New technologies have brought great change in recent years. And above all, has made possible a new industrial revolution, the so-called fourth industrial revolution, mass digitization of processes and services.
Many of the futuristic films we saw just a few years ago, incredulously proved the prediction of what today are our days, or will be soon. As happened with Jules Verne more than 150 years ago, as happened in films like Blade Runner and Akira, but hopefully we will improve certain things by then.
What would you think if I told you that the future is in smart cities in which we can interact? But not only that, I’m talking about a near future, where this cities act more like a living organism, than as a set of concrete and steel buildings; Masdar, Abu Dhabi, are an example.
All will pass through the network. Yes, Internet has come to change the world. Literally.
Electrical network, pipes… everything will be connected. There will be driverless vehicles. Streets, signs, stores, buildings … everything will be intelligent and will respond to our needs. The needs that we have always had. The reason why we could not be able to build this kind of cities before is because we didn’t have the capacity to manage data properly, but now we are able to do that. The massive data processing techniques, the famous big data, allows it.
An ecological trend
Intelligent and sustainable, this is the trend of the new cities.
Sustainable solutions not only remain vital in cities and buildings, but in the city of the future, there will be no longer independent solutions and it will become part of an integrated digital system.
We talked earlier in the blog, about roads that use solar energy for self-sufficient lighting, or roads that turn air, generated by passing cars, into energy.
The same goes for buildings, for example, they will be able, through big data, to know when there is a greater demand for electricity and store it for use when needed, to detect states of emergency, manage water efficiency, etc. Efficient water and energy management are key elements for the cities of the future, if we want them to be sustainable and self-sufficient.
One of the major problems in cities is the traffic. It is also a major problem for efficient logistics. Priority is set for road users, increasing the use of public transport and freight priority uses. For environmental and efficiency criteria, subways or trains should be encouraged, that have the capacity of moving 20,000 people / hour instead of cars that in the best of cases reach 1200 persons / hour and 5 times less polluting per passenger than private vehicles.
In addition, today the vast amount of data that can be handled thanks to new technologies makes it possible to predict those places where there will be traffic congestion. This is an important advance. However, we are still not able to make traffic jams disappear.
Companies like Waze, now owned by the giant Google, are working in this direction.
For those who do not know, Waze is a social application for automobile traffic in real time and assisted navigation asking citizens to help in solving the huge problem of traffic. The actual data, sent by users, allows the application to generate a map of the conditions in real time. Surprisingly, in countries like Israel, it was observed that when this service is not available, a great chaos is generated.
When will we have Smart Cities?
This is perhaps the biggest question. We already have the technology.
It is not an easy task, we have to think of it as something big, and we could define it as a big monster, unknown and uncontrollable. Probably we have first to learn how to tame it. This big monster could make most of our cities clean, efficient and safe, but to become Smart Cities, governments need to be smart and trained to handle this revolution. It is much easier to build a city from a blueprint than to remodel an existing one. In the second case, smart elements will be incorporated, slowly, wisely. The “smart” way is the only way to do it. Pilot testing, and see how it progresses.
The involvement of governments is essential if we want to have Smart Cities, as we face decisions that alter the urban planning, traffic flows, local regulations, etc. In this aspect, infrastructure investments will be made on investment criteria, for example economic revenue or environmental impact and other criteria that we used to see. I must say that this “smart” digital revolution is a very important route to economic growth if it is used properly, as an opportunity that cannot be missed. It could generate high-level jobs.
Of What you can be sure is that the pace at which technology and society advances is not going to be calmly … The future is very close to the present.