Smart City vs Smart Community vs Smart Residential Community
What is Smart City?
Smart
city became a hot topic since the United Nations released a report titled
“Urban and Rural Areas 2009”, saying that by the middle of 2009, the number of people living in
urban areas (3.42 billion) had surpassed the number of people living in rural
areas (3.41 billion) and since then, the world has become more urban than
rural. The figure was expected to climb exponentially every year and in the report “World
Urbanization Prospects: 2018 Revision”, it is stated that 55%
of the world’s population is residing in urban areas in 2018 as compared to 1950 whereby
only 30% of the world’s population was urban, and by 2050, 68% of the world’s
population is projected to be urban.
Since
we expect the population to continue migrating from rural areas to cities, and not the other way around, hence city development and
sustainable urbanization were widely discussed, and three major points were emphasized:
• As
the world continues to urbanize, sustainable
development depends increasingly on the successful management of urban growth,
especially in the low-income and lower-middle-income countries where the most
rapid urbanization is expected to happen between now and 2050. Integrated policies to improve the
lives of both urban and rural dwellers are needed, strengthening the linkages
between urban and rural areas and building on their existing economic, social
and environmental ties.
•
Urban growth is closely related to the three
dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. A well-managed
urbanization, informed by an understanding of population trends over the long
run, can help maximize the benefits of agglomeration while minimizing
environmental degradation and other potential adverse impacts of a growing
number of city dwellers.
• To
ensure that the benefits of urbanization are
shared and that no one is left behind, policies to manage urban growth need to
ensure access to infrastructure and social services for all, focusing on the
needs of the urban poor and other vulnerable groups for housing, education, health care, decent work and a safe environment.
Many
papers were tabled by scientists and experts at the high levels, and the
concept of Smart City seemed like the solution to the world that has further
moved towards urbanization at a greater
speed.
What is Smart
City? There are different definitions for Smart City, not a single one accepted
by all, so it is hard to precisely define what is Smart City. Wikipedia gives
us this definition: A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate
information and communication technology (ICT) and Internet of Internet of
Things (IoT) technology in a secure fashion to manage a city's assets. These
assets include local departments' information systems, schools, libraries,
transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, water supply networks, waste
management, law enforcement, and other community services. A smart city is
promoted to use urban informatics and technology to improve the efficiency of
services. ICT allows city officials to interact directly with the community and
the city infrastructure and to monitor what is happening in the city, how the
city is evolving, and how to enable a better quality of life.
There are four
factors contribute to the definition of a smart city that most commonly
accepted, is listed by Deakin and Al Waer, in their published Journal of
Intelligent Buildings International: From Intelligent Cities to Smart Cities as
follow:
1.The application
of a wide range of electronic and digital technologies to communities and
cities;
2. The embedding
of such Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in government
systems;
3. The use of ICT
to transform life and working environments within the region;
4. The
territorialization of practices that brings ICTs and people together to enhance
the innovation and knowledge that they offer.
Six Pillars of a Smart City
Let us look further into the most common six pillars to build a Smart City.
Pillar 1: Smart mobility or smart traffic
management
Mobility and
transportation shall be simplified for city residents and visitors. The inflow and outflow of people into and
from the city or the travel within the city has to be made easy and seamless,
and planned so as to provide comfort to all citizens. Smart traffic management
should focus on how to reduce traffic congestion as well as road and traffic
safety. We believe that the efficiency in traffic management will help
eliminate extra commuting hours and save of fuel.
Pillar 2: Smart Environment
There are many features to smart environment such as autonomy
adaptive behavior to environment, and interaction with humans in a simple way.
Smart environment is not possible without the rapid evolution of pervasive
computing. One of the goals of a smart environment is that it supports and enhances the
abilities of its occupants in executing tasks. These tasks range from
navigating through an unfamiliar space to providing reminders for activities and to moving
heavy objects for the elderly or disabled. For a larger scope of smart
environment, we believe that clean resources such as water, air and energy are
essential for our city residents to lead healthy and productive lives. A
low-pollution and low-emission environment coupled with clean resources will
ensure a sustainable development path for a Smart City.
Pillar 3: Smart living
A
smart city is focused on providing and developing a desirable place to live,
work and spend time in. Quality of life is essential to the prosperity of a
smart city. The factors contributing to quality of life include cultural facilities, health
conditions, individual safety, housing quality, education facilities, touristic
attractiveness and social cohesion.
Pillar 4: Smart economy
The
smart economy is a new field to stress on how a city is attractive as well as
competitive with regard to factors such as innovation, art, culture,
productivity, and most of all international appeal.
