Smart Cities: Digital Innovations for a More Livable Future
With the advancement of smart technologies, cities are becoming increasingly livable and responsive. Today, we are merely glimpsing the potential of what technology can ultimately achieve in urban settings.
Until recently, city leaders viewed smart technologies mainly as tools to enhance efficiency behind the scenes. Now, these technologies are being integrated more directly into the daily lives of residents. Smartphones have become essential, providing instant access to information about transit, traffic, health services, safety alerts, and community news for millions of people.
After a decade of trial and error, municipal leaders are recognizing that successful smart-city strategies prioritize people over technology. “Smartness” goes beyond simply implementing digital interfaces in traditional infrastructure or optimizing city operations; it involves leveraging technology and data intentionally to make better decisions and enhance quality of life.
Quality of life encompasses various aspects, from the air residents breathe to the sense of safety they feel while walking the streets. This article examines how numerous digital applications address these practical and human concerns. It reveals that cities can use smart technologies to improve key quality-of-life indicators by 10 to 30 percent—improvements that translate into lives saved, fewer crime incidents, shorter commutes, reduced health burdens, and decreased carbon emissions.
- What defines a smart city?
- Smart-city technologies hold significant untapped potential to enhance urban quality of life.
- An examination of current implementations in 50 cities worldwide shows that even the most advanced have considerable room for progress.
- Smart cities transform the economics of infrastructure, opening up opportunities for partnerships and private-sector involvement.
What defines a smart city?
Smart cities utilize data and digital technology to make informed decisions and enhance the quality of life. Access to comprehensive, real-time data enables agencies to monitor events as they occur, understand evolving demand patterns, and respond with quicker, more cost-effective solutions.
A smart city operates through three interconnected layers (Exhibit 1). The first layer is the technology base, comprising a critical mass of smartphones and sensors connected via high-speed communication networks. The second layer involves specific applications; translating raw data into alerts, insights, and actions requires the right tools, provided by technology providers and app developers. The third layer is the usage by cities, companies, and the public. Many applications are effective only if widely adopted and capable of changing behavior. They encourage people to use public transit during off-peak hours, alter routes, consume less energy and water at different times, and reduce healthcare system strain through preventive self-care.
Smart-city technologies have significant untapped potential to enhance urban quality of life.
The Kamiweb Project evaluated how smart-city applications could impact various quality-of-life aspects: safety, time and convenience, health, environmental quality, social connectedness and civic participation, employment, and the cost of living (see interactive). The diverse range of outcomes highlights that applications vary in effectiveness from city to city, influenced by factors such as existing infrastructure systems and baseline conditions.
Applications can help cities fight crime and improve other aspects of public safety
Applying these functions to their fullest extent could, according to their message, reduce fatalities (from homicide, road traffic, and fire) by anywhere between eight and 10 per cent, saving up to 300 lives in a typical five-million-person high-crime city. Assault, robbery, burglary and auto theft rates could decrease by 30 to 40 per cent. Then there are the unquantifiable benefits of giving residents the freedom to move about and live their lives in peace.
Data cannot, by itself, curb crime. But it can help agencies deploy scarce personnel and resources in the best way possible. Real-time crime mapping shows where patterns abound, while predictive policing uses big data to glean the likelihood of future crime profiles in a way that, if refined enough, can stop crime before it starts. When it is on its way, gunshot detection, smart surveillance and home security systems can hasten responses by police. But all forms of data-driven policing have to be deployed in ways that protect civil liberties and don’t criminalise entire neighbourhoods or demographic groups.
In some cases, those lost few seconds could mean the difference between life and death. And what makes the difference? Speed, of course: speed in answering calls in a call centre, speed in dispatching the appropriate personnel to the scene of an emergency, speed of traffic-signal preemption granting right-of-way – even tenth of seconds saved along the way to an emergency call. According to industry estimates, these types of applications can shave a staggering 20 to 35 per cent off the response time. A city starting in the high eight-second range, say, could slash nearly two minutes off its response time. A city starting off with an average of 50 minutes has the potential to trim more than 17 minutes.
