Smart Cities: Reimagining the Urban Experience

By Paul Doherty

In a post-pandemic world, amid environmental crises, and advances in technology, the dynamics of what the average city looks like have called for change, leaving governments and policymakers to reimagine urban planning and development. In Smart Cities: Reimagining the Urban Experience, Paul Doherty shares his organization’s “secret sauce” recipe to marry information technology infrastructure—design thinking—with sustainable development goals (SDGs) for building smart cities. Paul dives into strategies, master plans, work templates, and real-world examples. This book will disrupt existing paradigms to offer practitioners, urban developers, and policymakers some solutions to creating greater social responsibility in a human-centric, data-driven world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ASQ Quality Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781636941127

Paul Doherty

Paul Doherty has written over 100 books and was awarded the Herodotus Award, for lifelong achievement for excellence in the writing of historical mysteries by the Historical Mystery Appreciation Society. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and include the historical mysteries of Brother Athelstan and Hugh Corbett. paulcdoherty.com

Book preview

Introduction

When originally asked to write a book about smart cities more than a decade ago, I was hesitant to take on the task. I felt the smart cities market was maturing, as was my understanding of what this movement was and, more importantly, what it was not. Since that time, there have been many different books, articles, descriptions, smart cities experts, and self-appointed celebrities that have not stood the test of time. But as time has passed and the market has become more comfortable with the term smart cities —and the COVID-19 pandemic brought an increased awareness to the general public of their urban environments and their roles in them—I was approached again to write a book about smart cities. Feeling more comfortable and confident that I could at least describe and communicate smart cities from my own viewpoint since I have the experi­ence of actually doing the work, I agreed to do the best I can with this book.

I have been inspired, motivated, disillusioned, and confused, yet always curious regarding cities since I was a child born and growing up in New York City—Hollis and Queens, to be exact. My family moved out to Long Island where I grew up in the shadows of the city. I have always enjoyed the never-ending energy of New York along with its cuisine, art, fashion, tough business ethic, and beloved sports teams. To be clear, I am a die-hard New York Yankees, Giants, Knicks, and Islanders fan. I know this will result in a good portion of the New York readers closing this book immediately and rolling their eyes. Not to worry, I mention this as an example of the many woven elements that make up an urban fabric, and in this case, create an identity as a New Yorker. Our love of our New York sports teams begins to identify a fan, a neighborhood, a society, and a culture. Our love of cuisine brings many disparate people together into different neighborhoods to carry on traditions or try something new.

When Art Meets Science

Many New Yorkers also have a passion for the arts. The wonderful thing about growing up in New York is that you are absorbed into the arts whether you like it or not. All art is democratized from day one. From the never-ending exposure to all forms of great music, to easy access to the greatest museums in the world, to being able to experience the performing arts at an early age through school field trips, to the beauty of Broadway. Growing up in New York, art shaped me. Looking back at my youth, the mix of races, religions, cultures, viewpoints, and cultures was a blessing, as it exposed me to celebrating the differences between people and making friends with people based on who they are, not what they are. Growing up in East Meadow, New York (on Long Island), my neighborhood was a mix of Jewish, Italian, German, and Irish, like myself, and most of my friends were transplants from New York City, like myself. We brought the traditions, celebrations, and games from the city out to Long Island, and that provided a common experience among us kids. These common experiences came from the many neighborhoods that make New York City real. New York City is not some monolithic place that calls its inhabitants New Yorkers. Rather, you can identify people from The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and especially Manhattan, fairly quickly if you are from New York. To me, New York is a collection of neighborhoods with strong unique identities that over time create a woven urban fabric that is our common identity of being a New Yorker.

With this background, I began my journey of curiosity studying architecture and became a New York licensed architect in 1994. What I learned from doing my undergraduate architecture studies in New York City was how many of us focus on one building as a project when that project has ramifications for its neighboring buildings, the traffic, the people of the neighborhood, and the city as a whole. I never went through a formal urban planning education, but my urban education was learned by doing and being immersed in urban projects my entire career. Street smarts with enough formal training in architecture provided me with the tools to continue my journey.

While I was practicing architecture, working on projects that affected real people in real neighborhoods, I had the unique timing, luck, and experi­ence of being good at information technology in the 1980s. While in architecture school in New York in the late 1980s, I was given the oppor­tunity to enter a work/study program where I would work in the private sector one semester and then attend academic studies the next semester. This extended my undergraduate education by a few years but also cut down my internship requirements to becoming a licensed architect. I chose to participate in a work/study program with IBM in New York, which at the time was the largest information technology company in the world. I designed and fabricated trade show booths for IBM for trade shows like Comdex, PC Expo, and many others.

To properly design and showcase IBM technologies, I was partnered with the world’s best system engineers and computer engineers. I needed to learn everything about hardware and software in order to design the best trade show booths in the world. I became an expert in AS/400, RS/6000, PS/2 desktop computers, token ring networks, and OS/2 operating systems, all IBM products. I also had to learn the hardware and software of IBM partner companies in order to show how they were used in a showroom/show­case environment. These software partners included startup companies called Microsoft, Adobe, Lotus, Citrix, Norton, Intuit, and McAfee, among others.