Pillar 5: Smart Governance
Smart
governance suggested that the role of ICT is important to achieve openness,
participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence for the five
governance goals. Smart governance further encloses better city planning,
emergency management, budgeting, and forecasting based on real time data
describing needs as well as changing priorities. In addition, it also relies on
strategic orientation and better healthcare that reduces the impact of aging
populations. At last, it ensures the aggregation and monitoring of energy production
and consumption data in order to provide better management policies.
Pillar 6: Smart people
For a smart city
to thrive, the human factor has to be accounted for. Since ICT is one of the
main infrastructures for smart city, city residents have to possess additional
technological skills that allow them to interact and benefit from their smart
city as well as to improve it.
Figure 1: Smart
City and its 6 Pillars
Smart Community
And, what is
Smart Community?
Often, Smart City
is used in plural form - Smart Cities, and it is interchangeable with Smart
Communities. I state my disagreement here, but I will revisit later to
elaborate my points.
If we refer to the Smart Communities Guidebook, developed by the State
University of San Diego (1997), Smart Community
is described as a geographical area ranging in size from neighborhood
to a multi-county region whose residents, organizations, and
governing institutions are using information technology to transform their
region in significant ways. Co-operation among government, industry, educators, and the citizenry, instead of individual
groups acting in isolation, is preferred. The technological
enhancements undertaken as part of this effort should result in
fundamental, rather than incremental, changes.
And
in the Implementation Guide (1997), developed by the same Institute:
A
“smart community” is a community in which members of local government,
business, education, healthcare institutions and the general public
understand the potential of information technology, and form successful
alliances to work together to use technology to transform their
community in significant and positive ways.
Because
of these unified efforts, the community is able to leverage resources and
projects to develop and benefit from telecommunications infrastructure
and services much earlier than it otherwise would. Instead of an incremental
change, a transformation occurs which increases choice,
convenience and control for people in the community, as they live,
work, travel, govern, shop, educate and entertain
themselves. Smart communities or regions are also economically competitive
in the new global economy, and attract and promote commerce as a result of an
advance telecommunications
infrastructure.
Based on the
above definition, even though it is much simpler, if we compare it to the
lengthy description of a Smart City, it seems like the essence of the two
definitions does not have much
differences.
Smart City vs Smart Community
But, should the
term Smart City be equated to that of the Smart Community? Since there is no single
definition accepted by all, I rather champion the difference for easier
comprehension.
According
to the very first paragraph of Wikipedia, a city is a large human settlement. Cities generally have
extensive systems for housing, transportation, sanitation, utilities, land use,
and communication. Their density facilitates interaction between people,
government organizations and businesses, sometimes benefiting different parties
in the process.
Whereas the first paragraph in Wikipedia,
a community is defined as a small or large social unit (a group of living
things) who have something in common, such as norms, religion, values, or
identity. Communities often share a sense of place that is situated in a given
geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in
virtual space through communication platforms.
From the two
definitions, you may find that “City” is referred more to as an infrastructure
to most individuals, but “Community” is referred more to the people themselves.
Hence, even if we add the word “Smart” before the word “City” or “Community”,
the former still should focus more on infrastructure, and the latter should focus more on people.
And, in view of
its infrastructure or info-structure nature, Smart City should be more about
government-led mega projects, and Smart Community even with or without the
involvement of government can be a community self-initiated projects, and
normally smaller in term of scale.
Learning about
the Smart City’s stakeholders could help us understand the complexity of a
Smart City project. Nearly all Smart City projects are founded upon
collaboration in the triple or quadruple of local administrations, knowledge
institutes, industry and citizens. This means that involvement of the relevant
stakeholders and governance play a dominant role in the successful
implementation of any smart city project. The complexity of most smart city
projects means that many stakeholders need to be involved, and the fact that
many independence exists between these stakeholders, a large variety of
interests have to be aligned. The following list of possible stakeholders has
been drafted:
● Municipality, local government,
politicians
● Other local authorities
● Regional authorities
● National authorities
● Utilities
● Transport operators, owners
of transport infrastructure
● Energy network operators and
energy suppliers
● Owners of infrastructure,
building and land
● End users of buildings and
services
● Real estate developers
● Investors, financial
institutions, banks, private equity
● Citizens, tenants
● Bottom-up initiatives
● NGO’s
● Local businesses
● Construction industry
● Architects, planners
● Advisors, consultants,
engineering
● Knowledge institutes and
universities
● Providers of technical
solutions
● ICT consultants
The first four
government authorities namely municipality, local government, regional and national authorities almost inevitable in kick-starting any grand plan of
a Smart City project. And with the fundamental ICT info-structure built by the
government, for example smart traffic, smart governance and smart economy, only
different community groups with different interests may initiate their own
smart community projects. The involved parties are varied depending on the
objectives to be achieved by different community groups or business groups.
