future cities essay

CITY GUIDES

CITIES OF THE FUTURE

By 2050 the world’s population is expected to reach 9.8 billion. Nearly 70 percent of this booming population—

6.7 billion people — is projected to live in urban areas. We asked experts at the architectural and urban planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) how they would design a city of the future, educated by lessons of the past and anticipating challenges of the future. Their vision is articulated on five scales, from surrounding ecosystems to building interiors, and follows 10 key principles:

Designing to scale: Urban hubs

In a densely developed hub, sustainable land use within and outside its borders helps people thrive by providing water, food,

and recreation. High-capacity transit reduces emissions and speeds commute times.

Sponge city

Green roofs

Solar panels and roof gardens are common atop buildings, encouraging sustainable energy and small-scale farming.

Rainwater cleansing

In lieu of gutters, bioswales (absorbent rain gardens)

and pools collect and filter rainwater for reuse.

Social transit

Regional high-speed rail stations become centres of business and social activities.

Urban farms and gardens

New communities and developments take advantage of advanced hydroponic technology for urban farming.

Designing to scale: smart buildings

Buildings incorporate natural elements and are largely modular, leading to faster production with less waste. Spaces can quickly transform to meet changing housing, industrial, or business needs.

Sky gardens

Interspersed green spaces promote natural airflow

in buildings while providing shade

and social areas.

Solar walls and windows

Solar panels incorporated into all surfaces of the building’s facade during construction capture the sun’s energy.

The low glow

Low-rise buildings allow

more light and air to reach

the ground, promoting

health and well-being.

Green streets

Water filtration, environ­mental monitoring, and native landscaping are part of the streetscape.

Designing to scale: social interiors

Shared spaces and amenities increase human interaction and allow for smaller and micro-size homes. Community-wide activities aim to foster a sense of belonging and social equality.

Room to breathe

With fewer cars outside and more plants inside, air quality is improved and airborne particulates are reduced.

Intergenerational housing

Small and family-size units, as well as easy access to services and transit, welcome a range of ages in one building.

A future city for all

Future cities are fully accessible to the disabled, giving all residents unfettered access to goods and services.

Recycling and reuse

Used items—those that aren’t already biodegradable—are more easily reused or recycled in dense communities.

Designing to scale:

self-contained neighborhoods

Neighborhoods are designed to meet

most daily needs within a 10-minute walk. Varied housing types draw mixed-income communities; people of all economic

strata can live close to work.

Wetland restoration

The world has lost

one-third of its wetlands since 1970. Future cities preserve and restore all that remain.

Clean energy

Lighter and cheaper bladeless wind turbines on building rooftops provide supplementary energy.

Drone commuting

Remotely programmed

drones become large and powerful enough to transport people within the city.

Flexible buildings

Modular interiors can be “hot swapped” for other uses in response to new economic conditions or innovations.

Underground farming

Soil-free hydroponic farms grow produce under high-­efficiency LED lights, directly beneath homes and offices.

Strategic landscaping

Only local plant species are used in a gardening style known as xeriscaping, which requires little or no irrigation.

Designing to scale: Resilient regions

Future cities are composed of a series of urban hubs: dense developments connected by high-speed rail. The regional ecology dictates where and how hubs grow; city centers move inland, away from rising seas.

Biomorphic Urbanism

From regions to rooms, SOM’s designs flow from one idea: development and infrastructure complement and are shaped by ecology—letting nature regenerate and support rapidly growing urban populations.

Sustainable agriculture is developed close to city hubs to limit transport.

Scaled transit

The region is connected by local rail, bus lines, and high-speed trains capable of reaching 600 miles an hour.

Connected employment

Compact city centers connected by high-speed rail knit together employment hubs and reduce urban sprawl.

In line with biologist E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth Project, 50 percent of the ecosystem and its waters are protected.

JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF. ART & SOURCE: SKIDMORE, OWINGS & MERRILL (SOM)

By 2050 the world’s population is expected to reach 9.8 billion. Nearly 70 percent of this booming population— 6.7 billion people — is projected to live in urban areas. We asked experts at the architectural and urban planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) how they would design a city of the future, educated by lessons of the past and anticipating challenges of the future. Their vision is articulated on five scales, from surrounding ecosystems to building interiors, and follows 10 key principles:

Principles of

City Design

The future city is designed around

natural features and forces, protecting wildlife habitat and

natural resources. Based on a unified vision for the region, the city is compact and dense to limit impacts on the ecosystem.

Protecting upland water systems and rigorous collection and cleansing of stormwater improve water quality. Wetland restoration and sponge-city measures revive habitats and protect against flooding and sea-level rise.

In the city of the future, energy is 100 percent renewable. Enough power is produced within

or close to the city for

it to be self-sufficient.

Area buildings share energy resources, generating as much energy as they consume.

Waste becomes

a resource to produce energy or alternative material. Landfills and abandoned industrial areas are gradually converted to other purposes after soil remediation. Wastewater is treated for irrigation or human consumption.

According to SOM’s design, all parks and infrastructure allow water to percolate through soil to recharge the water table. Such “sponge city” measures are already being tested in Shanghai.

Designing to scale: SMART BUILDINGS

Wind turbine

Sustainability practices are mandated across the life cycle of a product, from food production to delivery and disposal. Global standards are established for organic farming and animal treatment; most produce is locally sourced.

in buildings while providing shade and social areas.

