The Smart City Transformations: The Revolution of The 21st Century

By Amitabh Satyam and Igor Calzada

A handbook for the practitioners, this book is a complete treatise on the topic of Smart, covering:

1. A comprehensive framework with the needed definitions, concepts, strategies, approaches, and technologies to develop and manage a greenfield or brownfield Smart city.
2. Integrating economics, developmental concepts, engineering, environment and governance that sets the definitive foundation of the Smart framework.
3. Technologies that are powering the Smart movement. Extensive case-studies.
4. Societal and Political research, and progress made by the academia.
5. Specific methodology of measuring Smart elements of a city. Introduction to the concepts of Smart Map and Smart Index.
6. A structured approach to transformation, setting priorities, execution, financing and governance.
The new structure and market dynamics of the Smart industry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9789386643025

Book preview

1

Chapter 1

Introduction

Loving it

Jim gets up at five in the morning. Drives to the Princeton station to reach at 6:30. He picks up the Wall Street Journal and a bagel before rushing to platform three to catch his train to the Manhattan Penn Station. He reads his paper, eats his breakfast, and calls to say good morning to his newly-wed wife from the train.

Jim would not want it any other way.

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Sarita gets off her work at the University of Mumbai at 7:00 p.m. During her walk to the Victoria train station on her way back home, she buys fresh vegetables from the street vendors for dinner. She gets a place to sit only for a third of the time during her 90-minute ride to Panvel. Once seated, she takes out the vegetables and her portable knife and cuts the vegetables to get a jump start on her cooking. She rushes to the kitchen the moment she enters her house as her kids are hungry by then. Her husband, who returns home an hour later after a 14-hour work schedule, catches up on his sleep on the morning train.

Sarita would not want it any other way.

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Haruto’s 100 square-foot apartment in Tokyo vibrates when the metro train passes by. His life is synchronised with the trains schedule. When he visits his parents, he is unable to sleep as there are no running trains in the neighbourhood to comfort him to sleep.

Haruto would not want it any other way.

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Eduardo is on the Maracaibo football team and his wife Maria is a sales executive. She also does leg modelling for a shoe company. Their schedules are orthogonal and they barely meet even on weekends.

Eduardo and Maria would not want it any other way.

How convenient

Cities have a large number of people living and working in a relatively compact space. The rural population, on the other hand, is sparsely distributed. Tokyo has about 7000 people living in a square kilometre of an area, Mumbai metropolis has about 21,000, whereas, rural areas have only about 100 to 500 people per square kilometre. Cities are about 50 to 100 times denser than villages.

This density brings many good things. Cities host businesses, so people have jobs there. Cities have malls, eateries and movie theatres for people to enjoy life. Schools and colleges are nearby. Things are closer together in cities.

Let us spend billions for billions

In many cities, there are a million people on the road, every morning, travelling about 10 kilometres each. That is about 10 million person-kilometres travelled. There is also the return trip to home from school or workplace.

With hundreds of such cities world over, imagine the billions of hours spent in travelling and billions of litres of oil consumed, every day. There is no meaningful economic value or pleasure to be derived from the time spent in travel. People generally commute long distances every working day against their wishes.

This is how our life and work have become now: long commutes, crowded streets, small living areas, and polluted air. It just happened this way, and that too very quickly, without the civilisation realising what it was getting into. The first billion years of life had remained about the same, with only incremental changes over the millennia. However, it is during the last few hundred years that we have experienced practically all the structural changes in our society – how we eat, the time we sleep, our ways of raising children, or ways of making a living. Our genetic make-up or even the physical infrastructure did not have the time to catch up with these changes.

Cities are falling apart. Living in them is full of misery.

We would like to do better

If we could expand the cities to make them as sparse as a village, then we would solve the problems caused by the high density of population. However, once the cities become spread out, each trip out of the house would have to be several times longer. All the city facilities would also have to be spread out: Offices, hospitals, and malls would all be far away. While some cities in the world are indeed sparsely populated, we cannot imagine such a dispersed population for the most part of the world - there will be houses and lawns all over, with little left for agriculture - unless people grow food in their backyards, like the old times.

People choose between job opportunities and fresh air.

Hospitals cost a lot to build – we, therefore, cannot make one every two kilometres apart, all over the country. We also cannot build police stations, colleges, schools, or movie theatres at a walking distance from every home. We would have to have too many of them if we were to be spread out like the rural areas and yet expected the conveniences of a city. Metro trains, frequent buses, and taxis within reach would be impossible. Economies of scale will not work out.

