Smart Cities

Meiki City Blueprint

Smart cities are the wave of the future.  Tech giants, like IBM, Cisco, Siemens, Oracle, and Samsung are jumping at opportunities to establish themselves as the preeminent powers behind these interconnected smart cities.  These firms are fighting for market power in the projected trillion dollar industry over the next ten years alone.

Meiki Lake, China -- Proposed City Design

Smart cities incorporate technology to reinforce existing infrastructure and foster new forms of broad based technology.  Traffic control centers, weather prevention centers, and crime tracking centers all improve the effectiveness of existing means combating these negative by-products of congested cities.  By plugging in geographic factors, statistics, cameras, sensors, weather patterns, and other constantly changing data into interconnected computer simulations, smart cities can manage problems in real time speed.  Cisco's Globalization Chief, Wim Elfrink, calls smarts cities "the industrialization of the Internet. First voice became a packet in a network; video is a packet in a network. Now, electricity, safety and security can also become packets in a network."

IBM's Rio Master Command Center

Metropolises new and old are beginning to integrate smart technology to in order to increase reaction time during emergencies and to generally smooth traffic, commerce, and crime.  Cities, like Rio de Janiero, are adapting to these changes, with Rio’s mayor contracting IBM to establish and run a control center, fully operational in time for the World Cup (2014) and the Olympics (2016).  For years London has experimented with street corner cameras to combat crime.  Others, like Cisco’s crowning achievement, Songdo, South Korea, are currently under construction, built to embrace ultramodern technological infrastructure. 

Songdo, South Korea -- Cisco's $35 Billion Investment

If applied correctly, smart cities can enhance urban livability.  Control centers can redirect traffic so that car accidents won’t clog arteries.  Timely alerts from police and emergency workers could warn citizens to vacate sensitive areas during monsoon season mudslides.  Interconnected information can easily reduce negative externalities associated with urban densification, although crime cameras, like those in London, suggest that smart cities are just another step towards Big Brother.

As IBM, Samsung, Siemens, Oracle, and Cisco compete to build the most extravagant smart city for marketing bragging rights, they will continue to refine and enhance the services offered by their control centers and broadband management teams.  With technology’s growing presence in all walks of life, fusing technology into city architecture and infrastructure will continue to influence urban sciences and the construction of new smart cities.  While the estimated trillion dollar industry remains up for grabs, technology companies will continue to partner with urban developers to build the globalized world's cities of the future.

For a great article on cities' prominence in the world read When Cities Rule the World.  For more specifically on smart city development, read the Motley Fool's Cisco Joins a Trillion-Dollar Gold Rush.

Smart Cities