Smart Cities

Introducing Digital Innovation to Cities

Oliver Gassmann, Jonas Böhm, Maximilian Palmié

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787696150
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Umweltmanagement

Transformation through digital innovation is becoming an imperative for every city. The 'Smart City' concept promises to solve the most urgent queries of progressive urbanization in the area of mobility, energy, water supply, security, housing deprivation, and inclusion. Despite the exploitation of existing potential in lighthouse-cities that include Barcelona, London, Munich, Lyon, and Vienna, the less tenacious pursuit of smart city possibilities in the majority of municipalities has resulted in major discrepancies between leading smart cities and those that are less aspirational. Although the necessity of action is frequently recognized, an appropriate path of action remains obscure.
Smart Cities: Introducing Digital Innovation to Cities offers answers, with clarifying examples, to questions that have remained unanswered for many cities. The book identifies and addresses the core elements and potential of smart cities, best practice methods and tools to be implemented, as well as how diverse stakeholders might be effectively integrated.
Based on perennial international research in the field of smart cities, this book brings together the authors' collective experience in practice-based political, administrative, and economic projects to provide a common framework to guide and engage key stakeholders in the transformation and realization of smart cities.

CHAPTER 1

THE FUTURE OF CITIES

The projections convey a clear message: cities represent the living environment of the future. The “century of the city” has been a crucial theme preoccupying politicians, business developers, city planners, public authorities, and citizens in recent years (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1. The Worldwide Urban and Rural Population from 1950 to 2050.

Source: United Nations (2015).

CITIES AS A MEGATREND

The importance of cities for the future of civilization becomes evident when one considers the following facts:

• Worldwide, more individuals are living in cities than in rural areas. In 2014, 54% of the human population resided in cities, whereas in 1950, city dwellers constituted only 30% of the global population.
• In 2040, 65% of the global population will be living in cities.
• Every second two persons move into a city worldwide.
• In 2050, 70% of the global population will be living in cities. Urban societies will consume 80% of total energy, produce 75% of total CO₂ emissions, and expend 75% of resources.
• Urban centers possess massive appeal. The three most popular city hashtags on Instagram in 2016 (#NYC, #London, #Paris) were mentioned in more than 180 million tweets.

The growth of urban economic centers is already causing the importance of countries to diminish. Silicon Valley, the epitome of innovation in the digital age, is competing with cities such as Shanghai, Boston, and Bangalore, rather than with nations such as India or China. This trend toward the increasing importance of cities, which may even surpass the significance of nations, not only entails bright prospects for urban areas but also great challenges: noise, smog, mobility bottlenecks, tightly constrained living spaces, overloaded energy and communication infrastructure, the redefinition of the urban role, modifications of existing structures, and social challenges related to living and working.

The challenges confronting cities vary significantly depending on the region and the city’s size. Massive urban regions such as Tokyo–Yokohama, Jakarta, Delhi, Manila, Shanghai, and Mexico City have all exceeded 20 million inhabitants and have experienced enormous population growth in the last few decades. These cities have very different challenges and opportunities from cities such as Stuttgart, Porto, Halifax, Richmond, or Boise.

Urbanization Across the World (United Nations, 2017)

Africa: Africa has the lowest level of urbanization, with an annual urban growth rate of 4%. The number of cities in Africa with more than one million inhabitants has grown rapidly from 28 in 1995 to 43 in 2005 and 59 in 2015. It is expected that the number of individuals experiencing urbanization will rise from 413 million (2010) to 569 million (2020).

Asia-Pacific region: About half of all people living today are in Asia, which is experiencing rapid urbanization, largely due to the industrialization of China and India. The impact of Asian cities on the world stage is increasingly apparent. In global city rankings, based on its gross domestic product, Shanghai is expected to rise from 25th place in 2008 to 9th place in 2025. The number of city dwellers in this region will increase from 1.675 billion (40% of all residents) in 2010 to 2.086 billion (47%) in 2020.

Latin America: Demographic changes during the past century have prompted the development of a highly urbanized structure in Latin America. About 540 million Latin Americans (78% of the total population) are living in cities. However, regional differences exist. In some South American countries, the proportion of city residents has approached 90%, whereas in Central America this demographic group represents only 50% of the population. As a whole, the urbanization level for the entire region is expected to increase to about 83% by 2020.

