According to its report, ‘Is Your City Smart Enough?’ technology was an important enabler of a more sustainable approach to designing, building, and operating cities.
New greenfield cities and major urban renewal projects provide the focus and investment needed to reengineer the way a city and its society works.
The United Nations was predicting that the world's cities will need to house an additional 2.9 billion people by the middle of what is being called "the urban century."
Ovum research director, Dr Steve Hodgkinson said hundreds of cities will be built and expanded to accommodate migration and growth – particularly in China and India.
“This is leading to a rise in competition between cities to attract and retain the investment and people needed for urban development and revitalisation” he said.
Two broad streams of digital enablers in cities were identified in the report.
Digital City, the first stream found inside-out projects that provided new ways for public authorities, utilities, and developers to architect and build more efficient infrastructure and services.
The strategies included; such things as IP network infrastructure; e-government/Government 2.0 services; the digitisation of processes and systems in urban planning, transport, healthcare, education, utilities and buildings.
The second, Digital-Society initiatives were more emergent, outside-in initiatives, which stimulated self-help and co-production behaviours in the community.
They complement Digital-City strategies but also hold government bodies to account. Digital-Society initiatives are often created using low-cost websites and publically available social networking platforms such as Facebook.
Dr Hodgkinson said together, formal Digital-City strategies and emergent Digital-Society initiatives offer the prospect of making cities more efficient and more liveable even as they become more densely populated.
He also believed that Digital-City strategies offer a breath of fresh air to stale e-government programs – many of which have reached a plateau in recent years.
Online services benefits have been realised, but deeper citizen-centric reform has often become stymied by political volatility, structural complexity, and the conflicting agendas of multiple layers of government.
“The timing is right for cities to drive innovation in the next few decades for a number of reasons,” he said.
According the analyst urbanisation trends compelled cities to innovate to prosper – sustainably accommodating a further 2.9 billion people in cities during the next 40 years can’t be done unless we change the way they are built and operated.
Also cities brand new energy and focus to e-government – cities are decisive, commercially focused, and by necessity citizen-centric.
“Intra-city competitive pressures on a global stage will only make them more so in the future,” Dr Hodgkinson said.
“Finally, the technology building blocks of Digital-City strategies are becoming increasingly globalised and commoditised – available to any city on equal terms.”
The analyst said cloud computing was creating the means for cities to use shared global technology and solution platforms, rather than each city reinventing the wheel by building and owning fixed assets and dedicated solutions.
Greenfield-cities were the urban laboratories where the next generation of Digital-City technologies is being developed.
Songdo in South Korea was a good example and global technology company Cisco is implementing a Smart+Connected Communities program to implement IP networks and IT systems in all aspects of Songdo’s infrastructure and operations – in its utilities, transport, hospital, school, offices, and homes.
“For example, every Songdo home will have a high-definition TelePresence unit provided as part of its infrastructure – with 20,000 units so far confirmed,” Dr Hodgkinson said.
“The city will feature an integrated control centre for all of its essential and emergency services.”
According to the analyst solutions developed in places like Songdo and deployed in the cloud by global companies like Cisco will provide the tools for other cities to accelerate their Digital-City visions.
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Quelle/Source: Government News, 01.04.2011
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