Cities have been good to us. They have powered the progress of the civilisation. They brought economic prosperity, security, comfort, heating, cooling, lights, and cooking gas. Economic activities have been concentrated in the cities for thousands of years, as evidenced by some of the oldest civilisations, such as the Indus Valley. People of diverse skills in the cities have an opportunity to collaborate to develop new ideas. These ideas drive progress.

So, a dispersed population is not sustainable.

So, cities are fine

We do need a high-density population. We need police stations, hospitals, offices, and schools close enough to be useful.

Then how about billions of hours in commuting in the cities? What about the thousands of acres of slums in the poor countries? What about the flickering electricity supply and waste rotting on the streets? What about people breathing carbon monoxide released from cars and sulphur dioxide from factories?

Rich countries invest a large proportion of their income to keep the streets clean and sewage pipes running. Poorer countries, however, cannot afford it. Housing is an even bigger challenge for cities. A one-bedroom apartment in London costs a million pounds. How do school teachers and nurses manage their finances?

So, while the big cities offer jobs and economic prosperity, they take away peace and comfort. People have to choose between job opportunities and fresh air.

Jim, Sarita, Haruto, Eduardo and Maria struggle with their lives, however, they still choose a city.

Cities offer more.

Expectations are high, stress is higher

Where will the next billion live when they move to cities? In Delhi and Dubai, there are a dozen people living in one room - taking turns to sleep. Should a civilised society accept these living conditions? Can we blame these people who need to earn for their families? A large slum population in the cities pose even bigger challenges.

Economic prosperity and urban competitiveness also breed a desire for more wealth and better lifestyle. The income gaps also lead to higher crime levels in many cities where a large population cannot maintain an acceptable quality of life.

People leave acres in villages to fight for a few extra square feet in the cities.

People leave acres in villages to fight for a few extra square feet in the cities. City architects, visionaries in the governments, and technology solution providers are struggling with these challenges.

It is getting worse

Already compressed, this urban population is constantly increasing. In another 30 years, urban population will increase to about 70 per cent from 55 per cent today. Cities that are centres of economic activities will experience the largest increase. India has 30 per cent of its population living in the cities today; China has 55 per cent - both will inject hundreds of millions of new people into the cities every year.

In addition to long commutes and small living spaces, availability of drinking water to the ballooning population is a serious challenge. While the water sources have remained unchanged over the millennia, such as the lakes, rivers, and groundwater, the volume of water available is diminishing as these water sources do not recharge like they did before. Urbanisation has damaged the natural processes. Lakes do not receive water from rains, as the construction of buildings and roads obstruct the water flow.

Consumption of energy is increasing as well, fuelled primarily by economic growth in lesser developed economies. Air and water pollution by irresponsible urban behaviours are making citizens sick.

So, energy consumption and pollution levels are increasing whereas living spaces are declining. Time spent on unproductive activities is increasing, leaving little time to celebrate life.

Every city has a critical mass – an optimum number of people that is just right for jobs and infrastructure.

We are losing the human touch. A daughter is unable to visit her ailing father as she lives at the other end of the city. Additionally, since a large population is a recent settler, meeting the family is turning into an annual affair.

It is, indeed, getting worse in the cities.

So, what next?

Cities are great places to live in, work, and raise a family. They bring together the best that a society has to offer. However, as people migrate, these large cities are burdened with supplying quality infrastructure, conveniences, and safety to this continuously increasing population.

Higher aspirations of people are also demanding higher levels of energy consumption. Only a few cities can afford to provide for as much as their citizens expect them to. There are similar constraints on water supply and waste disposal. This mismatch between aspirations and availability of resources causes social turmoil, and many governments fall because of this.

A city, essentially, has a critical mass - an optimum number of people that is right for education, entertainment, commute, employment opportunities, water supply, safety, and square footage per person. However, if the transport systems improve, then the city can take in more people. Similarly, if schools, offices, residences and entertainment centres are evenly distributed, then also the city can absorb more people. Critical mass incorporates all the areas of physical and social infrastructure. Bigger than this critical size results in unbearably long commute, a dense population, and an unaffordable real estate. Smaller size means suboptimal availability of job opportunities for people and inadequate availability of manpower for businesses.

