Pop culture routinely explores the detrimental effect the lack of community has on us. Whether that’s how to re-establish some semblance of community amid unspeakable horrors in The Walking Dead or watching a person grow increasingly unhinged as The Last Man on Earth, losing our connections to others is one our greatest collective fears.
The concept of a community has existed ever since there were people around to conceptualize things. Communities exist always for the same reason – people want to establish connections with one another. And soon, there will be a lot more people on the planet and most of them will also yearn to create communities that offer a better quality of life.
In the years ahead, one of the many challenges for cities will be to find a way to leverage technology to foster the development of smart and connected communities. If cities are to become the new wonders of the modern world, they’ll first need smart and connected citizens who desire to create smart and connected communities. And with the dawning era of the smart city, communities will be able to connect like never before – both locally and globally.
Connecting All the Things
There are many definitions of what constitutes a smart city. Part of being a smart city is becoming a place where transportation is fluid and efficient. Part of it is building intelligence into infrastructure such as water and energy systems. But a truly smart city is all of those things and more. It’s a place in which the infrastructure generates useful, actionable data that can be used by citizens and city officials to make better decisions about the future.
How does a city build intelligence into its infrastructure? Until recently, it couldn’t. But the analog world of the past has evolved into a digital one. Now, cheap and prolific sensors, pervasive connectivity and powerful communications technology enables us to start bringing all our things online – or, put more simply, to create an Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things (IoT), according to SAP, is “is already playing an important and growing role in infrastructure management … [and] IoT-generated data increases the effectiveness of these services for urban citizens while lowering their cost of delivery.”
Whether people refer to it as the Internet of Things or not, connected infrastructure is the foundation of what a smart city is. But a smart, connected community is a step beyond infrastructure that generates useful data. It is a place that leverages connectivity for economic and social vibrance, a place in which data empowers people.
According to SAP, “…it is connected citizens themselves who are actively using this information, and contributing to the information base, that enhances the livability of their connected cities.”
Buying into this line of reasoning, one might then argue that a smart city is one wherein the citizens themselves are connected for the purpose of making the city a better place to live. At this point, the Internet of Things is now only part of an equation that includes people, process and data. Things are going to produce a massive amount of data. Even people will become “things” as wearable devices proliferate. Ultimately data, things and people will together result in the overall improvement of urban life.
Cisco has steadfastly maintained that this combination of people, data and things yields something beyond the scope of the Internet of Things. They call this connected ecosystem the Internet of Everything.
“It’s a complete, virtuous cycle of people, process, data and things,” said Hardik Bhatt — a former Chicago CIO and formerly the senior director for the Internet of Everything for Cities at Cisco — on a recent edition of FutureStructure Radio, “Together that makes up the Internet of Everything.”
Does Size Matter?
Setting the stage for what’s possible with technology is an exciting exercise. But does the idea of an Internet-of-Everything-enabled city translate equally for cities both large and small? Can little cities also make the leap from analog to digital? Bhatt, who has considerable experience in municipal government, says yes.
“When we are talking about the Internet of Everything or basically connecting all the unconnected assets, the city size does not matter,” Bhatt said. “Regardless of the size of the city, you are going to see value as you start connecting all these assets.”
The measure of a smart, connected community isn’t its size, Bhatt argued. Rather, the measure is whether value is created by its existence.
“It needs to be environmentally, economically and socially sustainable,” he said. “It needs to go back to value creation – does it create new jobs, does it create new innovation, does it reduce the economic entry barriers and does it make a city more environmentally efficient?”
This idea of a smart, connected community defined by the value it creates pairs with the concept of “Cities 3.0” pitched last year by U.S. Conference of Mayors president and Sacramento, Calif., Mayor Kevin Johnson.
“Today, we are entering the era of Cities 3.0,” Johnson said. “In this era, the city is a hub of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology.”
According to Johnson, smart cities must become the “ultimate service provider” in the areas of infrastructure, economy, sustainability and education. Johnson, like many others, believes cities will be at the forefront of social and economic progress. The traditional top-down hierarchy from federal to state to municipal is a model that no longer makes sense when technological innovation and agility is prized.
