Nearly 5bn people will live in cities by 2030, making appropriate city planning more important than ever – especially when it comes to supporting the wellbeing of citizens. Cameron Dean discusses the tools that are driving the innovation of tomorrow’s metropolises
Smart cities are already a reality across the world. According to digital marketing company Juniper Research, Singapore is the foremost smart city in the world. It’s a place where jungle canopies grow on rooftops, and where gigantic alien-like trees (the Gardens By The Bay) light up in time to the tune of an orchestra every evening.
And while Singapore certainly offers a glimpse into the future, it is really just a city at the top of its game. Right now, efforts are underway to build what’s known as Virtual Singapore, or an entirely digital mirror image of the City.
Virtual Singapore – The first Smart Nation initiative
The ambitious project has cost about $53mUSD and is described as the ‘most advanced and comprehensive’ 3D mapping project in the world. Once completed, it’s thought that Virtual Singapore will be the basis for all future change and growth in the City.
Indeed, the project will help determine a fair structure of development across the City-state; traffic flow; how microwave-radiation travels through high-density areas (to abet mobile phone coverage); to even predicting the spread and damage of would-be flash floods.
The insights for the project are gleamed by real-time data from an array of sensor networks and intelligence systems throughout the City. This data can then be used to optimise operations, manage resources, enhance economic development, maintain physical assets, and improve the quality of life for its inhabitants generally.
One simple way to think of Virtual Singapore is as a Sim City game brought to life. Upon completion it will be available for use by public, private, and research organisations alike, to help with planning and decision making. For example, elderly people, or persons with a disability; wheelchair-bound, or likewise, will be able to consult Virtual Singapore for a pedestrianised route that does not include barriers or other impediments to travel.
Virtual Singapore is big data summarised.
It works by pulling in from a wealth of sources: including government departments; pre-existing 3D models; information from the internet, and real-time data.
Sidewalk Toronto: a project that blurs the boundaries of the digital and the physical
Whereas Singapore is looking to be a total smart city, in the catching up metropolises of other developed countries there is only as of yet partial forays into the digitisation world.
A good example is in Toronto, where a $1.3bn project is working on the hopes of drawing in $38 billion in private sector development by mid-century.
Sidewalk Toronto is a collaborative project between Waterfront Toronto (a public regeneration company) and Sidewalk Labs (a subdivision of Alphabet, the company that owns Google). The two collaborators are taking advantage of a unique opportunity – mainly to turn a small portion of Canada’s largest city into a digital experiment.
The ambitions of this project are to address the challenges that Toronto faces – mainly how its citizens consume energy, get about, as well as addressing the issue of housing affordability.
For example, Sidewalk Labs is already using a planning tool called Replica to monitor mobile phone usage throughout the City. This mobile phone tracking collates data that, in turn, provides comprehensive data on when, why, and how people travel in certain areas. This data can then guide future planning decisions regarding how land is appropriated, and where better transport links are needed.
This monitoring of mobile data is ‘de-personalised’ so that Replica can only determine the movements of the people and nothing more. It creates what is known in the jargon as a synthetic population: essentially the captured virtual behaviours of the real-world population. This synthetic data can be fed into computer simulations, where it replicates (hence the name ‘Replica’) up to a week’s worth of patterns and activity from the general public.
The digital twin: a replacement for the physical world
A popular buzzword in the construction industry right now is ‘digital twin’. Virtual Singapore is essentially a massive digital twin in action, mirroring the real Singapore so accurately that planners only need to consult a computer monitor, and not actually look at the concrete pavements themselves.
In our increasingly data-driven world, digital twins are becoming more common. As we have seen, they exist on a city-wide scale (Singapore), and for more localized projects such as waterfront regeneration (Toronto). But they are very appealing to planners on individual projects. One recent example, in Amsterdam, is the digital twin of the Johan Cruijiff ArenA.
Digital twins are used even on small projects because they create an almost God-like (‘omnipresent’ was the word used by a spokesman for Geodan, the communication technology company behind the ArenA project) oversight of various scenarios, estimations, and challenges that the project may face. Some of these include making the stadium totally carbon neutral, and digitizing the façade.
The digital twin of the ArenA is just one part of a wider effort to bring the whole city (Amsterdam) with it into the smart-city age.
Conclusion: digital nations; a digital world?
The world is moving rapidly into the ‘smart age’. Singapore is already there, and Italy is already aspiring to be the first smart ‘nation’ in Europe. So already, the idea of a smart city is rapidly becoming just a smaller part of a larger puzzle.
The first mention of the term ‘digital twin’ was coined in 2002. Within the next three years there are expected to be ‘billions’ of digital twins – an era also known as the digital twin technology explosion. Digital twin technology is opening up new and exciting doors for planning and research departments, with the potential to usher in a new age of progress, functionality, and wellbeing.
And, if historian and author Yuval Noah Harari’s predictions are accurate, then the internet of things will become so omnipotent that eventually there will be a point when big data understands a person more than they do themselves.
Conjecture aside, though, one thing we can confirm is that smart-(insert noun here)s are going to be with us for a long time.
Cameron Dean is a copywriter and researcher with a background in construction project management and journalism. He currently works for RJ Lifts as a lift repair engineer.