Smart-city technologies can make daily commutes faster and less frustrating
But in every city on Earth, tens of millions of people spend the first and last hour of every working day idling in traffic, or packed into badly overcrowded buses or trains. Good urban transportation is a key to quality of life.
In cities using smart-mobility applications by 2025, average daily commutes could shorten by up to 15 to 20 per cent, with some people enjoying bigger improvements. The amount of potential that each application can offer also varies considerably, depending on each city’s density, existing transit networks, and prevailing commute patterns. In a dense city with robust transit, smart technologies could for the average commuter almost 15 minutes a day. In a city in the developing world with longer, more gruelling commutes, the improvement could be 20 to 30 minutes a day.
In the broadest terms, where a city has built a robust infrastructure for transit utilisation, it is the rider experience that is enhanced by apps. What good is it to have capacity if your riders can’t travel where and when they need? Providing riders with real-time information about the status of their route through digital signage or on a mobile app allows them to reroute based on real-time conditions. Installing IoT sensors on existing physical infrastructure empowers crews to patch issues before they break down a train or bus.
Applications that ease congestion are more useful in cities where most people drive or where buses are major forms of public transit. Smart signal coordination can cut average commutes by more than 5 per cent in developing cities with high bus ridership. Real-time navigation alerts drivers to delays, and then calculates the fastest route. Smart-parking apps guide drivers to the nearest available spots. No more aimlessly circling city blocks while hoping for a coveted spot to free up.
Cities can be catalysts for better health
And because of the dense nature of cities, they are likely the biggest, most underused platforms for healthcare going forward. We narrow our scope in acknowledgement that tech’s role in healthcare is expansive, and changing daily; only digital applications that can be used in cities, and in a way that comprehends cities’ potential role, figure into our analysis. We quantify their potential mitigation of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). DALYs are the standard metric for the amount of overall disease disability in the world, which currently kills and disables 1.2 billion human beings. It combines years of life lost by early death and years lived with disability or incapacity, and it’s the major compilation used by the World Health Organization to quantify global disease burden. If cities deploy applications within our coverage towards their full potential, we see the potential to mitigate DALYs by 8 to 15 per cent.
Apps that help prevent, treat and monitor chronic conditions, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease, offer the greatest hope for the developed world. In high-income cities in the market for remote-patient-monitoring systems, the health burden could be reduced by more than 4 per cent. Such a system has digital devices that regularly take vital readings, which are then sent electronically to a doctor in another place for review. This information can alert both patient and doctor when medical intervention is needed to prevent complicated illness and hospitalisation.
It can use data and analytics to identify elevated risk-groups in the demographic profile of each city and better target interventions to them. With so-called mHealth interventions, lifesaving messages can be sent via SMS on vaccinations, hygiene, safe sex or adherence to antiretroviral therapy regimens. In low-income cities with high rates of infant mortality, DALYs arising from maternal and child health problems alone could be reduced by more than 5 percentage points through data-based interventions. If developing cities use infectious-disease surveillance systems to be one step ahead of the next fast-moving epidemic, an additional 5 percentage points is possible. Telemedicine – clinical consultations via videoconference – can be lifesaving in low-income cities where few doctors are available.
Smart cities can deliver a cleaner and more sustainable environment
As urbanisation, industrialisation and consumption expand, stresses on the environment increase. Building-automation systems, dynamic electricity-pricing schemes and even some mobility apps could combine to reduce emissions by 10 to 15 per cent.
For example, environmental-awareness messages derived from advanced metering of water consumption can reduce water use by about 15 per cent in cities where residential water usage is especially high. Water leakages from pipes in developing countries are often the biggest source of water waste, and monitoring with sensors and analytics can reduce such losses by up to 25 per cent. With pay-as-you-throw digital tracking, the amount of solid waste per capita can be reduced by 10 to 20 per cent. On an aggregate level, this means that cities can save 25 to 80 litres of water per person daily and reduce their unrecycled solid waste per person by 30 to 130 kilogrammes per year.
