Let’s imagine a modern city in 2020. It is a smart city. Urban planning, ecology, and information technology reach into every neighborhood, to improve citizens’ quality of life.
Sensor-based systems (see also application areas in the graphic below) are already in place in many municipalities and regions all over the world. Before long, smart cities everywhere will be generating tons of data to help you find a parking spot, to conserve water in parks, to monitor transport, crowds, and pollution levels, and to keep us safe.
Of course, not every city has reached that point yet. From a practical, hardware-based point of view, I want to share how far we’ve come in cities from Hoboken to Gerona, from Malaga to Melbourne, from Salamanca to Sydney… but particularly in Europe where the smart cities movement has its roots.
In the first wave of smart cities, starting around 2009, mayors and city managers were excited about adopting sensor technology. It was what they had been dreaming of to monitor air quality, traffic, noise. Sensors would help manage services, to improve, and modernize urban areas. Municipalities listened carefully to the many smart city advantages, and cost reduction was a big driver. And so calls for bids were issued, and won. Contracts were signed, the first pilots and projects were launched, and then… reality set in.
Early on, the challenges came from understanding the limits of technology — sensor placement, over-the-air programming, how to deal with mobile and moving networks to track trams and buses, or the eternal trade-off between real-time data monitoring and power consumption. The biggest challenges had nothing to do with technology. I remember when an elderly lady stopped to ask our engineers what all those black boxes on the streetlights were for, and if they were paid for with taxpayer money. Another time, a city employee actually came down to the street and blocked our installation because he thought it was unsafe. It turned out no one had told him what was going on. As engineers it took us a while to realize this was not a technical discussion, but a political one.
New devices are very visible in the urban landscape, and at the same time the population has never been so well informed. Citizens ask: “What are you doing with my taxes?” People wonder which services were dropped in favor of funding this shiny new project. And we found that you’d better have a good answer, or there will be a firestorm on the social networks, at great political cost. Some resistance can be chalked up to NIMBY — “not in MY backyard.” But it’s not just citizens who worry. Mayors ask more questions because they are more informed. They are concerned with costs and funding, the ability to produce real, useful information and even how to get internal cooperation.
Early projects brought out the first signs of frustration because there were very few answers.
