There was a time when it was thought that filling cities with sensors everything would be better. Cars would no longer drive around looking for parking, garbage containers would never be filled to overflowing, and water consumption for irrigation would be much more efficient. Technology should be the magic solution for everything, but the passage of years has shown that it is not enough on its own.
No matter how many sensors there are on the streets, mobility difficulties and waste collection management continue to be headaches for mayors of large and small Western cities. “The city that has more sensors is not smarter; the key is data management and what is done with that information,” says Pilar Conesa, president of the consulting firm Anteverti, specialized in advising cities to take advantage of the potential of the innovation. Large corporations, with divisions dedicated to city management, are now focused on integrating into a single platform the endless amount of data they receive through multiple means, including artificial intelligence, which has also burst into the sector.
With this infinite amount of data scrolling on their screens, in offices with glass walls, municipal and metropolitan governments have decided to take a step forward. The devices give way to ideas and the way of applying them at street level. Cities that are committed to leading innovation in the urban sphere – labeled under the concept of smart cities – take action, pushed in part by everything that the pandemic represented, with the aim of creating more sustainable urban environments, efficient and with people at the center of the action. “It is the usual evolution of innovation: first understand, then plan, test prototypes, analyze them and finally develop on a large scale,” says Ugo Valenti, director of the Smart City Expo World Congress, which will meet at Fira from November 7 to 9. from Barcelona to delegations from more than 800 cities, both in Europe, America and Asia.
In this congress the mayors rule, not the prime ministers. The organizers boast that New York, the big city par excellence, has a GDP higher than that of all of Italy, and capitals of countries governed by the extreme right proudly display progressive policies. The fair also becomes the meeting point between municipal representatives and a thousand exhibiting companies. As happens in the city itself, they share space from solutions for the distribution of parcels in the last mile to systems for accompanying older people in their procedures with an increasingly digitalized administration. “We can never lose sight of the fact that the objective of progress must be an improvement in the quality of life of citizens,” highlights Valenti.
Companies in the sector, together with experts from leading cities, will see how the ideas reflected on and matured in recent years are being applied. The mayors have opted to jump into the pool even if their projects are controversial. The new green axes of Barcelona's Eixample serve as an example of proximity, which will see political and technical officials from other cities parade in the coming days to observe in situ the transformation of the space, just as they did a few years ago in the pedestrianization of the New York Times Square.
These colorful and symbolic solutions accompany a common strategy of cities to resolve the most mundane issues at a time that the United Nations has defined as “the decade of action.” Flying taxis could look great in Blade Runner, but debates to mitigate the traffic congestion that plagues all large cities revolve around less flashy but more effective solutions: an improvement in urban and interurban public transport systems, with reliable railway lines for long journeys, electric vehicles on all roads and shared bicycles or personal mobility vehicles for shorter urban journeys. Only in this way can an individual response be given to the more than six days a year that residents of the most congested cities like London spend trapped in their cars, according to a study by the North American consulting firm Inrix.
The challenge is also to provide a global response to the problem posed by the fact that 45% of emissions are attributable to road transport, according to the International Energy Agency. “As cities strive to achieve climate neutrality, we can see that technological innovations alone will not be enough to achieve this goal,” warns Maria Tsavachidis, CEO of the EIT Urban Mobility. The institution promoted by the European Union organizes the part of the hall called Tomorrow Mobility, which already occupies a quarter of the exhibition space of the congress.
Mobility has become the central axis of the smart city sector, and therefore, of the Smart City Expo, because “it acts as a connector of all economic activities,” according to Tsavachidis. The rest of the sectors are also growing, and the show, in its twelfth edition, is 55% larger than last year, surpassing the record figures of 2019, with an increasing diversity of approaches and a certain sense of urgency to see results in actions.
The most pressing problems need to be resolved quickly, since if in 2018 55% of the world's population lived in urban areas, it is estimated that by 2050 it will exceed 68%. And it will continue to rise, with the corresponding pressure it puts on cities and those responsible. This is why the way to make the city more livable also becomes one of the priorities of the Smart City Expo. This is influenced by the projections of global population growth in urban areas, which will exceed 68% in 2050, well above the current 55%, with the corresponding pressure on cities and those responsible. Furthermore, for this 27-year scenario, it is estimated that 70% of the housing infrastructure has yet to be built or will require rehabilitation.
All of this explains that if the area dedicated to mobility premiered two years ago, this edition makes it an area that revolves around housing: Tomorrow Building. Large companies known from other sectors, such as Siemens or Samsung, are entering the construction sector with force, either through new materials or the application of technology in increasingly industrialized processes. In this space, everything from access to housing to the adaptation of homes to the new context of climate change, with new materials, better insulation and lower energy consumption, will be discussed.
In addition to the extreme heat and highly destructive storms, more than half of the large cities are coastal. In this call to action that the Smart City Expo has become, the resilience of urban environments that coexist next to the sea will also have a prominent place in the so-called Tomorrow Blue Economy.
The blue economy is another area that debuts this year to deepen the relationship between cities and the sea as an axis of innovation, both from a point of view of resilience to climate change and cruise management, intertwining the vision economic with the environmental and social, just as in the rest of the elements that make up cities that aspire to be intelligent.
