Gogoro® Ignites Smart City Transformation with Launch of World’s First Smartscooter™ and Battery Swapping Infrastructure

Gogoro, a company transforming how energy is distributed and managed in megacities, today unveiled the world’s first high-performance, zero emissions, two-wheeled electric vehicle, the Gogoro Smartscooter™. The company also announced the Gogoro Energy Network, a battery swapping infrastructure that will enable a more efficient, cleaner and flexible energy future.

“With the world’s megacities at a tipping point in population density, pollution fallout and rapid expansion, it is essential that we reimagine the energy infrastructure and create a renewed mindset for change in tomorrow’s urban generation,” said Horace Luke, co-founder and CEO, Gogoro. “The Smartscooter and Gogoro Energy Network will capture the hearts of the next generation and become a catalyst for more efficient, cleaner, and smarter energy choices in our cities.”

The Gogoro Energy Network is a modular battery-swapping infrastructure that can be deployed across a city to provide broad consumer access to portable power through battery vending machines called GoStations. The Gogoro Battery is an engineering breakthrough with a variety of technologies including 25 sensors, near field communication (NFC) connectivity and 256-bit security encryption. It utilizes Panasonic’s industry-leading cylindrical 18650-size automotive-grade lithium-ion energy cells to deliver the ultimate in safety, performance, efficiency and portability. The Smartscooter is the first vehicle to be integrated into the Gogoro Energy Network, and both will begin initial rollout in 2015.

“Gogoro is more than a startup. This is the start of an industry,” said Luke. “Our products and business model will impact a variety of consumer areas to create a metropolitan ecosystem with better connectivity, easier access to energy, and a more enjoyable urban living experience.”

About the Gogoro Smartscooter™
From the drivetrain to the dashboard, the Smartscooter utilizes the precision, processes and materials used for supercars to offer top-level performance that is both user-friendly and accessible to the mass market. In order to deliver unprecedented power, agility, acceleration and handling, Gogoro reimagined the entire ride experience and then created a unique powertrain, chassis, suspension and electronics to deliver the best efficiency, handling, acceleration and riding range possible.

• The Gogoro G1 Motor – Power-packed and ultra-compact, the G1 Motor redefines what’s possible in electric motor design. Every component is precision-engineered to ensure the entire system works smarter, stays cooler and goes further in the most efficient way possible.
• Aeroframe™ – Ultra lightweight and incredibly strong, Gogoro’s Aeroframe monocoque chassis is stamped out of racing grade aluminum that makes it stiffer, stronger, lighter and more responsive.
• Race Suspension – The Smartscooter delivers an amazingly smooth and responsive ride even in dynamic conditions at speed. This performance stability comes from Gogoro’s high-performance suspension that is inspired by jet-fighter landing gear in the front and multi-link suspension in the back.
• Balance and Agility – Designed with the rider in mind, the Smartscooter reaches perfect 50/50 balance when the rider sits and becomes an integrated extension of the Smartscooter. This amazing balance and agility enable greater stability, a tight 48.5° lean angle and ultimately a more enjoyable riding experience.

Smartscooter is Smarter
The Smartscooter harnesses the power of 30 onboard sensors, cloud connectivity, and an integrated Gogoro mobile application that enables the scooter to get smarter and more efficient with every ride. The Gogoro iQ System™ puts the power of a personal computer in the Smartscooter, synchronizing wirelessly across the Smartscooter, Gogoro app, Gogoro Battery, GoStation™ and Gogoro Energy Network. The app utilizes the Gogoro iQ System to find the closest GoStation, deliver detailed scooter diagnostics, adaptive throttle control, customized regenerative braking, and the ability to track ride details like the top speed and range so the rider can analyze riding patterns to optimize power and energy consumption.

Smartscooter is Easier
Riders don’t need to wait to refuel or recharge the Smartscooter. When a depleted battery needs to be swapped with a charged one, riders can make a six-second swap at any GoStation. Batteries can be reserved in advance, and a subscription-based payment model offers unlimited access to as many charged batteries as needed. Also, with Smartscooter’s hyper-connectivity, if vehicle servicing is needed, the rider is immediately alerted via the Gogoro mobile app or at the GoStation when swapping batteries.

Smartscooter is Customizable
Designed from the outset to be individualized, Gogoro gives unique control to each rider to select the specific ride feel and throttle acceleration, the dashboard screen color spectrum and the lock-and-unlock audio and lighting themes. There is also a broad variety of practical and designed-oriented accessories to add enhanced functionality or customized body details.

Founded by technology veterans Luke and co-founder and CTO Matt Taylor, the Smartscooter and Gogoro Energy Network are Gogoro’s first products. In October 2014, Gogoro announced it had raised $50 million in Series A funding in 2011, and is currently closing its Series B round of $100 million to commercialize and go-to-market in 2015.

