With May’s major flooding in Ratnapura, a city in Sri Lanka, and its disastrous consequences still fresh in our minds, it reminds me of a similar occurrence, this time in the city of Buenos Aires . The cosmopolitan capital of Argentina, too, is not a stranger to floods as it is built on nine streams. In 2013, a disastrous flood and endless rain caused over 50 casualties and thousands of evacuations.
The above two scenarios are pretty similar. However, perhaps locally we should be looking to and learning from what has gone before. Following the weather event, the local Buenos Aires government proactively embarked on a project to leverage big data and gain insights into rainfall and water levels during stormy seasons, leveraging on Oracle’s business intelligence capabilities.
Read more: Smart cities can serve citizens better after significant rise in urbanization in Asia
When you think of smart cities, images of Singapore, China, and Japan usually pop into your head, irrespective of which part of the world you live in.
It’s because of all the news about how cities in these Asian countries are accelerating projects in this avenue, leveraging technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G networks.
Read more: Has Asia bought into the concept of smart cities?
Concerns over high upfront costs and associated risks are hindering the adoption of cloud computing in the region, where only 22.2 percent of Asian cities have deployed it, according to Microsoft-CityNet research.
Cloud adoption in Asian cities remain low with governments harboring concerns about high upfront costs and associated risks such as data security and legal requirements.
Asia’s cities are facing what could be one of their greatest challenges. Unprecedented urbanization coupled with other pressing issues such as a rising middle class, explosive population growth, shifting demographics and increasing pressure to go green is pushing Asia’s cities to the limit.
More than half of the world’s mega-cities, are today found in the Asia-Pacific, with an expected 62 megacities by 2025, up from the current 32. With Asia urbanizing at such a rate, Asia is turning to smart cities to bolster economic growth, attract new business activities and to deal with the issues that accompany population growth in cities. Singapore aims to be the first Smart Nation; other Asian countries such as China and India are implementing smart cities on a massive scale. Korea has recently built Songdo, touted as the world’s first smart city from scratch.
On the one hand there is a wave of consolidation throughout the region as unsustainable legacy infrastructure is phased out. As a new free FutureGov Report - ‘Asian Government ICT Project Priorities 2014’ - indicates, IT departments are taking the time to review their strategic use of ICT, opening up new opportunities for vendors.