Alright kids, it’s late and I spent all day in the police station instead of writing this like originally planned, so let’s jump right into things here. Cities, how should we do them? This noble question has plagued mankind since the earliest attempts at city planning, leading to monumental symbols of progress like the aqueducts, garbage trucks, and curbside hot dogs. Today, more than ever before, cities are being stressed beyond their limits, as more and more economic activity worldwide is carried out in their borders, causing more and more people to flood into cities all over the globe. 60% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2020. People even live in Las Vegas. On purpose. This boom in population has led to a host of social and environmental problems, including spiraling homeless populations, concentrated poverty, and strained support systems. Cities have dealt with the in-surge of new residents through skyrocketing rents (e.g. San Francisco) or godforsaken sprawl (e.g. Los Angeles), among other responses, but in the future, cities will have to be more intentional with how they develop and how they welcome newcomers.
In the past, cities have been developed according to grid systems, hub-and-spoke ideals, or just based on where cows liked to walk (looking at you, Boston). As many cities either develop public services and planning for the first time, or attempt to overhaul decrepit and failing systems of old, there is an opportunity to truly take social and environmental goals into account. It’s even one of the Sustainable Development Goals. So let’s consider some goals\ worth weighing as far as city planning and development goes, with the full foreknowledge that as city developers, we will be booed mercilessly by current residents no matter what changes we attempt to implement.
The first goals to consider are on the social side. Cities and urban areas bring together a mass of diverse people and backgrounds into a concentrated space, as illustrated by any metro system ever during rush hour. However, markets being what they are, a crush of people will not all be on equal footing. Concentrated and systemic poverty is a reality in urban areas worldwide, ranging from huge slums to neighborhoods you just don’t go in at night, depending on where in the world you are. Slums and such areas present social problems for cities. Not only are the people living in poverty suffering, but there are consequential issues of safety and health in this neighborhoods quite often as well. For areas of extreme poverty, city planners must create goals targeted at providing support services for those living in these areas, ranging from basic sanitation to enhancing education opportunities in bad neighborhoods to improved affordable housing.
In many of impoverished areas, homelessness is an intractable problem as well. Cities must set clear goals targeted at reducing homelessness and finding housing solutions for the city’s most vulnerable population. What is often necessary in these situations is to provide mental health services and drug rehabilitation programs as well, to better serve those members who are the least able to serve themselves. Considering many cities’ approach to homeless issues today is to literally bus them to other cities or just generally kick at them and grumble, there is a lot of potential progress to be made here.
On the environmental side, cities must strive towards being self-sustaining. This means a closed loop for energy production and consumption, and targeted reductions in overall water usage and carbon emissions. For energy production and consumption, incentives for private use of alternative energy have the potential to make a difference, as well as supporting and investing in alternative energy production for the overall city grid. The economics for solar and wind energy are becoming more and more favorable as time passes, so this goal should be achievable for cities in the near term. To speed up the process, cities can invest themselves in renewable energy and try to disincentivize huge energy usages like air conditioning.
For carbon emissions, investments in green public transit systems (and actually usable public transit systems in general) can go a long way towards combatting the usage of cars within cities. The usage of cars and motorcycles is a cultural issue as well, so cities will have to base this goal on their existing baseline, rather than a worldwide target. Cities can also enact improved recycling programs and support more green and nature spaces within the city limits. Overall beautification of cities through the spread of parks and trees is a worthwhile aim, both aesthetically and environmentally as well.
The question remains how cities can tackle some of these major issues. Some of them are a matter of rethinking incentives. Others can be influenced with a change in business models. One potential business model innovation that can be applied to cities is in regards to the Internet of Things. With the ability to have almost anything generate data and the tools being developed to harness and clean that data for diagnostic and predictive analytics, cities can begin to truly understand how the interconnected systems within their borders work and make adjustments to improve things like energy and water usage. Big data and analytics are proving financially sustainable in many industries, from retail to mining, so the use case and business case has been vetted. The application to cities themselves has yet to be thoroughly explored on a large scale, given the speed in which governments move in general. Additionally, urban areas can lay claim to being some of the most complex systems on this planet, requiring monumental investments in data gathering and analytical processing power.
