How the evolving technology being built into our cities and suburbs is set to change our lives and the environments in which we live for the better.
In early 2021, a neighbourhood building project in the township of Googong, a regional community that sits just beyond the eastern border of the ACT, earned international acclaim thanks to its innovative and novel use of new technology.
The Googong Smart Community: Smart Suburb Blueprint project was named as a finalist in the 2020 Asia Pacific Smart Cities Awards by analyst firm IDC, making the cut out of more than 260 smart city initiatives across the entire region.
The recognition was well-deserved, with the community development project making effective use of a broad range of technology commonly associated with smart cities, including the Internet of Things (IoT), Wi-Fi, CCTV, network infrastructure, data management, smartphone apps, environmental sensors, smart poles and more.
Perhaps most importantly, the technology being built into the new township development offered improved resource efficiency, community health, urban amenity, safety, suburb design and services delivery and innovation.
This project, and others like it all around Australia and internationally, represent a mind-shift in how we go about building our urban environments, with technology being woven in by design from its very inception.
At the same time, new technology is being retrofitted into existing infrastructure in urban areas around the country to digitally connect cities and their people. Although this approach may not always be as efficient or effective as building in new technology by design, it still offers the many benefits that can be drawn from smart technology.
And the outcomes for citizens, business and the natural environment can be profound.
For example, it is anticipated that the smart solutions being built into the civil infrastructure of the Western Parkland City, an economically important region in Sydney’s west and subject of the Smart Western City Program, will lead to insights that help to strengthen the resilience of the local environment while supporting improvements to the health and wellbeing of communities.
Moreover, such latent digital infrastructure is expected to enable the adoption of technologies that help to reduce travel times, reduce resource use and emissions and provide more ways for citizens to access up-to-date information about services and developments in their city.
The idea behind smart cities, after all, is the implementation of information and communication technology to improve the efficiency, safety and quality of life in urban precincts.
The broad implementation of the technology underpinning smart cities can have a multiplier effect, too.
A report on smart cities in Australia jointly published by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2021 noted that Australia has more than 45 major precincts and precinct programs under development, often at very different stages of smart precinct maturity.
As the report’s authors pointed out, with so many precincts under development, Australia has a rare window of opportunity for the country’s smart city developments to succeed in building better precincts and more sustainable communities, attracting global tenants and new industries.
However, if the opportunity is ignored, we run the risk of paying the price for having to retrofit these sites for generations.
But if we get it right, we can anticipate living in cities that are designed from the outset to improve efficiency within areas such as public safety and urban mobility, thanks to smart camera and sensor technology, along with environmental monitoring and better decision-making, among many others.
In terms of public safety alone, the opportunities are enormous. It has been claimed by consulting firm McKinsey and Company that deploying a range of smart city applications to their maximum effect could potentially reduce fatalities – from homicide, road traffic and fires – by eight to ten per cent.
And this is just the beginning. We are very much still in the early days of true smart cities, even if we have been talking about them for decades. But as the technology supporting such cities evolves, new capabilities are emerging.
Biometric technology is progressing at pace, as is artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). These technologies, when combined with connected camera infrastructure, are helping to keep people safe in public spaces and better manage crowd or traffic flow in areas prone to overcrowding, such as underground train stations.
An Axis network camera, for example, may be primarily used for video surveillance to improve public safety, but it can also be a tool for gathering data and statistics for traffic management and environmental monitoring.
And this is important.
As of 2018, cities occupied just three per cent of the earth but account for up to 80 per cent of the energy consumption, as well as 75 per cent of global waste and carbon emissions, according to research by the United Nations.
The imperative to getting the development of smart cities right lies beyond our personal comfort and economic gain, although it very much serves those purposes, it also represents a fundamental tool in how we embed sustainability into everything we do, by design, not as an afterthought.