The Gogoro Smartscooter and GoStation will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 5-9, 2015, at select locations, including:

• Pepcom Experience (Jan. 5; The Mirage)
• Wynn Las Vegas Fairway Villa (Jan. 6-8)
• Panasonic booth, Green Mobility area (Jan. 6-9; LVCC, Central Hall, Booth #9808)

SOURCE: Gogoro

Essel Group adds Maharashtra for developing smart cities

Essel Group, India’s leading businessconglomerate, is aggressively pursuing thedevelopment of smart cities in the country. After announcing plans for the states of Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, the group has now brought Maharashtra into the list of states for development.

Targeting cities with population of more than 5 lakh, the group will be looking at markets like Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur, Nashik and Aurangabad with world class smart city developments in the next five years.

Speaking of the company’s vision, Subhash Chandra, chairman, Essel Group, said, “We see smart utilities as a blueprint for the future of smart and connected cities in India. We want to collaborate with the Maharashtra state government in delivering good governanceand services to citizens and helping transform the way citizens will live, work, play and learn.”

Accordingly, the company will bid for turnkey projects in Maharashtra from planning and designing stage to funding and implementation of projects, in creating a smart city habitat.

Essel Group’s integrated utilities company – Essel Utilities & Distribution Company Limited (EUDCL) will focus on nurturing smarter communities across major cities in Maharashtra by undertaking projects in power and water distribution services, municipal solid waste management, sewage treatment, drainage and storm water management, city wi-fi, cable and broadband, city gas distribution and intelligent traffic management systems. These services will be offered through a single-window solution model based on SIPC (Smart Integrator and Principal Contractor) concept, thus delivering an all-in-one conduit to consumers. This will be a first-of-its kind concept where all utility services will be offered under one roof.

Essel group had committed to invest Rs 7,500 crore towards transforming five major cities of Madhya Pradesh into state-of-the-art smart cities and is evaluating development projects in infrastructure utility worth Rs 50,000 crore in the years to come. So far the group has invested Rs 5,000 crore for similar projects in Madhya Pradesh. According to the company management, projects of this scale will help generate employment opportunity to a huge number of people and transform the way cities and communities are designed, built and renewed to ensure economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Kamal Maheshwari, president, Smart City Business, said, “With our pioneering spirit of venturing in futuristic arena, Essel Utilities will work towards developing inclusive and smart cities in India with world’s leading eco-system partners, thus transforming the quality of life of citizens across cities. We are looking forward to closely work with the central and state government in formulating the governance and policy framework, and sustainable financial model for Smart Cities.”

Essel Utilities presently manages power distribution franchise in Sagar & Ujjain (MP), Muzaffarpur (Bihar) and Nagpur (Maharashtra). Shortly, the company will also be managing power distribution services for Gwalior in MP. The company also manages the water distribution franchise in Aurangabad (Maharashtra) and Bhagalpur (Bihar).

The company has also been awarded seven projects in solid waste management in Deonar (Mumbai), Jabalpur (MP), Pallavapuram (Chennai), Surat (Gujarat), Bhubaneswar (Odisha) and Bangalore (Karnataka). It further intends to foray into various other verticals such as city gas distribution and, cable and broadband in major cities of India. The company is targeting a top line revenue of close to Rs 2,000 crore and a reach of more than 2 million consumer households by 2015-16.

Source:dna

Surat Set To Become India’s First Smart City Under Microsoft’s CityNext Project

Microsoft CityNext has partnered with Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) to develop Surat as a smart city with advanced urban planning and citizen empowerment processes never heard in India.

Using Big Data, Internet and eGovernance, CityNext will help to make the city as a model of development and progress.

Milind Torawane, Surat municipal commissioner said, “We are excited to partner with Microsoft to transform Surat into a sustainable and competitive city that cares for its citizens,”

Some of the vital areas where Microsoft and SMC will work together to develop Surat as a Smart City include:

• Hi-tech Urban Planning using Big Data and real time information
• Water management solutions
• Waste management system
• RTI mechanism
• Vaccination Alert System
• Property Tax payments
• Birth/Death Registrations
• Uniform Application Tracking system
• Disease analytics and reporting mechanism for hospitals
• Development of a City Dashboard to track and analyze all development projects under a single umbrella
  And more….

Niranjan Zanzmera, Mayor – Surat said, “By transforming Surat into a smart city, we are setting a benchmark for other cities in the country on how IT solutions can help empower citizens and address cities biggest challenges and fuel economic growth.”

Why Surat?

With 4.6 million people, Surat is Gujarat’s second largest city and a major economic hub. It is India’s 9^th largest metropolitan area and World’s 4^th fastest developing city (as per study conducted by City Mayors Foundation).

As per GDP ranking of Indian cities, it is ranked 8^th with a GDP of $40 billion, with estimates of $57 billion GDP by 2050.

The city is popular for it’s diamond trade, and it singlehandedly accounts for 99% of global diamond polishing and cutting industry. Surat exports $15 billion worth of diamonds from India, which is highest in Asia.

