Would you recognize a smart city if you saw one? For all the talk about smart cities over the past decade, there’s actually very little agreement about what they should look like. Candidates that have been touted as smart city examples are remarkably different from one another. There are some who even believe that the core idea of a smart city — where every public function is governed by technology, networked to meet the needs of an urban population — is a daydream.
After all, network architecture is still a work in progress. Standards for cloud and data connectivity architecture — key prerequisites for building a comprehensive system — are still evolving. And no one is sure where it will all end up.
Historically, the conventional and almost universal approach of local governments is to have every element of city infrastructure operate in its own silo: water, education, police, trash, transportation, and so forth.
Although breaking that pattern is a huge challenge, there are plenty of visionaries who want to do just that. And elements of their dreamscapes are starting to emerge, even though the specific elements vary significantly from place to place. That’s partly because the effort to create smarter cities is worldwide, reflecting global diversity.
Several years ago, a study by Juniper Research named five municipalities as top choices for smart cities, some of which were surprising. Barcelona, for example, was crowned number one for its score on environmental stewardship and smart parking. Numbers two and three were even more unexpected: New York City and London.
New York was chosen for smart street lighting and traffic management, while London scored high on technology and open data. In France, Nice scored well on environment and agency cohesion. And in Asia, Singapore was cited for its high score on traffic management and creative use of technology.
A separate, more recent examination by Datalux focused only on America’s smartest cities. Here too, the criteria varied. New York, once again, was lauded for its LED streetlights and sidewalk communication kiosks.
Boston was hailed for creating helpful, resident-friendly apps. San Francisco led the way in transportation. Chicago was cited for deploying sensors to collect an assortment of useful data including overflowing trash cans. Seattle was big on data-based decision-making.
Charlotte did well in energy conservation. Even the District of Columbia was applauded for making innovative use of data in law enforcement.
So, what really constitutes a smart city? You could argue that recently constructed communities, like Celebration, Florida, or Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates — both of which were built from scratch within a framework of advanced technology — were born smart and naturally earned the status of smart cities.
But many of the world’s population centers, built and largely settled centuries ago, don’t have that luxury. They need to be retrofitted.
And that needs to happen quickly because the issues that smart city initiatives are designed to handle have become increasingly urgent. According to the United Nations, 55 percent of the world’s population today live in urban areas, a share that is expected to reach 68 percent by 2050.
The population shift from rural to urban areas, combined with overall growth of the world’s population, could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050.
