As part of our work with the Wellington City Council, transforming Wellington into the creative and innovative centre of the known universe, I had envisaged the creation of a network of managed services – delivered in partnership between the City Council and various private and public sector organisations – that would together allow delivery of a “city-as-a-service”.
It appears that others have similar ideas … as I found out when I read the latest FastCompany magazine.
Around the globe, technology companies and local governments are teaming up to create “smart cities”. The leading example of this type of thinking is New Songdo City in South Korea, where Cisco has become the exclusive supplier of “digital plumbing”. More than simply installing routers and switches, Cisco is expected to wire every square inch of the city with synapses. From the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching through every wall and fixture, it promises this city will “run on information.” Cisco’s control room will be New Songdo’s brain stem.
And that’s just the beginning. No longer content to sell just plumbing, the company is teaming up with Gale, 3M, United Technologies, and the architects of Kohn Pedersen Fox to enter the instant-city business. At a Cisco event near New Songdo last summer, Gale stunned the room by announcing plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. In the spirit of Moore’s Law, he says, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year.
You’ve heard of software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Well, Cisco intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities – water, power, traffic, telephony – into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.
We don’t have the luxury of levelling Wellington and starting from scratch (and wouldn’t want to, given the choice), and don’t have the multi-billion dollar budget that Cisco is playing with, but a lot of the thinking behind their initiatives can be extrapolated and applied to our unique situation. And, of course, cities such as New Songdo are our competition in terms of enticing creative and innovative individuals and companies to live and work here …
Other smarter cities supporters include Nokia and MITs Senseable City Lab, as well as IBM (who are focusing their efforts on how to retrofit existing infrastructure to cope with new paradigms).
