Accelerating change: From smart city to smart society
Outbreaks of communicable disease have a long history of changing cities for the better. London’s sewer network was constructed following the cholera epidemic in the 1850s, and building ventilation standards improved after the Spanish flu in 1918.
The current COVID-19 pandemic presents a similar whiteboard moment to accelerate the adoption of the best technology and infrastructure for modern cities. The smart city, a catch-all term used to describe how technology and data analytics can be harnessed to make cities more sustainable and efficient, is likely to have a profound influence on how policymakers and inhabitants reimagine urban spaces.
A smart city approach has long been seen as a crucial tool for managing explosive population growth in cities. According to the United Nations Department for Economic and Social Affairs, more than half of the world’s population lives in towns and cities, a figure that could climb to close to 68 percent by 2050. As city populations have swelled, so have their economic clout. By 2025, the world’s top 600 cities are expected to account for 60 percent of global GDP, according to McKinsey.
Smart city developments—such as the giga projects under construction in Saudi Arabia and Masdar in Abu Dhabi—have shown that the technology is available to reduce city running costs, cut resource consumption and improve service delivery. But retrofitting existing urban infrastructure—as opposed to building new smart cities from the ground up—has been a long-term challenge. Hefty price tags and the complexity of these undertakings have slowed the pace of implementation.
The impact of COVID-19 on economies, communities and public health, however, may yet prove to be the spark that galvanizes cities to overcome these barriers and find creative, multi-disciplinary approaches to make smart city principles the foundation of all long-term urban planning. The pandemic may also provide useful data and support for the implementation of specific technologies.
For any city or organization that plans to put smart city ideas at the center of its wider planning strategy, the collection of data, and regulation of its use, is the foundation upon which any plans must be built.
Data collection and analytics sit at the heart of smart city planning and are essential if smart cities are to deliver on their promise. In greenfield smart cities, such as those in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, data collection devices may be built into the fabric of buildings from the outset, helping to minimize costs and maximize efficiency.
In some parts of the world, privacy laws and rights make it more difficult to track people and collect and use their data without implementing compliance measures. Although some governments have been given more power to collect and process personal data in order to fight COVID-19 (the European Data Protection Board, for example, has given guidance to this effect), there are nevertheless, limitations on how long this data can be held, and the purposes for which it can be used. Indeed, there is an argument that many western countries have lagged behind Asia- Pacific and may lag behind the Middle East in smart city development precisely because of these restrictions, especially in Europe, where GDPR rules place significant emphasis on the rights of individuals to privacy and respect for family life.
Inevitably, there are trade-offs to be made between the privacy rights of individuals and the rapid development of new technologies in the context of smart cities. In many western legal structures, these rights make it more complex and expensive to collect data concerning individuals, and to process that data for purposes including the operation and development of smart cities. The collection of data also comes with commercial and intellectual property challenges. If smart cities are to work, especially those adopting artificial intelligence, they need data sets that are accurate and up-to-date.
