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The Top Five Smart Cities In The World

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Since the days of the industrial revolution, cities have been the engines of economic growth. The revolution was effective in developing prosperity for many countries, but the development was not always “smart,” sacrificing health conditions, for instance, for greater productivity.

Now with greater use of technology, a number of cities are accumulating data, delivering innovation, and enhancing lives of citizens. Juniper Research recently compiled its list of top-five “smart cities.”   The author of the study, Steffen Sorrell, focuses on two overarching benefits of smart cities: sustainability and efficiency. To that end, he identified five essential components of a smart city.

  • Technologies
  • Buildings
  • Utilities
  • Transportation & road infrastructure
  • The smart city itself

The people who live in cities are driven economic performers who are seeking to take advantage of technologies to further their personal and collective opportunities. Cities provide them these opportunities and in doing so draw many like-minded parties into their midst. With this drive and  an increase in active participants, there are downsides. Most notably, energy consumption, waste and congestion. In this day and age people are increasingly concerned with climate change and awareness of limited resources all while demanding more efficiencies and technological development.

Citizens are not the only factors to consider in the evolution of cities into smart cities. Governmental and commercial entities are going to play increasingly important roles in development and implementation of technologies that pave the way to the smart city.

Peter High: Barcelona was named the top smart city.  What were some of the things that that city did that caused it to stand out?

Steffen Sorrell: The city wasn’t actually top of the class across any of the metrics: Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates won out where environment and sustainability were assessed for example, while Singapore’s smart traffic system is second to none. However, the breadth of Barcelona’s involvement in the smart city concept, and consistent above-average performance across all metrics judged lead it to the top step.

High: It was noted that Barcelona “performed consistently well across all metrics.” What were the metrics used to gauge smart cities?

Sorrell: Our report on smart cities forecasts for smart city involvement in the smart grid, smart traffic and parking as well as smart street lighting, so naturally those were assessed in terms of cities’ involvement. Several other metrics were judged, including cities’ agency cohesion, citizen engagement, technological capability and use of open data among others.

High: How key is government regulation in pushing cities to be “smart”?

Sorrell: That depends on the level of separation between national and municipal powers, and level of market regulation! Ultimately both at national and municipal level, it boils down to economics, and there is significant economic incentive in the long-term to develop smarter cities.

High: As these are smart cities and not smart countries, do you find strong city government has a larger role to play than federal governments in pushing change?

Sorrell: Yes, I think so. Cities tend to be budget-constrained, requiring them to look for private investment. Furthermore, municipal governments need to bridge siloed agencies for maximum effectiveness as well as look at transferring services to a cloud infrastructure. Naturally, that requires overcoming a city’s governmental inertia and a deep understanding of a city’s individual requirements.

High: What is the balance between government influence, business investment, and citizen engagement among the leading smart cities?

Sorrell: Barcelona’s participation in the City Protocol initiative as well as Amsterdam’s platform approach demonstrate the required frameworks for establishing a strong smart city ecosystem between government, industry and citizens.

High: Nice, France is the only city among the top five that is below 1.5 million in population.  (Its population is actually below 400,000 people).  What advantages, if any, do large metropolises like New York, London, and Singapore have versus a city like Nice, and what advantages do smaller cities have?

Sorrell: I think the issue is more to do with population density and area than overall population when looking at the concept of resource-strain. High population densities over a wide area create strategic complexity in that projects cannot be initiated to cover an entire city at once due to many constraints. Therefore the need for agency collaboration and analytics is even greater to decide on implementation.

High: The report highlights advances made in the internet of things (IoT).  Please note some of the methods used leveraging IoT technology.

Sorrell: In my opinion, the IoT is comprised not only of connected devices, but also of analytics leading to contextual awareness. Examples of such systems include smart parking, where networked sensors enable congestion easing through both dynamic pricing and driver communications; smart grid, where PMUs and smart meter data serve to increase grid reliability; smart street lighting where LEDs and smart controllers enable reduced energy consumption according to footfall and traffic analysis.

High: The report notes that use of technology to help facilitate the development of smart cities also make them vulnerable to cyber-attacks.  What winning strategies have emerged to safeguard the data necessary to make smart cities possible?

Sorrell: Given the sophistication of attacks observed these days, it’s no longer a question of if, but when. Obviously strong encryption is essential: the idea of any plaintext information travelling across smart city information systems is frankly ridiculous, and yet it still happens. The ultimate goal is to share learning and best practices across agencies in order to implement a robust security model that not only makes it difficult for attackers to access, but mitigates damage once breached, via a ‘bulkhead’ approach. I think wider adoption of PFS (perfect forward secrecy) will play an important role there in that it doesn’t necessarily prevent attacks, but prevents long-term data compromise.

Peter High is  President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, has just been released by Wiley Press/Jossey-Bass. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Follow him on Twitter TWTR +1.84% @WorldClassIT.