The economies of mankind have evolved dramatically over time. From hunter-gatherers, we settled down once
we discovered the art of farming, thereby giving rise to the first settlements and the first true economies.
Nevertheless, as settlements became towns we became reliant on trading, even more so as empires started to
flourish in the ancient times. This, in turn, resulted in a manufacturing base which grew rapidly with the start of
the industrial era in the 1800’s which further cemented the dominant position that the West had in the world.
However, as we know, it did not stop there and soon it became apparent that in order to manage such complex
systems, information and knowledge was required. The age of the knowledge worker was upon us and it is estimated by the IDC that the growth rate of knowledge workers worldwide doubled compared to that of other occupations between 1999 and 2007. This has underpinned the continuing economic growth of the West, but also necessitated structural changes in its economies as knowledge work differs not only from manual work in that it delivers information rather than goods, but it also requires higher degrees of flexibility and autonomy and
is reliant on innovation driven by collaboration. This, in turn, necessitates different systems, working practices, technology and organisational models.
Whilst the West has been building up its knowledge industry, it did so at the expense of its manufacturing
industry as its citizens became wealthier and rising labour costs made it economically unviable to compete with
developing countries who were not burdened with such welfare and legacy costs. The result was a notable shift
in manufacturing from the developed countries towards the developing countries, but as the latter ones are
building up their product base too, many of them are now also undergoing a rapid transition into knowledge
based industries.
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The economies of mankind have evolved dramatically over time. From hunter-gatherers, we settled down once we discovered the art of farming, thereby giving rise to the first settlements and the first true economies. Nevertheless, as settlements became towns we became reliant on trading, even more so as empires started to flourish in the ancient times. This, in turn, resulted in a manufacturing base which grew rapidly with the start of the industrial era in the 1800’s which further cemented the dominant position that the West had in the world. However, as we know, it did not stop there and soon it became apparent that in order to manage such complex systems, information and knowledge was required. The age of the knowledge worker was upon us and it is estimated by the IDC that the growth rate of knowledge workers worldwide doubled compared to that of other occupations between 1999 and 2007. This has underpinned the continuing economic growth of the West, but also necessitated structural changes in its economies as knowledge work differs not only from manual work in that it delivers information rather than goods, but it also requires higher degrees of flexibility and autonomy and is reliant on innovation driven by collaboration. This, in turn, necessitates different systems, working practices, technology and organisational models.Whilst the West has been building up its knowledge industry, it did so at the expense of its manufacturing industry as its citizens became wealthier and rising labour costs made it economically unviable to compete with developing countries who were not burdened with such welfare and legacy costs. The result was a notable shift in manufacturing from the developed countries towards the developing countries, but as the latter ones are building up their product base too, many of them are now also undergoing a rapid transition into knowledge based industries.
As economies and society developed, so did the cities that resided within them and in many respects their evolutionary process has been similar as they have been determined by the same external pressures. Whilst in the earlier stages of our evolution their main purpose was to provide mankind with shelter and safety, soon they became trading hubs connected by roads and waterways and, in parallel with the industrial revolution, they evolved into breathing and living structures through the introduction of engines, electrical systems, heating and ventilation, which eventually got complemented by communication structures throughout the electronic era.However, even more so than the world’s economies, cities are reliant on knowledge work as they contain an increasingly large share of the world’s highly skilled, educated, creative and entrepreneurial population, giving rise to highly concentrated and diverse pools of knowledge and knowledge-creation networks. In order to compete in this new economic environment, cities will need to better apply advanced information technology, analytics and systems thinking to develop a more citizen-centric approach to services. By doing so, they can better attract, create, enable and retain their citizens’ skills, knowledge and creativity. What is paramount in this is creating a sense of locality. Ironically, the globalisation of the world’s economy puts more and more pressure on cities to achieve a world-class local economy in order to compete globally for the knowledge workers. Indeed, although our information needs are increasing, they remain overwhelmingly local and Google already stated that the next battle on the internet will be fought around hyperlocality. This applies to knowledge work too, as it becomes self-reinforcing in knowledge-sharing networks. Technology assists with this, as it enables a worker to be both connected and magnified: he or she is attached to the work and workgroup, while detached from the physical workspace, and has infinite access to the knowledge, information, talent and resources needed within and outside the organisation.