With the ubiquitous ICT info-structure provided by some tech giants like Amazon
to enable the global accessibility for the cloud computing, it became less
dependent for some communities on government’s infrastructure to start their
own smart community projects to serve their own smart purpose.
According to
Statista, a statistic portal, number of smartphone users from 2014 to 2020, the number of
smartphone users is forecasted to grow from 2.1 billion in
2016 to around 2.5 billion in 2019, with smartphone penetration rates increasing as well.
Just over 36% of the world's population is projected to use a smartphone by
2018, up from about 10 percent in 2011. All these numbers contributed to more
and more self-initiated Smart Community projects and they are viable even
without government intervention.
Figure 3: Number of Smartphone Users from
2014 - 2020
Besides, the
Smart City planning papers tabled by the elitist groups are always ideal to
assume a good government is in place to look after their own people’s interest,
or the government usually has a larger worldwide humanity goal. But that was
not always the scenario it turned out to be. According to a weekly, The
Economist, on its June 2nd -8th issue, featuring “The
Surveillance State”, the adoption of ICT in a Smart City project may serve
opposite functions against the humanity. It says “Under an authoritarian government such as
China's,
digital
monitoring is turning a nasty police state into a terrifying, all-knowing one.”
“Since the
digital revolution has transformed surveillance, as it has so much else, by
making it possible to collect and analyze data on an unprecedented scale.
Smartphones, web browsers and sensors provide huge quantities of information
that governments can hack or collect; data centers allow them to store it indefinitely;
AI helps them find needles in the digital haystacks thus assembled.
Technologies that once seemed a friend of freedom, allowing dissidents in
dictatorships to communicate and organize more easily, now look more Orwellian,
letting autocrats watch people even more closely than the Stasi.”
In its conclusion
statement, “Police rightly watch
citizens to keep them safe. Citizens must watch the police to remain free.” It
is of the utmost importance that unless necessary, smart community projects
should remain independent, and keeping its own data in control and serving its
own purpose.
Since there are
so many books discussing about Smart City, I shall focus all my topics towards
Smart Community with the intention to promote practicality instead of generalization,
to be more specific, it should be about Smart Residential Community.
Smart Residential Communities
We understand
that the world is evolving, and society has become increasingly digital,
mobile, and connected. Smart communities in short, are the places that
recognize the trend and willing to adopt the intelligence infrastructure
effectively, deliver services efficiently, collaborate freely, and analyze data
for local benefits. Smart communities achieve exciting lifestyle benefits for
residents, robust economic opportunities, and more efficient governance within
a safe and healthy environment.
We should agree that there is no universal way to design a community of the future, and there is no standard smart community in terms of achievement; hence one can set their own scope of contribution, so I particularly draw my scope of discussion towards the Smart Residential Community, where Smart Living is inevitably, my highlight.
Although we narrow down the scope from Smart Community to Smart Residential Community, when we referred to Wikipedia once again for definition, it led us to something like this, "A residential community is a community, usually a small town or city, that is composed mostly of residents, as opposed to commercial business and/or industrial facilities,..." which is also playing quite "big", and will not easily be viable when come to implementing a "smart" residential community project. Because residential communities will not normally like to think of something beyond their reach at a "town" or "city" level, but rather focus on some issues that surrounding their neighbourhood.
We should agree that there is no universal way to design a community of the future, and there is no standard smart community in terms of achievement; hence one can set their own scope of contribution, so I particularly draw my scope of discussion towards the Smart Residential Community, where Smart Living is inevitably, my highlight.
Although we narrow down the scope from Smart Community to Smart Residential Community, when we referred to Wikipedia once again for definition, it led us to something like this, "A residential community is a community, usually a small town or city, that is composed mostly of residents, as opposed to commercial business and/or industrial facilities,..." which is also playing quite "big", and will not easily be viable when come to implementing a "smart" residential community project. Because residential communities will not normally like to think of something beyond their reach at a "town" or "city" level, but rather focus on some issues that surrounding their neighbourhood.
But the main
objectives of Smart Residential Community still would be quite similar to of Smart
Community or even the same with Smart City, which are:
1. To enhance security
A Smart Residential
Community, same like Smart Community, is a collection of interdependent
human-cyber-physical systems, in which the states of these systems are
estimated and adapted by IoT technology. It enables sustainable societies that
can offer increased well-being, safety, and security.
