CityReads│What Technologies Can Do for the Future of Cities?
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What Technologies Can
Do for the Future of Cities
A recent research report, Technology and the Future of cities, submitted by President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, analyzes how the science and technology can improve America’s cities—in terms of quality of life, social services, infrastructure, and sustainability—for all their residents.
Source:https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/pcast_cities_report___final_3_2016.pdf
Picture source: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/
Cities are entering a fourth stage of modern transformational change, shaped by technological innovation. The first stage came with the steam engine, the second with the electrical grid and reliable mass transit, and the third with the personal automobile, which stimulated the growth of suburbs and in turn necessitated the creation of a network of highways.
From 1920 to 2010, U.S. cities “hollowed out,” with suburbs growing faster than their urban cores. In 2011 the flight from the cities began to reverse, with Millennials and Baby Boomers leading the return to urban neighborhoods as they looked for social connections and societal services.
Cities are again growing. This fourth transformational era sees distinct districts and sub-centers supplementing unitary downtown centers. As a result demands on city design, infrastructure, and services are growing and changing. Important needs include more effective use of limited space, greater walkability, and ways to support residents across the income spectrum. In addition, the need for improved urban resilience in the face of climate change and other natural and man-made catastrophes adds to the challenges cities face. Integrating new physical and digital technologies to create innovative solutions will offer the best opportunities to address these challenges.
Technological advances promise to improve the environments in which people live and the services that city governments and companies offer.
Cleaner energy technologies, new models of transportation, new kinds of water systems, building-construction innovation, low-water and soil-less agriculture, and clean and small-scale manufacturing are or will be available in the near future. These options are summarized in the Table blow.
Information and communication technologies (ICT), the proliferation of sensors through the Internet of Things, and converging data standards are also combining to provide new possibilities for the physical management and the socioeconomic development of cities.
Technologies influence patterns of behavior. Digital and mobile technologies are making the connections between service providers and users tighter, faster, more personal, and more comprehensive. Sharing-economy business models are emerging that enable more efficient use of physical assets, such as cars or real estate, and provide new sources of income to city residents.
Large U.S. cities are using technology and data analytics to solve specific problems in areas such as health, transportation, sanitation, public safety, economic development. For example:
• The city of Los Angeles shares road closure, safety, and other data with app providers to improve driving, reduce congestion, and promote safety. In return, the app providers, such as Waze, share real-time crowd-sourced reports of issues encountered on the streets from more than 1.5 million users to the city’s emergency management, police, fire, transportation, street services, sanitation, and other departments.
• The city of Chicago is working with the Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago to deploy the Array of Things—a city-wide network of 500 lamppost-mounted sensors that monitor air quality, among other conditions; and it is analyzing its non-emergency complaint-call data to identify environmental issues such as pest infestations, connected to the incidence of asthma.
• The New York Fire Department started using datamining and predictive analytics to determine which of New York City’s one million buildings are most likely to erupt in a major fire. They now examine 7,500 factors across 17 city-agency data streams and use artificial intelligence to track trends city-wide.
Because change in a city is costly (in many ways) and can be especially challenging for early adopters, it is important that the results of urban experimentation be shared, helping to foster less expensive and more easily replicable solutions. U.S. cities need a platform for collaborating with each other.
As the World Wide Web itself, this platform is introduced as the “City Web.” It can help cities build on each other’s work and also open these solutions to smaller cities that lack the budget for significant technology capacity.
Understanding and adjusting tradeoffs between physical and socioeconomic transformations in cities requires well-planned, integrated experimentation and implementation. That is difficult to do city-wide, but districts create the perfect living laboratory. A district does not necessarily have a predefined scale, nor must it fall within the political boundaries of a single city. A district has an area and population that are large enough for new technology implementations to have an impact, but also manageable from the point of view of clarity of intervention, tuning, collection of data, and assessment of progress and lessons learned. The potential of a district-based approachis first captured attention through Innovation Districts, which were primarily started to improve the local economy and create jobs in abandoned urban areas.
Today technological implementations provide another path to impact, transforming city districts to become more energy-efficient and green; more convenient, accessible, and conducive to mobility; and more connected and inclusive. These goals are interconnected, and pursuing them jointly through integrated solutions can produce much more livable cities.
For example, the use of connected and autonomous vehicles would greatly reduce the need for parking spaces and space dedicated to roads. Freed-up space could enable pedestrian paths, bike lanes, urban farming, and clean urban manufacturing; or it could facilitate change in the density of buildings, which might, in turn, facilitate the deployment of more-efficient energy and water systems, which could lower the cost of housing and help entice people back to the city.
In 2015, several Federal agencies started or increased efforts to implement programs of technology-based innovation for cities. A key milestone was the September 2015 announcement of the White House Smart Cities Initiative. It also featured the launch of the private, non-profit MetroLab Network, which pairs city governments with local university research labs using Federal R&D funding and philanthropic support to apply innovation to the solution of diverse city problems.
The rest of the world is not standing still. National governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, China, India, Brazil, and Singapore have stepped up with considerable organization and resources to become leaders in urban innovation, positioning their countries and companies for what is now recognized as a multi-trillion-dollar worldwide opportunity. In reality, the nations of the world are in a race to transform their cities and reap the rewards, many of which will be economic―new products, new companies, and new skilled jobs, which, along with improved urban quality of life, create a virtuous circle that attracts talented new residents and additional businesses from around the world.
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