We have been adapting our ways of living and ways of interacting since the birth of civilisation. However, if millions of people leave their homes and families to move to cities, the change is too traumatic for the society. This destroys families and relationships, and brings considerable strain on the emigrants. Loneliness, emotional disorders, and crimes are highly correlated with these changes.

It is a complex situation. We must find a smarter way of finding the next equilibrium.

Notes

Chapter 2

Evolution

The beginning

A long time ago, when civilisation was settling in, people lived in caves and temporary shelters. Soon they started building permanent dwellings and communities emerged. Located close to a water source such as a river or a lake, these places became self-sufficient over time in food, water, and safety in numbers.

These communities then became villages with a social and physical infrastructure. Paths, community centres, and markets emerged. Basic rules and laws evolved alongside to govern the community.

This process of development continued for centuries.

Proximity to water and a favourable climate supported the growth of these communities. Concentration in some of these villages, especially where the rulers resided, grew more. More infrastructure, larger buildings, and planned dwellings for staff and army developed.

Some of these villages are now known as Paris, Kolkata, Shanghai, and Bangkok.

People then lived in harmony with nature, and the cycle of life sustained like it had for thousands of years.

A few hundred years ago

Political and regional importance also influenced the increase in the size of settlements. Planning for the well-being of the citizens and related infrastructure were after-thoughts. Concepts of urban planning, infrastructure development, utility delivery, and security management evolved over time.

Planned urban layout, water supply, and sanitation systems have been around for thousands of years. However, optimising them for larger populations and managing the non-degradable waste is a relatively new exercise. In most cities, such planning became relevant only after the industrial revolution.

Human civilisation evolved through the cycles of economic expansion. Global wars for religious supremacy have been the key drivers for the reorganisation of the world and for the growth of many cities. With science, engineering and entrepreneurship, as well as with loot, exploitation and slavery, Europe became the centre of the economic activity post the middle ages.

Many of the large cities of today were also large cities a few hundred years ago. People rode horses and bullock carts. Most walked. Water sources were also close. Waste was mostly organic and people used to discard it around their houses or in the fields. In addition, people defecated in the fields and bacteria provided by nature took care of reducing the excreta to earth.

All the consumables were organic. Metallic items were few and were barely wasted or thrown out. So, cities were sustainable.

During the last three hundred years, Europe witnessed an exponential increase in scientific activities. Those, I believe, were the golden years of human existence. Prior to that, for three to four thousand years, Indian scientists had put together a comprehensive set of theories about the life, health, atoms, gravity and the universe, along with geometric formulas and the numbers system. Greek, Chinese and Persian scientists also added considerably to the foundation of science.

Science in Europe progressively became free from Christianity during the 1600s, and with the advent of steam engines, Europe took the lead in both science and engineering. Life transformed rapidly during these years. Newton’s simple laws describing the physical motion of objects along with Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism revolutionised the scientific world. Economic growth accelerated due to a stream of new discoveries.

A few years ago

With industrialisation, the types and volume of waste increased: industrial first, and then domestic. Large cities, such as London used to smell of filth in the streets. People would throw their garbage out wherever they found a spot.

By the early 19th century, trains for public use were becoming a reality. Then came cars. Cars needed open spaces for higher speeds. So, wider roads became a necessity. Train infrastructure had already expanded by then, and waterways were quite advanced even before these modern technologies came around.

The sources of energy must also move with these mobile carriers. So, portability of energy needed the technologies of engines - machines that are small enough to be carried along. So, vehicles were designed to carry the engine on them as well as the fuel. These engines gave birth to modern transportation.

People’s lives were earlier defined by the space they could cover by walking or by carts. Cultures and languages changed beyond ten to twenty kilometres. So, the ability of the common citizens to travel beyond a few kilometres, powered by the machines, led to a social transformation. People started exporting excess grains, and later productions from factories, facilitated by these convenient transport machines. Cultures and communities started assimilating and merging, and societies became larger.

Further industrialisation changed the landscape of cities. Areas for living and areas for working got separated. In addition to the safety in community living, people lived away from the factories to save themselves from the fumes that emitted from the industrial processes. The mechanised transportation options made this separation possible - people could take a bus or a train to commute. This freedom also led to the development of new layouts in cities, away from the existing places – either as an organised effort by the government or by the expansions in the industry. Electrification had already been going on, and by the 1950s, electricity from the grid was considered a standard utility in the large industrial and affluent cities.

