The future of smart cities: AI, data and urban development

After the 2008 financial crisis, a new way of urbanization and service delivery began to take root around the world. As technology advances, urban planners have devised new ways to monitor the needs of city residents and leverage technology to deliver services.

By deploying the Internet of Things in numerous tasks of city management, “smart cities” are born. More than a decade later, the smart city revolution has become commonplace in the world’s leading cities. However, the concept seems more like a branding exercise than a complete revolution in urbanization.

Using technology to ease urban living is nothing new in cities. Since the first cities over 6,000 years ago, humans have been looking for ways to use technology to improve our daily lives. With the advent of smartphones, city planners have been able to collect vast amounts of data and better understand residents' needs.

solve urban problems

As a surveillance technology, the amount of personal information collected by smartphones is unparalleled in human history. This data provides city planners with new insights into how urban environments are used and where resources should be allocated.

However, smart city brands are often more focused on personal convenience than data surveillance. In cities like Dubai and Singapore, residents can interact with city services through smartphone apps as municipal offices move away from paper documents for official transactions

Residents can utilize smartphone apps to report service outages and payment of fines, etc. Marketers of smart cities envision a future in which residents can conduct business without having to physically visit a physical city office and where resources are automatically allocated based on demand. Over the past decade, many cities around the world have adopted it to varying degrees. smart city approach. Even in a city like Cape Town, residents can solve many of their problems via smartphones or online platforms. Truly innovative smart city models are changing. NEOM, a planned city on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, promises to integrate technology into nearly every aspect of the urban environment

On the other side of the world, a group of leading tech investors in California want to build their own city from the ground up and test smart city concepts to solve urban problems.

Future Smart Cities

"California Forever" is a project backed by Silicon Valley billionaires Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs and Marc Andreessen and is planned to Building a “City of Dreams” in Northern California. The project has acquired large tracts of land and promises to create a futuristic smart city with the latest solar energy, security and quality of life.

These investors are responding to severe decline in California cities. California cities from San Francisco to San Diego have been unable to curb rising crime and homelessness. It makes sense that proponents believe in the concept of "California Forever," smart cities maintained by the latest surveillance technology to provide an alternative to California's increasingly dangerous urban areas. The core of smart cities is represented by the surveillance architecture built into the urban environment. But the public narrative has always been softer. To fully understand this dichotomy, we must consider how emerging markets have transformed over the past two decades. In the mid-2000s, investors began looking for new markets with lucrative returns.

Cheap funds brought about by globalization and low interest rates, as well as the growing young population, have made emerging market countries (especially those in the Southern Hemisphere) a popular choice for investors. The emergence of new narratives validates and accelerates new investor sentiment. In other words, technology and a growing young population are heralding a historic shift in the global economy. The future belongs to emerging markets

From a technology perspective, this is correct. Technology enables greater access to markets for knowledge workers around the world. Many emerging world cities have growing populations of young people who have more opportunities than their predecessors. Cities like Dubai have become new innovation hubs that will Different groups of people come together. That narrative has been shattered in recent years as high interest rates have drained away the cheap money that fueled the boom. However, some emerging market countries have really come into their own.

The smart city narrative remains critical to the narrative in emerging markets. Many city officials view the use of smartphones to pay parking tickets as a sign of technology's promise to make life easier. It removes the bureaucratic hurdles often associated with the legacy of colonialism in some emerging market countries.

Now that these developments have become commonplace around the world, the narrative needs to change. The rise of artificial intelligence will change the way we think about cities. Thanks to the vast amount of data collected by cities over the past decade; artificial intelligence systems can be deployed to predict and handle resource allocation. The seamless experience promised by smart city visions can be more easily achieved through artificial intelligence.

The dream of a truly smart city is not over yet. As long as humans live in cities, there will be motivation to improve the urban environment.

Smart city brands associated with growth in emerging markets may have had their best days and are changing as new technologies give planners more options. Thus, one important chapter in the history of urbanization is coming to an end and another is about to begin

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