“There are no 100 per cent smart cities, in the same way that there aren’t any zero per cent smart cities,” explains Machina Research founder and CEO Matt Hatton, when asked if any cities can currently be classified as ‘smart’. We’re still in the early days of smart city innovation and deployment, leading Hatton to argue against any claims made in the media that governments are failing to meet their smart city targets. “How do you measure the success or failure of a smart city at this moment in time?” he asks. “Obviously there’s a few deployments with established dollar values attached which can be tracked, but the measures of success for most smart city projects are still quite nebulous. So it’s hard to quantify their success, and to judge the extent to which they improve citizens’ lives.” Most agree that this is the end-goal of any fully-fledged smart city, along with being eco-friendly and creating infrastructure that reduces ongoing costs. So which cities have demonstrated ‘smart’ strategies that will allow them to achieve these objectives in the foreseeable future?
Bigger doesn’t mean better
Not the cities you’d expect, according to Hatton. The usual suspects – New York, London, San Francisco et cetera – have seen some excellent individual smart deployments in recent years: smart parking schemes on Hoff street and connected bins lining Cheapside. But these could become more of a hindrance than an advantage if they’re not part of a more comprehensive, city-wide strategy. “For me, how smart a city is depends on the level of integration involved. A single solution for a single problem is rarely enough. The real smart cities with the most potential are those with central units exercising control over all smart city deployments,” Hatton comments. “The difference between a smart city that’s good enough for this decade and one that’s really future-proofed is a fully thought out, end-to-end approach.” Hatton points to Singapore, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and even Milton Keynes as cities that have taken significant strides in the right direction. He cites Bristol as another great example. Bristol Is Open – a joint venture between Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol – oversees many research and development projects produced by third-parties, to make Bristol an ‘open programmable city’ by revamping its digital infrastructure.
MattHattonThere’s a premium associated with deploying and using propriety technologies that doesn’t apply if you adhere to the standards – Matt Hatton, Machina Research
The fragmented nature of districts, boroughs, departments and councils within bigger cities often prevents integration on this level, but could be solved through similar schemes. There’s certainly plenty these cities could learn from their smaller-scale counterparts.
Crowdsourcing and democratising the smart city
“Some of the more exciting and disruptive stuff that’s happening in smart city development has come from crowdsourced ideas,” comments Hatton. “There’s this misconception that every idea has to come from the top down, but at the moment I’d say it’s the bottom-up projects that are the ones to watch.” He’s talking about the likes of Waze, AppyParking, JustPark (to mention transportation apps alone) and tons of other innovative apps and schemes that promise to make the day-to-day urban experience more convenient and less stressful. And even if they’re not building these solutions themselves, there’s a lot municipal bodies can do to facilitate these projects and maximise their potential. Hatton says top-down assistance should come in the form of councils making their data widely accessible to private companies and the public (another area in which Bristol Is Open excels), and allowing anyone to propose potential solutions. “We need to democratise the smart city,” he stresses.
A standardised approach could save $341 billion
Machina Research recently published a white paper on future smart city deployment. It studies the chasm between a future universe where standards for deployment are recognised and followed, compared to one which is essentially “business as usual”. They found that cities globally could waste as much as $341 billion by 2025 if their IoT deployments aren’t standardised. This makes Matt Hatton’s message to the CTOs and CIOs overseeing the world’s smart cities two-fold: share your data widely and make sure every solution you implement is standardised. “Individual schemes might work in their own right, but deployments not based upon standards entail additional costs that aren’t anticipated. Through the white paper, we tried to illustrate that there’s a premium associated with deploying and using propriety technologies that doesn’t apply if you adhere to the standards,” Hatton concludes.
If the future of smart cities lies with crowdsourcing, then it also lies with collaboration, communication and openness – not government departments operating in silos. Ultimately power still lies with these governing bodies. The onus is on them to share their data and resources; when third-parties come forward with their projects, their responsibility is to embrace the best ideas and ensure their implementation embraces smart city standards as the world moves forward.
By Jeremy Coward July 27th, 2016
