Can SA embrace ‘cities of the future’ for growth?
Upgrading to smarter towns will bring enormous benefits — not least of which will be reduced traffic congestion
Smart cities are always depicted as futuristic havens with shiny skyscrapers, flying cars, intelligent robots and the odd alien. In reality, they are less sci-fi but no less game-changing.
Given that most people already live in cities – and the few smart cities built from scratch around the world are slowly gaining traction – what we understand as a smart city might start as simply noteworthy upgrades to our home towns.
The first wave of this future starts with self-driving cars. We’ll soon see more of them, but in limited environments like highways, where the parameters are less complex. A typical suburban road, particularly in SA, is awash with hazards for autonomous vehicles to identify — from pedestrians to cyclists and the inevitable mother with a pram. A highway only has other cars and is within a clearly defined space (with helpful road markings and warnings about when not to overtake).
But what if the entire city had a grid of smart cameras these autonomous cars could tap into? That grid could also be used for other traffic-control measures, including a real-time database of available parking. The days of driving your electric BMW into town for a meeting and wasting half an hour looking for parking will be gone. In the smart city, not only will your car be autonomously driving you there, it will be able to drive itself to find parking or operate as an Uber-like taxi if you’ve bought into a communal model of car ownership. As much as the technology itself will change, so will the business models that underpin it.
A few years ago, BMW presented this exact scenario at MWC Barcelona.
The average internal-combustion car has tens of thousands of parts, while a Tesla has one tenth as many — partly because it doesn’t have a gas-guzzling engine.
But electric cars have one key limitation: they don’t have a long range, certainly not the smaller models likely to be owned by families. The 600km trip to Durban from Joburg is possible, as there are already supercharging facilities along the way — but it still takes an hour or two to “fill” an electric car.
In that case, BMW envisages a model in which you include in your car purchasing deal that you use an SUV for a driving vacation, and an electric car in the city.
would need a fast data connection to give real-time data and video, which is where the much-hyped 5G network comes in. To transmit that much data from the camera to the network then to a car, the city of the future will need a data network of the future.
Barcelona has a test 5G network, built by Huawei, that demonstrated this concept. I was able to see streaming video from multiple cars — as I would were I an emergency response chief watching firemen fighting a fire.
There are other things this nextgeneration network could do: imagine being able to stream video from drones hovering over football games, or change cameras to
Still, those cameras
behind the net for penalties. These scenarios are, in some cases, already happening.
That sort of football streaming was trialled last year by Germany’s Bundesliga — offering various packages based on your device. If you’re on your smartphone while travelling home, you will be offered a highlights package which isn’t in the highest resolution, so that it doesn’t blow your data cap.
In Singapore, smart traffic cameras change traffic flow during the day and route it, depending on how many cars there are, thus reducing congestion.
As cities look to upgrade themselves, the easiest and swiftest way to make a city smarter and more productive is to offer its citizens free Wifi. Free connectivity is an economic enabler that uplifts local economies. It means stores can advertise online and set up e-com
merce portals, while commuters can be warned if their bus is running late (this is already commonplace in punctual Scandinavia). And electric self-driving buses are being tried out in some of the more sophisticated cities.
As many countries, including SA, look back to the sort of infrastructure programmes which boosted post-war economies, there are others countries looking forward to upgrading,
Improving urban services through digital transformation is a huge industry, says Arturo Bris, professor of finance at the International Institute for Management Development.
“But the idea of a ‘ smart city’ encompasses more than the clever application of technology in urban areas,” says Bris.
“That technology must also contribute to making cities more sustainable, and improving the quality of life for people who live there.”
Prof Sylvie Albert, from the Faculty of Business & Economics at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, argues that “cities need to focus on intelligent, collaborative and community-orientated approaches to smart city planning.”
The legacy of apartheid spatial planning, which moved so many South Africans far away from their jobs, could be meaningfully addressed too. Imagine a network of cameras or autonomous electric drones monitoring railway lines for cable thieves. Heat-sensitive equipment would sense criminals approaching the tracks and warn security staff, who could apprehend them before damage is done.
Albert says the challenge for policymakers is how to create an “intelligent collaborative planning process”, given the rapid pace of technological change and sustainable development needs on one hand, and the reluctance of people to change their everyday lives.
Maybe, before SA embraces the “smart city” idea, it needs smart city management that isn’t locked in factional political squabbles. Maybe if they put the citizens first … now that would be a smart idea with real promise.