Cities of the future

Defining the smarts behind the smart city

The largest wave of urban growth in history is currently underway.

Urban landscapes will have to evolve physically and technologically as city populations grow. More than half the world’s population — approximately 4 billion people — now live in urban settlements, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs; and that’s expected to increase.

By 2030, the UN predicts that city dwellers will account for nearly 60% of the world’s population, or more than 5 billion people, and that figure will swell to 70%, or almost 6.8 billion, by 2050.

Such a rapid population influx raises a question: What will it take for the world’s urban areas to support nearly a billion additional human beings in a little more than a decade? Today’s urban centers are already starting to exhibit stress cracks, and these those fissures are expected to keep spreading unless our cities evolve. Physical changes will be needed over the long run and technological ones right now.

Carlo Ratti, the architect directing the MIT Senseable City Lab and the founding partner of design firm Carlo Ratti Associati, says he believes that data is a key factor for designing better cities. It offers insight so urban planners can better understand how spaces are already used.

Assessing the real cost of city living

Although there’s no universal definition for “urban settlement,” city living tends to be associated with higher levels of literacy and education, better health care, greater access to social services, and enhanced opportunities for cultural and political participation, according to the UN’s study of world urbanization prospects. But that same study points out that cities are also known for having higher levels of pollution, traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and unsustainable production and consumption patterns.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Atlas of Population and Environment shows that urbanites consume roughly 75% of the planet’s natural resources. If current patterns of water consumption continue unabated, the World Health Organization predicts that half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas by 2025, and the UN estimates that at least 25% will lack access to clean, drinkable water by 2050. Urban expansion will likely exacerbate water problems, as well as expose 11 other stress points such as a strained food supply, dwindling energy sources, limited employment in a rapidly shifting economic landscape, increased housing shortages, and overtaxed transportation systems.

Some urban planners believe, to varying degrees, that these problems can be solved by leveraging smarter infrastructure, design, and planning techniques to create what they describe as a living, breathing organism, rather than the sprawling concrete jungle of inert buildings and disconnected systems we have today. They argue that smart cities are needed to help address a long list of issues that includes energy production, waste management, water distribution, and mobility.

Seeking the definition of a smart city

None of them is definitive, either, because smart cities have only recently come into development. “It is kind of like asking someone to paint a watercolor in a stream,” says Mitchell Joachim, an architect and co-founder of Terreform ONE, a Brooklyn, New York–based nonprofit architecture research and consulting group focused on socioecological design.

The definition of a smart city remains so broad that an ancient place like Istanbul could arguably be considered one. “[It’s] had thousands of years of warfare, religion, and different kinds of planning morphologies overlaid,” Joachim says. “And it is still super functional.”

Joachim’s personal definition of a smart city combines sociological planning with mobile technology that ensures nearly everything — a device, an object, an entity — can connect to the Internet of Things. This approach to urban planning and management addresses the needs of residents in large, rapidly growing cities. It acknowledges the symbiotic relationship between a city and the ecosystem it inhabits.

Indeed, the common thread that runs through future-oriented urban design philosophies is technology. A smart city should have a fully integrated infrastructure with advanced communication networks, automated transportation systems, water services, and power grids that are all connected and unified.

Essential technological infrastructure

At the heart of a smart city is a foundational communication system that includes an “open internet; broadband wireless communications to support the growth of the Internet of Things; secure distributed systems serving the public good and improving resiliency and emergency response services; access to information; and data for analytics,” says Shawn Chandler, an IEEE senior member and director at Navigant Consulting.

Implementing such a system is harder than it sounds, as such efforts can be hampered by legacy infrastructures. Not so with Amsterdam and its unique community-owned IoT wireless system. The Things Network, a civic project unveiled in 2015 and led by Dutch entrepreneur Wienke Giezeman, crowdsourced a series of gateway devices that use a low-power, long-range, low-bandwidth radio-frequency protocol to cover the city with a signal. That signal allows sensor-laden objects, such as streetlights and trash cans, to be connected without wi-fi or cellular service. Ten devices developed by the Things Network offered a relatively simple solution to a connectivity problem in only six weeks.

