Image Credits: T’sul Floral Design Beverly Hills
I’ve just returned from Bangkok. At eight million inhabitants it’s one of the brasher, more chaotic places to live or visit. It’s polluted, over-trafficked, edgy and exciting.
“Bangkok’s rapid growth amidst little urban planning and regulation has resulted in a haphazard cityscape and inadequate infrastructure systems” – Wikipedia.
The reaction of a former colleague when I told him what I was working on was “well, Bangkok certainly isn’t a smart city.”
Thailand has a significant focus on smart cities. But this focus is on smaller places, not Bangkok – on Phuket (population 600,000) Chiang Mai (200,000) and Khon Kaen (150,000). Actually, so is Australia’s – Ipswich, for example (200,000) or Newcastle (160,000).
Within the big cities, it is a few suburbs, rather than the entire city, that are taking Smart initiatives – Parramatta (250,000) for example, in Sydney’s west.
In the rest of the world, Bristol – which started off as a poster-child for the smart city movement – has about 450,000 inhabitants.
Now all of these examples are at phase I or phase II, at best, in the smart city journey – meaning they have one or two projects underway, such as sensor-enabled LED lighting or solar bins.
They haven’t started on the (very disciplined) process of putting together data from smart and other projects and turning this data into value of internet proportions. So, the projects are not only small in terms of population compared to a Bangkok: they are still small in scope too.
People get derailed by the word cities. Let me explain. It is an abbreviation for communities. You see, just as the name William gets commonly abbreviated to Bill or Will – so, by omitting two syllables in communities, the word when used in the smart context becomes cities.
It makes sense to start small. Small is more affordable. To get started, you don’t need the buy-in of huge numbers of people with disparate agendas. If things don’t pan out, you can easily change direction. – or scrap it altogether – without much upset. Three good reasons why small is better in smart c(ommun)ities. There are more.
Small is also good as there’s no common agreement (yet) as to what is/isn’t in scope for smart cities.
When the original new towns were conceived then (much later) executed – some with grand scale ambitions – there was clear and concrete definition as to what they would be, how they would designed, and what they would achieve. Even so, some of them turned out to be disastrous monstrosities.
How much more of a mistake would we be making if the nebulous, soft-defined (not even software-defined in most cases) half-concepts were executed on the scale of Metro Manila – population 14 million – in the Philippines. Unthinkable.
No, the few ideas I’ve seen on transforming a metropolis into someplace more liveable by deploying (IoT) technology, are well-meaning exercises which cherry-pick a few tech solutions, and which then make a positive difference to a few people – though often these few are the ones promoting the solutions.
Amsterdam has smart pole EV charging, but has unco-ordinated, dysfunctional public transport. Barcelona’s (and Catalonia’s) government has done wonders in broadband, but has let Airbnb price long-term and upstanding residents (the very lives smart cities should be improving) out of their homes. Chongqing’s biggest improvements came from a former governor, now in jail: recent benefits there have accrued to overseas American consultants, not to inhabitants.
“Small is Beautiful” is from the book by economist EF Schumacher “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. In economics, you may or may not agree with it. However, when it comes to the smart city journey, small makes sense. Small is achievable.
Also, small will get larger. But that’s another story.