North America: In contrast to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, North America is experiencing relatively moderate population growth (0.9% annually between 2000 and 2010), 75% of which is occurring in metropolitan areas. However, this growth is not uniform. In fact, the suburban growth rate was three times as high as that of inner cities. Migration from northern to southern regions has occurred, leading to especially high population growth in suburbs of southern US cities. Nonetheless, large cities are still growing due to the high proportion of immigrants, which balances out the flight of other Americans away from cities. It is projected that the degree of urbanization is continuing to increase from 82% (2010) to 85% (2020).

Europe: Urbanization patterns in Europe are similar to those in the United States, with both differing sharply from demographic developments in the rest of the world (see Figure 1.2). Various trends in Europe have caused conceptions of the city to evolve constantly and have posed significant challenges. In Europe, growing populations are not a major factor in urban development; in fact, during the last century, one-third of European cities experienced a population decrease while another third had no significant change. Projections indicate that the degree of urbanization is increasing only slightly from 73% (2010) to 75% (2020).

Figure 1.2. Typical Development of Urbanization in a Western and a Non-Western Nation.

CURRENT CHALLENGES FOR CITIES

City planners are confronted by new and constantly changing sources of tension and strain. Consider the following surprising facts:

• In San Francisco, 4% of municipal waste is produced by domestic animals, and that percentage continues to grow.
• In Germany, 320,000 coffee-to-go paper cups per day are consumed, leading to 40,000 tons of waste every year.
• The Swiss city of Basel has 31,000 public parking spaces and 69,000 more on private property, whereas the city’s residents have registered only 57,000 automobiles. This is not efficient.
• The average speed of tramways is 15.4 km/h. Subways meanwhile drive at an average speed of 31.3 km/h.
• 80% of buildings in Europe will still exist in 2050.
• Drivers in Frankfurt am Main spend on average 65 hours each year searching for a parking space, resulting in costs amounting to 1,419 euros (Statista, 2017).
• City residents in Germany spend up to 60% of their income on housing (DESTATIS (Federal Statistics Office) 2017).
• Twenty bikes can fit into just one inner-city parking place.
• Chinese rental bikes such as Yobike have flooded German cities. The boomtown Shenzhen illustrates what such developments can lead to. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of rental bikes, which were easily rentable on an app for around two Euros per hour, were stationed in Shenzhen. As a result, traffic was obstructed as the enormous number of bikes blocked main travel routes. In an attempt to alleviate these consequences, rental bikes were heaped on the side roads, leading to the emergence of junk piles several feet high (Mania-Schlegel, 2017).
• In the United States, 26% of individuals between 16 and 34 years of age do not have a driver’s license.
• In Washington, DC, 2,338 bike trips were made using the local bike sharing system during the coldest days of an ice storm in 2013.
• The expected total investment gap for infrastructure in 2030 is 4.7 billion euros (McKinsey Global Institute, 2016).

In a survey conducted by the German Institute of Urban Affairs (Difu, 2016), mayors of German cities reported the level of importance they ascribe to current urban challenges. Figure 1.3 reveals the results.

Figure 1.3. The Most Urgent Challenges for Cities with Respect to Smart City Topics.

Source: Difu (2016).

Another survey, of mayors of US cities, conveys a very similar picture (Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4. Challenges Addressed by Smart City Projects.

Source: IHS Markit (2018).

The issues that the mayors identified as most pressing are also ones that arise in the process of transformation into a smart city. The following discussion enumerates the most prominent urban challenges that must be addressed to accomplish such a transformation.

Challenge 1: Urbanization and Opposing Trends

The global trend of urbanization is one of the most pressing issues all around the world (Figure 1.5); however, it encompasses different characteristics in different geographic locations. As a result, urbanization can play out in one or more of these contrasting ways in different regions:

• Suburbanization processes, in which even more individuals migrate to the surroundings of cities.
• Reurbanization processes, in which ambitious housing development occurs in the city center, accompanied by infrastructure expansion.
• Post-suburbanization processes, in which central services are relocated from the urban core of a city to its outskirts, in response to prior suburbanization processes.

Figure 1.5. Urbanization Worldwide.

Source: © Haase, Güneralp, Dahiya, Bai, & Elmqvist (2018).

The former city planner of New York City, Vishaan Chakrabarti, once stated,

For centuries we have been told that masses of individuals are moving into cities. However, what we actually see, is that people are moving to the outskirts of cities. The dream of the middle class, which is imparted to us through television, is constituted by one single family house, two automobiles, and a garage. One must drive everywhere and the workplace is far away. (Welt, 2016)

In contrast with this development, Europe reveals a mixed picture....