Smart Cities Should Be People-Centric
In the previous article, I emphasized that the development of smart cities should aim for "cities as people." While it may sound clichéd, the saying "Rome wasn't built in a day" serves as a reminder to those building smart cities. Most current discussions on smart cities focus on means and technologies, such as advanced cloud technology, IoT, and big data, which contribute to elements like smart transportation, smart communities, smart healthcare, and green ecosystems. However, if we think from the perspective of "people," what is our role as future owners and residents of smart cities?
Openness, sharing, and experience are the core principles and values that place "us" at the center of smart city construction.
Openness and sharing mean that the entire process of planning, designing, and implementing smart cities should provide society and the public with sufficient channels and conditions to share and participate in technology, data, and applications. For example, smart transportation requires the government to open video traffic data of road networks, entry and exit data of public parking lots, and usage data of public WiFi. Through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), more commercial programs can connect, encouraging the creation and competition of more applications (apps). These applications can be designed to solve traffic congestion problems or help tourists choose attractions and make purchases, ultimately selecting the best options based on "our" experience.
At the end of last year, Google's parent company Alphabet planned to build smart cities in one or more existing cities in the United States. In these cities, Google will establish infrastructure for self-driving cars, data sensors, connected cars, and public WiFi. Its subsidiary Sidewalk Labs will collaborate with the "Transportation for America" (T4A) organization to provide cloud computing services, helping over ten cities better prepare for innovative applications such as self-driving cars and bike-sharing. Participating cities will share real-time information with Sidewalk, such as traffic and parking conditions, and share information with each other. The goal of this technical assistance is to improve public transportation services and traffic flow in participating cities. Sidewalk also hopes to open the obtained public transportation data to ride-sharing companies, allowing Uber to navigate cars to overly crowded bus stops, helping to divert traffic.
In addition to smart transportation development, which involves almost all urban residents, food safety is a topic of common concern for everyone. The Brazilian tainted meat scandal left Hong Kong citizens worried. If consumers have a way to trace the source of food at any time, they would feel much more secure when purchasing meat products.
Recently, I visited the National IoT Identification Management Public Platform (NIOT) established by the Guangzhou Computer Network Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nansha, Guangzhou. This project is highly characterized by openness, sharing, and experience. As long as food producers or suppliers attach a QR code provided by the platform to each meat product's packaging, containing information such as origin, ingredients, and expiration date, consumers can use their phones to scan the code before purchasing to access this information. The most impressive feature is that this consumer action creates a data loop, simultaneously providing the platform server with the scanning location, time, and corresponding product information. Big data can then analyze whether the product is suspected of being counterfeit, its circulation status, and its level of attention, and finally, feedback these results to the consumer's phone.
This truly aligns with the people-centric approach of smart initiatives.
Dr. Angus Cheong Chairman of the Asia-Pacific Internet Research Alliance and Chief Data Consultant at uMax Data Technology Ltd.
(Originally published in Hong Kong Economic Journal)