In January 2019, IDC estimated that 40% of the world’s spending on smart cities initiatives is in Asia-Pacific, with nine cities in China forking out more than US$300 million in 2019. By 2023, IDC expects the total smart city market to reach US$184 billion by 2023. That kind of projections is typically what gets people excited.
“With competition for talent and foreign direct investment being even more intense today, these socioeconomic hubs provide huge openings for solution providers to aid in seamless connectivity and collaborations, enhanced productivity and automation, as well as address security and privacy concerns,” said Gerald Wang, head of IDC Asia Pacific Public Sector research.
Five strategies
Coming into the end of the year, ABI Research listed five key smart cities strategy shifts that governments may need to consider as it combats what it claims is a growing list of challenges for city administrators including congestion, pollution, and public safety on top of emerging concerns like cyberattacks and climate change.
“This new reality requires new approaches, leveraging a range of new technologies to create true strategy shifts,” says Dominique Bonte, vice president at ABI Research.
The researcher offered five new urban strategy shifts including digital twins & urban modelling, resilient cities, circular cities, micro-mobility, and smart spaces.
The first strategy shift on the horizon is holistic, real-time modelling (digital twins of entire cities), and the automated, generative design of urban environments, both brownfield and greenfield.
The second strategy shift is migrating from a focus on “safe and secure cities” to resilient cities. This shift is where next-generation technologies and paradigms can be fully leveraged. Due to their dense character, urban areas are extremely vulnerable to both loss of life and economic value (GDP).
Cities need to be ready and prepared for such events in terms of evacuation emergency response procedures. To make cities fully resilient, it is vital to be able to predict (with the help of advanced AI and deep learning approaches) and, whenever possible, avoid disasters.
Moving from green and sustainable cities to circular cities is the third strategy shift. “It is about turning entire cities into circular entities, eliminating their “outside of the city” footprints entirely by achieving large degrees of self-support and self-sufficiency in areas like energy generation,” said Bonte.
Sharing, recycling, repairing, refurbishing, and repurposing materials, assets, and natural resources are guiding principles of circular economies. Bonte labelled this the endgame for smart cities.
Adding micro-mobility into the mix is a strategy shift known as Mobility 2.0. Cities are embracing electric, two-wheel, micro-mobility to reduce congestion (through their innate ability to mingle with four-wheel traffic) and provide cleaner mobility to address rampant air pollution.
Bonte explained that “While earlier docked, non-electric bike-sharing schemes never really took off, citizens across the globe are now massively adopting dockless electric bike and scooter sharing, and to a lesser extent electric motorbike sharing, offering a much higher level of convenience due to their ubiquitous availability and powered operation.”
The last strategy shift is rethinking the urban built environment through smart spaces. Many of the shifts discussed earlier are impacting how public space is used. The most obvious example is the decommissioning and repurposing of parking lots and buildings in cities enjoying high levels of car-sharing adoption.
Catering to new forms of mobility, modular roads, and energy-generating roads and sidewalks are just some of the possibilities considered. The expansion and active management of green spaces are also high on the agenda of urban designers.
Role of IoT in smart cities
While smart city tech investments will reach over US$61 billion globally in 2026, most of the expenditure will be for incremental improvements.
“In fact, it is an illusion to believe that adding just a shallow layer of IoT technology to legacy urban environments will allow cities to address the urban challenges of the future, ranging from the provision of sustainable energy to the adoption of smart mobility and the construction of resilient cities,” Bonte explained.
Reflecting on their experience with customers in the region, Nokia’s head of public sector for Asia Pacific, Barbara Noonan suggested an opportunity for city digital transformation: “where cities will deploy shared connectivity and digital platform foundation that will allow them to capture rich and deep innovation in the long term. We call it the ‘city as a platform’ approach and we believe that in 2020, we will see more of these city development models materializing,” she added.
What’s happening in Asia
Noonan said one key strategy shift for smart cities in the future is the application of IoT to help mitigate the loss of life and economic value caused by natural disasters.
One such example of a pilot by the Sendai City in Japan where the government has tested drones for disaster prevention and mitigation by using a private LTE mobile broadband network. Using speakers, HD cameras and thermal cameras mounted on Nokia drones, the testers were able to issue a major tsunami warning to evacuees in coastal areas through the drone speaker and monitor the tsunami arrival zone and coastal areas through drone camera images. They also guided people to evacuation sites using the drone to convey directions and monitored the movements of evacuees using the drone camera.
In Eastern Zhejiang province, the Quzhou Municipal Government deployed an urban smart transportation/traffic application. Buses were fitted with a positioning device which transmits the bus’ location to smart receivers at select traffic lights.
When the bus is about 100 meters away from the traffic lights, according to the operation data on the bus together with the actual situation of the intersection signal light , the Smart Transportation Platform will optimize the waiting time of the traffic lights in real-time to ensure that the bus does not have to wait too long at the intersection.
Reflecting on the nearly 200 smart city programmes and initiatives in more than 40 countries around the globe, F.E. (Edwin) Diender, chief digital transformation officer and vice president, government & public sector business department at Huawei, nominated several businesses in Asia that owe their innovation to IoT including bike-sharing, smart lock, and connected manhole cover. Other industries that may benefit from IoT include Agriculture, Cattle & Farming.
The 5G hype machine
The hype around 5G has been on high gear particularly in early 2019 as smartphone and 5G radio equipment makers take every opportunity to talk about the technology. But while the technology itself promises greater range, speed and connectivity, it is the industrial and commercial applications of 5G will enable true innovations as ambitioned by smart city architects.
All eyes are on the ITU with the imminent release of the IMT-2020, a standard that will underpin the next generations of mobile broadband and IoT connection, due out sometime in 2020. But expectations are it will be well past 2020 by the time these standards get deployed commercially.
Yang Ming, executive director and chief operating officer for Whale Cloud is confident that the high bandwidth, large connectivity and low latency of 5G can solve many problems in the process of smart city construction, especially the critical M2M communication issues.
He further cautioned that 5G is more like a seasoning, not an ingredient in smart city construction at least in the foreseeable 2020.
“This is because the network infrastructure is far from mature and the data processing capabilities need strengthening in most of the current smart city platforms. Hence the wide adoption of 5G in smart city will happen around 2025. The city can only be smarter when the network, platform, and devices are all better connected and communicated,” he concluded.
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