Traveling in the city of the future is more affordable, safe, and convenient because of automated technology and high-speed rail. Fewer personal automobiles are on the road and more pedestrian space is available.

Residential

In the densely populated and diverse city of the future, historical heritage is preserved and celebrated.

Recreation, arts, and entertainment can be shared globally through virtual and augmented reality.

The city of the future is designed for accessibility and safety as more people populate urban areas. Residents have healthier lives with more streamlined access to nature, services, and automated technology.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Buildings are constructed more efficiently and include technology that can improve the quality of natural resources such as water, soil, and air. Infrastructure is designed for pedestrian access with limited roads for cars.

The economy of the future city must work in tandem with policies that safeguard ecological sustainability. People adapt to more flexible working hours as artificial intelligence and automation become more widespread.

This is what the cities of the future could look like

Social and environmental issues are now prevalent in futuristic city design. Image:  REUTERS/Tim Chong

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Paul cureton.

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Stay up to date:, cities and urbanization.

• Visions for the cities of the future have often been based around the potential of future technology.
• But, recent research suggests its important to consider issues from sustainability to tackling social inequalities.
• These projects could give a window into our lives in the future.

Imagining future cities has long been a favourite activity for architects, artists and designers . Technology is often central in these schemes – it appears as a dynamic and seemingly unstoppable force, providing a neat solution to society’s problems.

But our recent research has suggested that we need to significantly rethink the way we imagine future cities , and move our focus from an overarching technological vision to other priorities, such as environmental sustainability and the need to tackle social inequalities.

We need to answer questions about what can be sustained and what cannot, where cities can be located and where they cannot, and how we might travel in and between them.

The coronavirus pandemic has further reinforced this need. It has profoundly disrupted what we thought we knew about cities . It has further sharpened existing inequalities and brought about major challenges for how we physically live and work together.

Have you read?

How teaching 'future resilient' skills can help workers adapt to automation, why dockless bikes are the symbol of our future cities, to build cities fit for the future, we need to think differently.

The future – yesterday

The architect and influential urban planner Eugène Hénard was arguably the first to publicly discuss “future cities” in Europe during his 1910 address to the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. His vision anticipated the technological advances of the future, such as aerial transportation. This approach, prioritising technology, was also evoked in cinema in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis .

It was also mirrored by architects such as Le Corbusier in projects such as the 1924 Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) . In this work, Le Corbusier developed his concept of the city as a symmetrical, regulated, and highly centralised landscape.

Such an approach can be traced through many subsequent visions for cities, portrayed as the physical embodiment of technological prowess.

A new focus

But rather than simply focusing on technology to shape our future, we also need to look at it through social and global lenses. These alternative approaches are increasingly urgent. To provide a safe and sustainable world for present and future populations, we need to think beyond “solutionism”. This is the idea that every problem we have has a technological fix.

An identifiable shift in how future cities are being conceived, designed and delivered concerns the people involved in these processes. This ranges from localised projects to global initiatives. For example, the Every One Every Day project in Barking and Dagenham in London aims to make practical participation in neighbourhood projects inclusive and available to all residents. On a much wider scale, the New Urban Agenda global vision by the United Nations’ Habitat programme, meanwhile, calls for more inclusive and sustainable urbanisation and settlement planning.

We may want our future cities to prioritise environmental renewal. The Green Machine , a design for a future city by architect Stephane Malka, moves like a mobile oasis, replenishing desert rather than causing more environmental degradation. This future city collects water through air condensation and uses solar power to drive itself over arid landscapes.

These are ploughed and injected with a mixture of water, natural fertiliser and cereal seeds as it passes. Agricultural greenhouses along with livestock farms support the city’s inhabitants and supplement local populations. The project is scaleable and replicable in relation to the number of people needed to be accommodated.

Climate change brings with it the possibility of dramatic sea level rise. Post Carbon City-State , a project by architecture and urban design group Terreform, imagines a submerged New York. The project proposes that, rather than investing in mitigation efforts, the East and Hudson River are allowed to flood parts of Manhattan.

The new city is rebuilt in its surrounding rivers. Former streets become snaking arteries of liveable spaces, embedded with renewable energy resources, green vehicles, and productive nutrient zones. This replaces the current obsession with private car ownership towards more ecological forms of public transport.

Both these projects emphasise responses to the impacts of climate change over technological innovation for its own sake.

Alternatively, the cities of the future may prioritise equality. This is illustrated by spatial design agency 5th Studio’s Stour City, The Enabling State .

This is a future city for 60,000 inhabitants, envisioned along the River Stour and the Port of Harwich in East Anglia, England. Based around the urbanisation and intensification of existing rail and port infrastructure, it features initiatives such as waste to power generation in order to support a viable, low-impact city, with priorities including affordable housing for all.

Imagining these cities helps us understand how we want our future lives to look. But we must open up the opportunity to conceptualise these futures to a wider and more diverse set of people. By doing so, we will be better positioned to rethink the shifts required to safeguard our health, that of other species and the planet we share. This is the significance of visions for tomorrow’s world – and why we need to create new ones today.

