CENTER FOR DATA INNOVATION
By Joshua New, Daniel Castro, and Matt Beckwith
Cities around the world are undergoing two important transformations. First, they are growing. For the first time in history, a majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Second, they are beginning to evolve into “smart cities”—cities capable of collecting and analyzing vast quantities of data to automate processes, improve service quality, provide market signal feedback to users, and to make better decisions. While city governments can and should manage much of this transformation, national governments have an important role to play in accelerating and coordinating the development of smart cities. Indeed, the long-term success of smart cities in any particular nation will likely depend on whether the national government supports their development.
Cities of all sizes are beginning to use an array of technologies, including low-cost sensors, wireless communication systems, data-actuated devices, and advanced data analytics to operate more intelligently. Cities can use these technologies to address many key challenges, such as traffic congestion, crime, and pollution, as well as to improve the quality and reduce the costs of a vast array of government services. The emergence of smart cities is a marked departure from the past when most urban systems—roads, transit, waste-removal systems, the electric grid, and buildings—had few, if any, built-in capabilities to measure and act on their performance, particularly in real time. With the development of new technologies to collect, analyze, act on, and share municipal data, urban infrastructure and services no longer need to be static and unresponsive, but can instead adapt to changing needs.
However, cities cannot complete the evolution into smart cities on their own. There are five key challenges limiting smart city development that even the most capable of cities will likely not be able to overcome on their own. These are:
- Too Much Risk: Cities have little incentive to be early adopters of new smart city technology when that means they bear all of the risk of failure. Instead they have an incentive to wait until others have worked out the challenges. Similarly, while public research and development (R&D) will be critical to the success of smart cities, such as improving cyber security and establishing demonstration projects, a city cannot be expected to take on the costs of R&D in exchange for only a small share of the total benefits it will generate.
- Lack of Focus on Smart Infrastructure: Many national governments’ infrastructure funding focuses almost exclusively on enabling cities to build and maintain traditional “concrete and steel” projects. This leaves little opportunity for more capable and innovative cities, which rely on national government funding, to pursue smart infrastructure built around “concrete and chips.”
- The Need for Interconnected Smart Cities: If cities can share and compare data with one another, governments can reduce costs, as well as analyze larger pools of data, enabling more accurate and actionable insights. However, cities are not equipped to develop interoperable systems and share data across their jurisdictional boundaries.
- Lagging Communities of Practice: Building and operating smart cities will require a significant change from the normal way of managing cities, and local leaders need to be able to easily share their successes and failures and learn from their peers. If every city experimenting with smart city technology would share what they learn, every other city would benefit. But without an initial critical mass of cities capable of developing and sharing these insights, overall learning and action will remain limited.
- The Need to Ensure Equity: Smart city technologies have great potential to help address the needs of underserved communities, however these technologies can also exacerbate inequalities if applied or adopted unevenly, which simultaneously limits the efficacy of these technologies. Municipal governments can enact policies to help ensure the equitable distribution and application of smart city technologies, but historically efforts to promote equity have been supplemented by national government efforts, suggesting municipal actions alone would be insufficient.
Fortunately, national governments can provide solutions to all these challenges. Cities will rightly make the majority of investments and decisions related to their evolution into smart cities. However national governments have a key role to fill in addressing the problems cities cannot resolve on their own, particularly in the early stages. Importantly, large portions of the role of national governments will be temporary. While national governments should always be involved in supporting innovation, their main goal with smart cities is to enact policies that set in motion significant shifts in how cities operate that will allow this evolution to be self-sustaining. Thus, some of the roles for national governments in smart cities will be temporary—for example, once robust communities of practice arise for smart cities, national governments do not need to heavily encourage their development—while others, such as promoting equity, may be ongoing. National government solutions include:
- Supporting shared projects in at least four areas: 1) R&D on key technical challenges, such as cyber security; 2) research and demonstration projects that develop and test particular new smart city applications; 3) shared applications and tools that make cities better equipped to work with smart technology and data; and 4) demonstration projects to establish a few comprehensive smart cities to test system-wide applications.