To tackle the enormity of the problem with the Internet of Things, cities should take the approach that startups often do: start small and vet the application first. By applying sensors and analytics to, say, a few lines of the metro system, the city can begin to realize improvements, make mistakes and figure out what works on a smaller scale. Once the implementation has worked out the kinks, the city can roll it out across many different areas. The financial sustainability will come from the improvements that cities are able to make. For example, a better understanding of the transit system can help reduce operating costs and even improve scheduling, leading to more ticket sales. The more success that a city has in Big Data and Internet of Things implementation, the faster it can roll it out to other potential areas and the faster that improvements can be realized. The potential applications include transit systems, the energy grid, water usage, maintenance, and public services, among others. As a starting point, cities should target those applications that represent the low hanging fruit and where clear data can make clear decisions more obvious. One such area is the energy grid, and indeed there are some cities who are exploring the possibilities of “smart” technology in this field.
Of course, nothing is given in this magical world of ours, so let’s talk about costs and risks associated with spraying a city with sensors and waiting for intelligence to happen. The first is that unlike some other industries where Big Data is more a matter of leveraging existing data that was otherwise going unused, a lot of these applications will require investments in the data gathering step itself. Sensors will have to be slapped on the pumps and trains and bike lanes. Investments will have to be made in the IT infrastructure to handle all the data as well. This will have to be outsourced to companies who have the tools to handle Big Data and perform some of the complicated analytics required to get actionable results. Cities do not have the teams in place to do anything resembling machine learning, for example. One risk that is not financial is the risk that the results will not actually be that actionable. Perhaps cities have come pretty close to optimizing public transit schedules, for examples, through the years (as unlikely as that sounds). Perhaps a lack of data isn’t always the problem — it may be that the problem is one of those Wicked Problems that is simply extremely difficult to solve, no matter how much data you can visualize.
So is any city anywhere making attempts at implementing some of the smart city ideas? Indeed, a few have! As you may have guessed, North American cities are lagging behind in general, but Europe has a few good examples. Amsterdam has taken some steps with connecting home solar panels to their energy grid and offering smart batteries. Copenhagen has been testing sensors for monitoring the city’s bike traffic in real-time. And cities all over Europe are implementing smart grids for energy. On the North American side, New York has been experimenting with using IoT and Big Data for gunshot detection, which is an extremely North American application of this technology.
To summarize everything here, cities are ridiculously complex ecosystems that bring together people of all walks in tiny apartments. Given the growth of urban populations and the social and environmental problems intrinsic to cities worldwide, there must be explicit social and environmental goals stapled to every city planner’s forehead as we move into the future. These goals should include ways to address poverty, housing, and the city’s most vulnerable members. Additionally, explicit goals around achieving sustainability with energy usage and reducing carbon emissions should be baked into any new infrastructure project a city undertakes. Of course, having goals is nice, but achieving them is even nicer, and there are many approaches cities can take towards realizing their social and environmental goals. One such approach is to invest in Big Data and the Internet of Things. Smart cities have the potential to understand and address some of the large problems that today seem beyond the scope of your average local government. An intelligent approach to implementation with an eye on scale and financial costs could yield not only financial sustainability, but real progress towards social and environmental sustainability as well. Maybe then, when a tree grows in Brooklyn, it won’t be such a notable event as to inspire a book (yes, yes, I know that’s not what that book is about, just roll with it).
A couple quick references for you
http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/3/262/pdf
https://www.entitymag.com/cities-can-reduce-co2-emission/
http://uk.businessinsider.com/internet-of-things-smart-cities-2016-10?r=US&IR=T