Bristol switches on city-wide wi-fi next month, signalling its intention to become the UK’s first smart city. But, as Elaine Knutt reports, is the industry ready to deliver on the "smart cities" promise?
Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past two years, you will know there has been a bit of a buzz around the concept of “smart cities”. Conferences. Books. Lots of magazine articles like this one. Exciting case studies about traffic management systems in Alabama or wind turbines in Aarhus. Driverless vehicles that look a lot like golf buggies. The promise of “Internet of Things” interconnectivity that boils down to digital home energy meters or – to take a real-life example – smart soap dispensers in Milton Keynes’ leisure centres.
In other words, “smart cities” holds out the promise of an exciting data-enabled future, but delivers a slightly disappointing reality. Often, the examples on the PowerPoint slides are too geographically distant, too remote from the industry’s areas of expertise, or too obviously driven by the marketing budgets of IT companies such as IBM, Siemens or Cisco Systems.
And yet … the smart cities buzz is growing, and increasingly resonating in industry circles. It is partly because of the connection with BIM, recently made manifest in the title of the Level 3 BIM strategic plan, Digital Built Britain. Both agendas are about using data to increase understanding and create better solutions, but if BIM is about collaboration and bringing different viewpoints into one model, smart cities scales that up to city dimensions. “BIM brings multiple professions into one model and one process, but a smart city model allows you to bring to economists, social aspects, political aspects,” says Francis Glare, BDP’s head of urbanism.
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Also, the industry’s consultants now see “smart cities” as the organising principle for interventions and projects in urban areas that might once have been termed “regeneration”. “The goals you would have for a city – aspirations for growth and economic prosperity, safe, clean places with a minimal carbon footprint – haven’t changed, but the solutions have,” says Alex Burrows, a technical director at Atkins. “There is now the technology and ability to realise the smart city concept.”
But most of all, smart cities is starting to feel decidedly more real because the technology has caught up with the talking shops: with smartphones, everyone can be located and identified.
“[Taxi app] Uber exists because we all have universal sensors we call cellphones. So if you have a well-instrumented building [or location] it can locate you accurately,” says Amar Hanspal, a senior vice-president at Autodesk, which recently acquired digital city-modelling specialist Synthicity as part of its smart cities portfolio.
Conference call
So the PowerPoint slides in the forthcoming round of conferences – including the BRE’s Cities Convention, Designing City Resilience at the RIBA, the Making Cities Livable Conference in Bristol in June – will be more closely aligned to the agenda of most industry professionals.