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• Smart Cities
• Sustainability

The City of the Future: This is How Cities are Becoming Smart

Cities are evolving, and innovation plays a huge role in this transformation. Almost 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers learned the secrets of selective breeding and agriculture and managed to grow their food. For the first time in history, humans found a way to survive without moving to a different territory to find new food sources. And that’s how everything started.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that modern cities as we know them appeared. New technologies deployed on a mass scale allowed these vast communities to grow faster than ever before.

Innovation has always been vital to improve and prevent communities from collapsing. Cities need sanitation systems, properly-built homes, and secure public transportation. And the list goes on forever. Even if we’ve evolved a lot since hunter-gatherers changed the course of history, there’s still much left to be done.

What is the future of cities?

As cities become increasingly populated and resources more and more sparse, cities need to focus on achieving smart growth . There’s no time for it to be a thing of the future - the future of cities is now.

Thankfully, many cities are already focusing on becoming smart and sustainable cities by implementing practices such as the circular economy, and smart mobility, helping reduce carbon footprint in urban areas.

Check out this short video of our action-packed Travel & Smart Cities EXPO 3 in Vienna, which brings fresh perspectives to the innovation landscape in the CEE region.

The city of the future: What are the challenges?

What will the city of the future look like? There is not one good answer.

Cities are made by the people inhabiting them, and people are profoundly affected by culture and the city itself. Thus, two cities facing the same problem might need two different solutions.

And that’s the main challenge encountered when developing a smart city. A smart city is not just a city that uses cutting-edge technology. It’s a city that carefully studies the habits and the needs of its citizens and tries to fix them in the most suitable way.

Image source .

But even though the solutions might differ, s ome main challenges affect most cities:

Smart mobility for the city of the future

Traffic consistently ranks as one of the main problems affecting cities. If there’s ever such a thing as the perfect smart city, smart mobility will play a key role. But let’s clarify something before anyone gets confused.

How 21st-Century Planning is Different

Governments have always tried to foresee potential problems and fix those already happening. However, the approach to solving these problems is radically different. For example, some decades ago, the solution to busy highways was to add a new lane.

Simple, right? Well, maybe not so much.

What seemed like an excellent way to reduce congestion brought, in fact, poor results. Adding a new lane didn’t reduce traffic, instead, it attracted new drivers who didn’t use that route. Cities ended up with equally congested roads (only, this time, they had an extra lane full of vehicles.)

The city of the future will face problems differently. Those trying to create a smart city should look at the main challenges of mobility from different points of view and ask questions like: Do we need that many cars? Should we own cars, or should we share them ? Would it be preferable to have autonomous vehicles ? The possibilities are endless, and the answers vary depending on the city.

So, back to mobility.

Some of the main elements that will shape mobility in the city of the future are:

• Shared Mobility : Ride-hailing services have been growing steadily for years. And every indication suggests that they will keep doing so. The city of the future is, without a doubt, a city where people will share transportation methods such as cars, motorbikes, or scooters. Why own a car when there’s such a thing as Mobility As A Service or MaaS?
• Electric vehicles : Electric cars are becoming more popular every year, but cities have a long way to go until they’re fully prepared to “host” these types of vehicles. The number of charging stations available is still low, and grid capacity needs to be improved (nowadays, it still needs to be fully prepared to charge vehicles such as electric buses.) These are some of the problems that get in the way of the mass adoption of electric cars, and cities will need to face them soon.
• Traffic Management : Traffic is one of the main problems for urban areas worldwide. Fortunately, new solutions are coming up daily to try to fix this problem (or at least mitigate its consequences). Cities are developing systems to try to address this issue. Pittsburgh, for example, deployed a video and radar to analyze traffic in 50 intersections and adjusts signals in real-time. This AI-based system has reduced travel times by 26% and vehicle emissions by 21%.

Buildings in cities of the future aren’t just buildings

Nowadays, 50% of the total human population lives in cities. Studies predict that 35 years from now, that percentage will rise to 75%. That means we need to find a home for 3 billion people in just 35 years.

And, if we want future cities to be smart cities, only some buildings are good enough. We need our skyline to be made up of buildings that are, amongst other things:

• Sustainable : The buildings where we work and live create almost 50% of CO2 emissions on the planet. Smart buildings are designed with sustainability in mind. This means low-energy houses, natural materials (like cork, clay, or recycled paper), renewable energy use, or waste reduction.
• Secure : We’re discussing buildings with integrated fire prevention systems or intrusion and access control - Protecting the building’s systems from hackers is also essential.
• Cost-efficient : There are many ways in which a smart building helps its inhabitants save money. It detects occupancy patterns and adapts to how much energy it consumes. Cooling and ventilation are regulated automatically. Sensors can see potential maintenance problems and stop them before they happen. And so much more.

IoT: The core technology upon which a city in the future is built

Without the Internet of Things, smart cities wouldn’t exist. These intelligent, interconnected cities rely on data collection for everything . And that is what IoT sensors do: they collect data and feed it into a platform to be analyzed.

In the city of the future, devices must be able to communicate with each other so that decisions can be made. Authorities must work hand in hand with network operators to position several connectivity points throughout the city to ensure proper communication.

