While we saw plenty of bold ideas influence urban planning throughout the 20th century, the building frenzy after the Great Depression and World War II largely followed the urbanist movement. Our cities expanded, but the business world remained central and separated from other walks of life.
In 21st-century Australia, there is a new vision for our cities. COVID-19 broke the link between the office and work, putting the days where floods of commuters shuttled in and out of the major business hub behind us. Combined with the smart city movement, new macroeconomic conditions have prompted governments all over the world to invest in the planning and development of modern cities that reimagine the way we live and work.
But rebuilding a bustling, often congested, city is like building a plane that’s already airborne. It’s not an easy task, and therefore requires intense planning prior to commencement.
While urban planners and governments have been collecting big-picture data for planning in transportation and zoning for some time, there is a new wave of technology encouraging the capture of even more granular data.
Measuring everything from noise pollution and canopy cover to wastewater volume, the era of data-led intelligence is changing how we build and rebuild cities. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to smart city planning — every urban scape is vastly different in terms of citizen requirements, infrastructure, and technology maturity levels. While governments can take inspiration from their national or global counterparts, the overall quality of urban spaces relies on rich, local insight.
Digital twinfrastructure
Digital twins can help urban planners solve a city’s specific problems by enabling teams to mimic their localities’ environment on a screen. Users can visualise how proposed designs impact everything in the real world, even simulating future changes such as population growth.
In essence, city planners are given the tools to test whether a solution will work before a single jackhammer hits the road.
The vibrant city of Barcelona is doing just this. Using a digital twin version of itself, Barcelona is in the works of executing its plan to become the first 15-minute city.
Originally developed by Professor Carlos Moreno, the 15-minute city concept ensures all essential needs — groceries, medical care, public transport stops, schools, leisure, and cultural spots — are accessible within 15 minutes or less on foot or by bike from home.
With people’s workspaces no longer concentrated to a single area, the idea has never been more applicable.
Back on home soil, several Australian councils are deploying data-driven city planning to solve urban issues like traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, vandalism and youth crime, and environmental degradation.
The City of Unley, for example, laid the computing foundations to power its digital twin, built to accurately measure and monitor changes in tree canopy coverage across the Adelaide council’s landscape over time.
With a pledge to increase total canopy coverage by as much as 20% by 2045, the leafy, inner-city council is keen to better understand how its different policies and programs are affecting growth.
More specifically, data on tree health and coverage is being used to merge the city’s heat-mapping data to understand the impact of certain tree species and their shadows.
Unley’s intelligent use of data is having a real impact on the physical world with services like smart benches and information touchscreens, digital parking permits, and development applications, improving the lives of its citizens every day.
Smart cities like these present a more connected, efficient vision for the future — they use technology and data in ways that enable them to be cleaner, more sustainable, and offer a variety of automated public services.
Bytes over bricks
The global smart cities market is expected to exceed US$2.5 trillion as early as 2025 – more than double the estimated US$1 trillion in 2020. In Australia, there are more than 45 major smart city precincts under development, each overhauling assumptions on what place, transport, social and cultural infrastructure can provide.
As the world moves in this direction, far more work will need to be done for cities still running on legacy systems designed for paper-based bureaucracy.
The World Economic Forum notes that smart cities must be built in a way that acknowledges the inevitable obsolescence of current-day technologies; they must be constantly evolving and innovating, and always prepared for future disruption and change. Hybrid multi-cloud strategies, therefore, are the ideal infrastructure model to support smart cities as they offer flexibility and freedom of choice to shift workloads, applications, and data as needs change.
Sapporo City, for example, created the first hybrid multi-cloud environment used by a local government in Japan, enabling engineers to put workloads in the cloud environments that made the most sense, freeing resources to focus on sustainable urban development with data at the epicentre.
This flexibility is critical because data is the prime currency in a smart city’s success — it makes cities smart but it has to first be captured from the thousands of sensors and devices, then collected and stored securely before it is analysed.
Recent large-scale data breaches, combined with a growing backlash of big technology companies, have caused citizens to become increasingly distrustful of interconnected environments
A city is ‘smart’ when it is connected and citizen-centric, and this centricity must include privacy and data protection on the edge and in the core.
As demonstrated by the NSW government’s $45 million Smart Places Acceleration Program, smart cities are a key focus in Australia. There are untold benefits to be gained from smart city and digital twin strategies, but first the city’s digital backbone needs to be capable of automating the data-collection process, securing what’s collected, and powerful enough to run the necessary analysis.
IT infrastructure from the 20th century has little to no hope of delivering what’s required in the 21st.
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