Despite being such a major economic hub, Surat witnessed a devastating plague outbreak in 1994, which killed 54 people, and created a state of terror in and around the city. Major travel restrictions were put into place, and city suffered heavily for it. Proper urban planning and timely action could have prevented such an incidence at one of India’s richest cities.

What Is Microsoft CityNext?

It can be described as a ‘people-first’ initiative by Microsoft to provide a platform for citizens and government to use technology as a medium for development and progress. CityNext empowers governments, citizens and businesses to literally transform their cities and their future. Every plan and blueprint devised by CityNext aims to create a greener, healthier and prosperous communities.

CityNext has already delivered stunning results in Paris, Auckland and Washington DCwhere they have introduced faster public transport system, solved their energy problems and introduced world class technological solutions to improve city life.

Last week, they had announced similar people-centric projects for major Kenyan citiesas well, where the work has already started.

Which other Indian cities should be converted into a smart city? Do share your views by commenting right here!

Source: Trak.in

Smart jobs for smart cities

An ideal scenario: A coastal city with shiny new buildings. Trees are planted on every side of the street and the air is automatically purified each hour. You can pay with your phone and charge your car at every parking place. A dream? This isn’t a modern science fiction novel, but is happening as we speak. These technologies are being developed in China, often in cooperation with Western companies.

The above is what is now termed as ‘smart city’. Smart cities are a hot topic and a commonly used buzzword today. This concept primarily involves combination of human capital and technology to create a sustainable environment. Such cities work towards improving sustainable economic development, infrastructure and also create a higher quality of life for the citizens as they contribute to this process.

China probably identified this opportunity one of the earliest and acted its way through in creating several such smart cities. McKinsey Global Institute wrote in 2009 that China’s urban population will grow from 527 million in 2005 to 926 million in 2025. Cities with a population exceeding 1 million are likely to increase from 153 to 226 in that same period. In 2011, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics announced that China’s urbanisation rate had surpassed 50%. This was the first time in China that more citizens were living in cities than in rural areas.

An important drive for developing smart cities is the rising middle class. Another report from McKinsey in 2013 considers consumers in China with household incomes between 106,000 to 229,000 yuan to be the upper middle class. According to McKinsey, in 2012, this segment accounted for just 14% of urban households. Their estimates for 2022 show a turnaround, with 56% becoming upper middle class and 14% mass middle class, which are household incomes ranging from 60,000 to 106,000 yuan.

Does India fit into the above scenario? Do we see a rising opportunity in creating smart cities which, in turn, creates a sustainable environment for its citizens?

Urbanisation in India has significant implications for the future development of the country. By 2030, India’s urban population will touch 590 million or nearly twice that of the US, while Indian cities will generate close to 70% of the GDP. This will exert tremendous pressure on urban infrastructure and services. It is, therefore, imperative that we find innovative solutions for the urban challenges of growth and sustainability.
This dramatic growth also provides impetus for the creation of smart cities which leverage information and communications technology (ICT) to greatly improve the productivity, lifestyle and the prosperity of our people. Additionally, green growth strategies can build environmentally sustainable cities.

India has 50 cities with more than a million people; China now has more than 350. Job creation needs new cities because it will replace the current short-term thinking of taking people to jobs with a more sustainable solution of taking jobs to people. There will be strong regional disparities in the next 20 years; five states in the South and West of India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh) will see 50% of the country’s GDP growth but only 5% of population growth. We must define urbanisation carefully; it is not about relocating more people into the larger cities nor is it about well-planned economic wastelands like Chandigarh. We have seen emergence of small pockets of economic success in areas like Gurgaon near Delhi, Gachibowli near Hyderabad, Magarpatta near Pune, Whitefield in Bangalore and Mohali near Chandigarh, but these are from far being identified as smart cities.

The next question is, how do we create these smart cities? The recent announcement from the government to create a ‘Digital India’ is a positive move. A budget of $1.2 billion has been allocated for smart cities alone. This should encourage some of the big-wig technology firms to submit proposals to local governments, and collaborate with real estate developers to build sustainable green cities.

Industrial corridors between India’s big metropolitans like the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, the Chennai-Bangalore Industrial Corridor and the Bangalore-Mumbai Economic Corridor seem a positive move. It is hoped that many industrial and commercial centres will be recreated as ‘smart cities’ along these belts. The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), which is spread across six states, seeks to create seven new smart cities as the nodes of the corridor in its first phase.

The very idea of smart cities is based on the assumption that there are technocratic solutions for the routine problems that citizen face. Problems of inefficiency that are seen to dominate the old bureaucratic-political order are hence given a ‘smart’ solution by employing ‘Big Data’.

