Nesta, (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) is an independent charity that regularly publishes research papers on how innovation can boost economic growth.  This month, their publication Rethinking Smart Cities from the Ground Up tells stories from around the world about how cities are becoming ‘smarter’ to face the challenges of how they move people around to do things, how they provide efficient energy and how they keep people safe.  The report starts with the statement:

“As cities bring people together to live, work and play, they amplify their ability to create wealth and ideas. But scale and density also bring acute challenges: how to move around people and things; how to provide energy; how to keep people safe. For several decades the ideas brought together under the label ‘smart cities’ have offered answers to these challenges. The combination of sensors, data and advanced computing has promised to speed up information flows, reduce waste and sharply improve how efficiently resources can be managed.”

However, the report has found that those that have invested in ‘smart cities’ around the world have often faced criticism for being too concerned with hardware rather than with people. The key findings from the report are:

  • Many ‘top down’ smart city ideas have failed to deliver on their promise, combining high costs and low returns.
  • ‘Collaborative technologies’ offer cities another way to make smarter use of resources, smarter ways of collecting data and smarter ways to make decisions.
  • Collaborative technologies can also help citizens themselves shape the future of their cities.

 

Nesta concludes with five recommendations for city governments who want to make their cities smarter. They suggest that successful smart cities of the future will combine the best aspects of technology infrastructure while making the most of the growing potential of ‘collaborative technologies’, technologies that enable greater collaboration between urban communities and between citizens and city governments.

The origin of the ‘Smart-City’ can be traced back to the 1950’s where transport planners used computer technologies to model transport flows in cities. It was not until the 1990’s when governments started using public networks and digital technology to improve internal government services that the real concept of a smart-city arrived. in the 2000’s cities such as Masdar and Songdo were seen as ‘technology-driven and companies started to develop digital tools such as FixMyStreet to let people describe local issues and share them with government.  Today with the mass introduction of sensor technology we are beginning to see large-scale smart-city developments take place.