- Allocating a share of infrastructure investments to specifically target smart infrastructure, such as intelligent transportation systems and smart grid systems.
- Developing policies and common standards for smart city technologies that encourage interoperability and data sharing to increase the effectiveness of smart city applications and increase the value proposition for smart technologies.
- Fostering collaboration and coordination in the smart city ecosystem to facilitate inter-city learning and reduce knowledge sharing barriers.
- Ensuring that efforts to support smart cities, such as through pilot programs, infrastructure investment, or support for public-private partnerships, address the needs of underserved communities.
The Benefits of Smart Cities
Smart cities are those that use sensors, data, and analytics to tackle important issues such as how to better manage sanitation systems, improve transportation networks, and deliver government services more efficiently. Most smart city applications are built around the Internet of Things–objects embedded with sensors and wireless connectivity to enable them to send and receive data that can be analyzed and acted upon. Other enabling smart city technologies include wired and wireless broadband networks; analytics tools to process data coming from sensor networks; and autonomous systems.
There are many potential applications of smart city technologies, and many more will arise as the technologies mature and achieve widespread adoption. Areas of application include transportation systems, infrastructure monitoring, natural disaster detection, utility system management, environmental monitoring, urban planning, public safety, municipal service delivery, public lighting, and many others.
It is difficult to estimate the potential economic and social benefits smart cities will generate. Smart city applications are only just emerging and there is no telling just how transformative they will be once they mature. However, the success stories of early adopters are promising. For example, Santander, Spain was able to cut energy costs by up to 25 percent by installing smart street lights that automatically dim when nobody is nearby. In Seoul, South Korea, smart trash cans that city workers can monitor in real time reduced waste collection costs by 83 percent. And in Israel, the cities of Jerusalem and Netanya are using sensor networks to rapidly identify when and where leaks occur in their water infrastructure and will use the data from this system to perform preventative maintenance to prevent costly pipe bursts. Though these examples just scratch the surface of the benefits of smart cities, it is reasonable to assume that in a smart city, most city functions could benefit from data that gives them the potential to be more efficient, responsive, and effective.
Smart City Developments Around the World
Many countries have recognized the potential value of smart cities and have taken steps to accelerate their development. Though several countries have launched high-profile initiatives to develop smart cities, only a select few countries have made significant progress. The following lists some high-profile developments.
India
India launched an urban modernization initiative called the “Smart Cities Mission” on June 25, 2015 with the ambitious goal of creating 100 smart cities over a five-year period. The funding is also ambitious, with the national government allocating 480 billion rupees (US $7.5 billion) to the initiative and requiring matching funding from participating cities. While some participating cities’ proposals include a focus on the use of information technology, a large portion of the Smart Cities Mission is devoted to basic modernization and quality of life improvements, such as ensuring cities have reliable electricity, water supply, and waste management, and promoting walkability. In fact, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, which oversees the Smart Cities Mission, does not substantially emphasize the use of data and smart technology in its definition of smart cities. As such, India’s Smart Cities Mission is not truly about smart cities in the commonly understood sense of the term.
Singapore
While Singapore is a nation, it is also a city-state, and as such has advantages in deploying smart city technology. In November 2014, Singapore launched the Smart Nation Initiative, investing $1.6 billion in the development and deployment of a national system of sensor networks and supporting communications infrastructure. Singapore invested another $2.8 billion in the Smart Nation Initiative in 2016, pledging to extend Wi-Fi coverage to every public school, optimize and increase the government’s data storage capacity, and provide all public servants with laptops over the next three to five years. Singapore’s use of smart city technology and analytics is fairly pervasive, monitoring everything from green-energy initiatives in affordable housing communities to the development of a citywide system of self-driving buses. Since 2015, Singapore’s Elderly Monitoring System (EMS) has installed movement-sensors in seniors’ homes to monitor movement and can alert family members and caregivers via text in the event of an abnormally long period of inactivity. One of Singapore’s most ambitious smart city ventures is Virtual Singapore, a digital 3D model of the island that can serve as a dashboard for municipal data sources, including sensor networks, census information, and geographic information systems. Virtual Singapore will enable a wide variety of useful urban planning and management applications, such as interactive simulations demonstrating how new buildings would affect airflow in cities or how altering bus routes would affect commute times across Singapore.