Another positive impact of the ‘smart city’ and ‘Digital India’ projects is job creation, which will be, needless to say, ‘smart’. While it is difficult to give an estimate of jobs that will be generated and the reduction in labour migration, one can confidently say that even if work begins on 5-10 smart cities over the next two years, we would have created a favourable ecosystem for many thousands of jobs. This will be more inclined towards white-collar jobs as IT professionals will be in greater demand; IT infrastructure being the backbone of any smart city. Data analytics, programming, high-end consulting, system and network integration will be the order of the day and professionals and students in this area can expect better opportunities. It is a great time and opportunity for the ‘Internet of Things’, as they call it.

With a burgeoning urban population, there is an immediate need for creation of infrastructure facilities to satisfy the increasing urbane aspirations of our populace and smart cities seem to the solution. While the focus seems to have shifted towards smart cities and urbanisation, care must be taken so as to ensure the large percentage of population that relies on unskilled jobs and agriculture are not left behind.

By Mohit Gupta

The author is co-founder & director, TeamLease Services

Source: The Financial Express

Dubai keen to develop Hyderabad as smart city

Vinayak Chatterjee: What is a ‘smart city’?

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has certainly focused India’s attention on the urbanisationimperative and got the “smart city” concept buzzing. As things stand, the urbanisation agenda is in three parts:

• urban renewal of 500 cities;
• rejuvenation of heritage cities (like Varanasi), and
• the implementation of 100 smart cities; understood to be both “greenfield” and “brownfield”.

While renewal and rejuvenation are relatively easier to grasp, there appears to be only an evocative imagination in the public mind as to what the contours of a smart city could be.

So, here are 10 suggested attributes that may well describe, and to some extent define a smart city.

(i) Information, communication, and technology (ICT)-enabled governance: The international and domestic big daddies of the information technology (IT) world have, with their aggressive presentations, virtually hijacked the smart city definition to only mean IT-enabled administration and governance. While such a restrictive definition is undesirable, enabling ICT is clearly one of the more important planks. Often referred to as “smart government”, the use of integrated technology platforms that are easily accessible across various devices is certainly key to providing access, transparency, speed, participation and redressal in public services. For example, on December 10, 2014, the President launched the Karnataka Mobile One app in Bengaluru that would provide citizens a range of e-governance services over mobile phones.

(ii) Efficient utilities – energy, water, solid waste and effluents: This area is often the most talked about after IT. Smart meters, renewable energy, energy conservation, water harvesting, effluent recycling, scientific solid waste disposal methods et al are all clearly the hallmark of a smart city.

(iii) Meaningful PPPs: The creative use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) is a key attribute of the smart city concept. PPPs are to be used not only as a source of much-needed capital but also for the efficient delivery of utilities with agreed service-level standards. PPPs could range from health care to street lighting; and be used wherever there is a clear connection between the provision of a service and the ability to charge for the same – directly or even indirectly.

(iv) Safety and security: This aspect is high in public consciousness, especially with disconcerting news on the safety of women, road rage, robbery attacks on the elderly and juvenile delinquency. Clearly, networks of video-cameras, brightly lit public areas, intensive patrolling and surveillance, identity-verified access, and rapid response to emergency calls are all on the expectations list.

(v) Financial sustainability: The 74th Amendment to the Constitution (1992) enjoins towns and cities to “take charge of their own destinies”. Nowhere is this more important than financial independence. This is only possible with elaborate and extensive tapping of all sources of revenue – property taxes, advertisements et al; coupled with astute collection of user-pay charges across the full range of utilities. It also has to do with the elements of fiscal discipline that would enable the raising of long-term debt like municipal bonds.

(vi) Citizen-participative local government: The enthusiastic participation of citizens in local issues needs careful designing of electoral and participative fora. The current apathy towards civic elections needs comprehensive reversal.

(vii) Sufficient social capital: Smart cities cannot be devoid of the appropriate levels of social infrastructure – like schools, hospitals, public spaces, sporting and recreational grounds and retail and entertainment venues. Along with a brain that works, and hands and legs that move, it must also have a heart that beats to the joys of daily living.

(viii) Transit-oriented habitats: “Walk-to-work” is the dream solution here. Nevertheless, conveniently networked public transportation with first- and last-mile connectivities in place, reduced motivation to use personal vehicles, use of electric cars, and bicycle paths are all in the expectation matrix.

(ix) Green features: Minimising the carbon footprint and eco-friendliness are de rigueur. Parks and verdant open spaces, absence of pollution, use of renewables, conservation and recycling are mandatory.

(x) Minimum population criteria: Towards the end of November 2014, Panasonic Corporation announced the opening of its new business vector – the sustainable smart town (SST) at Fujisawa in Japan. It has rooftop solar energy, electric cars and electric-powered bicycles. However, it comprises only 1,000 homes over 47 acres that will have a population of 3,000 people. This kind of project is at best a smart enclave, and clearly, in the Indian context, cannot be included in the definition of a city. India has 5,545 urban agglomerations. Class 1 towns (called cities) are those with a population of 100,000 and above. This should be the minimum population cut-off for a smart city.

