Smart Cities - Lessons From The Global Village

The world is becoming a smaller place

Cities (and the data they generate) are growing at an exponential rate. The idea behind Smart Cities is to utilise new technologies to respond to the challenges growing cities bring. Those challenges range from traffic management to the maintenance and operation of infrastructure. The connecting theme is finding ways to use data to manage or influence human behaviour. By way of example, a scheme used to make a city smarter would be to provide the ability for smartphone-equipped road users to take pictures of potholes and send these to local councils, so that the potholes can be fixed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Being smart however does not necessarily achieve a sustainable and smart economy. In Rio de Janeiro, an award winning 'mission control' approach to monitoring and improving Brazil's infrastructure and economy is only as effective as the capability or willingness of the population to utilise it. To date, the greatest impact of the Rio control room has arguably been to provide, through live feeds of civil unrest in the City, a compelling new form of reality TV. Nonetheless, advocates of Smart City projects persuasively ague that harvesting of information and data about mobility, population and the environment can generate solutions with the capacity to alleviate pressures and to make cities "liveable".

The types of demand a Smart City must address include:

Energy Consumption Infrastructure Waste and recycling Education Employment Food Case Study - Lessons from the Global Village: Wuhan

Speaking at Charles Russell LLP's seminar Smart Cities: Lessons from the Global Village Kevin Schofield of BDO drew on his experience of working on the creation of a vast new logistics centre in China to demonstrate the gains that can be achieved.

Population growth, sustainability, transport logistics and air pollution are inextricably linked problems. The Smart City of Wuhan in central China planned to tackle all of these common issues in one large scale project.

Utilising Wuhan's geographical location and proximity (1,000km radius to Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou), this project focussed on five guiding principles:

Natural Capital Low Emission Transport Industrial Interdependence Community Renewable Energy Wuhan provides a striking example of the scope for transition from a merely "digital city", in which huge amounts of data are created but with little or no coordination or application, to a...

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