The cities of the future will be sustainable (and this is not an option)

Sustainability is key in the development of any smart city, and it’s related to other challenges:

• Waste management : Smart cities need to face different problems related to waste management, such as overfilled trash bins, unoptimized truck routes, or the need to separate mixed materials for recycling. Smart waste management can help solve these kinds of issues. Sensors attached to trash bins can measure fill level, send an automatic alert if it reaches the limit, and optimize trucks’ collection routes.
• Energy : “ The city of the future will definitely be energy-efficient. It might even produce energy instead of consuming it. The main challenge is convincing companies and governments to invest more in this area, " said Daniyar Tanatov’s, Partner Account Manager at Spaceti. Cities can produce more energy than they consume by using turbines, solar panels or even solar walls - buildings with solar panels incorporated into their facade.
• Working hours : Unexpected, maybe? Current working hours vastly exceed what we could consider sustainable, concluded research conducted by the think tank Autonomy . Fewer working hours would mean less commuting, fewer products manufactured, and fewer resources used. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence could help make the future of work sustainable.

The city of the future: Who is behind it?

Startups play a crucial role when it comes to finding new solutions to build the city of the future.

Smart cities' challenges are endless, and public institutions and large corporations can’t come up with all the solutions we need. Some of the most brilliant (and passionate) minds are in startups like Gaia Smart Cities, Recycle Smart, and Smart Air. For corporations, these startups are a threat but also an opportunity.

At Plug and Play’s Smart Cities accelerator , we match large corporations with top-tier startups that are changing the world as we know it. Together, they’ll build the cities of the future. Want to know more? Join our platform today.

Building the City of the Future

Read the rest of the collection..

Mobility, IoT, sustainability, and more. Smart cities will revolutionize the way we live.

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• Corporate Innovation

9 Smart Cities Startups That Are Reshaping Cities As We Know Them

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Humanity Might Have Been Born to Live in Cities

Paleo-style sensibilities aside, earth’s future hinges on the success of our urban spaces.

From Machu Picchu to the Mediterranean, humans have invented and reinvented cities, over and over again. Courtesy of Poswiecie / Pixabay .

by Greg Woolf | April 26, 2021

Sometimes it feels like we made a wrong turn a long way back.

Perhaps it was the shift to fossil fuels and scientific medicine that led us to this place, a population of nearly 8 billion crowded onto a warming planet, a terrestrial species melting the ice caps so there is less and less land to inhabit or to grow food.

Or maybe it happened further back, with our jump down the food chain to become growers and eaters of grass (and maize, and rice, and sorghum). Agriculture started the slow demographic explosion of the last 10 millennia, pressing on biodiversity, and bringing on the sixth extinction. The anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott makes a strong case in his book Against the Grain that the shift to agriculture also ushered in slavery, oppressive states, and social inequality.

But it would be a mistake to see life before agriculture as the answer to our problems. Proponents of the “Paleo diet” promise personal wellbeing if we only return to pre-agricultural gastronomy. They usually stop short of suggesting we go big on protein by scavenging on the kills of big cats and hyenas, an important food source in some periods of prehistory.

So how does city life fit into all this? Is urban life another wrong turn? Should we return to the countryside—ideally, a bit of it with decent broadband and a farmers market within cycling distance? Not quite.

The spread of cities over the last 6,000 years is one of the epic themes of human history. It is well documented, since so many societies that built cities also developed writing systems. It is a global phenomenon—not because cities originated in one place and spread out over the planet, but because people invented cities, out of nothing, so many times. Ancient humans congregated and built in the valleys of Mexico, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and north China, and also in the Sahel region south of the Sahara, in the Amazon Basin, in what are now the southeastern states of the U.S., in the Andes, in the forest of southeast Asia. People probably built cities in yet-unknown other places, too, where LiDAR and satellite imaging have not yet found them.

Cities followed agriculture in all these regions. At first, they varied widely from one place to another. There were low-density cities like those of the Maya, and tightly packed hill towns; instant cities built at the command of an Assyrian, Chinese, or Roman emperor, and others that grew slowly out of collective efforts like the settlements of the Etruscans. Modern cities, with their convergent architectures of steel and concrete, fiber optics and tarmac, are much more similar to each other than were the many seeds from which they have grown.

Today about a quarter of the people of the world live in cities of more than one million people: that share is growing faster than the global population. Growth has not been smooth, but it is now irreversible. The landscapes and biodiversity needed for gathering and hunting are long gone, and could never sustain today’s global population. We cannot turn our backs on farming or on cities. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a human future that is not more urban than ours, unless it’s a dystopian world founded on some species-wide catastrophe, like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs. Is such a colossal cull plausible? Even a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, global deaths add up to less than 0.4 percent of the world’s population. Could anything less than an asteroid strike or a super volcano explosion derail our urban journey now?

These doomsday scenarios aside, an increasingly urban future seems assured. But there is no need to be alarmed by it. One reason not to consign cities to the trash can of some of our species’ worst ideas is that we have turned out to be very well adapted to live in them. Human beings move easily in cities’ complex three-dimensional topography. We are adept at building social groups with strangers as well as kith and kin, we are tolerant of the new (and often nutritionally impoverished) diets that cities impose on their inhabitants, and we combine a sense of local territory (our homes, our neighborhoods) with a capacity for exploring and mapping new spaces that is far superior to that of our nearest animal relatives. We might have been born to live in cities.

