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The city that never sleeps

As cities become the world's primary living space, managing their information sprawl will define future sustainability.

Lezette Engelbrecht
By Lezette Engelbrecht, ITWeb online features editor
Johannesburg, 13 Jul 2010

The next time you take a leisurely stroll to the corner caf'e, imagine for a second the hundreds of streams of information criss-crossing the sidewalks, stores and structures making up the neighbourhood. The city is literally breathing data; inhaling and exhaling the flows of a million recordings and readings, which harnessed in the right way, could enable it, and its citizens, to breathe a little easier.

According to a European Commission (EC) workshop report released in November last year, cities have become the primary living space for around half the world's people. Already, the global urban population encompasses 3.3 billion and by 2050, this will almost double to 6.4 billion.

That's a whole lot of people living, eating, wasting, working, travelling, being, in a relatively small physical area, and a significant contributor to resource consumption, congestion, and pollution.

As the EC report points out, while these urban hubs occupy only 2% of the world's land area, they account for 75% of its greenhouse gas emissions. As a consequence, cities and their related infrastructure play a major role in any attempt to cut carbon emissions. Given their collection of networks, connections, and information systems, cities are also the ideal platform for leveraging ICT to create more efficient economic, social and environmental services.

The concept of a “smart city” is, however, a little vague. Smart how, exactly? And that's the tricky part; it has to be smart in small ways and all ways, for any real kind of impact to be felt. Because being truly smart, in the human sense, doesn't involve thinking in disparate chunks marked “water management” or “electricity grid”, but in the kind of interconnected, multi-tasking way that allows people to make split-second decisions based on numerous, simultaneous sensory inputs.

It's not a particularly new idea either. Smart city-type programmes have been researched and implemented by institutions, tech companies, and governments from Sydney to Singapore. These include everything from using old TV broadcast spectrum for a network accelerating efficient services, to the first carbon-neutral city in Abu Dhabi.

Street as platform

Combining and optimising information flows seems like an obvious way to facilitate the efficient running of systems. What has changed recently, however, is the incredible growth of cities, as well as the amount, speed and nature of flowing in and around their “walls”. This adds a powerful element to the traditional “operations management” approach, as huge loads of personal information on resource use accompany conventional numerical streams.

Our physical environment creates a set of responses that spills over to our subconscious.

Lezette Engelbrecht, copy editor and journalist, ITWeb

Also, advances in Web and wireless technologies make the transfer of these flows much more open and exchangeable. Now, you can not only run systems, but the people using them, much more efficiently. Ok, the people run themselves, strictly speaking, but you get the idea.

Essentially, a smart city is one that combines physical infrastructure with intelligent technologies that convey and organise information. It involves creating an urban central nervous system constantly feeding us information about air quality, energy usage, water supply, traffic activity, wireless connectivity, and how these affect each other, to better understand our surroundings and make more informed decisions as a result.

It allows “the invisible to become visible”, as Dan Hill explains in his essay, 'The street as platform', as people understand their impact on the urban environment in real-time. “Citizens turn off taps earlier, watching their water use patterns improve immediately. Buildings can share resources across differing peaks in their energy and resource loading. Road systems can funnel traffic via speed limits and traffic signals in order to route around congestion.”

The EC describes it as a city that “makes a conscious effort to innovatively employ ICT to support a more inclusive, diverse and sustainable urban environment”. Imagine a city...making a conscious effort.

Agents for change

However, the very characteristics giving cities the potential to massively reduce environmental impacts also make it extremely challenging to implement an over-arching infrastructure aimed at efficiency. The process involves municipalities, electricity grids, water systems, traffic authorities, communications networks, public facilities, all incorporating different levels of technology and connectivity. Added to that, and perhaps the most challenging of all, are the citizens themselves.

The smartest, most intuitive of systems will mean little if there's no corresponding change in human behaviour. “What is the city but the people,” as the Bard would say. People need to see changes in order to introduce changes themselves. The effects of a smartly connected city need to be widespread, sustainable and long-term for similar behavioural shifts to occur in society.

Our physical environment creates a set of responses that spills over to our subconscious; it frames the way we assign value, judge and react to things. By being immersed in functional spaces geared at every point for efficiency, it will start becoming a natural part of people's lives, thinking patterns, and habits.

As we complete the first decade of the 21st century, thoughts turn to what will be its defining characteristics. UN Habitat executive director Dr Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka said at the Shanghai World Cities Summit that this will be known as the century of the city - one during which massive urban hubs of more than 20 million people will emerge.

Another defining feature, however, will be the quest for environmentally responsible development. If we can get these two trends to converge, it will create a new signifier for our age. It will be remembered as a century of cities where economic and social developments complement, rather than threaten, environmental sustainability; where the dark satanic mills are replaced with buildings powered by the elements; where the relentless buzz of activity is found not in the bustle of the streets, but in the invisible undercurrents of data managing an immense urban organism. A city of dreams, some would argue, but that's to be expected, in a city that never sleeps.

* Lezette Engelbrecht, copy editor and journalist, hopes the next generation will be one where mass urbanisation brings a completely new approach to the way we interact with the environment. It may be idealistic, improbable and challenging, but change is inevitable, and we can either adapt or get left behind. As Edwards Deming once said, it is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

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