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Smart Sustainable Cities Reconnaissance Study Smart Sustainable Cities – Reconnaissance Study Smart Sustainable Cities Reconnaissance Study Smart Sustainable Cities – Reconnaissance Study Authors Elsa Estevez, Senior Academic Programme Officer, UNU-EGOV Nuno Vasco Lopes, Postdoctoral Fellow, UNU-EGOV Tomasz Janowski, Head, UNU-EGOV Partners United Nations University Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance (UNU-EGOV), http://egov.unu.edu International Development Research Center (IDRC), http://www.idrc.ca Contacts UNU-EGOV, [email protected] Matthew Smith, Senior Program Officer, IDRC Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank IDRC for co-funding the preparation of this report. Particular thanks are due to Matthew Smith and Laurent Elder who championed the project from the very beginning. We also wish to thank John Bertot (University of Maryland, USA), Wojciech Cellary (Poznań University of Economics, Poland) and Ruhiya Seward (IDRC, Canada) for valuable comments. Last but not least, we wish to thank a group of international experts who were interviewed for this report: Jasmith Barrera (Manager, Spatial Data Infrastructure for the District Capital, Bogotá, Colombia), Ricardo Costa (Deputy Mayor, Municipality of Guimarães, Portugal), Jaime Lerner (Architect and Urban Planner, former Governor of the State of Paraná, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil), Marco Peres (Director, Observatorio de Sociedad, Gobierno y Tecnologías de la Información, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Colombia), Juan Prada (Director, Information Technology, Municipality of Montevideo, Uruguay) and Lark Yang Tan (Director, Infocomm Development Authority International, Singapore Government). iii Executive Summary The global urban population is expected to grow by 63 percent between 2014 and 2050 – compared to an overall global population growth of 32 percent during the same period. Megacities with over 20 million inhabitants will see the fastest increase in population – and at least 13 new megacities are expected by 2030, in addition to the 28 existing today. The fastest growing urban centres contain around a million inhabitants, and are located in the lower-middle-income countries in Asia and Africa. The anticipated growth of cities creates unprecedented sustainability challenges. Increasing demands for energy, water, sanitation, education, healthcare, housing, transport and public service are testing the limits of city infrastructures. In 2015, 828 million people lived in temporary housing that lack basic services like sanitation and access to drinking water. Six million new people move to such housing every year, thus ever increasing the demand for services. Cities are responsible for 67 percent of the global energy demand and consume 40 percent of world’s energy overall. Urban centres are responsible for 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to climate change. In addition, urban centers increasingly experience natural disasters. They can also witness social tension brought on by rising inequality and unemployment, air and water pollution, traffic congestion, and urban violence and crime. At the same time, urban centres offer tremendous opportunity for economic development. Eighty percent of the world’s gross domestic product is generated in cities. Urban citizens earn on average three times the income of their rural counterparts. Cities have a concentration of universities and are critical venues of research and innovation, political activism and cultural exchange. People living in larger cities tend also to have a smaller energy footprint, require less road and communication infrastructure, consume fewer resources, and have higher productivity levels. For example, according to earlier research, a city of eight million has 15 percent more productivity, e.g. wages and patents produced per capita, and 15 percent fewer infrastructure needs, e.g. gas stations, electric wires and roads, than do will two cities of four million each. Smart Cities have emerged as one response to the challenges and opportunities created by rapid urbanization. This report presents the results of a reconnaissance study examining the thesis that Smart Cities advance sustainable development. The study analysed 876 scientific publications, recommendations from 51 think tank organizations and 119 concrete Smart City initiatives. Researchers also conducted seven interviews with city managers, planners and researchers responsible for successful Smart City initiatives. Smart Sustainable Cities There are different digital technology models for cities, from Digital Cities to Intelligent Cities to Smart Cities, which are incorporated according to the degree and nature of digital technology capacity of the city. Digital Cities integrate digital technology into the city’s core infrastructure systems, while Intelligent Cities rely on the Digital City infrastructure to build intelligent buildings, transportation systems, schools, enterprises, public spaces, and public services, and integrate these into intelligent urban systems. Smart Cities deploy intelligent urban systems to serve socio-economic and ecological development, and to improve quality of life and address the origins of social instability in cities. iv Executive Summary The Smart Sustainable City – the concept advanced in this report – best realizes the benefits of Smart Cities as it focuses on a continuous transformative process, based on stakeholder engagement and collaboration, and building different types of human, institutional and technical capacities. In this model, the city contributes to improving the quality of life of its citizens by pursuing socio-economic development and protecting natural resources among other locally-defined priorities. The study learned for instance that Smart City initiatives can help overcome the limitations of traditional urban development that tends to manage urban infrastructure systems in silos. The siloed system leads to poor information sharing between systems, functions and stakeholders, such as citizens, businesses, government and civil society organizations. Smart City initiatives leverage data and services offered by digital technologies, such as cloud computing, open data sets, or the Internet of Things to help connect city stakeholders, improve citizen involvement, offer new or enhance existing services, and provide context-aware views on city operations. A city-wide digital infrastructure can help integrate different urban infrastructure systems including energy, water, sewage, or transport, and enable efficient management, control and optimization of such systems. These initiatives also address environmental and human-capacity issues. Smart City development is at the same time highly complex and challenging. The integration of urban systems into one “system of systems” capable of self-adaptation and self-management is difficult. There are constraints on system interoperability and reuse of data, and heterogeneous sources of quantitative and qualitative data provided by open government, citizen science and other projects and low capacity for connecting data to analytical models. Smart Cities raise serious concerns related to citizens’ privacy, government surveillance and other digital rights. There are also other issues with connecting urban sustainability challenges to actionable approaches, social and territorial cohesion issues requiring unique governance solutions, and the different discourse used by technologists and policymakers. In the end, it is critical that Smart Cities are not driven by particular ideological positions or commercial interests, but rather embrace public value in all economic, social, ecological, and political dimensions. This study discovered a wide variation of Smart City initiatives in different geographic locations. There are Smart City initiatives in both developed and developing countries, and Europe leads the way with 37 percent of initiatives found followed by Asia Pacific (28%), Africa (13%), North America (13%), and Latin America and Caribbean (9%). Most Smart City initiatives (25%) focused on Smart Living, i.e. how digital technology enables healthy and safe lifestyles; Smart Environment (21%), e.g. technology-enabled energy grids, waste management and other initiatives for reducing pollution; and Smart Economy (19%), e.g. technology- enabled production and delivery of products and services; and less on other initiatives, such as Smart Mobility (13%), i.e. technology-enabled and integrated transport and logistic systems; Smart Governance (13%), i.e. technology-enabled policy and governance processes; and Smart People (9%), e.g. people with e-skills, working on technology-enabled jobs. The majority of initiatives focused on one (40%) or two (24%) objectives and a few (8%) tried to balance all six objectives. The majority of initiatives (66%) are implemented by governments, followed by industry (19%) and NGOs (15%). Most were concerned with planning (60%), and the rest by implementation (40%). Interestingly, despite the discourse in the literature that contrasts top- down and bottom-up initiatives, it is clear that top-down or government-led initiatives (83%) are dominant, while only 17 percent are bottom-up or citizen-driven. Smart Sustainable Cities in Developing Countries Smart Cities have a lot of potential to improve the circumstances of developing countries. Yet given the relative newness of the concept, this potential is not fully realized in most developing countries. Several existing trends and structural factors could actually widen the gap between potential and reality: v Smart Sustainable Cities
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