Macrowikinomics is now available in paperback! 
Ayesha and Parag Khanna Ayesha and Parag Khanna explore human-technology co-evolution and its implications for society, business and politics at The Hybrid Reality Institute.
Follow Ayesha (@ayeshakhanna1) and Parag (@paragkhanna) and on Twitter
The 21st century will be dominated by the city. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, in China alone, 350m people – more than the current population of the United States – will move to cities by 2030. To accommodate the millions migrating to cities in search of the coveted middle-class urban life, Brazil, China, and India are raising new cities from dust. Meanwhile, countries like Sweden, UAE, Russia, South Korea and Portugal are also building new cities as magnets for talent and innovation, and the economic growth that they bring. Cities, not nations, now compete for people, ideas and capital, and increasingly, a city’s “smartness” is becoming a major selling point.
Today’s cities can barely handle the burden of their current populations: core services like energy, water, communications, transportation, and public safety are wasteful, inefficient and decrepit. Even though cities only occupy 2% of the landmass of the Earth, they consume over 75% of the Earth’s resources. The only way to prevent rapid urbanization from being an environmental disaster is to operate cities in a brand new way: faster, smarter, cleaner.
A city becomes “smart” when all parts of its infrastructure and government services are digitally connected and optimized. The city’s intelligent infrastructure is powered by three key technologies that share environment and citizen data constantly: sensors, the cloud and smart interfaces. Sensors, tiny devices that can measure variables such as motion, sound, and bacteria, collect information and send it back to a central database - the cloud. The city’s computing cloud then analyzes the information and changes the city in response to the input it has received, whether from sensors. Residents can also change the city experience, tailoring it to themselves by entering their preferences in touch screen smart applications. For example, if you’re feeling unwell, you could take your blood pressure at home, and the results will automatically be added to your health record, which is stored in digital format in the city’s cloud. If the blood pressure is at a dangerous level, your doctor is automatically paged, and soon, he appears on the Telepresence monitor in your apartment where he gives you a quick consultation.
Adding such layers of intelligence to the bloated legacy systems of cities like New York, San Francisco and London will be slow and painful. However, new cities have no such constraints. In South Korea, 40 miles west of Seoul, for example, a new city is being built that promises to epitomize the smart city. Built on 1500 acres of reclaimed land from the Yellow Sea, the International Business District of Songdo offers residents green living in LEED certified buildings, smart homes with Telepresence monitors, a state of the art school outfitted with the latest technologies, a park fashioned after Central Park in Manhattan that offers cultural centers, and a 15 minute ride to Incheon airport, and from there, less than a 3 hour flight to all major cities in Asia. Songdo’s smarts don’t come cheap: apartments are priced in the millions and yet are sold-out within days of going on sale.
Songdo is the first of a string of smart cities that are either in planning or development stage. In Paredes outside Porto, Portugal, PlanIT Valley is an intelligent city that aims to serve as the living lab of how to build smart cities: CEO Steve Lewis wants to build an urban operation system – a core set of digital city services – that any city can license from him to make itself “smart”. His business model is ambitious and revolutionary, and Lewis has won numerous IT partners and financial investors. PlanIT Valley is on schedule to open in 2015 when it will house 200,000 residents. Other efforts underway include Masdar in Abu Dhaba and Lavasa in India; cities in planning stages include Skolkovo in Russia, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudia Arabia and several cities in China including Meixi Lake and Wuxi.
Not to be left behind, existing cities in the US, Canada and Europe are all trying to quickly insert intelligence in pilot projects. In Sweden, for example, the Stockholm Royal Seaport project is testing implementing a smart grid in an urban environment. The market demand for intelligence services for retrofitting cities and building new ones is estimated at trillions of dollars. And the fight to capture it is on: Cisco, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Siemens, and Phillips, are just the big technology firms racing to get a piece of the action; others include startups, architects, urban planners and interface designers.
Yet in this gold rush to build smart cities, are we hastily creating urban environments that infringe upon the rights and sensibilities of residents? The biggest fear in a city where every movement of citizens is recorded is invasion of privacy. Unlike traditional cities, which are governed by elected politicians and civil servants, smart cities are often managed by a public-private hybrid organization that consists of the mayor’s office, the private developer and the technology firm. Who owns citizens’ private data and what will they do with it? It is imperative for city residents to demand to be included as a fourth party in city management, and to ensure that they are not unknowingly signing a new social contract where they are giving up privacy for convenience and security.