The problem, however, is that creating such a local economy in the shape of a city requires commitment and foresight whilst most of them will be under tremendous pressure in the coming decades. Social: it is estimated that by 2050 approximately 88% of all citizens will live in cities, compared to 73% in 1990. Although this growth is mindboggling in many ways, it pales into insignificance by the changes in developing countries where the amount of city dwellers will double to 67% over the same period. This will rise the standard of living for many new constituents of the cities, but it will also mean that cities will become a ground-zero for poverty, communicable diseases, terrorism, international gangs and crime syndicates.Economic: since cities hold a lopsided larger amount of knowledge workers and the knowledge economy is what creates the most value-added in economic terms, cities will increasingly become the economic power-houses. Indeed, it is anticipated that many cities – like London, New York and Shanghai – will hold a disproportionate sway over their respective national economies.Environmental: Knowledge economy cities consume significantly more energy than other comparable cities and will thus face increasing pressure to mitigate the adverse impact that they have on the environment. The fastest way to shrink cities’ carbon footprint is through conversation and efficiency, both driven by insightful decisions based on data, and Cisco estimates that cities that run on information can improve their energy efficiency by 30 percent within 20 years.Interestingly, it is exactly these trends that strengthen the case for creating an intelligent city, as it will be this intelligence that will allow us to mitigate the risks that are inherent in these mega-trends. Indeed, cities will act as the hubs of the global economy and are therefore the focal points for the transformation towards a sustainable social, economic and environmental era. But information will be crucial in achieving this.
Indeed, we are now at a stage where we can virtually connect any system, asset or even human being to a network and monitor its behaviour and even what it “sees”, “feels” or “thinks”. This is often referred to as the third web age, or “the internet of everything”, a concept in which all of the 50 to 100 billion objects of daily life eventually may become connected to an overarching network.The internet of things is the precursor to intelligence: once you can sense, you can make intelligent decisions. First, connected sustainable cities will depend upon continuous, fine-grained, electronic sensing of the human activities unfolding within them. Tiny, inexpensive sensors and tags of varied kinds are increasingly being mounted on buildings and infrastructure, carried in moving vehicles, integrated with wireless mobile devices such as telephones, and attached to products. HP and Cisco in particular are working on this in initiatives that they respectively have dubbed “CeNSE” and “Planetary Skin”.The data that flows from the ability to “sense” and “relay”, can be used to increase the responsiveness of connected sustainable cities through well-informed and coordinated human action, automated actuation of machines and or some combination of the two. Indeed, distributed memory and processing capabilities enable effective use of this information in local contexts. Thus buildings, vehicles, and mobile individuals can become intelligently aware of the broader contexts in which they operate and can begin to function as actors in larger self-organizing systems that respond to these goals on larger scales. Finally, just as online environments are now managed by extremely sophisticated software, so too will be the physical systems of connected buildings and cities. The standalone software that controls individual machines and systems at present will increasingly be combined into larger-scale, more broadly integrated systems.As the world becomes increasingly instrumented, interconnected, interrelated and intelligent in nature, cities have the chance to accelerate their journey towards sustainable prosperity by making use of new “smart” solutions and management practices.
Cities operate in three main conventional realms: work, leisure and services. These realms are operated by three sectors: the market sector, government sectors and the civil sector. The market sector creates market capital, the government sector creates public capital and the civic sector creates social capital. The collation between the different sectors produces what could be described as a networked city—where production, consumption of goods and services, and waste management are coordinated to improve the standard of living. Cities also have a range of goals they want to deliver for their constituents. They strive to provide a healthy, pleasant and safe living environment for their residents. They also endeavour to attract business, help it thrive in a competitive global economy, as well as provide an effective and efficient infrastructure in a sustainable way. Each of these two user systems have a different sub-set of needs, which can be summarised in five so-called city infrastructure systems. Although the challenges that each of these infrastructure systems faces are substantial, for each of them a high impact area is identified which needs to be tackled first and foremost:Utilities: a smart grid allows the easy integration of renewable and a two-way data flow which allows for use, interpretation and change at every point of the system, leading to efficiency increases;Transport: reducing congestion in the transport systems will positively impact on the local economy, the attraction of skilled workers, the quality of life and carbon emissions;Safety & Security: in mature and rapidly developing economies alike, the levels and quality of a city’s talent pool can be directly related with the overall levels of public safety;Real Estate: buildings consume around 40% of the world’s energy and 58% of office workers do not believe that their office design is conducive to their organisation’s performance;Government Services: strong education and healthcare facilities are fundamental to the quality and productivity of a workforce, especially one that must be able to think and innovate.Digital Cities will leverage public money, foundations and corporate institutional funding to create jobs, empower citizen engagement and provide an open innovation platform to entrepreneurs who will build new companies which will offer services, applications and tools to the city’s Digital Citizens.