Achieving all the 10 attributes may well be Utopian. So, maybe even if seven out of the 10 attributes are achieved, we should have no hesitation in declaring an urban habitation as a smart city.

Security China eyes Pune for smart city projects

Chinese Government Officials today visited Pune to explore opportunities to collaborate on the Smart City project announced by the government of India. A team led by Senior Chinese Government Officials participated in a conference organised by Unique Delta Force Security.

Pune based Unique Delta Force Security, today also inked a 50:50 joint venture with China-based Security China to market their products and concepts. Both the companies declined to share financial details of the JV.

According to Alan Chow, CEO Security China, firm providing security solutions and services, said that the security solutions market of India is of $ 2.5 billion which is 5 per cent of the global market.

“India has a huge potential for security solutions. The Government of India is keen on developing smart cities, our company will create a cluster to provide security solutions. We are beginning with Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporations in association with Unique Delta Security. We will provide techno commercial assistance to develop such initiatives as a part of “China – India Mutually Beneficially Co-operation Plan,” said Chow.

The company has established a smart and security cluster in Shaoxing District in China. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) in China has set up 90 smart city demonstration areas and more applications are under review.

The company focuses on three sectors- business, production and service and targets to build a global network of permanent resource providing centers globally through its National Premier Partners.

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has focused India’s attention on the urbanisation imperative and got the “smart city” concept buzzing. The agenda includes urban renewal of 500 cities, rejuvenation of heritage cities (like Varanasi), and the implementation of 100 smart cities; understood to be both “greenfield” and “brownfield”.

Several countries like Japan, Germany, Sweden, Singapore, Israel, United Kingdom, the United States of America, Hongkong and the Netherlands besides multinational corporate have shown keen interest in partnering in building smart cities in India. Many private players like Microsoft, IBM, Essel Group and Prince of Qatar have shown interest in developing smart cities in India.

Source:Business Standard

10 Key Factors That Contribute To Develop ‘Smart Cities’ In India

BANGALORE: As the global population continues to grow at a steady pace, more and more people are moving to cities every day. Cities are referred as the engines of economic growth and ‘The National Democratic Alliance’ government’s decision to develop 100 “Smart Cities” in the country has brought the focus on smart cities concept.

 
What is a smart city? Smartness in city means smart design, smart utilities, smart housing, smart mobility, and smart technology. There is need for the cities to get smarter to manage complexity, increase efficiency, reduce expenses, and improve quality of life. Here are 10 factors that make a city really smart as compiled by ‘Rediff.com’.

 
1. Mobility
Most of the cities have gone rapid motorization and this has lead to congestion, increasing energy bills, road accidents and poor air quality. Ease of being able to move from place to place and sound transport system is at the core of a “Smart City”.

The smart transport system emphasizes walking, cycling and public transport as the primary means  for mobility with personal motor vehicles being discouraged.

 
2. Utility Services
Reliable, adequate and high quality utility services like electricity, sanitation and ICT are part of a  smart city. Similarly, municipal services such as water supply, drainage, solid waste management  are of very high quality and available round the clock.

A Smart City cannot have only a few hours of water supply a day or electricity that goes off for  several hours or the streets littered with garbage.

Source:Silicon India News

The truth about smart cities: ‘In the end, they will destroy democracy’

A woman drives to the outskirts of the city and steps directly on to a train; her electric car then drives itself off to park and recharge. A man has a heart attack in the street; the emergency services send a drone equipped with a defibrillator to arrive crucial minutes before an ambulance can. A family of flying maintenance robots lives atop an apartment block – able to autonomously repair cracks or leaks and clear leaves from the gutters.

Such utopian, urban visions help drive the “smart city” rhetoric that has, for the past decade or so, been promulgated most energetically by big technology, engineering and consulting companies. The movement is predicated on ubiquitous wireless broadband and the embedding of computerised sensors into the urban fabric, so that bike racks and lamp posts, CCTV and traffic lights, as well as geeky home appliances such as internet fridges and remote-controlled heating systems, become part of the so-called “internet of things” (the global market for which is now estimated at $1.7tn). Better living through biochemistry gives way to a dream of better living through data. You can even take an MSc in Smart Citiesat University College, London.

Yet there are dystopian critiques, too, of what this smart city vision might mean for the ordinary citizen. The phrase itself has sparked a rhetorical battle between techno-utopianists and postmodern flâneurs: should the city be an optimised panopticon, or a melting pot of cultures and ideas?

And what role will the citizen play? That of unpaid data-clerk, voluntarily contributing information to an urban database that is monetised by private companies? Is the city-dweller best visualised as a smoothly moving pixel, travelling to work, shops and home again, on a colourful 3D graphic display? Or is the citizen rightfully an unpredictable source of obstreperous demands and assertions of rights? “Why do smart cities offer only improvement?” asks the architect Rem Koolhaas. “Where is the possibility of transgression?”

