Building smart cities: Where are we now?
In an interview with NUS Cities, Dr Jonathan Reichental lays out his vision of the ‘smart city’, and how lessons from past experiences around the world can refine the approach to a technologically-enabled city. He also discusses the intersection between technology and the climate crisis.
Dr Jonathan Reichental
is the founder of Human Future, a global business and technology advisory, investment, and education firm. Previously, he was chief information officer at O’Reilly Media and Palo Alto, California. This year, he led the NUS Cities course “Exploring the Digital Transformation of Cities”.
Q: What is your definition of a smart city?
A: Even today, there continues to be considerable debate on what constitutes the definition of a smart city. My preference is always to focus on the intent: what are we trying to achieve?
We must recognise that cities are the dominant living environment for a majority of the planet now, and that number will get as high as 70 percent by mid-century. Can we conclude that our urban world operates optimally? Far from it.
Certainly, some cities operate better than others and deliver quality experiences. But every city has work to do, to provide services that meet expectations and are more equally accessible.
Considering all the options available, contemporary technologies can play an outsized role in improving conditions. So, that’s what we’re trying to achieve with smarter cities: the use of a wide variety of technologies to deliver a superior urban experience.
Q: What have been the positive and negative lessons learned from past approaches to the smart city around the world?
A: On the positive side, the use of digital technologies and data have, in many instances, been game-changers. Many communities around the world now deliver entire services digitally, such as requesting a permit, reporting a problem, or managing healthcare paperwork.
Smart cities such as Barcelona, Helsinki, Melbourne, Singapore, and Dubai, have transformed the way their cities operate and deliver results. Solutions have improved options for managing traffic, public safety, and even energy management.
Cities have generally been forthcoming about sharing successes and failures with other communities, and this has enabled best practices to emerge.
On the negative side, there have been far too many false starts and failures. Expectations by city leaders have exceeded what was possible. For too long, the vendor community was convinced that cities would benefit from single, central platforms that would manage all operations.
However, this concept mostly never delivered, because, in the end, a city is a collection of vastly different businesses, and assuming that one tool could integrate them all simply amounted to a folly.
Poor vision and strategy, that ended in high costs with little to show, also created credibility issues with the larger global smart city movement.
Q: What should be the role of private sector technology firms in urban governance and life?
A: The private sector has always been a deeply integrated partner in how cities are managed and operated. With technology playing an increasingly bigger role in solving societal challenges, there’s little doubt that technology company participation will continue to grow.
Ideally, the best outcomes often arise when public-private partnerships (PPPs) are formed.
Rather than relying on the traditional vendor-customer dynamic, cities and tech firms are collaborating to learn from each other, and together, deliver creative solutions to intractable issues.
Q: Which city does the smart city the best and why?
A: Smart city initiatives address local issues, so it’s often unfair to call out a specific city. What really matters is what the constituents of that city believe. Ask them and they’ll tell you.
For example, one community might have issues with flooding that need to be resolved. Another might have significant traffic congestion challenges. Those cities will
approach and try to solve those
issues in ways that make sense for their circumstances.
How would we judge these two, and determine which was smarter? It’s not a fair assessment.
That said, we often evaluate smart city programmes by their comprehensive nature, and how they deliver across core city functions such as transportation, energy, infrastructure, public safety, and others.
In this regard, Scandinavian countries have been disproportionately successful. But again, ask someone who lives there. That’s what really matters.
Q: To some, Alphabet’s failed venture in Toronto with Sidewalk Labs raised scepticism surrounding the idea of the smart city. What is your assessment of what happened there?
A: Sidewalk Labs did just about everything wrong. It’s a case study in how not to build a new smart city. At the core of the failure was how they communicated with the constituents of Toronto.
While I believe Sidewalk Labs had good intentions and wanted to create
a new model for a highly responsive modern urban environment, what people perceived was that there
would be high degrees of surveillance, privacy concerns, and a vendor intent on leverage data extracted from the functioning of the project.
Constituents and a growing number
of city leaders believed there was a lack of transparency and a vision incompatible with the culture of the greater city. Once trust was lost, Sidewalk Labs found it close to impossible to regain it.
One lesson gained from this failure is that city projects require deep engagement and transparency with all city stakeholders and community members. Another lesson is that there’s a limit to how much privacy people are prepared to give up for a given benefit.
Q: In the increasing anxiety around the world surrounding climate change, digital technologies have been raising concerns about their use of energy and their contribution to the carbon footprint. Data centres are notorious for their energy consumption.
At the same time, there have been inroads — for instance, proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies have been created which use less energy and contribute to a lower carbon footprint. Are the tech industry and city governments doing enough to ensure that, while digital technologies are being piloted, cities do not exacerbate the problem, but instead, contribute to climate mitigation?
A: The world has a big appetite for energy, and we’re getting hungrier. For sure, as we continue to use more technologies in our lives, energy demand will continue to rise. Nobody wants to go backwards.
In fact, we can’t. Our cities are entirely dependent on the digital and hyper-connected world we’ve built.
The solution lies in how we produce energy. We’ve made remarkable progress in deploying wind and solar energy, and lots more will come online every year for the foreseeable future.
Other non-carbon energy sources such as hydro, nuclear, and geothermal will be important too.
More investment and innovation in these non-carbon energy sources is needed, and in many instances, the tech community is stepping up. They see the opportunity and are motivated to act.
Recently, there have been some modest, yet important, advances in fusion energy. If we have a breakthrough in the next few years, fusion has the promise of clean, low-cost, abundant energy for the world. Let’s see what happens.