We were not, of course, designed for city life. Evolution is the opposite of movement by design—it’s a lurching blindly into the future, through one happy accident after another (or at least, by following paths that are less disastrous than the alternatives). Our species has been around for some 300 million years, and we owe most of our city-friendly features to evolutionary processes that go back even further. For instance, our sociality, linked to the development of our frontal cortex, is pure primate. Our dietary flexibility probably developed in environments where it was never certain exactly which foods would be available. All this added up to an awesome potential for living in cities. We are not the only species with this potential. Mice, rats, bats, and house sparrows also do pretty well in concrete jungles. The difference is, we build cities. They have colonized them.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson pointed out, in The Social Conquest of Earth , that other species too have taken advantage of the chance to live in dense communities. Some (but not all) bees and wasps, coral polyps and termites, and even naked mole rats have come to live what Wilson called eusocial lives, in which social cooperation becomes central. These species are not closely related—not to each other, and not to us—but they have one crucial thing in common. They all make something like a nest. Getting the most out of a social existence, argues Wilson, required cohabitation. Big brains need crowds.

Cities are our nests, so natural to the human animal that we find it difficult to imagine how we ever got on without them. How did we look after our big-brained but slow-developing children when we had no homes, nor enough neighbors or grandparents to care for the kids when we went foraging? How did our astonishing capacity to make tools and artifacts operate when we were so often on the move? If we wanted to develop technologies that were not all small, light, and easy to carry) we had to have a base. Camps and temporary homes must have done some service, and villages were good nests for a while, but only cities have made it possible for human societies to specialize, so everyone lived near a smith or a doctor or a priest, and we could make the most out of our talent for cooperation.

Cities are a new experiment, in evolutionary terms. Probably in the first thousand years or so there were many failures; archaeologists are beginning to map more clearly the urban civilizations that collapsed like so many houses of cards. But we got better at it. Most ancient cities were small just because it was so difficult to provision large ones in time of crisis. The first city builders often concentrated their energy on the house of gods and kings, and on defensive walls. Later generations turned their attention to water supply and drainage, and to constructing roads and canals, granaries and reservoirs. Fire and earthquakes ravaged many ancient cities until architects learned to build in stone and brick, to plan cities for safety, to build resilient structures.

Some of those cities turned out to be so resilient they are still with us today. Athens is maybe 3,500 years old; Rome and Istanbul, nearly 3,000 years old. Even medieval capitals such as Cairo and Tunis are close by ancient predecessors in Memphis and Carthage. Once we found good places to nest, we often stayed.

Modern cities are far more elaborate of course. Few ancient cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Today there are more than 30 cities of more than 10 million. We have learned to pack our nests more densely, piling our homes high. Even more important have been improvements in our cities’ nervous and circulatory systems (electricity, gas, the internet)—the channels by which food and water enter the nest, and waste is removed from it. The modern megacity depends on fast transportation that allows citizens to live far from where they work. These technologies are different from those employed in Tenochtitlan, Alexandria and Baghdad, but the principles are the same.

For the last few thousand years, our societies have mostly been ruled from cities, and our key infrastructures have been designed for urban populations—a state of affairs that holds great promise for humanity and the natural world. Done properly, city life is the most environmentally friendly way to live. Waste disposal, sanitation and recycling is easier to organize in cities than in the countryside. Our generation will see the end of private cars powered by fossil fuels. Already many city dwellers use public transport for most of their travel needs. Electric cars and buses are city friendly as well as environmentally friendly.

Romantics have been calling for us to go back to nature ever since the Industrial Revolution began. But the sums don’t add up. There is not enough “nature” out there to support us all. The kinds of lives we want now—high tech, highly connected, materially rich—work better in cities. And it is better for the planet that we don’t try and live this way in what wilderness is left.

We have not arrived at the city of the future yet, but it’s early days. Each generation our nests get better and better. Cities will continue to be better connected, greener and healthier, and that is all good news. So, city life: not one of our worst ideas, then, after all.

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Smart Cities, Future Cities, Sustainable Cities

Currently, the Earth is home to over 7.4 billion people, with over half of those living in an urban setting and using 80% of the planet’s resources. By 2050, the population is forecast to be just under 10 billion people, with 80% of that population expected to be urbanised. 1 The challenge that every city is facing is how to best deliver the resources and services needed to ensure a thriving population and good economic performance. For many, the most obvious answer is to use new and evolving information and communication technologies (ICT) to enable data analysis and sharing between delivery channels. This will, in turn, allow local authorities and service providers to monitor and control resource delivery in real time and proactively address needs. The popular term for a city that takes this approach is “smart city”. But the experts and visionaries will tell you that creating a truly smart city is about more than adopting ICT solutions; it’s also about sustainability and quality of life.

The definition of a smart city

There is no universally accepted definition for what makes a city a smart city. While narrower definitions focus on ICT, broader definitions take a more holistic approach to city planning. One of the most thorough definitions comes from the SAC, the general working group of Chinese National Smart City Standardisation:

Smart Cities: a new concept and a new model, which applies to the new generation of information technologies such as the internet of things, cloud computing, big data and space/geographical information integration, to facilitate the planning, construction, management and smart services of cities. Developing Smart Cities can benefit synchronized development, industrialization, informationization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization and sustainability of cities development. The main target for developing Smart Cities is to pursue: convenience of the public services, delicacy of city management, liveability of living environment, smartness of infrastructures, long term effectiveness of network security. – as translated from the Joint Directive Document published by either ministries of the Chinese central government and taken from the ISO/IEC JTC 1 information technology document entitled ' Smart Cities Preliminary Report 2014 '.