South Korea
South Korea is the home of the world’s first purposefully built smart city, Songdo City, which was made possible thanks to the Korean government’s efforts to make the land suitable for development by filling in marshland with landfill and the creation of a special economic zone, with tax breaks for businesses and limited regulations, to incentivize businesses to move there. The government developed the public infrastructure while private developers funded the bulk of the building of Songdo, particularly the Songdo International Business District, a six square kilometer publicprivate real estate development that makes extensive use of connected technologies in residential and commercial buildings. The Internet of Things covers the city, with sensors built into the roads, buildings, and public transportation. Songdo’s developers have also partnered with Cisco to develop a system called U-Life that helps residents and businesses use a variety of smart city services, such as smart wallets to pay for public transit and remote-controlled building management.
United Kingdom
In 2012, Innovate UK, the innovation agency of the United Kingdom, allocated £34.5 million (US $55.89 million) in funding to allow 30 cities across the United Kingdom, including Glasgow, Bristol, and London, to research smart city policies and develop proposals about how smart city technology could benefit their cities. In 2013, Innovate UK launched the Future Cities Catapult, an urban innovation center that works with economists, engineers, businesses, and city officials to finance and establish smart city applications. The Future Cities Catapult also develops IoTUK, a series of initiatives designed to increase adoption of the Internet of Things, and in 2015, with £10 million ($16.2 million) in funding from Innovate UK, helped the city of Manchester develop a smart city demonstrator pilot called CityVerve.
United States
The Obama administration launched its Smart Cities Initiative in September 2015, committing $160 million in funding ($105 million in new spending as well as reprogrammed funds) to a wide array of Internet of Things applications, including, but not limited to, smart cities. The Smart Cities Initiative includes support for a range of programs including the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Global City Teams Challenge, which encourages the development of smart city applications, Internet-connected vehicle pilots, and the establishment of Internet of Things research test beds. The federal government’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program also released its Smart Cities and Connected Communities Framework—a guide to coordinate federal agency investment and collaboration for smart city technology. And in December 2015, the Department of Transportation launched the Smart City Challenge, which awarded $40 million in March 2016 to Columbus, Ohio—a mid-sized city—to implement connected technologies to reduce congestion, improve transportation safety, protect the environment, and support economic growth. However the 15 projects the Smart City Challenge is funding in Columbus have a relatively narrow focus on transportation, and the city must still integrate many additional systems to build a comprehensive smart city.
Problems Limiting Smart City Development and the Role for National Governments
Local governments will make most of the decisions related to the deployment of smart cities, as they are in the best position to understand and act on the unique opportunities and challenges specific to their cities. However, cities face an array of challenges limiting smart city development that they are not well-equipped to address, while national governments are. If a national government fails to fill this role, the transformation to smart cities in that country will be slowed.
Download full version (PDF): How National Governments Can Help Smart Cities Succeed
About the Center for Data Innovation
www.datainnovation.org
From creating a modern, evidence-based health care system to building sustainable, energy-efficient cities, data is increasingly a critical component in many initiatives to make the world a better place. In the coming years, the collection, analysis, and use of massive amounts of data will have the potential to generate enormous social and economic benefits, but successfully capitalizing on these opportunities will require public policies designed to allow data-driven innovation to flourish
Tags: Center for Data Innovation, Daniel Castro, Joshua New, Matt Beckwith, Smart Cities
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