The smart city concept arguably dates back at least as far as the invention of automated traffic lights, which were first deployed in 1922 in Houston, Texas. Leo Hollis, author of Cities Are Good For You, says the one unarguably positive achievement of smart city-style thinking in modern times is the train indicator boards on the London Underground. But in the last decade, thanks to the rise of ubiquitous internet connectivity and the miniaturisation of electronics in such now-common devices as RFID tags, the concept seems to have crystallised into an image of the city as a vast, efficient robot – a vision that originated, according toAdam Greenfield at LSE Cities, with giant technology companies such as IBM, Cisco and Software AG, all of whom hoped to profit from big municipal contracts.

“The notion of the smart city in its full contemporary form appears to have originated within these businesses,” Greenfield notes in his 2013 book Against the Smart City, “rather than with any party, group or individual recognised for their contributions to the theory or practice of urban planning.”

Promotional illustrations for a proposed new smart city in Dholera, India.

Whole new cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, have already been constructed according to this template. Its buildings have automatic climate control and computerised access; its roads and water, waste and electricity systems are dense with electronic sensors to enable the city’s brain to track and respond to the movement of residents. But such places retain an eerie and half-finished feel to visitors – which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. According to Antony M Townsend, in his 2013 book Smart Cities, Songdo was originally conceived as “a weapon for fighting trade wars”; the idea was “to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo … with lower taxes and less regulation”.

In India, meanwhile, prime minister Narendra Modi has promised to build no fewer than 100 smart cities – a competitive response, in part, to China’s inclusion of smart cities as a central tenet of its grand urban plan. Yet for the near-term at least, the sites of true “smart city creativity” arguably remain the planet’s established metropolises such as London, New York, Barcelona and San Francisco. Indeed, many people think London is the smartest city of them all just now — Duncan Wilson of Intel calls it a “living lab” for tech experiments

So what challenges face technologists hoping to weave cutting-edge networks and gadgets into centuries-old streets and deeply ingrained social habits and patterns of movement? This was the central theme of the recent “Re.Work Future Cities Summit” in London’s Docklands – for which two-day public tickets ran to an eye-watering £600.

The event was structured like a fast-cutting series of TED talks, with 15-minute investor-friendly presentations on everything from “emotional cartography” to biologically inspired buildings. Not one non-Apple-branded laptop could be spotted among the audience, and at least one attendee was seen confidently sporting the telltale fat cyan arm of Google Glass on his head.

“Instead of a smart phone, I want you all to have a smart drone in your pocket,” said one entertaining robotics researcher, before tossing up into the auditorium a camera-equipped drone that buzzed around like a fist-sized mosquito. Speakers enthused about the transport app Citymapper, and how the city of Zurich is both futuristic and remarkably civilised. People spoke about the “huge opportunity” represented by expanding city budgets for technological “solutions”.

Usman Haque’s project Thingful is billed as a ‘search engine for the internet of things’

Strikingly, though, many of the speakers took care to denigrate the idea of the smart city itself, as though it was a once-fashionable buzzphrase that had outlived its usefulness. This was done most entertainingly by Usman Haque, of the urban consultancy Umbrellium. The corporate smart-city rhetoric, he pointed out, was all about efficiency, optimisation, predictability, convenience and security. “You’ll be able to get to work on time; there’ll be a seamless shopping experience, safety through cameras, et cetera. Well, all these things make a city bearable, but they don’t make a city valuable.”

As the tech companies bid for contracts, Haque observed, the real target of their advertising is clear: “The people it really speaks to are the city managers who can say, ‘It wasn’t me who made the decision, it was the data.’”

Of course, these speakers who rejected the corporate, top-down idea of the smart city were themselves demonstrating their own technological initiatives to make the city, well, smarter. Haque’s project Thingful, for example, is billed as a search engine for the internet of things. It could be used in the morning by a cycle commuter: glancing at a personalised dashboard of local data, she could check local pollution levels and traffic, and whether there are bikes in the nearby cycle-hire rack.

“The smart city was the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people,” suggested Dan Hill, of urban innovators the Future Cities Catapult. “It never answered the question: ‘How is it tangibly, materially going to affect the way people live, work, and play?’” (His own work includes Cities Unlocked, an innovative smartphone audio interface that can help visually impaired people navigate the streets.) Hill is involved with Manchester’s current smart city initiative, which includes apparently unglamorous things like overhauling the Oxford Road corridor – a bit of “horrible urban fabric”. This “smart stuff”, Hill tells me, “is no longer just IT – or rather IT is too important to be called IT any more. It’s so important you can’t really ghettoise it in an IT city. A smart city might be a low-carbon city, or a city that’s easy to move around, or a city with jobs and housing. Manchester has recognised that.”

One take-home message of the conference seemed to be that whatever the smart city might be, it will be acceptable as long as it emerges from the ground up: what Hill calls “the bottom-up or citizen-led approach”. But of course, the things that enable that approach – a vast network of sensors amounting to millions of electronic ears, eyes and noses – also potentially enable the future city to be a vast arena of perfect and permanent surveillance by whomever has access to the data feeds.