With this experience and great success with IBM, I was always intrigued as to why buildings could not be like computers. IBM was a leader in that industry because it knew how to fit together other equipment manufacturer (OEM) products into a singular unit called a computer on which IBM put its logo, and that was the business. It’s more complicated than that, but in essence, IBM to me was a company that put together other people’s work and productized it—not too far from an analogy of a building. An architect designs the product, and the general contractor delivers the product, in this case, a building.

So, I have asked myself for decades, why can’t a building be a computer?

The World of Smart Cities

Embedding the OEM components and properly placing them into a build­ing provides the foundation of a fourth utility of a building. Electrical, plumbing, and mechanical are the current three primary utilities of today’s buildings. Can information communication technology (ICT) be the fourth utility where every building becomes a new form of computer?

I am very lucky to be alive to see this vision become a reality with the work my company is performing today. You will read in this book about our current work in designing and delivering manufactured buildings that bring the reality of building as computer to life. Moving from just one building to a cluster of buildings as computers, we are at the threshold of connecting these smart buildings to each other as a community that works as an internet of buildings. Efficiencies with safety, security, water, and entertainment are just being discovered in real-world metrics, making my old curiosity of a building as computer into an idea that has evolved into linking these buildings together as an example of the internet of buildings. Fascinating.

This book will examine our process and implementations as examples of people in the real world trying to move an industry forward through actions—not the only way, but an approach of the art of the possible. I wake up every morning bouncing out of bed with new ideas, new discoveries, and new opportunities knowing that the business of smart cities is just beginning with a long lifeline of work. Some of it is already available, while other work is yet to be discovered.

You will read some chapters and areas within chapters of this book that are more personal in tone, like this introduction, while other areas are more serious, even academic in tone and presentation. The reason for this is that smart cities is a very broad area of interest, study, and action. There are different people with different perspectives and needs for this book, so they can take portions of this book and make it of value to them and others around them. So do not be disarmed when portions of this book seem like a lecture rather than a conversation. They are meant for different audiences, but I hope you find value in the dual-voice approach. You will find that some ideas are positioned to frame your understanding and experiences to journey into my interpretation of smart cities.

This is the reason for this introduction. This book is very different from earlier attempts at defining smart cities, as this book will draw from real-world experiences and projects rather than just conjecture and visioning. One of the goals of this book is to provide you with honest, real-world solutions, strategies, and planning. It is my hope that by publishing our company’s ingredients and recipes of how smart cities are planned, implemented, and operated that others can take these ideas, improve on them, and blaze their own paths forward. The world does not need a singular voice to improve the human condition; it needs a community and movement to accomplish the enormous goals that smart cities provide. My motivation for sharing freely our secret sauce for smart cities is to leave behind some breadcrumbs, a path of success that we have enjoyed, so the younger generation can be inspired to create their own future smart cities for decades to come. There should be no ownership of smart cities. This is and always will be a collective effort. Many smart cities experts and consultants/advisors will call this sacrilege, but the benefits to the world of successful smart cities projects should never be about you—it is about us.

The rest of this introduction sets the table for a description of smart cities, while Chapter 1 provides an attempt at describing the matchstick that is smart cities. Chapter 2 provides details of how to identify, review, plan, and implement innovations in the context of smart cities solutions, using available products, services, and implementation in existing and future projects. Chapter 3 focuses on the master planning and human-centric but data-driven projects we are witnessing being designed and implemented today. Chapter 4 has some interesting collisions between the financial and real estate industries that affect municipalities and smart cities projects, and also bring in key performance indicators (KPI) as one measure of success.

In my company, The Digit Group, Inc. (TDG), this area of finance and critical success factor measures was our largest growth area of learning and understanding and is a key success factor in all of our worldwide projects. Chapter 5 really opens the kimono to show how we operate as a smart cities designer and developer as we provide what, when, where, when, and how concerning smart cities operations and overall governance. Executive program management office (ePMO) frameworks and implementations are shared, including what worked and what did not. Chapter 6 is our attempt at providing a crystal ball view of the near and far collective futures we all share. This chapter is one of my favorites, as it explores current examples of how the physical world of smart cities is colliding with the digital world of the metaverse in meaningful and impactful ways.

This last chapter is also meant to generate ongoing dialog with you, my readers. Traditional book authors have written their books from a pillar of knowledge, pontificating as if from Mt. Olympus as an all-knowing people who talk at you rather than with you. I am far from a traditional knowledge-master and much more of an adventurer who is willing to journey with teammates and learn through each experience to get to the next level of accomplishment and learning. With this in mind, allow me to invite you to continue the conversations that begin with this book on social media and other media of choice. No one knows the entire story of smart cities; it is a communal learning experience that I wish to continue with all of you.

I have mentioned my company, TDG. TDG will be referenced in this book in examples of real-world implementations of our innovation ideas. TDG is a boutique company with a subject matter expertise (SME) on sustainable real estate development and smart cities. It has been and is a SME for a variety of smart-city-style projects around the world for the well-known and leading management consulting firms and on behalf of governments and kingdoms. Some of the projects we have worked on under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) have lapsed and are now allowed to be mentioned in this book. In addition, the mention of our projects or my company is not meant to make this book as