One of the shortest and most succinct comes from the BSI's PAS 180 Smart Cities Vocabulary :

Smart Cities is a term denoting the effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens.

Other key definitions include:

A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology (ICT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets – the city’s assets include, but not limited to, local departments information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, and other community services. - Wikipedia

A developed urban area that creates sustainable economic development and high quality of life by excelling in multiple key areas; economy, mobility, environment, people, living, and government. Excelling in these key areas can be done so through strong human capital, social capital, and/or ICT infrastructure. - Business Dictionary

[…] ‘smart cities’, when used in a narrow sense, refers to the way Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can improve city functionality, proposing that use of the right hardware, software and technology platforms can solve many or most urban development challenges. However, a broader conceptualisation of smart cities – more commonly considered by academic and policy user groups, rather than corporates - places emphasis on good city governance, empowered city leaders, smart or ‘intelligent citizens’ and investors in tandem with the right technology platform. – What are Future Cities? Origins, Meanings and Uses

[…] the concept of a Smart City goes way beyond the transactional relationships between citizen and service provider. It is essentially enabling and encouraging the citizen to become a more active and participative member of the community, for example, providing feedback on the quality of services or the state of roads and the built environment, adopting a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle, volunteering for social activities or supporting minority groups. Furthermore, citizens need employment and “Smart Cities” are often attractive locations to live, work and visit. – Smart Cities: Background Paper, October 2013, Department for Business Innovation and Skills

Smart cities and ICT

From a technology standpoint, a smart city relies on embedded sensors and devices to gather data and then share that information via a combined wired and wireless communications system. Information from transportation systems, roadways, power and water systems, buildings, and other parts of the built environment is fed into software that analyses and organises it for use by local authorities, service providers, businesses and citizens to enhance services, address problems, and tap into information. For instance, smart power and water grids not only improve service delivery reliability and efficiency, they also help customers control their usage and lower their bills. Smart transportation systems optimise citywide travel by providing things like traffic mapping, public transport arrival and departure times, and taxi locations. This information is relayed via a variety of means, including tablet and smartphone applications. Essential to the creation of a smart city is a good broadband network. Fibre optic is currently the fastest type of connection available; however, the most robust network combines fibre optic with cable and wireless networking to ensure broadband availability is as wide-reaching as possible, with the focus for fibre optic initially being in key areas like emergency response centres, learning centres, government centres, research and technical institutions, and key business areas. Once a broadband network is established, the next step is to ensure that the city’s infrastructure and spaces are fitted with embedded systems that can provide real time data. Those systems then need to be interconnected to form an integrated ICT infrastructure. Finally, eservices and web-based applications need to be developed to ensure the right information gets to the right end users. Also key to smart city ICT success is transparency. Government information, in particular, needs to be open and available to the public. The OECD provides five reasons open government data is essential to the future of our cities:

1. It improves transparency, facilitating accountability, responsiveness and democratic control. 2. Citizens feel empowered, and that supports engagement and participation on a social level. 3. Empowered citizens become empowered civil servants. 4. It encourages innovative thinking which, in turn, creates an increase in service value and efficiency. 5. As the result of all of the above, the city performs better economically. 2

Smart cities and sustainability

While the foundation of a smart city is its use of technology to enhance city performance and optimise service delivery, a major factor in what makes a city a smart city is its level of sustainability. A truly smart city uses technology to become selfaware, which enables informed decision making and facilitates positive change. This includes things like tracking weather conditions and measuring water supply and consumption to efficiently manage use and tracking waste patterns to create more efficient recycling programmes.

Key elements of a sustainable smart city include:

• Offering a sustainable agricultural ecosystem and plentiful access to raw materials
• Favouring efficient building design, sustainable energy systems, green transportation, and green living
• Providing zero footprint water consumption through low and high tech means (rainwater collection, recycling systems)
• Exhibiting an awareness of its own context and local impact
• Resiliency to long-term changes 3

Smart cities and quality of life

One of the most glaring problems facing future cities is how to make sure that the fundamental needs of its growing population are met. At its most basic level, a city needs to provide its people with uninterrupted access to power, water, food, transportation and healthcare in both normal (blue sky) conditions and during disruptive events. Through the use of smart city technology and innovation, gathered data can be used to predict system behaviour and foresee problems. This allows the city to better meet population needs consistently, as well as provide additional benefits to enhance quality of life. This includes things like:

• High quality, reliable, superfast broadband network
• Agile transportation systems and interactive bus shelters
• Citywide cloud access and near field communication (NFC)-enhanced digital services
• GPS for bikes and bike route calculators
• Improved public safety
• Cleaner air via cleaner energy sources and the integration of nature into the city’s footprint
• Smart grids to reduce energy consumption, CO 2 emissions, and problem response times
• Energy efficient housing that takes advantage of natural lighting
• Higher quality food through urban agricultural programmes
• Disaster preparedness and proactive response to weather events

