This is my last smart city blog. So I’m going to let loose. I think Australia has an opportunity to demonstrate leadership—possibly world leadership—in smart cities.
It’s not going to be easy. A gambling man would bet against it. The challenges are many. They include:
- – Very complex processers with lots of interdependent moving parts.
- – Lack of a widely accepted definition of what a smart city or a smart community is . As a result, the places that are recognised as smart are those best at marketing themselves.
- – Poor recognition for Australian smart cities. We are just off the starting line; others are already at the 500-metre mark.
- – The ‘business case’ for implementation, sanscentral government support, ranges from non-existent to primitive.
Nevertheless, Australia could achieve leadership in smart cities. Here’s a possible three act evolution for this.
Act I
- A smaller community—not a major city—widely implements projects such as smart bins, lighting, mobility; but also
- Demonstrates that these are part of a coherent strategy. This would incorporate a working open data framework allowing citizens to easily access public data (and also allowing the different public sector ‘silos’ to share with each other!)
- Gains unforced recognition from its citizens that these initiatives have made it easier for them to live/work/play in the community.
Act II
Once Act I is fully underway, one/some of our major cities would take the lessons learned from the smaller community—the successes, and particularly the failures—and start to adopt them at scale.
Act III
If all the above can happen—and by now we have ‘if’ on ‘if’—there would be positive financial repercussions for the national economy.
Skillsets
The skillsets that go into devising these smart communities would turn to help towns and cities overseas; in the process earning export dollars for Australia.
Visitors
A place that’s a pleasure to live in, would be a pleasure to visit. Right? And one to return to, again and again. Right? (Currently, apart from family visits, 82 percent of tourism to Australia is one-off. They don’t come back).
Image credit: Wikimedia
Implementation and technology
Inevitably some—it doesn’t have to be all—of the technology and know-how that goes into enabling the interworking of sensors-with-analytics-with-AI-wrapped-in-security, will be Australian. It will gain export markets, adding to the financial benefits to our economy.
I have a deep-seated belief that Australia should aim for leadership in some sectors. Germany did that after 1945. The past seven decades, for example, have witnessed German leadership in one of their focus sectors: automobiles.
Germany painstakingly and methodically—using imported skills when needed—started engineering a product that was more of a pleasure to drive, higher quality, more reliable, and respected in the market. The auto industry is Germany’s largest industrial sector, accounting for 2.7 percent of GDP.
Australia’s current prosperity may have come about by being the Lucky Country (personally, I doubt that was the only factor): but are we going to stay prosperous by luck?
It does seem an inescapable economic logic that we should pick a few sectors & strive for excellence in them. Is it possible that smart cities could be one of these sectors?
