Smart technology is spreading at a rapidly increasing rate. What once was a 90’s dream of a fully automated house is quickly becoming a practical reality. People can lock their front doors with a voice command, monitor how much food their cat has eaten from a phone, and even order food delivered to their home just by asking their Alexa for it.
Before we know it, smart homes will be the norm, but not only that, entire cities will utilize smart technology. Here are some ways towns and cities could adapt smart technology to improve the lives of their citizens.
How a City Becomes Smart
When talking about smart, or interconnected devices, people mean electronics or devices that are connected to the internet in one way or another. This might use AI software, or just highly complex software to work. Typically, smart devices can easily communicate with others, like how a smartphone can connect to an Alexa smart speaker, which in turn can communicate with a smart lightswitch.
A smart city would work on a similar idea, with multiple city functions all connecting seamlessly, alongside communicating with citizens’ smartphones and relevant devices. Powering all of this would be software that knows how to adapt city services, respond to problems, and keep everything working smoothly.
While a smart city might sound like a sci-fi dream, it’s actually already happening. Cities across the US and the world are already adapting some smart technologies into their infrastructure and seeing great results.
Monitoring Citizens, But Hopefully Not Like a Big Brother
A common concern of smart technology is that the tech is spying on us and reporting back to somebody else, whether it’s a tech company or the government. This concern is nothing new though. With every new tech innovation, skeptics and conspiracy enthusiasts claim it will be used to spy on us. Yet, just like security cameras, people learn to accept it.
Smart city tech could be very useful in monitoring how citizens live their lives and identify areas for growth, improvement, or potential problems. It wouldn’t necessarily identify each individual, but more monitor the community as a whole.
This monitoring is essential for a smart city to work, and will influence all other parts of the system. The goal of the city is to try and help protect, make life easier, and prevent problems. A fully smart city would monitor everything from how we travel around, to how much utilities we use at home, and even identify and warn us of potential dangers.
The data collected by the systems running the city can also be useful for city and even neighborhood planners for the future. This information could help future builders determine things from a city’s entire sewage system to small things like whether to subdivide a neighborhood block.
Controlling Traffic to Go Smoother
The United States has a traffic problem. Building more and wider roads hasn’t fixed it. Freeways are always packed at rush hour, a single accident could make everybody an hour late, and even a single person tapping on their brakes on a crowded street could result in a car at the end of the line have to stop completely for a few seconds.
A smart city traffic system could minimize traffic and help control it when necessary. A city’s traffic system could work alongside Google Maps to help guide you on a quick path to your destinations, avoiding higher traffic areas, construction, accidents and more to get you there. Already Google Maps is trying to do this by monitoring smartphone GPS signals while driving and predicting slow down areas, but connecting to a city’s grid could only improve this.
Smart traffic lights is another piece of tech to help keep traffic moving. Instead of just working on a timed system or minimal observation, a stop light could measure how many cars are waiting to go, analyze standard traffic conditions, and adjust how long people have to wait at a red light.
By knowing or predicting our destinations, the city could help direct the flow of traffic and prevent potential traffic jams and move people away from jams. That way, if there is an accident on the freeway, fewer cars will go that way and lessen the overall traffic there.
Naturally, this lends the infrastructure to someday having self-driving cars, but that’s a different autonomous hurdle for another day.
Increased Reactions for Emergency Services
Currently, our emergency services rely on humans to contact them. If somebody breaks into a home, a human has to call the cops. Somebody has a heart attack, the paramedics have to get called. Home on fire? Somebody has to contact the firefighters. The problem is, humans aren’t always good under pressure. They freeze, forget to make the call, assume somebody else will call, or sometimes jump into action and do the wrong thing.
Now, there are some automated services out there, like smoke alarms that instantly contact firefighters or the security system that calls the police, but out in the wider world, that isn’t the norm. Smart systems in a city could be useful though in contacting emergency services and identifying potential problems. A camera on a highway could differentiate between a fender bender and a dangerous crash and call emergency services to respond before even the nearest citizen pulls out their phone. Cameras, sensors, and more could all be useful to saving lives combined with smart software.
Decreasing Waste, Becoming More Green
Smart systems, and more importantly the data it produces and gather could be very useful in identifying waste in a city. This is because everything a smart system monitors is transformed into hard data and recorded for analyzing.
For communities looking to become more green, or even creating a local circular economy, this data would be invaluable. It could highlight wasteful areas in the city that use up resources, and then lead workers to improve it.
Dangers of a Smart City
With every new piece of technology comes extra risk. Extra cameras and monitors mean less privacy for citizens, which for some is a big deal. As smart cities spread across the globe, governments who want to spy on their citizens will have a powerful tool to do so.
A smart city system would also be a major target for cyber criminals. If a criminal or terrorist got access to the smart system, they could create huge amounts of chaos and damage. Anything from creating traffic jams to destroying sewage systems, depending on how intricate and involved the system is, the more damage they could do. And that’s not all. The data collected by a smart system would be a big target too. Information about where most people are at a given point, to info at specific individuals.
Should We Have Smart Cities?
Even with the extra risks and loss of some privacy, creating smart cities is a huge answer to many problems plaguing cities and even small towns. Having more technology in public efforts can help a city become more efficient and improve the lives of its citizens, and it’s already happening. Cities across the globe are building the basics of infrastructure for a smart city. Some are providing free Wifi in public areas, others are creating a smart system to handle their stoplights, and more are building the framework for future projects. As years go on, expect to see more smart initiatives in your own city and do your part to advocate for intelligent design and careful planning.
