Delhi suffocates in smog. As every year, the Indian capital has disappeared under a yellow-gray bell made of fine dust. But this year air pollution has reached new record levels – the city has the worst air in the world. The hospitals reported a sharp increase in patients with heart and respiratory problems. Power plants were shut down and trucks were no longer allowed into the city.
Other metropolises are also struggling with polluted air and clogged streets. But not just with that. The rapid growth of the large metropolitan areas and the high industrial density also cause dramatic environmental problems. Sealing of surfaces hinders the runoff of precipitation, which results in streets and sidewalks standing under water. If the area of a metropolis exceeds a certain dimension, this leads to logistical problems. A regulated and effective waste disposal can then hardly be guaranteed, for example. Wild landfills are created or the garbage is burned on site.
The problem is: people are drawn to the cities because they hope for better work opportunities and more comfort there. According to forecasts by the UN, up to 70 percent of the world’s population will live in metropolitan areas by 2050. So that these still function as a stable living space, designs for the city of the future are being tinkered around the globe – without exhaust gases, without traffic jams, environmentally friendly and digitally networked. Some pilot projects are already in the construction phase.
For example, the Japanese mobility group Toyota, together with the renowned Danish architecture firm BIG, is currently building a model city as a fully networked ecosystem on a former factory site of around 70 hectares at the foot of Mount Fuji, which exclusively uses solar power and hydrogen-powered fuel cells for energy supply.
Less stress, less noise, less pollution
As a “living laboratory”, Woven City, as the city is called, is intended to accommodate company employees and their families as well as researchers who combine modern technologies such as automated mobility, robotics, smart homes and artificial intelligence and test them in a real environment.
“I’m excited to see what happens when we bring the latest hardware and software together on an urban scale,” says Bjarke Ingels, founder and creative director at BIG. In 2019, the architect received the honorary award of the German Sustainability Award as the world’s leading visionary of sustainable architecture.
Networked mobility solutions promise a new equality between road users in the Woven City: It is to be tested how robot cars, electric scooters and humans can coexist with one another without accidents. Toyota’s autonomous multi-purpose shuttles “e-pallet” are an important part of the concept. These modular, box-shaped electric vehicles serve as rolling shops, doctor’s offices, libraries, school buses or restaurants.
The apartments in sustainable timber construction are equipped with the latest assistance technologies such as networked household appliances and in-home robotics. This is intended to make everyday life easier for around 2000 residents. The approach: less stress, less noise, less pollution.
The Line is pursuing a similar goal in northwestern Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of the year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman presented the project on state television: a climate-neutral eco-city without roads and cars for a million people.
Over a total length of 170 kilometers, an underground ultra-high-speed train connects several settlement centers, which are lined up like pearls along the transport tube. No journey should take longer than 20 minutes. In the centers, which are planned for around 80,000 residents each, all facilities for daily needs can be reached within a five-minute walk. In 2030, The Line is expected to have a total of one million inhabitants and attract five million tourists.
Ultimately, it always comes down to one question: Who does the city belong to?
Digitization also plays a key role there. The city will have its own control system: Neos. “Where other projects use one percent of the available data, around 90 percent of the data is fed into Neos,” says Joseph Bradley, head of technology and digital at the Neom Company, which was involved in the construction. “Neos can take the initiative and it’s personalized.”
The system knows at all times where each individual resident of the city is, knows their habits and is informed about their state of health. If someone falls, the system sends drones to assess the situation, tourists arrive at the airport, and Neos sends an autonomous vehicle to drive to the hotel.
In order for the system to work, the residents are equipped with a digital ID card, whose data can be accessed by service providers – from transport providers to retailers to banks. The basis for these urban planning visions is a comprehensive digital infrastructure: sensors in public – and sometimes private – space, cameras and measuring stations everywhere. The glass resident, a bit of Orwell. The question naturally arises: Do you really want to live like that? Or is the price too high?
The failed project for a high-tech district in Toronto last year shows that such smart city concepts are not always met with enthusiasm. The Google parent company Alphabet wanted to build an ideal city there, in which there would be no more accidents because robot cars and smart bicycles recognize each other, and no more attacks because every resident would carry a tracker with them. But citizens resisted providing data to the Internet giant at every turn.
A discussion broke out about the power of IT corporations, about surveillance capitalism and data protection, about the role of the public and private sectors, which eventually ended with the dissolution of the treaty.
Ultimately, it always comes down to one question: Who does the city belong to?
Because unlike the model cities planned from scratch by a corporation or crown prince, most concepts have to be integrated into existing city structures with many decision-making levels.
Google knows everything. You should use that, says the expert
In Germany there are model projects in which the concept of data usage is being tested – be it via intelligent traffic lights for improved traffic flow or smart garbage cans that report their fill level to the municipal utilities for more efficient emptying – but of a real smart city, the essential parts If their infrastructure is coordinated via data flows, they are far away.
Nevertheless: “There is currently a shift in power in urban development,” says Jochen Rabe. He is Professor of Urban Resilience and Digitization at the Einstein Center Digital Future in Berlin. “The digitization of the city is happening so quickly that long-term planning and management alone is no longer sufficient. The authorities must be enabled to moderate additional processes in the future.” As an example, he cites the “Gieß den Kiez” app, on which you can adopt individual Berlin city trees. Anyone who has watered their tree enters this information in the app. “The app is there, people are using it, and the city must now respond to thousands of individual measures with its long-term tree care by community gardeners.”
In general, it is not easy to implement new technologies in existing systems. Take traffic, for example: One of the greatest challenges for autonomous vehicles is to react correctly in all situations – even in uncoordinated road traffic with sometimes unpredictable road users. In addition, robotic cars have to recognize their surroundings precisely and process the data very quickly. In addition to high-performance mobile communications and comprehensive traffic telematics, better digital map material is required above all.
Do we need more green roofs? Here, too, data could help
Technology companies like Google have the best real-time data in this area. To a large extent, they receive this information directly from the population, voluntarily, via their smartphones, which are used every day.
No city has similar opportunities, including financial opportunities. Jochen Rabe therefore advocates working with such companies. “Why build new digital systems to generate data that already exists in much better quality and quantity?” However, new legal foundations would have to be laid to make data accessible for services of general interest in the interests of the common good.
This can then help, for example, to improve the urban water cycle, which is subject to various influences within a city, such as different groundwater levels or local downpours. It could therefore make sense to merge these influencing factors from existing and new data. In this way, in a structurally very slowly changing city with scarce resources, the right measures could be taken with maximum effect in a targeted manner – for example to find answers to the question of where green roofs as water reservoirs would have the most effect.
The smart city can therefore be part of the answer to today’s ecological problems if planners and the private sector handle the data made available to them responsibly. However, it will hardly look any different from today’s city. The biggest difference will be in how we use and operate them.