The proliferation of next-generation high-speed digital networks and state-of-the-art internet-capable devices has finally brought our cities to a once inconceivable sci-fi future. Though there are naturally some fears about what all this connectivity will mean for us and future generations, it’s become clear that digital technologies offer serious benefits for society, as a whole. Smart city initiatives have already begun proliferating all over the world with largely positive results. Let’s look a several present-day smart city technology projects that may soon affect the lives of urbanites everywhere.
1) Personal Alert Button for Seniors Living Alone
Economic success generally results in diminishing birthrates over several generations, giving rise to a proportionally large elderly population after around half a century or so. This demographic trend is currently affecting many highly developed countries, with Japan, Korea, and Singapore being particularly prominent examples.
Given that most seniors would rather prefer to live alone than in a retirement facility, caring for them is now a growing challenge. In Singapore, 4G-enabled personal alert buttons (PABs) are being installed in seniors’ homes to ensure that they have two-way communications with vital public emergency services, should they need it. Today, these PABs are helping public service providers conserve resources while speeding up emergency response times, raising the possibility of adopting similar systems in other aging population centres.
2) Assistive Technologies for Persons with Disabilities
The most obvious areas for city-wide smart assistive technologies are in transport and access to public facilities. Some cities, however, are already looking into other ways to uplift the life quality of the differently-abled. The Singapore government’s eCanvas voice-controlled assistive technology is taking assistive technologies further by empowering mobility-impaired individuals to create art through verbal or touch commands. Eventually, similar voice and touch-activated technologies may be used to provide people with disabilities even more inclusivity in other areas of life.
3) Open Digital Platforms for Smart District Management
Many of today’s industrial parks do have smart features that aren’t found in typical cities. It’s not unusual to see these estates offer smart water management, automated traffic management, and other such services. However, their different smart subsystems are typically built on a collection of different platforms, placing a hard limit on how smart they can actually be.
In new smart district developments like Singapore’s Punggol Digital District (PDD), unified “operating systems” are being fielded to further increase the integration of various technology components, potentially making already smart districts even smarter. As these technologies are validated, the same open platform frameworks could then be safely applied to entire cities.
4) City Cloud Networks
With over 1,000 different digital services for city residents, Shanghai is often considered to be one of the world’s best examples of what a smart city looks like. Its strong deployment of 5G and cloud technologies has given it a decisive edge in the global smart city race, at least for now. In particular, the exclusive Suishenban Citizen Cloud super app has served to centralise most of the city’s key services in one place, ramping up service adoption and consequently creating the buy-in needed to further invest in smart city technologies.
5) Intelligent Transportation Systems
In smart cities, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) play a crucial role in increasing the viability of urban spaces. Several cities already use some kind of ITS to monitor and manage traffic conditions dynamically, but the inclusion of next-generation artificial intelligence can bring these systems to a different level of efficiency. One day, these systems may even become key to finally making autonomous vehicles viable for daily use within congested urban areas.
6) Smart Energy Management
It’s no surprise that much of smart city innovation is focused on further limiting the carbon impacts of cities, many of which are still reliant on fossil fuels.Cities worldwide are already embracing advanced technologies to optimise energy usage and ease the transition to green energy sources. Right now, these systems are used to dynamically manage larger power grids according to relative demand. However, they will soon be tied to individual city subsystems through open digital platforms as discussed earlier. This will serve to further reduce power demands while also increasing the viability of some reduced carbon energy sources such as wind and solar.
7) Next-Generation Urban Farming
The concept of Next Generation Urban Farming represents a transformative approach to food production within urban spaces. Smart city designers are already exploring vertical farming and aquaponics to maximize limited space and bring down the cost of high-quality produce for urbanites. The processing of human waste into fertiliser is also being investigated as a way to further increase food security both inside and outside of cities. Such approaches may one day address food production challenges while also contributing to self-sufficient urban ecosystems.
Are We Ready for Smarter Cities?
There’s a general consensus that all major cities will become smarter by default due to the falling price of digital technologies and competitive pressures from other urban centres. While more visible but expensive advancements like self-driving cars and robot-run vertical farms may not necessarily become ubiquitous everywhere, more accessible changes like city cloud networks and assistive technologies may already provide a massive quality of life upgrade for urbanites the world over.