One of the foremost ways that city residents can remain informed about a city’s intelligence infrastructure is to have access to it. Ideally, this means that the smart “plumbing” of the city will be open source so that citizens can add tailor-made city applications for themselves, and at worst, there must be complete transparency in how the infrastructure collects, uses, shares and stores data. Most likely, for cities that have proactive residents who insist upon this right, we’ll see process transparency and the option to innovate and create interesting city applications built upon a closed system like Cisco’s Smart+Communities platform.
There is no doubt that the world needs smart cities. However, in the age of smart cities, city residents need to have a geostrategy, i.e. they need to choose where they live and then they need to proactively influence and manage the environment in that city. This is the only way to be smart in smart cities.
Whilst the technological issues relating to sentient cities is ultimately feasible, you are correct that one of the main issues we will have to overcome as a species is the issue of privacy.
Like most things I think that this is a cultural issue, and as the Web becomes ever more pervasive into our lives the traditional notion of privacy becomes redundant. It may be that a future world will be one where information is freely exchanged in return for robust and healthy checks and balances allowing what that information can be used for.
I look in interest to see how the South Koreans handle this one.
Parag and Ayesha, thanks so much for getting the conversation started. I thought I might add a few “out-takes” from macrowikinomics to stimulate further discussion. Here we go:
Intelligent Cities
Cities around the world are straining under the pressure of this crisis and it’s causes. Romantic Mexico City is now the most dangerous city in the world and other megacities like Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, are straining to the point of paralysis from population influx, lack of infrastructure, traffic congestion, pollution and crime.
In the United States and other countries where cities have been built since the second world war, many urban centers are dysfunctional. By separating where we live, work and shop cities have been divided into downtowns that become ghost towns at night, suburbia where the commute is brutal and the mall where a car is required for all shopping. The downtown areas of many American cities like Atlanta, Houston are dangerous ghost towns after 6 pm as millions of computers are locked bumper to bumper on the vast freeway commute.
And as the industrial economy collapses, cities build around it in danger of collapsing as well. Detroit that has lost more than half of its population large parts of the city have become a wasteland, populated by wild animals. Median house price us under $10,000.
Yes at the same time there are fresh signs of renewal. The old Stappleton Airport in Denver has been transformed into a mixed-use community with housing, shopping and work integrated. Because residents have access to high-speed networks the daily commune is being replaced with a mouse click.
We are in the early stages of what many refer to as the urban century with over half of the world’s population living in urban areas. By some accounts, the green design of our cities is the single greatest design challenge we face in the 21st century. If we do not design nature into the fabric of our communities, the collapse of our civilization as we know it is inevitable. As cities become increasingly important, we need the idea of ecological design to develop further and connect more deeply with all aspects of design as cities of the future will have to find a way to connect people, and our infrastructure with nature.
To solve the global environmental crisis we will have to shift attitudes and behaviors and we will only make this leap through increased understanding, and interaction with the land. We will continue to need to conserve and save what we have but by designing cities that deeply integrate nature we might be able to change the attitudes and behaviors of people and turn the tide on the broader environmental challenges we face globally.
The 21st century is the urban century. In 1800, only three percent of the world’s population lived in cities. Now, more than 50 percent of the population does. This rural to urban migration, along with its implications and consequences, from the future of agriculture to the sustainability of water and energy supplies, are a critical issues for the future. In 1950, there were 83 cities with populations exceeding one million. In 2008, there are 468. China’s urban explosion, the largest in history, has given rise to over 100 cities with more than a million people.
By some accounts, the environmental conservation movement has been a complete failure. Unfortunately we continue to experience mass extinctions of animals, insects and plant life – faster than any other period in history. We are burning and cutting down our rainforest at a rate of over 80 million acres per year. Wetlands are being filled in and destroyed to the extent that less than half remain. The ocean is being fished at a rate that could see a collapse of all major fish species within 20 years, and toxic chemicals continue to be poured into our air and water systems at ever increasing rates.