Inside Rio de Janeiro’s centre of operations: ‘a high-precision control panel for the entire city’. Photograph: David Levene

One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiroto see this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: “What began as a tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the entire city.” He quotes Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: “The operations centre allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

What’s more, if an entire city has an “operating system”, what happens when it goes wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to Hollis, is really just a “perpetual beta city”. We can be sure that accidents will happen – driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look then?

A less intrusive way to make a city smarter might be to give those who govern it a way to try out their decisions in virtual reality before inflicting them on live humans. This is the idea behind city-simulation company Simudyne, whose projects include detailed computerised models for planning earthquake response or hospital evacuation. It’s like the strategy game SimCity – for real cities. And indeed Simudyne now draws a lot of its talent from the world of videogames. “When we started, we were just mathematicians,” explains Justin Lyon, Simudyne’s CEO. “People would look at our simulations and joke that they were inscrutable. So five or six years ago we developed a new system which allows you to make visualisations – pretty pictures.” The simulation can now be run as an immersive first-person gameworld, or as a top-down SimCity-style view, where “you can literally drop policy on to the playing area”.

Another serious use of “pretty pictures” is exemplified by the work of ScanLAB Projects, which uses Lidar and ground-penetrating radar to make 3D visualisations of real places. They can be used for art installations and entertainment: for example, mapping underground ancient Rome for the BBC. But the way an area has been used over time, both above and below ground, can also be presented as a layered historical palimpsest, which can serve the purposes of archaeological justice and memory – as with ScanLAB’s Living Death Campsproject with Forensic Architecture, on two concentration-camp sites in the former Yugoslavia.

The former German pavilion at Staro Sajmište, Belgrade – produced from terrestrial laser scanning and ground-penetrating radar as part of the Living Death Camps project. Photograph: ScanLAB Projects

For Simudyne’s simulations, meanwhile, the visualisations work to “gamify” the underlying algorithms and data, so that anyone can play with the initial conditions and watch the consequences unfold. Will there one day be convergence between this kind of thing and the elaborately realistic modelled cities that are built for commercial videogames? “There’s absolutely convergence,” Lyon says. A state-of-the art urban virtual reality such as the recreation of Chicago in this year’s game Watch Dogs requires a budget that runs to scores of millions of dollars. But, Lyon foresees, “Ten years from now, what we see in Watch Dogs today will be very inexpensive.”

What if you could travel through a visually convincing city simulation wearing the VR headset, Oculus Rift? When Lyon first tried one, he says, “Everything changed for me.” Which prompts the uncomfortable thought that when such simulations are indistinguishable from the real thing (apart from the zero possibility of being mugged), some people might prefer to spend their days in them. The smartest city of the future could exist only in our heads, as we spend all our time plugged into a virtual metropolitan reality that is so much better than anything physically built, and fail to notice as the world around us crumbles.

In the meantime, when you hear that cities are being modelled down to individual people – or what in the model are called “agents” – you might still feel a jolt of the uncanny, and insist that free-will makes your actions in the city unpredictable. To which Lyon replies: “They’re absolutely right as individuals, but collectively they’re wrong. While I can’t predict what you are going to do tomorrow, I can have, with some degree of confidence, a sense of what the crowd is going to do, what a group of people is going to do. Plus, if you’re pulling in data all the time, you use that to inform the data of the virtual humans.

“Let’s say there are 30 million people in London: you can have a simulation of all 30 million people that very closely mirrors but is not an exact replica of London. You have the 30 million agents, and then let’s have a business-as-usual normal commute, let’s have a snowstorm, let’s shut down a couple of train lines, or have a terrorist incident, an earthquake, and so on.” Lyons says you will get a highly accurate sense of how people, en masse, will respond to these scenarios. “While I’m not interested in a specific individual, I’m interested in the emergent behaviour of the crowd.”

City-simulation company Simudyne creates computerised models ‘with pretty pictures’ to aid disaster-response planning

But what about more nefarious bodies who are interested in specific individuals? As citizens stumble into a future where they will be walking around a city dense with sensors, cameras and drones tracking their every movement – even whether they are smiling (as has already been tested at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival) or feeling gloomy – there is a ticking time-bomb of arguments about surveillance and privacy that will dwarf any previous conversations about Facebook or even, perhaps, government intelligence agencies scanning our email. Unavoidable advertising spam everywhere you go, as in Minority Report, is just the most obvious potential annoyance. (There have already been “smart billboards” that recognised Minis driving past and said hello to them.) The smart city might be a place like Rio on steroids, where you can never disappear.