“It used to be that the federal government and states set the agenda, and the cities were the children, waiting for their allowance,” he said. “We’ve flipped that construct on its head, there’s been an inversion of power. Cities are now the leaders in the nation: experimenting, taking risks, making hard choices.”
Creating Value
If people like Johnson and Bhatt are right – that connecting people, data and things creates value in cities – where does that value come from? Bhatt said it comes from doing the work of connecting infrastructure – transportation, lighting, water and energy – which should generate increased revenue, decreased costs in management and maintenance, improved employee productivity and, most importantly, enhanced citizen experiences.
Such value isn’t merely conjecture – at least not entirely. Numerous studies indicate both the smart cities market and the Internet of Things market will shortly be industries worth trillions of dollars.
Globally, cities will spend approximately $41 trillion on Internet-of-Things-enabled infrastructure over the next two decades, according to data from Intel. Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting firm, estimates that in five years the smart city market alone will be worth $1.5 trillion. General Electric, meanwhile, believes the Internet of Things will add some $15 trillion to global GDP by 2035.
“Cisco has done extensive study on this. So has Gartner, so has Qualcomm, so has GE,” said Bhatt. “And most of us have come back with the value creation over a decade, by connecting the 99 percent of the unconnected world, these studies put that anywhere between $15 trillion and $20 trillion over a decade.”
It’s big money and big business, and could lead to the creation of entirely new industries in global urban services. It’s not far-fetched to imagine, for example, one city in South America outsourcing its municipal water management to another city in Asia or Europe that has proven itself to be particularly adept at service delivery.
But the true value of smart, connected communities may not be monetary. At least for citizens and city officials, it’s the data that will be generated by communities that makes them valuable.
“I think there’s a whole bunch of operational insights and issues around metropolitan areas like Pasadena and bigger cities,” Pasadena, Calif., CIO Phillip Leclair told Government Technology. “We have to somehow get more people, more cars, more everything through our existing infrastructure, so collecting more and more data about who’s here and what they’re doing and where they’re going is going to help us plan for our next-generation cities.”
Data is revolutionizing everything. Every industry – from manufacturing to journalism to governing – is being affected by data. Industry players that figure out how to capitalize on data are going to thrive and those that rely on old ways of doing business are going to wither. The same is true for cities and the people that live in them.
Data is what will connect communities and make cities and the people who live in them smarter. Kiva Allgood, senior director of business development at Qualcomm, told FutureStructure that smart cities are those which are adept at providing open data and inspiring innovation.
“I think knowledge is power and I think cities are starting to realize they need this information,” she said. The data such places will generate “has so many different implications” for cities, but it also may scare some who at present have too few resources to meet current challenges.
But, as Allgood points out, an actual smart city isn’t one that adds burden to service delivery. Instead, it’s technology linking people, process and data – the Internet of Everything, as Bhatt described it – that will make service delivery work better. That’s the “smart” in smart city. It’s not smart because it’s a city that has a bunch of data available to it, it’s smart because it’s a city that uses data to improve how it does things, to make the things it does cost less, and enhance the lives of the people whom the city serves.
By the year 2050, more than 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities. That’s why so many people believe it’s urgent and important to start connecting communities now, to start gleaning data now, so that the best possible choices can be made about how to accommodate the new urban migration.
“Cities are our hope for the future,” Jesse Berst, chairman of the Smart Cities Council, said in a 2014 webinar. “We really are at the cusp of a new age. Not just where cities will be more livable but also much more sustainable. And not just more sustainable but also much more prosperous – cities that will give citizens the tools they need to succeed and prosper. And that’s all possible thanks to smart technologies.”
Communities are about people finding ways to connect. Communities that connect with one another make up our cities. As cities grow smarter and larger, they’ll begin connecting more deeply with other cities around the world to create truly global communities. But it all starts with people, said Munish Khetrapal, managing director of Smart+Connected Communities at Cisco.
“The citizen is the most important aspect of this,” he said. And the citizen is what really “creates value for smart and connected communities.”