An intelligent city is one that uses technology to transform its core systems and optimize the return from largely finite resources. By using resources in a smarter way, it will also boost innovation, a key factor underpinning competitiveness and economic growth. There are three core components in the build out of such a city. First and foremost, it is built upon a core set of key infrastructures that make up the foundational layer consisting of a pervasive sensing infrastructure such as ICT enabled utility grids and other physical urban infrastructures, along with the proliferation of intelligent buildings and human beings connected to the network. Over this is a service oriented architecture layer situated that intelligently handles the vast amounts of data and manages these in the context of the relevant city infrastructure system, with the aim of creating on the basis of this data knowledge that can be used for mobilised user-centric services with the aim of creating what Cisco refers to as “experiences” around, for example, residential, fan or office. This could be in the shape of dashboards, travel assistants, home management systems, etcetera.As a final layer, social networks can be created in order to enhance social inclusion such as community programs, training and smart work centres or digital bureaus. However, this final layer is also about connecting people within the city, through community activity streams, networking structures or anything else of this ilk. Combining technology, people and community involvement into a comprehensive strategy for growth, empowerment and enrichment is what solutions are all about.Connecting these separate systems will deliver even greater efficiencies and address the interrelated, long-term threats to sustainability for cities.
In spite of the compelling vision for an intelligent city, it will always flounder on the rocks of reality unless there is a sound business model that underpins it. In order to get it off the ground, there needs to be a marriage between the public and private sectors whereby they work hand-in-glove in delivering one common vision: creating a sustainable and world-leading local economy that will become self-reinforcing in its economic, social and environmental development by attracting world-class talent. Whilst the public sector provides the legislative framework and the government services that make a city tick, the private sector installs the technology required for an intelligent city and helps the public sector to run the city in a smoother fashion. Whilst many ownership strategies are possible for the technology infrastructure (e.g. self-owned, hired or hybrid), either of these will provide a form of direct return-on-investment for the private sector. At the same time, the public sector will be able to start reaping the benefits on the short-term by improving its services on the basis of the data analytics that the network provides.Nevertheless, a system without users will be futile and cities are no different in this. Knowledge workers may be attracted through a variety of mechanisms, but in general the proposition to them can be summarised as a city that provides a better quality-of-life, higher flexible and mobility, strong social cohesion and a collaborative environment that is suited to their private and professional lives. In turn, these workers will provide a return-on-investment to the public sector through higher taxes and GDP growth and simultaneously a return to the private sector through their use of the network and the applications, service and solutions that reside on it. As such, technology brings together previously disconnected operational programs and allows for coordinated, efficient, and sustainable urban policies across neighbourhoods, institutions and, indeed, the entire social fabric of an urban area to the benefit of all stakeholder groups.
If the prospect of creating an intelligent city seems overwhelming, it is important to understand that it can be created in four stages. These four levels of 'intelligence‘ can be introduced incrementally, each adding different perspectives and depth to the total solution and therefore the ultimate benefits:Network infrastructure: the infrastructure for the single IP network must be considered during the planning stage and should be a part of the master development plan for maximum impact. The fibres should be installed during construction as an integral element of the building that can, at a later stage, control all the other utilities with the addition of active components (switches, routers and others) of the infrastructure.Content & communications: then at the next level the network lights up services for the city, delivering telephony, broadband internet access and video-on-demand over a single network.Building intelligence: next, intelligent buildings come into their own. Wireless sensors automatically control heating, lighting and ventilation, reducing energy bills so that these buildings have a reduced carbon footprint compared to non-smart buildings. Services can include access, security, fire alarms, lifts or escalators, parking systems and digital signage, all remotely controlled. Public services: the final level is the public domain. The city infrastructure systems can be optimised on the basis of the data that is derived from them, cooperative democracy can be encouraged whereby the government actively seeks out input and feedback from its citizens and further city development and optimisation decisions can be made on the basis of knowledge.
