Rise of the "Smart" Cities

A better quality of life is something everyone aspires to, and for city dwellers of the future that will mean a heavy reliance on the benefits of technology. We are only 30 years into the age of the personal computer, and yet the changes that computers have made in the way we live are extraordinary. However, one thing we can confidently predict is that city planners are going to be looking to technology to help enable Smart Living for future city dwellers. The focus will be on the use of information and communications technology to create smarter and more sustainable cities, and to help improve overall quality of life. It is projected that by 2050 70% of the world's population will live in cities consuming the vast bulk of the world's resources. This trend is already underway, with new generations of sensor networks in public and private managed physical spaces being developed.

Well get ready for the connected city as London’s Greenwich peninsula is to be the test bed for Urban OS, a ‘smart city’ operating system that’s been developed by Living Plan IT. The main idea behind Urban OS is that buildings, street lights and city systems will all be interlinked and connected. Traffic lights will ‘know’ where pile-ups might emerge and will be able to manage traffic more effectively. Similarly, street lights, monitoring traffic will dim their lights if a road isn’t busy and sensors in buildings will be able to help out in emergency situations such as a fire.

To be launched in time for the London 2012 Olympic Games, a Greenwich’s smart city test bed will feature a cable car, a dock for cruise ships alongside new connected homes and businesses. Living Plan IT Chief Executive Steve Lewis said "We are entering a phase when everything becomes connected, from healthcare to transportation. This is about connecting things that previously never did." Imagine being directly connected to your surroundings for example, There’s potential for smart ‘vests’ that could monitor your heart rate and other life signs and smart heating and cooling systems connected to the Urban OS could come online when your house ‘knows’ you’re coming home.

Another example of this "Urban OS", built on a technology developed by the Formula One team McLaren, and unveiled at a recent conference by the Portuguese company Living Plan IT. They, along with partners such as Cisco and Microsoft, are constructing a futuristic settlement in Portugal to test the viability of the new technology. The aim is to build a city run by one big computerised system. It's a bit like how the operating system on your PC works, but on a giant scale, and with enormous volumes of data being handled. There could potentially be billions of interacting devices in a typical city, and the city being built to test the Urban OS will have around one million high-tech sensors embedded in it. They will monitor all activity and effectively eliminate the need for human management of many areas that affect the quality of daily city living.

Of course, the longer-term goal will be to have smartphone technology interacting with the city-level systems, bringing the possibility of handheld manipulation of home-based systems that manage appliances, heating, lighting, safety equipment, and so on.

Time will tell how well the new urban-style OS might work, but whether people are for or against increased computerisation, it is certain that technology will form the basis of future city management. Cities worldwide are looking for technology solutions to ensure their citizens can work and live smarter, and here some innovations that IBM predicts most cities will be using in the near future:

Disease control: Better IT systems will allow public health officials to predict, manage and control disease outbreaks far more effectively.

Water management: Smarter water management systems will reduce water waste by up to 50%, through avoiding pollution of rivers and lakes, and by increasing drinkable water supplies through improved purification processes.

Green credits: Citizens will be rewarded with tradable online credits for reducing their carbon footprint, thus providing incentives to get involved in efforts to improve the environment.

Emergency responsiveness: Cities will use state-of-the-art systems to collect and share data in real time to improve emergency prevention and response mechanisms.

Of course, one obvious potential barrier to the effectiveness of all these new smart technologies is whether or not city-dwellers will have the necessary skills to make use of them all. As we enter the age of the knowledge-based economy, cities will become more and more reliant on their human capital, the knowledge and skills of individuals, if they want to be successful. So technology awareness and training are likely to feature strongly in the minds of future city planners. It is a clear from this story that our society is becoming more connected with technology all the time. Is this the natural course of human kind and the future of cities? Of course the benefits are countless of being "connected" and integrated into our environments, but how much of a slippery slope are we on? Do the pros out weigh the cons in a smart city? Well we are surely to find out in the not to distant future, that's for sure!