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Can IT Make Cities Better?

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For years now we've been hearing about how a smarter grid could smooth out supply-demand curves for utility companies and make both residential and commercial energy use more efficient. Moving beyond the energy use-case, big tech companies have been showcasing the various ways things like wireless sensors, analytic software, and improved processing power could help better manage any number of resources. IBM has put "smarter" in front of just about every noun related to daily human life (water, education, healthcare, and so forth), and run projects all over the world showing how a little basic IT can address everything from traffic congestion to water scarcity.

Now Cisco is wrapping up a five-year, multi-city global pilot as part of its Smart + Connected Communities program, which began in 2006 as the Connected Urban Development commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, with a series of white papers and reports aimed at helping cities everywhere get smarter. The aim of Cisco's $12 million Clinton Global Initiative investment was to "demonstrate how to reduce carbon emissions by introducing fundamental improvements in the efficiency of urban infrastructure through information and communications technology (ICT)."

The program began with three cities--Amsterdam, Seoul, and San Francisco--and expanded in 2008 to include Birmingham, Hamburg, Lisbon, and Madrid, along with one-off pilot projects in a number of other cities. At the heart of Cisco's research is the idea that cities can leverage the network as a “service delivery platform” – transforming disparate physical communities into connected communities that run on networked information in order to achieve cohesive sustainability in five dimensions: healthcare and workforce ecosystems; connected buildings and homes; public transportation and cars; electric energy generation, delivery, storage and consumption; and community life.

To that end, the company spearheaded projects such as the Connected Bus project in San Francisco, which involved taking the disparate tracking units the city had been using to keep tabs on buses, railcars and other transit fleet vehicles, and integrating them into one system that enables more reliable operations and maintenance as well as lower emissions. In Amsterdam, the Smart Work Centers project began as a mayoral initiative to reduce commuting and grew within three years into a public-private network of more than 100 telepresence centers.

"Because Cisco provides products and services to so many cities, we’ve become very familiar with the problems cities face," says Gordon Feller, Director, Urban Innovations Public Sector Practice, Internet Business Solutions Group for Cisco. "And we also get a look inside national departments of transportation, treasury, and so forth to see what programs they’re putting in place, and what problems they're having, so we see the interplay between national, state and city as well."

According to Fuller, the Connected Urban Development pilots helped to show how cities can accelerate their transition to sustainability, reduce CO2 emissions, increase energy efficiency, and decrease waste, all by harnessing the basic information and communications technology available in wireless networks. "Now we're rolling out a whole suite of new activities aimed at sharing what we learned, and understanding better what dynamics are at play in the cities that are successfully accelerating their progress toward sustainability," he says. "We're trying to figure out if those projects are replicable, scalable and transferable, and we think they are. We're doing more than experiments, now, we're deep into the thought leadership phase, where we're extracting critical lessons, and looking at what comes next after the pilot phase."

One of the early papers to come out of the project is a look at how the city of Busan, in South Korea, is using cloud-based city services to improve efficiency, reduce emissions and serve its residents better. The city's Green u-City project includes operational software for city managers that integrates disparate sources of public and private data such as traffic, facilities, office and residential buildings, safety and security, and disaster prevention and emergency management, enabling city planners to get a complete view of what's happening. The Green u-City project also includes the construction of dozens of Smart Work Centers--complete with daycare, computers and, in some cases, Cisco telepresence (naturally)--as well as various apps targeted at citizens, which enable them to find a nearby workspace, access transit information, or check their personal energy usage. In this way, the project aims to enlist the help of city residents in improving the efficient use of resources. Green u-City will also provide an open-source development platform for local developers to create further apps, either for city managers or for citizens.

According to Cisco, the u-City project will help Busan to boost economic development, increase revenue, encourage citizen engagement, reduce city operations costs, support brownfield revitalization (many of the Smart Work Centers will be built on brownfields), and strengthen city operations management and social resiliency.

What's happening in Busan gets at what Fuller sees as the next step in smart grid, the nexus of smart buildings, smart mobility, and smart energy. "This is where investment is flowing and where a lot of our partners – Toyota and DeutscheBank, for example – are making aggressive investments in their part of that nexus," Fuller says. "Toyota is looking well beyond the Prius and asking how mobility solutions can be not only green but also smart in their connection to the grid and to buildings. Right in the middle of that is this underlying digital infrastructure where we’re focused."

Connected vehicles are also the subject of another recent series of Cisco white papers, which look at how vehicles could connect not only to each other, but to infrastructure, the grid, and city buildings. "Those kinds of innovations are now abundant – the question is what is the platform?" Fuller says. "The network has to be ready for these things, the flow of bits and bytes is a network management challenge and when we have vehicles floating around connected to the wireless network and buildings connected to a wired network, what’s the optimal design?"

The question is also: Who's going to pay for these cities of the future? One Cisco telepresence suite in a Smart Work Center, for example, could set a city back six figures. "The difference between cities in Western Europe, China, and the United States, comes down to the availability of public budget resources," Fuller says. "Which is to say China has them and the rest of us don’t."

Some innovative financing models are emerging, however, particularly with respect to smartening up buildings. Deutschebank is experimenting with a financing model similar to that used by energy services companies (ESCOs) whereby the savings in energy costs are used to pay back the capital investment of the smart building upgrades.

Fuller says government mandates in Europe and China could help move the market along, as could more innovative financing models. So far, the big companies with the most to gain by smarter cities--namely Cisco and IBM--have been funding the lion's share of the research.