What’s Holding Smart Cities Back?

With the global population set to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, two thirds of which will be living in cities, according to United Nations projections, governments worldwide are already facing an array of challenges in ensuring the sustainability, security and success of an ever-more-crowded planet.

The urgency of these challenges underscores the importance of smart cities continuing to fuel growth, innovation and cultural dynamism amid this wave of continued urbanization. To do so, they’ll need to harness data analytics, smart infrastructure, sensing technologies and innovation networks to improve civic services, manage day-to-day operations and make cities attractive destinations for capital.

But while the case for smart cities is straightforward, the path to building them is not. Key hurdles stand in the way of unleashing the full potential of smart cities.  Here’s a look at five of the most pressing challenges that will need to be addressed.

Amid fierce debates about how tech giants have made use of data, smart cities have become yet another flash point in the war over digital privacy. Even among those who support smart cities, there are fears that in practice, smart city technology will give Big Brother—be it big government or big tech—too much visibility into citizens’ lives.

In Toronto, which has partnered with Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs to build an innovation hub, a privacy expert consulting on the project recently resigned over alleged shortcomings in data privacy protections, sparking calls for more measures against third-party exploitation of individual information.

As cities grapple with urbanization, digitization, and the growing abundance of data, public debate over how to realize the benefits of smart cities without sacrificing privacy will intensify—and while privacy safeguards will always remain a matter of contention, with no neat and easy solution, serious discussion on privacy today will help bring to fruition the smart cities of tomorrow.

Even as privacy advocates voice concerns about too much data in the public sphere, there’s also a data shortage that demands attention.

For example, all but a fraction of the data used to power connected vehicles are visual data—but to more intelligently control traffic and ensure road safety in smart cities, planners should turn their attention to harnessing data that are not visual. For example, we as humans can “feel” and respond to certain road conditions based on that feel, conditions such as black ice, potholes, windy conditions and so on. Yet autonomous vehicles and the mapping technology required to train them are often missing this element. Compounding the issue further, many methods of visual data collection can be extremely costly, difficult to scale, and inaccurate, as is often the case with data collected from cellphones.

Boasting fast connection speeds with ultralow latency, 5G will drive smart city development.