{"id":763,"date":"2017-07-25T15:47:26","date_gmt":"2017-07-25T19:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/semba\/?p=763"},"modified":"2017-09-14T16:12:19","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T20:12:19","slug":"what-are-the-10-key-things-that-make-a-city-smart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/si-mba\/2017\/07\/25\/what-are-the-10-key-things-that-make-a-city-smart\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are The 10 Key Things That Make A City Smart?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was written by Brian Lakamp, founder and CEO of Totem<\/a>, and originally appeared at readwrite.com<\/a>. Totem is working to\u00a0combine modern communications, advanced energy, and distributed intelligence into a single, powerful platform for modern campuses, retail centers, commercial facilities, cities and beyond. Brian participated in a workshop for\u00a0Sustainable Innovation MBA students in the Spring of 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"After Mobile World Congress and IoT World earlier this year, there was a lot of buzz about\u00a05G, smart mobility, general IoT, and smart cities.\u00a0It feels like we\u2019re entering the future, and the excitement is palatable.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there are many soldiers on the battlefield without a plan.<\/p>\n

Smart cities\u00a0need<\/em>\u00a0an orchestration framework. The smart cities of\u00a0tomorrow\u00a0require more than simply deploying connectivity, sensors, and devices. Incrementalism will not serve cities well. Foresight and planning are necessary to build\u00a0cities that are truly smart.<\/p>\n

Here are 10 key elements that are required for truly smart cities and for understanding any smart city initiative in context.<\/p>\n

#1: Ubiquitous connectivity<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s tough for a city to be smart without redundant, high-speed, low-latency wireless communications. That\u2019s why\u00a05G<\/strong>\u00a0has so much attention and is so exciting.<\/p>\n

For 5G to be maximally effective, the deployment strategy needs to bring 5G closer to the \u201caction\u201d than where a lot of 4G currently resides. To support real-time decisioning for autonomous vehicles, for example, 5G needs to live on the streets. It needs to be directly paired with curbside cameras, sensors, and processing that can, without a nanosecond of delay, support high-speed vehicles in motion.<\/p>\n

Smart city architectures must also include\u00a0low-power wireless access (LPWA)\u00a0that supports power-limited devices. For things like battery-powered devices floating in wells that report water level once a day, an energy-efficient communication protocol is paramount in such scenarios.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

#2: Resilient and advanced energy<\/h2>\n

Smart city solutions demand advanced energy networks that are sustainable, secure, dynamic, and resilient. You can\u2019t grant a city the moniker of \u201csmart\u201d without resilient, advanced\u00a0energy.<\/p>\n

Consider this. There isn\u2019t an IT engineer on the planet who\u00a0would build a data center without a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) and backup power. Why would we plan for anything less with high-value city infrastructure? If communications and intelligence systems are only available when the grid is up, we fail citizens during catastrophes and extraordinary events, when they need services the most.<\/p>\n

#3: Security and privacy<\/h2>\n

We must integrate security into\u00a0smart city platforms from the start, not as an afterthought. Insecure solutions are not acceptable. Access protocols and communications require an advanced security architecture that keeps out malicious agents. Overrides and mandatory upgrade paths must also be embedded into the architecture to prevent and mitigate the impacts of\u00a0cyberattacks.<\/p>\n

Security is about more than protecting systems and places; it is also about protecting the privacy of citizens that pass near city equipment. Smart solutions must respect citizens.<\/p>\n

#4: Sensors and measurement<\/h2>\n

Data capture has long been a major focus of smart city work. Smart cities are instrumenting literally everything possible, continuously adding new data capture capabilities. Weather, wind direction and intensity, road surface temperatures and conditions, air quality, radiation, pollutants, foot traffic, vehicle traffic, wildlife, soil moisture, noise pollution, light levels, pollen, water quality, water levels, vibration, tilt, sewage flow rates, valve pressure, and cameras are some types of data that smart city devices collect.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0data alone is not enough to make a city smart. Smart requires a corresponding, tiered architecture for processing that data and acting on the derived conclusions.<\/p>\n

#5: Curbside compute<\/h2>\n

In the cities of\u00a0tomorrow, we will be dealing with volumes of data and the need\u00a0for decision speed, which\u00a0won\u2019t allow for sending everything back to centralized processing in the cloud. Things will move too fast for proverbial soldiers to wait for central command to tell them when to shoot. Just think about the coming dynamism needed for autonomous vehicles and drones, for example.<\/p>\n