Today

Cities earlier had narrow streets - designed for walking or for horse carts. When the cities became larger and industrialised, the existing streets became infrastructure bottlenecks. So, people moved out and the cities expanded into newer areas.

We have reached an inflexion point where the maturity of Smart concepts and the cost of the solutions are optimally positioned to seed the grand transformation of this century.

The changes that caused cities to expand did not all occur at the same time. So, the city planners never had a single opportunity to develop a comprehensive design of any city, to incorporate all that we have available today. First, the trains, then cars and more recently the airplanes came about for transportation. Similarly, pipes for water, electricity, telephone and gas supply came at different times during the last two centuries. So, cities went through significant transformations several times to incorporate these innovations. This continues even today.

There is another revolution taking place now: The Information revolution. Availability of the right information at the right time helps in making decisions that directly impact how societies operate: Knowing precisely when the bus will arrive at the station; or, which route an ambulance should take at a particular time of the day; or the best time to run a washing machine to minimise the cost of electricity. These concepts are forcing us to re-evaluate the ways cities should be designed.

A large number of ideas have been evolving over the last decade. At this time, however, we have reached an inflexion point where the maturity of these concepts and the cost of the solutions are optimally positioned to seed the grand transformation of this century.

The deficit

Some have more money and some have less, but, every country runs like a family on a budget.

Cities are managed by the city governments, and funds to run the cities come from tax collections. So, the amount available to develop the physical infrastructure depends on the tax structure as well as the economic output of the city. Based on the value of tax collections, the cities prioritise the utilisation: Should new roads be built or should the existing ones be upgraded? Should new buses be inducted or should the water pipes be upgraded instead, to save from further rusting?

If we had unlimited resources, then the story would be different. We would do both: Add more roads as well as perform repairs on old ones. We would add a million new CCTVs across the city; build three times more schools and colleges; or pump more oil and gas from the underground wells.

In reality, however, resources are limited. Be it Jakarta, Detroit, Abuja, or Rangoon - cities are always working against financial constraints. Only a few countries are ‘rich’ - these are the oil pumping economies selling their family silver to stay rich. Their large deposits of energy underground are good for several generations, and they can use them to barter for other resources.

Japan, Kenya, India, Germany, or China - they all have large economies to run. They are like a family on a budget. Some have more money, some have less. However, no country is rich enough.

Today, citizens world over expect a reasonable quality of life. This expectation includes a continuous supply of electricity, water, and cooking gas in addition to telephone and broadband connectivity. Most affluent cities have these services integrated into the city infrastructure. These cities also have hospitals, schools, ambulance, police, and fire brigades.

The less affluent cities have fewer of these conveniences or none at all. A large part of the world - primarily the poor parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, is challenged with matching the aspirations of people with the available resources. These cities are stuck in a vicious circle where a lower level of economic activity leads to smaller tax collections. This lower revenue accrued to the cities leads to installation of fewer conveniences. Poor infrastructure, in turn, pushes new investments away, leading to more poverty.

Global population is growing and at the same time, the total quantity of natural resources is depleting. We are exhausting the fossil fuels irreversibly. Potable water supplies are also diminishing in absolute terms and even more significantly in per capita terms.

So, the scarcity is a given. It is built into our lives. We can never have 100 per cent safety. We cannot have zero per cent traffic jams. We cannot increase the police force to one policeman per dozen citizens. We cannot create water or new fossil fuels.

We always a desire for more than what we have.

In summary

Life was in equilibrium with nature since it was formed and the population was controlled by access to natural resources. Humans were subservient to nature.

We always have a desire for more than what we have. This forces our cities to keep reinventing.

With science and technology, humans started controlling nature: We now capture energy stored for millions of years; we change the forms of natural materials, such as iron, sand, and stones, to use in applications that benefit us; we develop new cities in thousands of acres of open fields; and we also control the flow of rivers. People now live comfortably in minus 50 degrees centigrade cold as well as in 50 degrees hot because the temperature can be managed by spending energy. We have disrupted many natural cycles, due to these interventions.

More are developing, and developed are

developing more

In this mini section, I am introducing the concepts of development, energy, waste and sustainability, and their interdependence. Our future discussions will make references to these concepts.

Development is the most commonly used word in practically every discussion on countries or on cities - both rich and poor. Every person, every family, and every community wishes to develop, and governments are measured by the rate of economic growth they are able to deliver.