Growth for cities in the twenty-first century will increasingly be driven by people – the skills and knowledge of a highly educated, innovative workforce – and by the ability of citizens and city economies to absorb, commercialize and extend innovation. Cities that want to thrive will need to plan, invest and work to improve their core systems with this in mind. But how do cities begin to make such improvements, especially in times of extreme financial constraints? There are a few basic steps and consistent guiding principles to help direct them.Determine the city’s brand: Identify the city’s differentiating strengths that will attract skills, knowledge and creativity. Create a strategy that emphasizes these strengths.Adopt appropriate policies: Attract internationally mobile talent by enhancing quality of life services and services responsiveness to changes in demand, whilst creating a domestic talent base by offering education services and training, with significant emphasis on investing in education infrastructure.Optimise around the citizen: Create digital linkage across city core systems and the analysis and actions triggered by patterns in the data and begin to shift from standardized, uniform services to a model for the delivery of tailored services that meet individual needs.Improve core city systems through ICT: Collect and manage the right kind of data, integrate and analyze this data and, based on advanced analysis, optimise the system to achieve desired system behaviours.
Cities have limited resources. To deliver on the range of ambitious goals they have, cities must take account of the interconnected challenges they face and the interrelated systems they influence. This is a journey for cities, not an overnight transformation. But the first step requires a shift in thinking and a break from the past. This means that city administrations should develop an integrated city-planning framework, based on deciding where their internal expertise lies – in essence identifying a city’s core competencies – and bringing in outside expertise where necessary.On the basis of the brand and the vision that a city administration has decided upon they can subsequently utilised this strategic planning framework in order to assess what is excess, what is missing and what needs to be brought in-house or what is best dealt with by the private sector. It allows them to focus and to leverage the core knowledge that they possess themselves, or to focus on those user or infrastructure systems that really will make the vision of their future city work.
When intending to create an intelligent city, administrations will have to assemble a team from within their organisational boundaries, but also from outside with likeminded partners from the private and non-profit sectors. Intelligent cities are in essence living, breathing and thinking entities and no single entity or organisation will possess all the knowledge and experience that is required to deliver them. Therefore, partnering will be of crucial importance.Cisco identified what they refer to as an “eco-system stack”, which outlines the various players that are needed for an intelligent city infrastructure, ranging from the provision of the actual network to the creation of the applications and services that lay on top of it. Each company plays an essential role in the ecosystem stack, whether it is focussing on machine-to-person, human-to-human and machine-to-machine communication. Together they comprise all the stakeholders required to deliver:Ecosystem-scale life-cycle design;Pervasive sensing;Scalable and configurable infrastructure;Data analytics and visualisation;Autonomous control.
So, what it takes to create a smart city is: clear vision & sound policy on the part of local and state leaders setting the stage for regional growth and prosperity, the appropriate technology infrastructure to deliver it, alignment between public and private sectors, and a framework that allows for long-term adoption by all users. More specifically, it requires the following: Government policy and regulations: a lead-by-example approach is necessary in order to create credibility by showing that governments themselves will set themselves challenging goals and abide by them. Furthermore, due to the complexity of intelligent cities, the management and design of technology systems is no longer something that can be viewed as a separate activity unrelated to traditional disciplines such as architects, urban and transportation planners, and healthcare professionals and, therefore, it asks for integrated planning principles. Technology infrastructure: B2B security will become imperative as the systems’ managers would interact with many non-conventional partners that they’ve never dealt with in the past. It also requires industry-specific compliance requirements given the vast array of assets that will interact with the city systems, plus it needs universally affordable technology in order to combat digital exclusion.Public/private partnerships: as discussed in the ecosystem stack, like mankind, no city is an island and a successful approach to intelligent city building warrants relationships with public, private and non-profit organisations on the basis of mutually beneficial business models. Like government clients, these partners will have to be set challenging tasks and held accountable to them. Long-term adoption: a system without users fails to meet any of its objectives, and care should be taken that adoption of the system is as widespread as possible amongst its users. Technology and access to it will in the future become a defining characteristic for quality-of-life, citizen participation and career prospects.
Intelligent cities provide benefits for citizens, city governments, and enterprises. For citizens, it improves quality of life, for example, enabling them to make informed decisions on day-to-day travel moments and eliminate unnecessary time spent on the road. For city governments, it enhances citizen engagement, increases mindshare, improves the travel experience, reduces carbon emissions, decreases demand for road capacity, and improves efficiency of asset/capital management and use. For both public- and private-sector organizations, it helps improve worker productivity and enables businesses to compete, as well as providing relevant public services such as parking, shopping, and dining.More specifically, it addresses the mega trends that cities of the future will face. Cities that adopt this thinking and make wise investments now to build an intelligent city can position themselves to thrive. Those that continue to invest in traditional infrastructure improvements designed for a mass population are very likely to struggle.