Energy innovations of the future

In an interview with Peter De Pauw, Eandis’ head of business development and strategy, Mr De Pauw outlined some of the key areas where innovation in energy technologies are imperative to the future of cities. This included:

• Smart asset management and the use of sustainable materials in service grids to facilitate long term, cost effective performance
• Smart grids and smart meters that provide vital information regarding network performance to facilitate better connection to local, renewable energy sources and allow consumers to monitor and adapt their energy use behaviours
• Better power quality management through energy storage (thermal and electrical)
• District wide heating and cooling in areas where residual energy is created by industry
• Network monitoring, control, and operation to support longer asset lifetimes and lower maintenance needs
• Energy efficient designs for housing and public lighting
• Greener energy systems via renewable, clean energy carriers 4

Challenges faced

Whatever definition a city’s authorities chooses to adopt and work towards, the one element that remains universal is that smart cities are not static cities; there will always be new challenges that require continual innovation and the ability to adapt to conceptualised data. This includes things like:

• Population growth and meeting the needs of an ageing populace
• Increased human mobility and the globalisation of economies, ecologies, risks, demographics
• Geo-political shifts and governance framework changes
• Inequality (social tensions) and insecurity (food, water, energy)
• Developing technologies and climate change 5

At the 2016 Planet Forward Summit held in Washington DC, US government and business (including not-for-profit) leaders talked about specific problems that future US and other world cities faced and proposed possible solutions. This included:

• Relaying a sense of urgency on and correlation of problems that aren’t directly observable. Examples included climate change, water quality, and the impact environmental and sustainability issues have on future economic health.
• Developing and financing a sustainable, rel iable water infrastructure. As in the UK, the US considers water to be a fundamental human right. However, in many US cities, the water systems are no longer capable of handling the necessary load, and this results in hundreds of water main breaks every single day. While solutions considered include raising prices (thus threatening access to a “fundamental human right”) in order to repair and upgrade water systems, the key to a smart city approach is innovation and one planet, holistic thinking. This means considering low cost, low tech solutions as well as higher cost traditional or high tech ones. For instance, to combat water shortages associated with drought without the cost of a major system overhaul, West Palm Beach in Florida gave out rain barrels and low flow fixture vouchers. This falls directly within the remit of smart city thinking.
• Addressing a fail ing public transport system. The primary issue here is the lack of faith that US citizens have in the successful implementation of public projects such as transportation, and similar attitudes can be found within the UK. What is needed, said experts at the Summit, is an integrated approach. People often use more than one type of transportation in their daily commutes, so by recognising that and proposing a transportation system that encourages and supports crosstransportation – including cars – people are more-easily provided with a system that can be tailored to their specific needs.
• Redesigning the urban setting. This is a biggie. As more of the world’s population becomes urbanised and all of our cities fill up even further, how we think of urban design must change. Like with most countries, in the US the trend has always been to grow outward. However, cities like San Francisco (and countries like ours) simply don’t have the land to do so. One solution is to take a page out of Shanghai’s Shanghai Tower, which is a vertical city in its own right, housing everything its occupants need to sustain a good quality of life.
• Producing the food needed to feed 9 billion people. The solution here may very well be urban farming that supports rural farming, which would require a lot of innovation – using high and low tech methods to produce ways of growing more food in smaller spaces. Considering that humans do better when they have access to nature, growing food in the urban environment could also be a way to address happiness and health needs above and beyond filling bellies. 6

The role of standards in UK smart cities

Bsi's smart city standards strategy.

Commissioned by the UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills, BSI’s “The Role of Standards in Smart Cities” takes a look at the role that standards will play in the implementation of smart city stratagems and outlines a standards strategy to aid in that process. Issue 1 of the document was published in June 2013 and Issue 2 was published in August 2014. Key priorities identified within the standards strategy include:

• How local authorities will set smart city objectives and how they will measure progress.
• How best to create a shared understanding between cities in order to “deliver the vision”.
• How information will be captured and shared between services and infrastructure.
• Identifying and managing risks surrounding smart city services.

The Smart City Advisory Group was created to oversee BSI’s response to the above priorities and provide a strategic vision for identifying and addressing city authority needs within the standards programme. 7

The Cities Standards Institute

In addition to the standards strategy, BSI and the Future Cities Catapult have launched The Cities Standards Institute  , which brings together innovators, industry leaders and city authorities in order to best define common challenges and determine best practice solutions. This includes:

• Ensuring standards are relevant to business commercial and technical requirements
• Facilitating purposeful engagement at national and international levels
• Prioritising common problems
• Encouraging smart city standards update
• Creating an active stakeholder network
• Defining international importance areas and incorporating them into standards developed 8

Future of cities series

The Government's Future of cities is a forward looking project that explores the challenges and opportunities in regards to our cities over the next 50 years. The collection was first launched by the Government Office for Science in June 2013 and continues to be updated with new reports, working papers, essays, blog entries and announcements on a regular basis.

The collection has been structured around six primary urban themes:

• Infrastructure
• Governance 9

To read more about the programme and view the report, papers, blogs etc, visit the Future of cities collection on the GOV.uk website. 

European smart city model

The European smart city model was first developed in 2007 as a way to provide a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to profiling and benchmarking cities in Europe for the purpose of sharing innovations and lessons learnt around urban development. The model is currently in its fourth version, and has grown from exploring medium sized cities of 100,000 to 500,000 citizens to those from 300,000 to 1,000,000.

