 1 – “Smart City 1.0”: technological revamping of the city through modern information technologies implementation. For example: urban services electronic payment systems.
- Stage 2 – “Smart City 2.0”: intellectual infrastructure formation. For example: increase of number of wireless Internet access points or creation of city service platforms.
- Stage 3 – “Smart City 3.0”: completely integrated infrastructure using to exercise on-line management of all city processes. For example: unmanned vehicle control, circular economy.
What are the applications of smart city?
There are many applications of smart city that have been explored in the recent year. A few popular examples are namely:
- Smart energy: the efficient consumption of clean, low-cost energy through he facilitation of peer-to-peer energy production and consumption. Smart blockchain-based contracts for solar-powered households to automatically trade surplus electricity with other members of the grid.
- Smart Mobility: An efficient transportation network which improve access to modernized transportation systems, continuous real-time tracking of transportation vehicles and passenger, optimize routing strategies and plan for the differing needs of commuters. Mobility-as-a-Service solutions, where various additional services can be delivered to citizens such as car-sharing, payments, insurance, and maintenance.
- Smart Government: public administration and service such as identity management, tax collection, etc. can be automated and delivered more efficiently through the use of smart contracts, enabled by the blockchain.
What are the forces to shape the future of smart city?
The smart city seems to be a promising solution to help the government on the urbanization problem, but we might wonder how smart cities can achieve its goals or what technology and process supporting the smart city concept. There are eight core forces identified to shape the future of smart city in which some can directly address the urbanization problems:
- Sharing economy: the new economic model is changing the way that people consume and access to product and service. Being supported by the online ecosystem, digital platform and Internet of thing, the sharing economy practices such as share drive service (Uber, Grab), crowd funding (Go fund me) become more popular.
- Industry 4.0: Industry 4.0-led digital transformation of manufacturingreshape the entire value chain and supply chain from design, production, delivery to customer service. The future factory will be operated by robots and worker who being supported by augmented devices and tools.
- AI: Living in the era of data generated by smart devices, these technologies like AI, big data analytics, cloud, connectivity and machine learning would enhance the way people live and work with better prediction and information for decision making as well as off-load simple and repetitive tasks.
- Urban Predictive Operations: real-time intelligence centers combine data, technology, and human expertise shared across various essential public service and department (police, fire department, hospital, security) can help to predict and response quickly to the emergencies situation.
Despite the development and maturity of smart city concept, yet there are challenges and concerns that do not lie in the availability of technology itself but rather on how these technologies is being used and governance. Sharing information and being more connected can brings many benefits to people but would it outweigh the concern on the threat of cybersecurity and privacy violation? Would there be new emerging technology or new regulation and policy to address these concerns?
References
Blockchain for Smart Cities: the future of Urban Mangement – Iberdrola. (2022). Retrieved 5 October 2022, from https://www.iberdrola.com/innovation/blockchain-for-smart-cities-urban-management
Nazir, S. (2022). National Digital Transformation and Smarter Cities: Eight Forces That Will Shape the Future [Blog]. Retrieved from https://e.huawei.com/en/eblog/industries/insights/2021/eight-forces-will-shape-future
Smart Cities Series: Blockchain and Smart Cities. (2022). Retrieved 5 October 2022, from https://www2.deloitte.com/za/en/pages/financial-services/articles/blockchain-for-smart-cities-article-3-of-3.html
Vishnivetskaya, A., & Alexandrova, E. (2019). “Smart city” concept. Implementation practice. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science And Engineering, 497, 012019. doi: 10.1088/1757-899x/497/1/012019
It is a very interesting topic! Personally, I like the idea of the smart-city- it is about time we change our over-populated cities into more sustainable and livable places. I don’t however believe that they will solve all the issues resulting from unprecedented urbanization levels. First of all, the smart city is only a concept for now, with only a share of the ‘smart city’ functionalities already implemented. Second of all, as you mentioned, the solution relies on sharing a lot of information, which can potentially lead to privacy issues. In my opinion the emerging technologies s.a. Blockchain and AI could potentially substantially improve the quality of life in the cities, however, the solutions should first be thoroughly analyzed in terms of data privacy.
Very very interesting read. Coming from a country in which the smart cities 1.0 seem to be unreachable, the prospect of having fully smart cities which would allow for a seamless management of all city processes sounds almost utopian. However, through your article, and through some additional research I am glad that urban development is heading that direction. As Zuzanna pointed out in her comment, this would require the collection of vast amounts of user data, and accordingly, data privacy risks arise. While I do hope that the current architects of the system are aware of this issue and are working on mitigation strategies (such as data masking or anonimization), think we are quite far away from having a seamlessly integrated, safely connected, and privacy safe smart city. Thank you for sharing, this was quite insightful!