How To Build A Smart City
In the New Mexican desert, a 20 square mile city is being built from the ground up. With all the amenities and infrastructure of a modern city, the only thing making this city unique is that there are no residents. The city, known as the Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation, is being built by Pegasus Global Holdings to be a testbed for the 21st century smart city. The city will provide a proving ground for alternative energy, smart transportation, and wireless networks.
New Mexico is not alone in developing smart cities. Gale International and Cisco, with several other firms, are building a city in Korea the size of Downtown Boston. New Songdo City, will be completely wired and is already LEED Certified.
Building New Songdo City. Source: Wikipedia.
Similiar in size to New Songdo City, and to be completed in 2015, Living PlanIT is building its new smart city, PlanIT Valley, just outside Portugal. Living PlanIT will provide an UrbanOS to control the city. A major difference of PlanIT Valley is that the construction of the city will also be modernized. When building are no longer needed, they will be demolished. Practical, but rather unsentimental.
All of these cities are being built from the top-down. History has taught us the dangers of such city building. Pruitt–Igoe was a single housing project and is considered a failure. The cities being built are much larger, more of the magnitude of Brasilia which, while beautiful, is not considered a success story.
Panorama of Brasilia. Source: Wikipedia.
Cities are complex. Human behavior is not easily modeled on a computer. And yet,
the bias lurking behind every large-scale smart city is a belief that bottom-up complexity can be bottled and put to use for top-down ends – that a central agency, with the right computer program, could one day manage and even dictate the complex needs of an actual city1.
If millions of dollars, large corporations, and brilliant leaders are incapable of building smart cities, how do you build a smart a city? According to Carlo Ratti and Anthony Townsend, you “…jack people into the network and get out of the way.” This should not come as a surprise. The entire economic system of the capitalist world is based on the notion that an individual,
by pursuing his own interest… frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it2.
A person using building sensor data to monitor their home energy consumption to save money makes us all better off because they have reduced their carbon footprint. Now imagine if the population of an entire city was doing this. We are in luck because they are.
Cities, and countries, all over the world are realizing that by providing the infrastructure and opening the data, individuals will build applications that a central planner could never have imagined. Cities such as San Francisco, Baltimore, the District of Columbia, New York, Edmonton, Toronto, The United States and the United Kingdom are all providing open data portals which can be accessed by anyone in the world.
Building new cities from the ground up is not a solution. We must find a way to turn our existing cities in to smart cities. If the government provides the data, we the people will provide the apps.
@Rory, I am a big supporter of open source and get a little nervous about proprietary systems and thoughts of companies controlling the city. However, I will say that from what I have read, the Living PlanIT UrbanOS seems to be a step in the right direction. The Daily Mail says that the CEO refers to the OS as the iPhone model allowing apps to plug in and connect. This is something I like. A City OS with an API that allows users to make calls to it and build apps on top of it -- this has me excited.
Glad you liked the article @rdopping. The firm where I work is also using BIM, but it has been tough to get everyone to go along. We are probably split 50-50. There is so much BIM can contribute outside of architecture that I hope to write about soon. The open data projects are awesome. I downloaded data from the US Food Pyramid and was shocked by the amount of info it contained and the possibilities that could be built off of it. Thanks for pointing out your project, I will take a look at it.
PlanIT are creating an operating system for the future city, seems like a mammoth task, but I'm sure it will be worth it. I for one can't wait for a city where the infrastructure adapts itself to the load of the city.
Paul, Very cool piece and a very interesting angle. It's good to see BIM being realized in the architecture and planning fields more readily. This will certainly help push the integration of "smart" technologies into the planning and construction world. The firm where I currently work http://designdialog.ca is certainly not on the leading edge but we are fully emersed in BIM as a design tool and are still scratching the surface as to its vast benefits. The open data projects are new to me and I live in Toronto and I am in the architecture and design field. Oh dear. Thanks for pointing it out. I am hoping you may be interested in a project that I have going on (a sideline) that would benefit significantly from your input. Please check out http://itsnotlikenewyork.com and let me know what you think.
[...] for this are vast, but most critically is the idea that urban areas are the most realistic means to create sustainable development and solutions-driven hotbeds for [...]