Chief Technology Officer of Hexagon’s Safety & Infrastructure division, focused on innovative new technologies for smart and safe cities.
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Smart cities are transforming governments from a series of siloed organizations to collaborative, integrated services. It’s not a moment too soon, either; according to the United Nations, approximately 55% of the world’s population lives in cities, and this number is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. To accommodate such rapid growth, public leaders must leverage smart city technologies to adapt.
Deployment is still a work in progress, however. While there are certainly examples of standout cities, more widespread usage of transformative, integrated solutions to urban needs has faced challenges. There are always unique wrinkles to any smart city technology deployment, but generally, there are three common hurdles to truly collaborative solutions: funding, people and data.
The first, funding, is the most easily understood — whether it’s smart street lighting, automatic gunshot detection, traffic monitoring systems or otherwise, these solutions cost money. Under normal circumstances, municipalities often face tight budgets, and after the coronavirus pandemic, many cities are staring at sizable deficits.
The “people” part of the equation surfaces as different organizations, both public and private, collaborate to bring new, or more integrated, services to life for a better citizen experience. One issue that rears its head time and again is the question of project ownership. Public officials are often conservative about becoming early adopters of smart city technology, but the flip side of the coin is that first-movers who do take the plunge often take leadership of inter-agency initiatives, which can cause friction with the other stakeholders over time.
On the data side are the issues of sharing and integration. Many collaboration projects have fallen apart because technologies lack the ability to integrate data stemming from different systems. On paper, it makes sense to integrate each organization’s data for overall greater understanding. But in practice, the lack of uniformity in data standards between agencies can become problematic, and the integration is too complex from a technical perspective. However, even when the data integration hurdles are overcome, organizations may still be hesitant to share data. They understandably want to have full control over when and how data is shared, and who has access to it.
Straddling people and data are issues of participation and flexibility. Specific entities can and should also be a part of some collaboration and data-sharing initiatives, but not all. Perhaps a private power supplier should be included in energy data-sharing initiatives, but not others, such as for public safety. Flexibility around data and processes are also needed for temporary initiatives like disaster relief; more than half of the world’s cities with a population of over 300,000 are at high risk of exposure to at least one natural disaster, so finding a way to imbue smart city initiatives with such plasticity is vital to their success.
These hurdles are far from insurmountable, fortunately, and in fact, smart city investments are ramping up due to progress in several areas. A recent National League of Cities survey found that two-thirds of local governments have invested in “smart technologies as new developments chip away at the problems that have bedeviled smart city deployment.”
In particular, the advent of cloud computing has made smart city collaboration more flexible, less centralized and less expensive than solutions even only ten years prior. In other fields, the cloud has been the driver of the software-as-a-service revolution, and the impact on smart city collaboration should be no different. Somewhat relatedly, the application of machine learning and advanced analytics is transforming the rapid processing of the vast troves of information that smart cities collect.
But ultimately, the most impactful development has been the growing recognition by agency leaders as well as the public of the importance of collaboration to realize the return on technology investments and fulfill the promise of smart cities. A true smart city is a holistic, collaborative endeavor between the disparate parts it comprises, and requires much more than simply deploying an app or a few sensors. It necessitates rethinking everything — the funding, people and technology — in order to fundamentally improve our way of life.
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