To the degree that these sensors serve their expected role, they might not alleviate the causes of pollution but they would identify the sources. In the case of Beijing, which in late 2013 had deadly airborne pollutants reduced by about 20 per cent in less than a year, focusing on the sources of pollution and controlling traffic and construction accordingly made all the difference. The ability to share real-time air-quality information with the public via smartphone apps could also encourage individual action to reduce the impact of pollution. For example, research shows that for a population with a current bad air-quality reading, individual efforts to reduce exposure (such as wearing face masks) could reduce the negative health effects by as much as 15 per cent and often more.
Smart Cities can generate a new digital urban commons, and a new feeling of connectedness
Community is a hard thing to measure, however, and so MGI posed an open question to residents of cities to see if they could be influenced by applications that provided digital avenues for contacting a local official, as well as digital channels that promote actual in-person interactions (including Meetup and Nextdoor). Our analysis showed that residents who use this kind of application will have nearly twice as high a share of residents who feel tied to the local community, and nearly three times as high a share who feel tied to local government.
Such two-way communication between the public and local agencies could make governments more responsive. Many city agencies already maintain a social network profile, and some have developed their own interactive citizen apps. Beyond disseminating information, they create vehicles by which residents can transmit feedback, provide data, or weigh in on developing plans. For example, Paris has launched a participatory budget in which anyone can post proposals for projects, and then the ideas are voted on online.
Lifting a city on to the smart grid is not a job creation strategy, but smart interventions can make the local labour market more efficient, and can lower the cost of living by a small margin.
Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of The United Kingdom
Like many local officials, a key question they’re asking is whether the smart city ‘rebrand’ will prove to be a bringing in of high-paying tech jobs or whether a wave of automation will only be turbocharged. We estimate that the overall net effect on formal employment turns out to be moderately positive, as smart technologies will directly eliminate some jobs (such as logistics of administrative and field jobs in city government) but also create others (such as maintenance, driving and temporary installation jobs). E-career centres can be a modest positive, as they create more efficient hiring functions and could draw more unemployed and inactive people into the workforce. Data-driven formal education and online retraining programmes can help enhance the stock of skills amassed in a particular city. Digitising the back-end of government enables and improves city functions such as business licensing and permitting, and helps entrepreneurs file taxes and other matters online. This can free economic agents from red tape that encumbers many developing-world small enterprises.
Housing shortages in many of the world’s most dynamic and livable cities – the ones where everyone wants to live – push up rents and home prices. Adding more units reduces those levels. In many places, bureaucracy delays land acquisitions, environmental reviews, design reviews and permitting. Digitised processes reduce risk and speed up development, therefore encouraging more housing construction. Most cities also have large amounts of development land that could be used for infill housing projects, but this land is not readily apparent or accessible in conventional cadasters. Open-source cadastral databases can shed light on these parcels.
Smart applications generate savings in other areas too, such as by encouraging better use of utilities and the health-care system. and digital offerings in the Internet of Things involve upfront purchases by consumers (for example, for home-security systems, personal-alert devices, and lifestyle wearables), so overall they provide value that most are prepared to buy. Mobility applications new value too, although it is possible that e-hailing will prompt people to take more rides than in the past. But e-hailing, like other sharing-based applications, enable some people to give up owning a private vehicle. MGI estimates it would save the average person as much as 3 per cent of current annual outlays.
An audit of deployment in 50 cities worldwide shows that, even five decades into the project, the smartest of the smart will still have a way to go.
MGI fast-froze the scene of deployment in 50 cities across the globe – not to declare the planetary champion of the smart city, but to review the full sweep of activity taking place around the world, from the depth of each city’s technology base, to current application rollout, to public adoption.