Cities are emerging as the critical frontier for our most pressing environmental issues. Some feel that we can change human behavior most effectively by redesigning of our cities, towns and villages with nature as the key element. By designing cities that deeply integrate nature we will be able to change the attitudes and behaviors of people and turn the tide on the broader environmental challenges we face globally.
It has become clear to me over the years that a primary ingredient for the future of urban design – has to be nature — the sort of natural space that gives us an opportunity to escape the city without going too far. Nature in the city creates an important outlet for a city and its citizens, and regular contact with it helps ground everybody in the city.
We are part of nature although many people today feel we have somehow “outgrown” nature through technology and machines. Our roots are in nature – it is where we come from. We weren’t born in some concrete box somewhere — as a race I mean. We are not superior to nature – we are part of it. This fact has been largely forgotten as we have increasingly isolated ourselves in cities, far away from natural systems.
For most of the past 500 years, with a few exceptions – urban planners, architects and citizens alike have tried to dominate nature, and push wilderness to the edge of our cities. We have channelized our river’s, we have manipulated our waterfront by filling in wetlands and constructing beaches of crushed marble and imported sand. We have paved our children’s school play ground’s, and developed suburban areas with astro turf and lollypop trees with flowers planted in rows. We have organized our city in a grid – north, south, east west and as a result we have become completely disconnection from the land beneath our feet, the natural world.
Not surprisingly, our most critical environmental problems stem from the simple fact that we have become disconnection from nature. We no longer see ourselves as part of nature. As such we treat it as a resource to be plundered as if it will continue to replenish and sustain us forever.
The opportunity to rethink, redesign and rebuild our collective future by focusing on the idea of welcoming nature back to cities is very exciting because it will change the shape of our cities and it will change the way we live. The process will have to involve a broad field of participants from across a many disciplines — architects and designers, community members and school children, along with corporations and politicians. Some work will be explicitly environmental, and some will be political. Some work will be organized and pragmatic, and some will be playful and artistic.
Around the world designers and politicians are pursuing ambitious goals that ten years ago would have been unimaginable. Close to home, Vancouver is aspiring to be the greenest city in the world and Toronto wants to be the greenest city in North America (challenging Vancouver on a basic level), In the United Arab Emirates, Masdar is being built as the first zero-waste, zero-carbon city in the world. In Europe cities like London, Stockholm and Rotterdam are each advancing unique and ambitious green strategies. And in Brazil the city of Curitiba is, by some accounts winning the global race to be the best – the greenest.
The scale of many of these projects is stunning as waterfronts are redesigned with long bands of natural space where indigenous plants dominate what might have otherwise been rows of neatly planted tulips. Greenbelts that wrap urban areas are being established with some resistance but they are happening – London England with 1.2 million acres, Melbourne with 1.6 million acres, and Toronto with 1.8million acres – and they are happening with huge political support. Apart from protecting the environmental significance of these lands they also help to constrains urban sprawl (the single worst land use design issue in human history). Green belts establish a boundary that forces intensification, infill developments, the creative reuse of old industrial sites and smarter city planning. They enable investments in public transportation, district energy program and more efficient waste management, not to mention the opportunity for a walkable and bikeable city. They also make nature available to those who live in the city.
At a smaller scale architects and planners are also actively advancing ideas that put green space on the roofs of buildings, in alley ways and along road sides in downtown areas. Tax incentives in cities like Chicago and Vancouver have made it economically advantageous for landowners to transform asphalt parking lots into gardens, and recent laws have made pesticide-free, ecological landscapes the default position for many municipal parks departments across Canada. A walk through many trendy neighborhoods in New York, London, San Francisco and Toronto will make one appreciate that things are changing. The idea of nature in the city – and ecological gardening – has become the new design aesthetic for residential front yards, contrasting sharply with the perfectly manicured suburban yard of mown grass.
Close to home, our work at Evergreen continues to push at the outer edges of this idea to integrate nature into the design of cities. Later this year, Evergreen Brick Works will open in Toronto as an international centre for sustainable green cities – a place where we will share design ideas and explore best practices. The 41 acre property was an active brick factory for over 100 years – helping to build cities across Canada with the production of 43 million bricks each year. The transformation of this old factory into a centre for green cities will maintain its role in city building – but moves it into the future with an even bigger purpose.