Tomorrow's cities - How do cities get smarter? - Города будущего - Как "умнеют" города? |
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Tomorrow's cities - How do cities get smarter? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mention "smart cities" to people and the first questions they ask are: "What is a smart city?" and "Where is the smartest one?" Unfortunately neither are particularly easy to answer. Smart means different things to different cities. For some, it may be finding ways to relieve pollution or congestion - using sensors and data analysis. For others, it is more about finding ways to make cities greener - with bike-sharing schemes or more parks. Some cities have been built with smartness in mind, such as Songdo in South Korea, which has hi-tech plumbed into its infrastructure, or green city Masdar in the United Arab Emirates. Even cities in some of the least technically advanced areas of the world have aspects of smartness, whether it be the plan to monitor urbanisation in Dar es Salaam with apps such as OpenStreetMap, or the smart slum being developed in Stellenbosch, outside Cape Town, which is powering homes with roof-mounted solar panels and allowing people to purchase electricity though their mobile phones. The UK is keen not only to build smarter cities but to become a world leader in smart-city technology. In order to kick-start its smart-city programme, the government ran a competition last year and the winner, Glasgow, was given £24m to spend on smart technologies. So is Glasgow a shining example of how to do things well? Currently basking the glory of hosting the Commonwealth Games, Glasgow also has its share of social problems - not least the fact that it has the lowest life-expectancy of any city in the UK. Some of the money may go on using big data to solve what is known as the Glasgow question - the conundrum that within a seven-mile radius of the city life-expectancy drops by 28 years. Some may go on helping improve energy efficiency in areas of the city where people spend large amounts of their household income on fuel, or to provide dynamic routing for public transport in areas of the city currently poorly served. Half of the money has already been spent on building an operation centre - rather like an existing one in Rio de Janeiro - a room filled with screens monitored by the police, traffic authorities and emergency services. Helping to solve crime is very important to a city that has more than its fair share of anti-social behaviour. It has upgraded its CCTV system with 400 high-resolution cameras and plans to plough money into research around how big data can be used to predict crime. It is also investing in intelligent lighting that, as well as helping cut the city's large energy bill, will be linked to security cameras to light up areas in which trouble is breaking out. It wants to use some of the money to open up a range of city data that people can access via an online dashboard and has created a MyGlasgow smartphone app that allows residents to report problems such as uncollected bin and potholes. But its move towards smartness hasn't been a smooth one. Earlier this summer, five of the executives on the board set up to oversee its smart city plans were sacked with little explanation. One source familiar with the matter, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the BBC what had happened. "The team wanted to set up a new company that would take some of the know-how and good practice developed in Glasgow and let others cities benefit. "Within weeks of the news that they had won a contract to set up this new company after its contract with Glasgow ended, they were asked to clear their desks and get out of the building." So why was Glasgow city council so against sharing its plans with others? "Glasgow has its own political way of doing things. It has a strong Labour-led council and perhaps was less comfortable with a private company using their know-how for private gain," the source suggested Not perhaps a great start for the vision of sharing smart cities expertise on a global market. And when the BBC asked for an interview with the current smart city team, the council refused to make any comment at all. |
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