Top 5 Smart City Predictions: AI and the Birth of Self-Aware Cities
What will cities look like in the future? With the birth of Machine Learning, explosion in Artificial Intelligence and our increasingly Tech-Centric culture, they may look much different than most people expect. And the process of planning them will as well. But one things for sure – they will be smarter.
As a licensed Landscape Architect working in the Tech industry, I see great untapped potential to adapt innovative technologies to empower landscape architects, architects, civil engineers and city/regional planners. And as these professions become increasingly involved in the Smart Cities process, they would be wise to begin educating themselves about the emerging technologies companies such as Cisco are developing.
So to prepare my fellow designers for their unexpected future creating more sustainable environments, I offer up my top 5 predictions on the future of planning SmartCities:
By 2020: Use of a single city wide digital platform to unify all operations, data aggregation/analytics, and actions across agencies will become popular. This will pull data from all city sensors, cameras, end points, databases, etc. and then aggregate that data into a single source, all in real-time. This data will then be pushed back out for immediate use by city leaders, agencies, businesses (including design firms), universities and even citizens to take immediate actions that result in better outcomes for all. Cisco is already pioneering this concept with its Smart+Connected Communities Digital Platform which provides a great foundation for your Smart City solutions. Plus there will be some very exciting news about that platform coming very soon.
By 2025: As Smart Cities become the rule rather than the exception, local governments will have to adapt their planning methodologies. This will result in the inclusion of language into municipal building codes and Unified Development Ordinances requiring and regulating types, uses and even quantities of digital technologies for buildings, land development and roads.