2. Easy to manage and convenient
The once
PC-oriented and Windows-based software has slowly been taken over by the web-or
the cloud-based system, more required functionalities inflicted by the
ubiquitous personal smartphones, achieving conveniences and easing management
at the same time.
3. Social & Communication platform
Smartphone is the
communication tool, when loaded with specific App either on iOS or Android
platform; it sparks the interactive functionalities to the advantage of Smart
Residential Community.
The Practical Focuses
The Practical Focuses
We will discuss
the topics of Smart Residential Community in more details in the following blog
articles. I just state a framework outline here for our academic research
coverage and the practical implementation suggestions and guides:
1. What are the
essential areas to be covered in forming a Smart Residential Community? For
example, visitor management system, vehicle management, surveillance and
patrolling system and etc are the core modules for a Smart Residential
Community.
2. Shall the
different individual Smart Residential Community be interconnected to become
Smart Residential Communities?
3. If so, how the
interconnection shall be established?
4. What are the
communication technologies and the IoT hardware involved to build a Smart
Residential Community?
5. Cloud
computing and smartphones, the two technologies that spark the Smart
Residential Community system;
6. Security
issues in Smart Residential Community, physical access issue and data security
issue.
7. What are the
social functionalities that constitute a Smart Residential Community?
8. What are the
roles of Smart Home in a Smart Residential Community?
9. Are E-billing
and e-Payment part of the integral Smart Residential Community System?
10. How to
initiate smart environment in a Smart Residential Community?
11. Is e-commerce
a part of a Smart Residential Community system, what type of e-commerce shall a
Smart Residential Community promote?
12. To discuss
Smart Living, we also shall look into the relationship of a Smart Workplace or
a Smart office with a Smart Residential Community.
13. The deployment of Blockchain, Big Data &
AI to build a future Smart Residential Community system
Summary
1. In this topic,
readers are supposed to learn about the concept of Smart City, sustainable
urbanization as its major objective, and the six pillars in building a Smart
City namely, smart mobility or smart traffic management, smart environment,
smart living, smart governance, smart economy and smart people.
2. Smart
Community is the concept often gets equate to Smart City, but the author disagrees
with, discerning the two definitions whereby the Smart City focuses on
government-led infrastructure initiatives, whereas the Smart Community focuses
on the self-initiated projects for different community groups. The author
highlights that an authoritarian government might launch a smart city project
that works against humanity, jeopardizing the goodwill of a smart city.
3.
Notwithstanding whether Smart City, Smart Community or even more specific Smart
Residential Community, development vision is to integrate information and
communication technology (ICT) and Internet of Internet of Things (IoT)
technology in a secure fashion to manage a city's or community’s assets.
4. To enhance
security, easy to manage and convenient, and to promote social and communication
functionalities are the main objectives to build a Smart Residential Community,
as well as a Smart Community.
5. The author
establishes a list of topics concerning Smart Residential Community, which
would be discussed in the following chapters and can be served as blueprints
for implementation.
References:
1. Smartphone
Users Worldwide 2014 – 2020 2014?, The Statistics Portal, viewed 20 July 2018, <https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/>.
2. World Urbanization Prospects, The 2018 Revision 2018, United Nations, viewed 5 July 2018, <https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-KeyFacts.pdf>.
3. The Economist 2018, Perfected in China, a threat in the West 2018, The Economist, vol. 427, no. 9093.
4. Mohammad
S. Obaidat & Petros Nocopolitidis (eds) 2016, Smart Cities and Smart Homes,
Key Enabling Technologies, Todd Green, pg. 2-7.
5.
Azahara 2017, Smart Cities vs Smart Communities, Geographica, viewed 23 May 2018, <https://geographica.gs/en/blog/smart-community/>.
6. J. Borsboom-van Beurden,
J.Kallaos, B.Gidroz, J.Riegler, M.Noll, S.Costa, R.Maio 2017, Smart City Guidance
Package for Integrated Planning and Management – Planning and Implementation of
Smart City Projects: Phases, Common
Obstacles and Best Practices, Key Performance Indicators, Upscaling and Replication, Intermediate version June 2017, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology.
7. Wikipedia 2018, City, Wikipedia, viewed 1 July 2018 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City>.
8.
Wikipedia 2018, Community, Wikipedia, viewed 1July 2018, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community>.
9.
Wikipedia 2018 Smart City, Wikipedia, viewed 1 July 2018, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city>.
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