We used a metric for the technology base of each city: the extent of sensor and device footprints, the quality of communication networks, and whether or not the city had an open data portal. The front-runners are Amsterdam, New York, Seoul, Singapore, and the Nordic city of Stockholm – but even these early leaders are only about two-thirds of the way to achieving what a modern tech base looks like. Cities in China, East Asia, Europe, and North America all have reasonably strong tech bases, as do selected cities from the Middle East. These days, New York shares code with Tokyo. In contrast, cities in Africa, India, and Latin America have fallen behind, especially in the sensor layer, the most capital-intensive element.
We rated each city’s progress toward implementation using a checklist of current smart applications. Mobility has been the highest priority for most cities, but in the cities with the highest overall number of applications implemented to date — London, Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, Shenzhen, and Singapore — an ability to spread across several domains has followed. Other cities have yet to implement the apps that hold the greatest potential for ameliorating some of their highest-rated challenges.
MGI also commissioned online surveys in all the cities we analysed to determine how residents feel about the technologies that are already in operation in their digital environment. Overall, Asian cities are the clear winners on awareness, usage and satisfaction, and Europe is lagging. A successful adoption and high awareness seem in some way linked to having a young population that not only can accept an increasingly digital way of doing things, but also expects it.
Smart cities change the economics of infrastructure and create room for partnerships and private-sector participation
They also create a different political landscape and a new business environment for infrastructure, creating space for partnerships and for the private sector. These technologies can both substitute for and complement existing systems and services.
At a basic level, they offer to make low-cost services available to a greater number of people. Just as the mass production of the industrial revolution made possible the affordable and equal distribution of services such as transport, building, heat and light, big data and new digital technologies can work to reduce costs and make them accessible to more people.
In the information age, with a scarcity of resources, waste will be increasingly impossible and intolerable. However, predictive, data-driven technologies are also likely to create divisions between the haves and the have-nots, more than they will unite societies. This is apparent in the technological strategies of governments and big business.
Governments are promoting national and regional strategies for digital economy while private-sector players are forming sector-specific international alliances. The creation of a smart grid, for instance, seems to be something that takes place among senior technology executives and top management in energy firms. Supranational organisations such as the European Union are developing standards and comparing approaches. The technological fast lane seems headed towards dominance by a small number of global corporations using standard equipment and procedures.
The smart-city layer helps cities get more value out of their physical assets, regardless of the starting point – whether a city has well-developed legacy systems or no infrastructure at all. Sections of physical infrastructure are going to have cost, and there will always be a need for maintenance. Once the cost of physical assets is accounted for, smart technologies can add new functionality as one or more of the core assets are revamped.
Infrastructure investment once locked places into capital-intensive, extremely long-term trajectories. Now, the right combination of standard and smart solutions can help places adapt more quickly to what demand is coming – and where. If a distant suburb has a population boom, opening a new subway or bus line (or the fleet and facilities to add a route) might take years. But privately operated on-demand minibus service can be in operation much sooner.
Under this principle, city government does not need to fund and run every kind of service and infrastructure system that is possible; rather, while most of the applications from our review would indeed remain the responsibility of the public sector, most of the initial investment could come from private actors (Exhibit 2). The public sector could put more focus on funding only those public goods that must be provided through the government itself To begin with, more than half the initial investment that the public sector would have to make would be financially positive, which means that public financing could remain as an option in partnerships.
More actors are always good, pushing adoption and bringing additional outside creativity to bear on their data. When private-sector, bottom-up innovations appear and grow organically, government’s role is often about regulation, convening, subsidies or shifting purchasing decisions. Some cities proclaim themselves to be ecosystems, but consortia and even physical collaboration spaces are ways for them to offer a similar approach.
And some cities are getting the ball rolling with significant advantages – namely, wealth, density, concentration, and a preexisting high-tech industry. But elsewhere, even places bereft of all these ingredients can differentiate themselves with a vision, a good old sense of management, a desire to break with the past, and a gritty commitment to zigging and zagging. There’s no dearth of whiteboards for the private sector, pro bono types and tech intelligentsia to paint up – and human beings possess a healthy desire, a healthy collective cause, to evolve the cities we call home.