When we develop, we create new products, new infrastructure, and new services by using various forms of materials and energy. These items of development are designed to improve the quality of life of the targeted community, and the process of development essentially entails extracting resources from nature’s stores and transforming them into useful forms.

Let us consider road building. It needs space on which roads are to be built. Materials needed include asphalt, concrete, and cement for making a smooth surface. These input elements are all made of materials already existing on earth. The needed energy is supplied by oil, coal or electricity. Electricity, in turn, is generated using coal, petroleum products or the gravitational potential energy in water. In essence, every component of the input is derived from an existing pool of resources of the earth. Even the road roller is developed the same way from natural resources.

In building cars, we use steel, aluminium and carbon-based polymers. The mobile electronic devices that are made of aluminium, copper, plastics and silicon are all procured from Earth; each component, including the transistors, capacitors, inductors, the circuit boards and the casing, however, has been transformed considerably from the elemental forms to provide the needed functionality.

Therefore, availability of material and energy have a direct relationship to development.

So, it is matter and energy?

Based on the discussions above, it is evident that higher the deposits of natural resources in a country, the higher would be its wealth, considering its direct contribution to production. However, we have observed that many communities that have more of these resources are not necessarily richer. In fact, some of the richest communities possess the least quantities of minerals and vice versa. Zambia, Sierra Leone, and Congo have large¹ deposits of minerals, but are relatively poor, whereas contribution of minerals is less than a third of a percentage of the total income of the USA: 99.7 per cent USA’s wealth, 99 per cent of UK’s and 95 per cent of India’s wealth is not directly attributable to the availability of natural material resources. There is, in fact, a negative correlation between the wealth from materials to the total wealth of the nations.

The second component, energy, is also stored in earth as fossil fuels. It supports all the heating, cooling and the movements required for the industry. Owners of oil wells are rich, however, there are many communities that are relatively poor despite the ownership of oil resources: Venezuela and Nigeria for example. So, while energy is an important contributor to development, that alone is not an indicator of wealth, prosperity, and progress of a country.

The third element

Consider an example of a 1500-yuan computer chip that uses about 100 yuans worth of raw materials and 200 yuans worth of energy for its production. The remaining 1200 yuans worth of value comes from transforming the basic materials procured from nature to a nanometre-scale product to hold millions of transistors. Similarly, the cost of input raw materials of a 20,000 Euro car is only a fraction of the total value of the car.

For most of the modern products, the raw material is of lesser value than value additions to them. Even steel and cement, which are closer to their original forms have to go through significant value addition from their raw forms. Strictly speaking, the natural materials do not cost at all; the cost is only of extracting and refining.

Today, communities with knowledge and expertise command power and wealth, not the ones with abundance of petroleum and iron ore.

This value-addition requires knowledge. Advancements in science and engineering lead to the development of technologies, processes, procedures, tools, and machinery. It is the knowledge of the properties of materials that makes it possible for us to develop them into products. For example, the technology of receiving the radio waves coming from a faraway satellite to provide an exact location is far more valuable than the 50 grams of plastic, silicon, and copper that make the device.

Today, communities with knowledge and expertise command power and wealth: They purchase raw materials from communities that have more of them and develop products that are ten or hundred times more in value.

The process that drives the transformation of materials from a low value to a higher value is, therefore, the third element, in addition to material and energy that contributes to the wealth of a nation. I intend for the term ‘process’ to encapsulate all the steps needed to develop products and solutions, including knowledge, innovation, inventions, discoveries, science, engineering, and creativity – essentially, all that is needed for production, in addition to materials and energy.

In today’s world, human ingenuity is driving the progress of mankind. Another word to describe this human ingenuity is Smart.

The development formula

Let me illustrate the relationship of Process with Development as below, based on above discussions.

(Material + Energy) x Processes ⇒ Development

I have used a multiplication sign to highlight that process changes the contribution of matter and energy by orders of magnitude. Therefore, it has a multiplying effect, whereas material and energy have linear impact.

This formula represents the conceptual framework of development and the interdependence of the four parameters. It can be converted to an exact formula with a suitable multiplier constant.

Energy and waste

The world needs an assurance of a sustainable life and sustainable quality of life. Humans are a plenty, so we are not as worried for their scarcity in numbers at this time. Inventive minds may be scarce, but certainly not the possibility of them.

How do we manage the aspirations of people in the short-term and ensure sustainability in the long-term?

Energy sources are, however,