The free, open, and community-owned Things Network gives software developers a way to harness data from whatever connects to it, be it boats or buildings. New applications could help operations such as waste management and power distribution become more efficient and environmentally friendly.

Songdo International Business District in South Korea is a planned city located in the Incheon Free Economic Zone west of Seoul. With planning beginning in 2001 and construction starting four years later, it was designed from the ground up to promote sustainable urban living. Sensors monitor conditions in the city and regulate automobile traffic by adjusting signals accordingly. An underground pneumatic waste disposal system removes trash directly from individual homes and sends it to centers that automatically sort and process the waste. Eventually, that waste could be used as renewable energy.

In new smart cities, significant upgrades to computing power will have to be made so that the massive amounts of data coming from all the sensors and city systems can be processed. In a tower in Songdo, for instance, there is a data management center that monitors real-time information streaming in from across the city.

The future of mobility

Some of the biggest problems facing cities of the future are automotive related. For instance, the transportation sector accounts for 29% of the nation’s energy consumption, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Global emissions from electricity and transportation are expected to make up nearly 52% of all carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, MIT researchers tell us.

While energy consumption and pollution are pressing issues, traffic congestion is also a vital issue. In the United States alone, the average commuter spends 42 hours stuck in rush hour on an annual basis, according to the Urban Mobility Report by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The university-affiliated research agency predicts that the figure will keep rising, growing to 47 hours in 2020.

Joachim expects that manual driving might even become illegal in the future. He envisions laws will be enacted to establish configurations for mobility, and the flow of traffic will be connected and optimized to an intelligent grid.

To ease traffic and congestion, some cities have gone as far as eliminating freeways. It seems counterintuitive but reducing the capacity of road systems actually improves their effectiveness by encouraging drivers to move more efficiently. The construction of the $900 million Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul required the removal of the elevated Cheonggye Expressway and replaced it with nearly 7 miles of waterway, vegetation, and public space. Since opening in 2005, the stream has not only become a well-loved part of the city, attracting more birds, fish, and other wildlife to the urban core, but it also brought the temperature of the inner city down by several degrees, according to one urban planner involved with the project.

At the same time, many automakers and entrepreneurs are betting on autonomous technologies to solve the majority of automotive transportation ills. Our partner, Savari, a Silicon Valley–based auto-tech company, is developing software for connected and self-driving cars. The technology known as V2X, or vehicle-to-everything communication, allows cars to exchange data with other cars, traffic lights, and pedestrians through their smartphones. The technology could help drivers and self-driving cars share data to avoid collisions and keep traffic moving while conserving energy by reducing the number of idling cars on the road. The promise of V2X is to make traffic jams, crashes, and pollution caused by vehicle emissions a thing of the past, says Ravi Puvvala, CEO of Savari.

Although Puvvala sees autonomous vehicle technology as an important step in the right direction, he acknowledges that it is not a panacea. The solution has to be multimodal, which is why you see car companies investing in bike sharing, he says.

Improving transport between cities is also important to the smart city concept. But it involves a serious investment in infrastructure, one that will likely take longer to build than merely improving the system already in place. One of the most ambitious advancements conceived is Elon Musk’s Hyperloop: an ultrafast method of travel involving vacuum tube trains. It would put the city front and center. But one of the consequences has become clear to Joachim.

On Twitter, Musk is encouraging development of Hyperloop systems that will link New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. A trip from the Big Apple to the nation’s capital would take only 29 minutes, he says. If Musk’s concept becomes reality, the Hyperloop could create a host of new living possibilities. For example, a person residing in New York could work full time in D.C.

When will we see smart cities emerge?

The innovations of a smart city may be revolutionary and worth pursuing, but making an entire city smart is not a short-term endeavor.

Look at how long it took before hybrid cars became viable, Joachim points out. He says we have a minimum of 40 to 50 years before there is a major shift in the base architecture of a city, and 100 to 150 years before the new version of a future city emerges. But the effects of technology on a city will be seen much quicker.

“You are going to get rapid changes in cellphone technology in a five to seven-year span,” Joachim predicts. That means much faster interfaces and broadband access because the infrastructure behind it doesn’t require a huge shift. This technology can even be used to transform mobility in 15 to 20 years, just in time for the next evolution, Civilization 2.0.