Smart Cities, Big Data

I first wrote about `smart cities' almost as soon as I began writing these editorials in the early 1980s. Back then, the PC (personal computer) or micro (microcomputer) was sweeping the world of computing and hard on its heels came the development of local area networks (LANs). In fact, LANs, as many other features of the PC, had been invented in the 1970s at Xerox Parc but it was not until the 1980s that they became ubiquitous and this heralded an age of wide area networks (WANs) that paralleled the Internet in general. What I remember most of those years were my visits to the Far Eastöin 1986 to Japan where I saw for the first time large-screen technologies in shopping centres and the implementation of fibre optic networks for wide-area Internet access, in the name of regenerating old industrial landscapes as they prepared for the postindustrial age (Batty, 1987). In the late 1980s, when I visited Singapore, the city-state advertised itself as the `Intelligent Island', and my visits to the National Computer Board mightily impressed me. I heard about how routine services could be delivered to the entire population through WANs (Batty, 1997), two or so years before the World Wide Web was invented. What then came to pass in the 1990s was the fact that services everywhere could be delivered in similar ways across the web. Singapore is still in the vanguard. In the 1980s the focus on instrumenting the city using network technologies was enshrined in the idea of the wired city. Dutton et al's (1987) edited book of the same name articulated this idea, but this was based on an earlier conception `The Wired Society', a term coined by Martin (1977) whose influence on IT and society still pervades the world through his philanthropy. The notion of wiring the city then was essentially one of providing networking for very diverse activities without any very specific uses in mind, although by the mid-1990s there was a sense in which routine services such as those provided by municipalitiesölibraries, welfare services and so onömight be delivered using WANs. To an extent, there was a continued slower progression involving the use of ICT (information and communication technologies) in emergency service support, building on an earlier generation of operations research techniques for automating and streamlining police, ambulance, fire, waste disposal, etc. Various related conceptions of the wired city were in vogue at that time, such as cybercities, information cities, intelligent cities, and virtual cities with the focus more on representing the city using various digital media from computer-aided design to virtual reality games and worlds. Many of these conceptions were based on visions of what wired cities might become rather than on the reality of what was actually possible then. It needed yet another ratchet up of the IT spiral to really propel our cities into a world where service delivery and related activities could effectively be delivered using deeply embedded seamless computing, and only then could our cities could become truly computable (Batty, 1997). What has changed these initial conceptions of the wired city is the development of ubiquitous devices of comparatively low cost that can be deployed to sense what is happening over very small time scalesöseconds and fasteröas well as over very fine levels of spatial resolution. Such devices that range from purpose-built sensors to individual hand-held devices that are as mobile as those using them provide massive capability to store and transmit data that pertains to movement and activity levels across space and time. Some of the most elaborate applications involve transport. Editorial Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2012, volume 39, pages 191 ^ 193