Siraj Syed covers CommunicAsia 2017, Singapore: Pre-event, 01: Smart City

By 2030, 70% of the world’s population will be concentrated in cities. Today, we are seeing large scale rural to urban migration with an estimated of 370,000 people, forecasted to migrate daily, between 2015 and 2020. The massive growth of urban populations has brought about a series of managerial challenges, in both the public and private sectors, from resource limitations, to the constant need to adapt to consumer demands.

To be truly Smart, cities must integrate and use Information and Communication Technology (ICT), that is citizen-centric, to improve the quality of life, enable more positive economic outlook and ensure greater economic resilience. 

CommunicAsia2017 (Singapore, May) Summit speaker, Dr. Renato de Castro, International Advisor, World e-Governments Organisation of Cities & Local Governments (WeGO), shares three Smart Cities predictions

Smart City: Disruptions and Predictions 

1. Rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combat security risks. Deep understanding and analysis of data is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for governments and businesses to leverage. Possible issues such as high crime rates and the threat of terrorism are just a few things that cities around the world must address. The marriage of technology to security potentially can alleviate and help manage these issues. Cities can consider adopting state-of-the-art, high-definition (HD) surveillance systems across information networks like social media where AI is able to process a large amount of data. This not only shortens the required response time in threatening situations but can also predict crimes. Controversies of monitoring and privacy aside, AI has the potential to improve the safety and security of smart cities for the betterment of its citizens.

2. Hyper-cities, and their consequences

According to the United Nations, a hyper-city refers to massive sprawling conurbations of more than 20 million people. Tokyo became the first hyper-city in the mid-1960s, when it crossed the threshold. By 2020, there will be more hyper-cities to boot, such as Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, New York, Dhaka, Jakarta and Lagos.

(Note: Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata are all Indian metropolises, and unofficial estimates put their population as more than 20 million in 2017 itself).

The rise in the number of hyper-cities is likely to lead to the development of district confederations, as a result of steep inter-city competition. Even today, large cities are already fighting for investments and talents, to increase competitiveness. This emerging trend among big cities is likely to become even more pronounced in the near future. In the long run, cities will play a more significant role in their own governance in response to the push to better develop and enhance its attractiveness. This will lead to the development of district confederations, where each district has their own rules, regulations, and pilot projects.

3. The Fourth Industrial Revolution and its resulting economies

The fourth industrial revolution seeks to be the most disruptive one yet, where transformation can be classified into four unique and dramatically different dimensions. They are:

*The Creative Economy. As the name suggests, is the use of creativity to value-add to the local economy. The blossoming of the creative class has been attributed by Richard Florida to the increasing prosperity of prosperous high-tech clusters such as Silicon Valley in California, Austin Technology Cluster in Texas and East London Tech City.

*The Sharing Economy. The rise of services such Airbnb (boarding ad lodging) and Uber (private, multifarious taxi-service) is shocking the traditional marketplace, and will affect the global production and distribution chain, and promote the rise of new business and innovation models, specifically one that caters to the idea of “access over ownership”

*The Circular Economy. An economy, wherein there is no wastage, which is obtained through consciously re-using resources, to ensure long-term sustainability of our environment. This is in stark contrast to our current linear production models, that transform raw materials into use, and then, eventually, into waste.

*Co-Creation. New start-ups are welcoming collaboration with all stakeholders; employees, suppliers, customers and even competitors. This concept can be developed to encompass the co-creation of citizens with public management to raise the quality of life.  

These major changes can be characterised by newfangled perspectives about the implications of time and space, due to technology bridging physical, digital and biological domains.

In the face of the impending change, one has to be mindful that it is mindsets and perspectives that will steer the movement towards smarter cities and smarter citizens. Technology is just a vessel for change. The embracement of technology has to be thorough, inclusive and complete on all levels for the successful implementation of Smart City projects.

For more insights, join Dr. Renato De Castro, International Advisor, World e-Governments Organisation of Cities & Local Governments (WeGO) at the CommunicAsia2017 Summit, on Conference Day 2, 24 May 2017, speaking on the topic ‘City SMARTup: New Tools to Build Wiser and More Competitive Cities’.