Smart Urban Spaces and Future Smart City Concepts

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By Dominique Bonte | 4Q 2018 | IN-5289

A lot of debate around smart cities is centered on how to digitize infrastructure through a range of connectivity and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. However, very little attention has been given to the urgent issue of redefining public space to cope with new tech-driven paradigms—such as the sharing economy, automation, and, more generally, the new smart urban economy.

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New Smart City Paradigms Call for Rethinking Public Space 

NEWS


A lot of debate around smart cities is centered on how to digitize infrastructure through a range of connectivity and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. However, very little attention has been given to the urgent issue of redefining public space to cope with new tech-driven paradigms—such as the sharing economy, automation, and, more generally, the new smart urban economy.

In particular, smart driverless mobility not only will require redefining how roads are designed but also will result in the end of the dominance of cars in city centers. This should free up road and parking space for pedestrian traffic, two-wheeled vehicles, and green and social spaces. Similarly, distributed renewable energy generation facilities will be intertwined with and/or embedded in roads, sidewalks, homes, and buildings. Centralized “brick-and-mortar” locations for supplying healthcare, education, and public services will be virtualized through online education, tele-medicine, and e-government. More generally, every piece of physical infrastructure will be connected and leveraged for the provision of digital services. In some cases, physical infrastructure like traffic lights, digital signage, bus stops, and so on will disappear altogether and be replaced with their digital virtual equivalents. Uber’s Pool Express service is an early example of what a virtual bus stop means by being dynamically and algorithmically determined.

As a result, public spaces will undergo fundamental transformations by turning cities into technology-centric living, social, and working environments, giving cities back to the citizens.

Smart Urban Space Solutions from Early Innovators 

IMPACT


The concepts outlined above are being explored by the smart city ecosystem and are offered by innovative suppliers and being deployed by visionary cites like Dubai.

  • Ford—Living Street: At the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018, Ford introduced its Living Street concept, showcasing how streets of the future will look like at its visionary exhibition booth and illustrating how roads and curbs can be “symbiotic” instead of competing with each other. Underlying technologies include a transportation mobility cloud with autonomous and Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) connectivity in partnership with Qualcomm, thereby enabling direct communication between cars and bikes as well as smart infrastructure such as signs, traffic lights, and construction zones.
  • Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs—Dynamic streets: In partnership with design firm CRA in Toronto, Alphabet is exploring a modular and reconfigurable paving system based on hexagonal modular pavers which can be reorganized within minutes to change the road function and to use as requirements change throughout the day.
  • Umbrellium—Smart crossings: Smart crossings consist of a responsive Light-Emitting Diode (LED) road surface that is allowed to change markings dynamically to keep pedestrians safe by changing the crossing’s width and displaying alerts by automatically differentiating among vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists through computer vision.
  • DEWI (Dubai) and Colas—Solar roads: Colas’s Wattway solar road solution is composed of embedded photovoltaic cells able to generate renewable electrical energy. Twenty square meters of solar road can power one home. It is being trialed by the energy utility DEWA, located in Dubai.
  • Siemens and Pavegen—Pedestrian energy harvesting: This involves interactive flooring that allows the conversion of kinetic footfall energy into off-grid electricity (by 5 watts per person).

New Smart City Concepts Driven by Data Sharing 

RECOMMENDATIONS


The challenge for city governments and urban planners is to start designing and deploying future smart city concepts while maintaining and optimizing the existing fabric of cities. While there are examples in some developing countries (like China) of smart cities designed from scratch, the default situation mandates organically transitioning legacy public space approaches toward new visionary designs through expensive infrastructure projects. The very long life cycles (up to 30 years) of urban infrastructure and city layouts makes this a formidable planning challenge. However, cities need to start designing, planning, and rolling out new public space concepts today, starting with redevelopments or new city neighborhoods.

To do this cities need to start collecting data on how new mobility modes are used in terms of pick-up and drop-off places, traffic patterns, and consumption patterns of public services. This is exactly why the SharedStreets public-private partnership has been set up in the United States. SharedStreets brings together the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and Open Transport Partnership with the companies Ford, Uber, and Lyft. They will work on curb space management tools and standards by allowing data sharing across 30 global cities.

  • Ford: Universal data standard for real-time curb demand and availability
  • Uber: Global data set of vehicles’ driving speeds
  • Lyft: Universal framework for sharing curbside pick-up/drop-off counts

The same holds for smart energy, where the complex interaction among smart grids, micro- and nanogrids, and Electronic Vehicle (EV) charging stations (in terms of distributed energy generation and consumption) will require advanced demand-response management systems and new grid designs, including the deployment of distributed electric energy storage into urban public spaces.

However, while these incremental initiatives are laudable, cities need to start designing visionary city concepts by redefining how, why, and by whom public spaces will be used. This goes far beyond accommodating smart mobility and smart energy. Airborne personal mobility, delivery, and freight transportation will require both ground-based landing facilities and blockchain-based air space traffic management. Homes and commercial buildings will require redesign for enabling electronic and remote access control and indoor robotic navigation. New modes of ultrahigh speed transit—such as hyperloops and roads with embedded wireless EV-charging electronics that support continuous charging—represent complex and expensive projects.

For cities, what is at stake is not only the creation of sustainable urban livability and social resilience but also the establishment of foundations for the urban economy of the future.

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