Welcome to the world of smart cities. A world of automatic bins, responsive lamp posts, smart traffic controls and automatic environmental trackers, writes Helen Roxburgh.
In South Korea’s Songdo, developer Gale and technology partner Cisco have created a city that monitors everything, including traffic flow, air quantity and emergency services.
Rubbish is collected through an automated underground system that sorts, recycles or burns the waste. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, which has made big investments in new technology, authorities say smart water meters save $58m (£44.8m) annually.
The smart city concept is particularly popular in developing nations with rapid, mass urbanisation. India has announced ambitions to create 100 smart cities; China says 290 cities have implemented pilot programmes.
And in London, a recent Juniper survey rated the UK capital as the world’s third-smartest city. Only a comparatively poor performance in renewable energy and power reduction stopped it being rated more highly.
London DataStore
London has been making strides in smart city technology recently; the Greater London Assembly’s cornerstone project is the London DataStore, which contains more than 500 free-to-use datasets, intended as a valuable resource for developers and researchers.
And as part of a UK strategy to market smart technology to the rest of the world, funding has been put into a number of test-bed developments.
Innovation agency Innovate UK has invested £100m in the past five years on smart technology, and the government has plans to boost international trade through marketing smart city best practice and a marketplace for smart city technology, standards and consultancy.
Most experts expect that in the post-Brexit era, this focus will accelerate as the government seeks new trade partnerships. “Smart cities would help the UK to compete with other global cities for talent and business – this is very relevant now with the UK’s move away from Europe,” says Benoy global director Trevor Vivian.
Political will shows no public sign of abating. In February, Greg Hands declared that the UK “can be recognised as the global hub of smart city technology” and “use our already enviable capability in this area to make the world’s cities more sustainable, responsive and smart”.
But are smart cities just the latest trend?
As technology advances, more uncertainties surface. If an entire city runs from an operating system, what happens if it crashes? Or worse, if it is targeted by cyber criminals? An estimated 2.3bn connected items will be used in smart cities this year, according to research group Gartner, a 42% increase on 2016.
A series of high-profile online hacks, including the Wannacry cyber attacks in May, have put cybercrime squarely in the spotlight, and experts warn many city systems do not have adequate controls. Cities using a supervisory control and data acquisition system are particularly susceptible to hacks, as they lack cryptography security and authentication factors. If a hacker targets a city’s SCADA system, they could threaten multiple areas of public health and security at once.
A study in January from the UK Electrical Contractors’ Association found two-fifths of buildings face serious risk of cyber attacks, and warned of major security and privacy implications given the projected increase in smart installations. And PwC estimates that this could see companies paying $7.5bn (£5.8bn) for cyber insurance by 2020, up from $2.7bn in 2015.
Awards and funding
Despite such fears, the UK government’s innovation agency is still funding smart city tech. In the most recent round of awards in April, two developers received funding; £115,835 was granted to one company monitoring environmental pollution and emissions, and £24,525 to a feasibility research study measuring human traffic and flow. In the same month, the agency also launched a £13m funding round for projects researching clean and affordable energy, and contributed to £470,000 towards proposals to encourage people to cycle or walk.
The European Investment Bank provided £5.6bn for 40 UK projects last year, including new hospitals, university campuses and schools. It also provided €25m (£21.6m) to the Horizon 2020 innovation group, of which around €8m went to London projects. London is the lead city in the European Innovation Partnership’s Urban Platforms project – an innovative exchange expected to cease after 2019.
But, says Rob Kitchin, professor of human geography and director of the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis at the National University of Maynooth, much of the current innovation around smart cities is new and market forces often do not add up.
“You have a lot of test bedding and urban experimentation going on, you have a lot of trials and prototypes,” he says. “But if you can’t get cities to buy it, either because they are broke, or they don’t trust the technology, then as the developer you have to move on and do something different.”
Those involved in the real estate industry need to evolve. “The roles of the city planner, urban designer and architect will need to change and adapt,” says Hakan Agca, associate director at Benoy. “They will become more complex, with a central role in curating data and dealing with many more parameters than they currently have to contend with.”
Ethical problems
Smart cities also throw up ethical problems. The biggest immediate issue is that smart cities necessitate collecting huge amounts of data, without any individual consent. It is estimated that driving through just one town in the UK means being pictured on 30 different systems – without ever once being asked for permission.
In 2013, the City of London Corporation made tech company Renew London remove ‘smart recycling bins’ from the streets after an outcry that the units, featuring LCD advertising screens, collected footfall data by tracking and recording passing smartphones.
Smart city technology also does little to reverse social divides. In Boston, an app called Street Bump was intended to collect data by detecting bumps and potholes in the road while driving, and automatically relay it to the city government. However, critics said potholes were only being fixed in wealthier parts of the city, where more residents had smartphones and downloaded the app, while less affluent areas remained unrepaired.
This also flags concerns about the commoditisation of cities. As Chris Fannin, senior vice-president at HOK, says: “The risk is that ‘smart cities’ are code for ‘monetisation’.” Designers are concerned the debate will move from using technology to create liveable spaces to focusing purely on financial efficiencies.
“You can’t fix homelessness with an app,” concludes Kitchin. “It requires political, social and policy solutions. That’s the danger with this notion of smart cities; it promotes the idea that you can fix everything with technology, but there’s actually a lot of things that are wrong in the city that need to be fixed with other types of solutions.”
