Everyone is sure that cities are getting larger – and that there will be more of them in the future. According to the forecasts of economists, as the population grows, there will be increasing migration into urban areas which will swell with fresh millions.
It is thought that three-quarters of the world’s population of nine billion will reside in cities by the middle of the century. In Europe, there is this proportion of city-dwelling already. In India there are 40 cities that could double in size from 500,000 to one million inhabitants in the next 10 years.
Cities may be getting bigger, but can they also get cleverer? Massive growth in size means opportunities for citizens to achieve new levels of prosperity by migrating from rural areas, and can spark innovation and creativity – but swelling cities also mean much greater stresses on resources such as power, sanitation and water. Transport grids lock up as traffic increases and pollution levels skyrocket, putting pressure on health services. The ‘informal settlements’ that expand the perimeters of cities – a kind of politically correct term for ‘slum’ – can be unusually vulnerable to storms and extreme weather events, say experts. In short, can cities grow sustainably, and are there more intelligent ways of running them?
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills thinks so. It has been working with engineering consultancy Arup on strategies for making British cities smarter. Science minister David Willetts, who is backing the project, believes that doing so opens up the opportunity for companies to grab a share of a massive global market worth more than $400 billion by 2020. The focus is principally on digital technology and the ways in which it can improve the management of infrastructure such as water, waste, energy and transport systems.
Some engineers are surprised that the debate is focusing on data rather than the development of more efficient physical systems. But experts such as Dr Akira Maeda, Hitachi’s chief engineer, say there should be a convergence of digital and physical development – although hardware develops and is replaced at a slower pace.
“Control technology is the key – the means to manage the physical devices such as trains and the power grid,” he says. “The basic control technology can be based on the same kind of IT but the nature of the challenge is quite different; the IT systems, the technology changes fast. In three years we can replace everything – but for infrastructure systems that can’t happen.
“The idea of smart cities is to realise information technology to create a sophisticated smart infrastructure to optimise operation and maintenance.”
Hitachi, he adds, is poised to capitalise on the smart city market because it understands and manufactures physical infrastructure as well as control systems and IT hardware and software. In Japan, projects are taking place to extensively modernise power systems in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and to introduce zero-emissions zones with electric vehicles and smart charging infrastructure in cities such as Yokohama. Electric buses are being introduced in metropolitan Tokyo.
Driverless cars are perhaps 20 years away but are technically feasible, says Maeda. “Especially in Japan, from the technological point of view it is possible. One of the most difficult challenges is the legislation. What happens if an accident occurs? Is it the fault of the car manufacturer or the driver?”
On highways, where platooning vehicles are already a near-term technological possibility in Europe, the lack of pedestrians makes these issues more straightforward, Maeda points out. “But if automated driving arrives, the whole city changes.”
Volker Buscher, a director at Arup, has been leading the work with the department for business on UK cities that have the potential to develop into smart ones. He says there is more focus on this objective now than two years ago, when the Technology Strategy Board funded a pivotal future cities competition.
To become smart, says Buscher, “cities will need a clear definition of where they have to go”. Good prospects for smart status include London, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Manchester. Peter Madden, chief executive of the Future Cities Catapult centre, also highlights Glasgow and Bristol.
What these cities are likely to share is leadership embracing a vision for the technology that could make them smarter. For example, says Buscher, Stephen Hilton, director of the futures group at Bristol City Council, is “working on what could be the governance model with the leadership qualities to have a more coherent strategic view”. Madden says there are often too many silos within cities that need to be thought of as an integrated whole. “And the mayor will need to look at this issue in London,” Buscher suggests. “I am not saying UK cities have it nailed yet – but the big change is that they have acknowledged there is an issue to be addressed.”
And engineers will play a critical role, says Madden, who has recently appointed Keith Clarke, the former chief executive of Atkins, to the board of the Future Cities Catapult centre. “We need to see how the bits fit together and play off each other,” says Madden. “The engineering mindset can be really helpful in seeing that and making it happen. The main barrier is that there are too many sectors and departments in the city that take decisions that can cause problems for other areas.”
A greater devolution of power from central government to cities may help them become smarter, he adds. “If they were given that there would be much more opportunity for UK cities.” Madden has recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the US and says he has been impressed by the way in which corporations such as Google, Amazon and Facebook have enhanced the country’s understanding of how data can be used to help make decisions and organise things differently.
Buscher says that cities have opportunities to develop faster fixed and mobile data networks and operational technology for infrastructure, making use of the emergence of the internet of things to guide drivers to parking spaces in cities, as one example. There needs to be a discussion on the data generated by such operations and how it is managed, he adds. Interfaces between citizens and governmental portals that allow, for example, updating of tax discs, also need to be considered.
“It’s no longer the task to identify challenges like congestion in a city and think about how technology fits in around it, but to start thinking about how the technology itself will change what cities can do,” says Buscher. Simply implementing a digital strategy that is not aligned with the city’s strategic direction is likely to prove fruitless. “There are a few cities in Europe which probably fit into that category right now.”
Having said that, cities choosing to act on other social issues such as crime or housing rather than focusing on an increasing convergence of digital data and physical infrastructure may be able to learn from others’ mistakes, although they are unlikely to become leaders, says Buscher – and so unable to export their know-how overseas.
