Underpinning any smart city – in fact, any city that will thrive in the future – is smart data. Data helps everyone, from individual citizens to city planners, make informed, intelligent and evidence-based decisions. It allows the development of new products and services and creates a new market for creative and digital industries to exploit. Data rich cities will be best placed to create that market.
Cities need to invest now in the infrastructure that will ‘harvest’ data they can provide. ‘Dumb’ cities will be left behind as those with high quality, fine granulated data will be attractive locations in which to do business.
Good data means lower risk investments – if you can predict with greater accuracy how a city responds to external effects, such as a prolonged period of hot weather, or through a football tournament, or when congestion is high on the road network, you can provide, with greater certainty, solutions to those circumstances that have value to customers.
Whilst investing in instrumentation to gather that harvest of data cities should exploit the data already available to them. Some already exists and is freely available. The UK’s Knowledge Transfer Network is promoting what is already available ahead of a formal launch of a call in the autumn – you can see some short videos online now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxlnivuEFDA&feature=share#!
China recognises this and has launched 9 smart city pilots – they are Taiyuan in Shanxi, Guangzhou in Guangdong, Xuzhou and Wuxi in Jiangsu, Linyi and Zibo in Shandong, Zhengzhou in Henan, Chongqing, and Huhan in Hubei. Every pilot city will invest more than 36 million yuan ($5.8 million) in the program each year. Like the KTN, it’s led by the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation which unveiled its Smart City program on Tuesday with the first nine selected pilot cities. Li Weisen, deputy director of the administration, believes the program will trigger a potential market of more than 30 billion yuan ($4.8 billion).
Alongside this, I have just read a great piece on the value of using geographical information systems – http://www.ubmfuturecities.com/author.asp?doc_id=525581&f_src=UBMFutureCities_theurbanizer written by Mary Jander, Managing Editor, UBM’s Future Cities. It advocates the investment in GIS such that cities remain resilient through being smarter and, ultimately, more sustainable.
Sustainable Smart Cities 