“If you have a mobile phone, and the right sensors are deployed across the city, people have demonstrated the ability to track those individual phones,” Lyon points out. “And there’s nothing that would prevent you from visualising that movement in a SimCity-like landscape, like in Watch Dogs where you see an avatar moving through the city and you can call up their social-media profile. If you’re trying to search a very large dataset about how someone’s moving, it’s very hard to get your head around it, but as soon as you fire up a game-style visualisation, it’s very easy to see, ‘Oh, that’s where they live, that’s where they work, that’s where their mistress must be, that’s where they go to drink a lot.’”

This is potentially an issue with open-data initiatives such as those currently under way in Bristol and Manchester, which is making publicly available the data it holds about city parking, procurement and planning, public toilets and the fire service. The democratic motivation of this strand of smart-city thinking seems unimpugnable: the creation of municipal datasets is funded by taxes on citizens, so citizens ought to have the right to use them. When presented in the right way – “curated”, if you will, by the city itself, with a sense of local character – such information can help to bring “place back into the digital world”, says Mike Rawlinson of consultancy City ID, which is working with Bristol on such plans.

But how safe is open data? It has already been demonstrated, for instance, that the openly accessible data of London’s cycle-hire scheme can be used to track individual cyclists. “There is the potential to see it all as Big Brother,” Rawlinson says. “If you’re releasing data and people are reusing it, under what purpose and authorship are they doing so?” There needs, Hill says, to be a “reframed social contract”.

The interface of Simudyne’s City Hospital EvacSim

Sometimes, at least, there are good reasons to track particular individuals. Simudyne’s hospital-evacuation model, for example, needs to be tied in to real data. “Those little people that you see [on screen], those are real people, that’s linking to the patient database,” Lyon explains – because, for example, “we need to be able to track this poor child that’s been burned.” But tracking everyone is a different matter: “There could well be a backlash of people wanting literally to go off-grid,” Rawlinson says. Disgruntled smart citizens, unite: you have nothing to lose but your phones.

In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society, and in particular about who holds power in society. “In the end, the smart city will destroy democracy,” Hollis warns. “Like Google, they’ll have enough data not to have to ask you what you want.”

You sometimes see in the smart city’s prophets a kind of casual assumption that politics as we know it is over. One enthusiastic presenter at the Future Cities Summit went so far as to say, with a shrug: “Internet eats everything, and internet will eat government.” In another presentation, about a new kind of “autocatalytic paint” for street furniture that “eats” noxious pollutants such as nitrous oxide, an engineer in a video clip complained: “No one really owns pollution as a problem.” Except that national and local governments do already own pollution as a problem, and have the power to tax and regulate it. Replacing them with smart paint ain’t necessarily the smartest thing to do.

And while some tech-boosters celebrate the power of companies such as Über – the smartphone-based unlicensed-taxi service now banned in Spain and New Delhi, and being sued in several US states – to “disrupt” existing transport infrastructure, Hill asks reasonably: “That Californian ideology that underlies that user experience, should it really be copy-pasted all over the world? Let’s not throw away the idea of universal service that Transport for London adheres to.”

Perhaps the smartest of smart city projects needn’t depend exclusively – or even at all – on sensors and computers. At Future Cities, Julia Alexander of Siemens nominated as one of the “smartest” cities in the world the once-notorious Medellin in Colombia, site of innumerable gang murders a few decades ago. Its problem favelas were reintegrated into the city not with smartphones but with publicly funded sports facilities and a cable car connecting them to the city. “All of a sudden,” Alexander said, “you’ve got communities interacting” in a way they never had before. Last year, Medellin – now the oft-cited poster child for “social urbanism” – was named the most innovative city in the world by the Urban Land Institute.

One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez of the University of New South Wales, suggests that “a smarter way” to build cities “might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team.” That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the “end user” – in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”

Source: The Guardian

PM Modi looks to push urban infra; stresses on smart cities in tune with 21st century

Aiming to improve urban infrastructure and governance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday chaired a high-level meeting with government officials on the ‘Smart City’ initiative. The meeting was part of series of consultations on smart cities.

PM Modi said, “One of the aims of the smart city initiative should be to improve the quality of urban governance, thereby lending greater strength to the overall governance processes of the country.”

Modi asked officials to identify the basics of infrastructure, quality of life, and citizen-centric services that would be essential to cities of the 21st century. Modi said He also said cities should be identified as hubs of economic activity. “Focus on “waste to wealth” – i.e. – solid-waste management, and waste-water treatment would be an important part of the development of smart cities,” Modi said.

He asked officials to visualize “urban-dependent” population, in addition to “urban” population, while planning for smart cities.

Modi asked the Ministry of Urban Development to convene a workshop of all central and state Urban Development Authorities at the earliest. He said the workshop should also focus on reforms in laws related to urban development.

“The Prime Minister called for identifying parameters that could be laid down for smart cities,” the government press release said. “The Prime Minister asked Government officials to visualize “urban-dependent” population, in addition to “urban” population, while planning for Smart Cities,” the release added.

Officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Urban Development, and Ministry of Information Technology, were present for the meeting.

Source:Economic Times

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