NAIOP RR considers predicted ‘smart cities’ of the future
RIO RANCHO — Working without a crystal ball, architect/ planner Dale Dekker enthralled the NAIOP Rio Rancho Roundtable meeting during a recent Thursday morning with a look into the future.
Many attendees could be considered area “movers and shakers,” including Rio Rancho Mayor Gregg Hull and Rio Rancho Public Schools
Superintendent Sue Cleveland.
Dekker, of Dekker Perich Sabatini — an architecture, interior design, planning, engineering and landscape architecture firm, with offices in Albuquerque and a few other Southwestern cities — is considered an expert in the topic.
Among the information about “smart cities” emitted by Dekker:
■Two million people globally move to cities every week.
■Sixty-five percent of workers in 2035 will have jobs that don’t exist today.
■Half of all jobs in 2025 will be done by machines, including computers.
■Albuquerque is ranked second among 10 best cities for driverless cars in the future.
■The iPhone 7 has more processing power than the entire NASA organization had in 1969, when Apollo 11 reached the moon.
■The next telecommunication era will include satellites in clusters 1,000 miles above Earth, not 27,000 miles above it, to aid in global communications.
■The “Internet of Things” will connect all the sensors — an estimated 45 trillion of them; and
Among the benefits of “smart cities” are improved safety and transportation, a reduced environmental footprint, efficient public utilities, an improved workforce and related data, and new economicdevelopment opportunities.
“Smart cities are about efficiency,” was Dekker’s gist. “It’s gonna be cool.”
“This is really powerful information — and we’ve got to get it out there,” remarked longtime NAIOP member Jeanie Springer Knight.
RRPS spokeswoman Beth Pendergrass and NAIOP member said, “It’s frightening and it’s exciting.”