As with the UK Future of cities model, the European smart city model also focuses on six “smart” characteristics working in relationship with each other:

• Environment

The smart-cities.eu website provides more information on benchmarking and the cities explored in particular. Several reports, including the Smart Cities Final Report , are also available for free.

City resilience index

The City Resilience Index has been developed by Arup with support from the Rockerfeller Foundation. A globally-applicable self-assessment tool, the Index allows cities to assess their resilience levels in order to understand and address challenges in a methodical way. To build its assessment, the Index uses 52 key indicators and 12 goals that are categorised into four key areas:

• Population health and wellbeing
• Societal and economic systems
• Physical infrastructure and ecosystems
• Leadership and strategy

Cities contributing to the underlying research include New York, Rio de Janeiro, Capetown, Shanghai, Dubai and Madrid, while Index pilot cities include Arusha, Concepción, Shimla, Hong Kong, and Liverpool.

Standards, publicly available specificiations (PAS) and other documents

Bsi standards focussed on common understanding and a unified approach to smart cities.

• PAS 180:2014 Smart cities. Vocabulary
• PAS 181:2014 Smart city framework. Guide to establishing strategies for smart cities
• PAS 182:2014 Smart city concept model. Guide to establishing a model for data interoperability and communities
• PD 8100:2015 Smart city overview
• PD 8101:2014 Smart cities. Guide to the role of the planning and development process 

Other supporting documentation from BSI

• Mapping research and modelling for smart cities
• Guidance on the economic assessment and funding of smart city initiatives

Other related standards

• BS 8583: 2015 Biodiversity. Guidance for businesses on managing the risks and opportunities
• BS 8900-1:2013 Managing sustainable development of organisations
• PAS 2060 Specification for the demonstration of carbon neutrality
• PAS 55-1:2008 Asset management. Specification for the optimized management of physical assets    

1. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population

2. https://www.eschergroup.com/files/8914/4491/8222/Smart_City_Planning.pdf

3. http://www.triplepundit.com/2015/08/smart-cities-enable-urban-sustainability/#

4. http://www.smart-circle.org/smartcity/uncategorized/smart-cities-offer-an-improved-qualityof-life-a-better-greener-image-and-a-pathway-towards-a-more-sustainable-planet/

5. http://www.ihsti.com/cis/cislogon.asp?accessionno=307487

6. https://www.greenbiz.com/article/5-toughest-challenges-tomorrows-cities-face

7. http://www.bsigroup.com/LocalFiles/en-GB/smart-cities/resources/The-Role-of-Standards-in-Smart-Cities-Issue-2-August-2014.pdf

8. https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/smart-cities/The-Cities-Standards-Institution

9. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/future-of-cities

Bibliography

• Colclough, G. (2016)  Follow us . 
• Contributor, 3 P. (2015) How smart cities enable urban sustainability .
• Five ICT essentials for smart cities A Whitepaper for business (2013)
• Government Office for Science (2016) Future of cities .
• Hower, M. (2016) The 5 toughest challenges tomorrow’s cities face .
• Junuxx, C. of and Commons, W. (2056) World population clock: 7.4 Billion people (2016).
• The cities standards institute (no date)
• The role of standards in smart cities (2014)
• What are future cities? Origins, meanings and uses (2014)

All accessed 26 May 2016.

Useful websites

• 100 Resilient Cities “Helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century”
• The Guardian, Smart Cities “The latest news and comments on smart cities”
• BSI Group Smart city standards and publications Standards and publications addressing the various issues regarding becoming a smart city.
• Smart Cities Council Advisory website promoting the move to smart, sustainable cities.

Recommended reading

• London and Bristol crowned UK’s leading smart cities, Huawei.com
• The innovators: the smart systems driving motorists towards smarter cities, Shane Hickey for the Guardian
• From Davos: Unleashing the power of nature in cities, Mark Tercek for GreenBiz
• 2015 challenges: geopolitical shifts by Joe Sandler Clarke and Anna Leach for the Guardian
• How smart cities enable urban sustainability, 3p Contributor, Triple Pundit

Technical Content Specialist at NBS

As populations grow and urban areas sprawl, light pollution increases. This article explores several types of light pollution, the problems created and a few things to consider when specifying.

What is environmentally conscious building 28 July 2020 | by Megan Groom Within the construction industry, there have been advances in the way we look at how we create buildings. Environmentally conscious building, also known as sustainable construction, is an innovative modern idea introducing more environmentally, socially and economically aware construction methods. Design and Specification Sustainability Smart cities Read more

Seeing the city: Mindfully 08 January 2019 | by NBS In a new series of articles we ask city dwellers - including artists, gamers and sound designers - how their work informs the way they see the built environment Design and Specification Smart cities Read more

Hyperloop: Shaping the future of transport. Part 2 03 January 2019 | by Will Marshall With rapid population growth and increased demand for resources being two of the major challenges the construction industry is currently facing, PlanBEE student Will Marshall takes a look at how Hyperloop could potentially revolutionise the way we live, work and travel. In part two, he looks at what’s being developed and the challenges those developers face. Design and Specification Smart cities Read more

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