Municipal systems cannot be deployed as a set of dumb nodes tied to an intelligent core. We must build high-value nodes with local processing resources that operate seamlessly as a tiered participant in a distributed network. Our municipal infrastructure must also coalesce into an incredible, distributed processing fabric: an extended, \u201cliving\u201d system, connected and rich with data.<\/p>\n

To support network-efficient, low latency, real-time decisions required for dynamic traffic management, augmented reality and beyond, smart cities need to deploy computational power at key locations and nodes: curbside data centers.<\/p>\n

#6: Sidewalk storage and caching<\/h2>\n

Storage goes hand in hand with compute. To be smart, cities also need to deploy storage at the very edges of our communications infrastructure as part of a tiered storage and caching network. The immense volumes of data we\u2019ll accumulate each minute will require pairing with local storage to avoid needless, crippling network congestion.<\/p>\n

Consider this. Each autonomous vehicle alone is projected to\u00a0generate roughly 4 TB of daily data<\/a>. Beyond vehicles, high-definition video from multiple cameras at thousands of nodes across a city to cloud centers will be impractical and wasteful to ship in as is\u00a0to central command. Instead, local storage can be paired with local processing to dynamically extract insights and identify data for retention or for relay to cloud resources.<\/p>\n

Caching is also important for delivery of next generation content. Augmented and virtual reality cannot withstand latency in delivery of assets. Media assets for such immersive content must be available instantaneously to make those capabilities reliably available throughout a city.<\/p>\n

In short, smart cities must develop architectures that extend storage capacity to the sidewalk. They must evolve to feature highly distributed and dynamic storage arrays embedded throughout the city.<\/p>\n

#7: Hardware maintenance and upgradeability<\/h2>\n

Even the brightest minds fail in getting everything in complex systems 100 percent right the first time around. Thus, smart city infrastructure needs to be maintainable and upgradable. We simply can\u2019t require ripping up of concrete and working through lengthy planning processes for every improvement to our city infrastructure. Technology moves too fast.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Cities need to standardize the street-side smart city \u201cserver\u00a0rack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deployed infrastructure also needs to anticipate maintenance and manage upgrades and future extensions. That will certainly require technical foresight, but new agreements with municipalities and unions will help\u00a0define operating norms and allowances.<\/p>\n

#8: APIs and third-party development<\/h2>\n

With distributed cache and compute comes the natural question of development platforms for third\u00a0parties. Smart city technology vendors, in partnership with municipal leadership, and with security in mind, must identify ways to thoughtfully expose access to resources, data and APIs to create new intelligence, apps and experiences.<\/p>\n

No company has a monopoly on innovation. Even Steve Jobs couldn\u2019t have foreseen the diversity of applications that emerged from\u00a0the iPhone platform. Apple relied on third\u00a0parties and a broad base of development talent to create apps like Instagram, Lyft, and Airbnb \u2014 apps that\u00a0couldn\u2019t\u00a0be imagined on launch day for the first iPhone.<\/p>\n

Of course, we can\u2019t simply create a smart city \u201capp store\u201d that allows developers to self-publish. We must\u00a0focus our attention on\u00a0an advanced approval processes to safely and\u00a0expeditiously determine what gets published to the \u201cproduction\u201d environment of our streets.<\/p>\n

#9: User interfaces<\/h2>\n

With consumer devices, we\u2019re on a trajectory for interfaces from wired (PC) to wireless (smartphone) to ambient (Amazon\u2019s Alexa). Similarly, truly smart cities will turn public spaces into interfaces.<\/p>\n

Smart cities will define strategies around \u201cambient\u201d interactions via voice and augmented reality. It\u2019s about a future of smart cities as seamlessly interactive spaces, and it\u2019s worth noting that the idea that \u201cspace becomes the interface\u201d has profound implications for architects and urban planners.<\/p>\n

#10: Better design<\/h2>\n

Historically, municipal and utility infrastructure has tended toward unattractive design \u2014 utilitarian, by definition. We can and must do better to make the public infrastructure that supports our daily lives beautiful, inspirational, and engaging.<\/p>\n

Smartphones didn\u2019t ignite their rocket-ship trajectory in adoption or capability until product design lit the spark of inspiration and imagination. We won\u2019t realize the full potential of smart cities until design changes attitudes, adoption, and acceleration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was written by Brian Lakamp, founder and CEO of Totem, and originally appeared at readwrite.com. Totem is working to\u00a0combine modern communications, advanced energy, and distributed intelligence into a single, powerful platform for modern campuses, retail centers, commercial facilities, cities and beyond. Brian participated in a workshop for\u00a0Sustainable Innovation MBA students in the Spring … <\/p>\n

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