Smart Cities: A Better Future For All
By: Austin Paul Harris
Tags: Mobility, Data Science, Smart City Project, Smart Cities, Urbanization

This article is an introduction to the series and will cover:

What is a Smart City?

Challenges municipalities face on the road to becoming a smart city.

What are the goals of smart cities?

Examples of successful smart city projects.

Background

First, let's talk about two key contributors that have influenced and accelerated the development of smart city thought over the last decade.

Urbanization

Cities around the world are faced with a new challenge: How can city population density increase without a subsequent decrease in quality of life for citizens? In 2007, the world passed a significant milestone — over half of the world’s population now lived in urban centers for the first time in history. Today, the trend continues. As of 2017, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban centers.

This massive migration into cities and their city centers, if not handled in proactive, thoughtful ways, could cripple unprepared urban centers. One response to dealing with the influx of people to cities is the research and development of smart cities.

Technological Advancement

Over the past decade, there has been an acceleration of exponential technological progress that has rapidly changed society. Computers are more powerful, smaller, and cheaper than ever. We use our phones constantly to obtain information about the environment around us — things like transit, traffic, health services, safety alerts, maps, weather, and community news. This has resulted in the ability to gather and analyze data more attainable than ever before.

At a larger scale, using IoT, advanced communication networks, and big data technologies, local municipalities can create truly smart cities while utilizing smaller amounts of their economic resources. The smart city concept is driven by the need to enhance the quality of life of citizens in an environment with an ever-growing number of inhabitants.

Value

Municipalities can greatly improve the effectiveness of how they manage their resources in a way that greatly reduces costs and time. As a result, freed up time and resources can be used in other ways like improving their services directly provided to the citizens. Improving air quality, public transit, transportation infrastructure, and public utilities are just a few examples of how smart cities can add value.

What is a Smart City?

A smart city is a city that utilizes technology and data to plan, build, and proactively manage the effects of urbanization. A smart city uses different types of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to collect data and then use insights gained from that data to manage assets, resources and services efficiently.

As people move into the cities, those cities must be prepared to change. There will be increases in traffic, pollution in all forms, hospital acuity, energy consumption, housing, and the potential stands for significant divides among socioeconomic lines. The implementation of smart city infrastructures in the form of cameras, sensors, fiber optic internet, high processing power, and more, allows for cities to collect and analyze data in real-time, so as to respond to these effects as quickly as possible.

The capabilities of smart cities not only apply to the effective management of the future but also the management of the city in its current state. Smart city infrastructure can be used for the efficient management of a city’s current resources, providing insight into inefficiencies and points of weakness to be corrected which can result in economic benefits.

What appear to be small improvements — such as decreasing commute times, for example — have large ramifications within the tangled interactions of urban living. When commute times are decreased, cars spend less time on the road, reducing carbon emissions and the potential for accidents, both to other cars or pedestrians. Less time spent commuting makes for easier navigation for emergency vehicles and reduces the arrival time to incidents. Ultimately, reduced travel time for emergency vehicles could potentially save lives where a matter of minutes can be the difference between life or death.

Smart City Challenges

The rapid urbanization of smart cities will exacerbate existing challenges while creating new ones. Currently, a wide range of initiatives have been proposed which define and conceptualize the notation of smart cities in terms of sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, management, operations and supporting infrastructure which can help to overcome these challenges. The smart city concept seeks to provide a resolution to many of these challenges such as aging transportation infrastructure, congestion mitigation, pedestrian safety, and intelligent transportation systems.

There is no clearly defined process for applying the smart city concept to existing city infrastructure. Such a process will provide answers to questions such as: What technologies should be deployed? What supporting software stack should be deployed? Where is the optimal location for technologies? What does the operations management look like in the municipalities? How do cities sustain these new technologies from a cost perspective? Answering these questions is not straight forward.

Legislation

Each city has its own complex ecosystem of policies and infrastructure. Adopting new technologies and implementing support systems is a complex task, especially for smaller, underfunded cities. Privacy is a significant barrier from a legislation standpoint. Many technologies and projects rely on new forms of data collection. Citizens may feel as if their personal data and privacy is being taken away. It is the cities responsibility to ensure the public is aware of new installations of sensors and how they plan to use that data to improve the everyday life of its citizens.

Infrastructure

Cities need to deploy a large array of new sensors at scale to gather data. There are a wide variety of smart city solutions and many of these solutions are completely new to cities. The procurement, installation, and management of this new infrastructure is an enormous challenge — largely because it is uncharted territory. Local governments must take time to research and explore potential solutions. They need to understand and have policies in place to support and maintain the infrastructure. These solutions require personnel that have the knowledge and capabilities to manage this infrastructure, which can be costly.

Management & Operations

A core component of smart cities is their ability to collect, analyze and take action on data. New devices mean more data. Cities must adopt new strategies and create internal teams to manage and maintain new sensors and technologies. Whether the infrastructure is managed internally or outsourced, the management and operations of this infrastructure can be extremely costly. Additionally, smart cities generate vast amounts of data. New software infrastructure must be developed to handle this data.

Goals of Smart Cities

The smart cities concept and its implementation is yet to be complete. However, large advancements in technologies have enabled local governments to begin the process. The vision for smart cities should be focused around enhancing the lives of its citizens. To achieve this, cities must understand the scope and priority of the problems they face. Steps need to be taken to ensure cities have the tools and knowledge required to make decisions on what projects provide the most value to its citizens. Enhancing the lives of citizens must be achieved one step at a time through projects that address problems around public safety, transportation and mobility, economic and educational strategies, and urbanization.

Examples of Smart City Projects

Austin, TX

The city of Austin, TX installed an open data initiative in 2013, and a smart city infrastructure plan in 2016. Among those projects includes a smart grid, digital energy meters, a fast and reliable emergency alert system, and is exploring the use of a public electronic vehicle sharing program. On top of this, the city provides free public wifi and uses satellite imaging to detect water leaks.

Pittsburg, PA

Pittsburg overhauled their traffic light synchronization system and the results were drastic: a 40% reduction in intersection wait times, a 25% reduction in travel times, and a subsequent 20% fall in auto emissions. Using the more efficient traffic grid, Pitsburg has become a major testing ground for autonomous vehicles. The Pittsburg airport has installed sensors and alert systems that tell passengers when is the optimized time to arrive at security to check-in for their flight.

Smart cities are a response to the growth of cities and provide a proactive response to the influx of people. Technology, big data, processing power, and high-speed internet allow cities to manage resources efficiently and quickly, making innovations that have significant benefits for the future.

Chattanooga, TN

While technology and rapid urbanization can leave small and mid-sized towns high and dry, the city of Chattanooga and its power company, EPB, built the city its own lifeline: high-speed, fiber optic internet for everyone. The effects were realized immediately. A study by the University of Tennessee estimated that the Gig could be directly tied to between 2,800 and 5,200 new jobs, bringing in roughly $1 billion in revenue from the internet’s installation to 2016 — a far cry from Chattanooga’s late 1960’s moniker “The Dirtiest City In America.”

Soon after, Chattanooga was among the first US cities officially recognized by US Ignite (us-ignite.org) as a Smart Gigabit Community. This designation, now shared by several other cities, indicates a commitment by the community to leverage advanced science, engineering, computing and networking technologies to improve city processes and quality of life for all citizens. In this paper, we summarize our approach to create an effective collaborative environment in Chattanooga that enables public-private partnerships to flourish and to develop productive R&D collaborations among city agencies, academia, and commercial partners.

The city sports a 1.2 mile long smart corridor, smart health initiatives, accident prediction computer modeling, near-miss detection via object tracking, and more.