But Madden argues that a smart city that forgets its citizens in the drive to become technologically sophisticated is missing the point. “Look at what happened in the 1960s when architects decided that they were going to socially engineer how people lived, and it wasn’t necessarily, in hindsight, good for our cities,” he says. “You’ve got to involve the people in a broader conception of what smart is.
“Clever use of data can help infrastructure be more efficient and help deliver public services in a better way. Where the danger comes is if you think you only need data and digital smartness.”
Paula Hirst, director of Disruptive Urbanism, says it’s clear what the downsides of increasing migration to cities can be. “If you have more people living in one place without appropriate transport infrastructure, and education and training, then you can end up with slums,” she says. “If you don’t live in a resource-efficient way then you wind up with increased use of fossil fuels, which creates air quality problems, and impacts on standard of living. And if people are living on top of each other, it can be pretty stressful.”
This doesn’t mean, she says, that all cities in the developing world should model themselves on ones in the West. “There can be pretty harsh conditions and poor quality of life, and we do have a responsibility to look at what innovations can be used to help those areas grow and develop in a sustainable way. But that’s not saying all cities around the world need to develop in the same way as western cities.”
Madden of the Future Cities Catapult centre agrees: “There are questions over how you provide sanitation and water but the experience of cities around the world demonstrates that it’s not necessarily a case of one size fits all. Our vision of a western provision of infrastructure is probably not going to work in a lot of places.”
Meanwhile there is the troubling fact that many cities – particularly in the developing world – are vulnerable to extremities of weather associated with climate change. According to recent data, extreme weather events occurred more frequently between 2001 and 2010.
But cities hit by storms and hurricanes tended to fare better when they had back-up infrastructure in place. For example, an area of the Bronx in New York managed to maintain power during Hurricane Sandy thanks to a 40MW combined-heat-and-power plant, which ran a micro-grid, says Tim Fox, head of energy and climate change at the IMechE. The impact of Cyclone Phailin in October was mitigated because the Indian government had learned to prepare sufficiently for such an event. It seems that a disproportionate number of extreme weather events are concentrated in South East Asia – which is also where there is a high number of rapidly growing cities in vulnerable areas.
“There needs to be the will to change infrastructure to make it more resilient,” Fox says. The institution has argued that more money should be devoted to engineering in resiliency: every dollar invested now would save four dollars in humanitarian aid later.
Human resources are important too: for instance, engineers from overseas could have been deployed to Haiti for far longer in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, Fox suggests.
In the context of climate change, says Fox, a city “could be very clever but it could fail very quickly”. “There’s a lot of work to be done outside of the area of communications technology – a lot of nuts and bolts engineering, a lot of mechanical engineering. For instance, thinking about power supply and transport infrastructure and the vulnerabilities that cities have to face in an extreme event.”
In a city, says Fox, one failure can lead to another, such as a halt to the power supply leading to the cutting off of the water or sanitation network. “You need to think about a cascade of failures and building in redundancy,” he says.
“Information technology is a part of the story in terms of enabling different sectors of the system to speak with each other, and improve the ability to organise the distribution of energy, water and sanitation. But without the city developing a resilient engineering infrastructure that’s fit for the 21st century you can’t truly describe it as a smart city.”
Smart ideas from the Olympics go global
Paula Hirst of Disruptive Urbanism says that city growth provides “both opportunities and challenges”. People living in close proximity may not always be a recipe for harmony, but it can spark greater competitiveness, knowledge transfer and economic benefits.
Connections between neighbours in poorer parts of cities in the developing world are potentially stronger, promoting social cohesion.Moving food sources into cities could help to reduce carbon emissions and provide opportunities for business, she points out.
Hirst worked on the development of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi where there were opportunities to do things in a different way to, say, London. “We were providing utility corridors, which are not rocket science but the idea that you put all your utilities in one box underground that is easily accessible by anybody,” she says. “It’s not something you can do in cities with a legacy.
“There is the opportunity to test new technologies in emerging markets. There are greenfield sites, and we can learn lessons.”
Back in the UK, Hirst was in charge of the sustainable development of the infrastructure for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. She says the project illustrated how a capital city could develop a major project with a long-lasting legacy for its citizens. “That was an area of London that had been neglected for a very long time,” she says. There was an opportunity to reverse some of that neglect and to open up the area to inward and outward traffic. The project helped to transform not just people’s ability to get into and out of that bit of east London but also their aspirations. But it was a huge project on a contaminated site.”
Sustainability was a key aim in the regeneration of the London 2012 site
She says she is always asked if there would have been that investment without the games. “It’s the £20 million question – you just don’t know. It’s unlikely that without the Olympics there would have been such a huge political commitment to that part of the country.” Expertise gained from the project is now being exploited by British companies in projects overseas, perhaps rather in the manner of a smart city.
Ultimately, more efficient cities are desirable if they are sustainable, she says. “There is a huge gain to be had by making our cities more efficient; allowing people to travel more efficiently or use energy more efficiently – and that is recognised by those companies producing these solutions and designs.
“But there is a danger that everybody gets too excited by sensors and data and gizmos. Underpinning that is that people need to get from A to B. It’s great knowing how much water you use – but the actual aim is to reduce the usage.”