As local governments move away from asking why and if to the when and how in terms of sustainability programs to drive an agenda around economic growth and job creation in an environmentally sustainable manner, they are also looking at technology playing a more proactive role to drive the delivery of next-generation citizen services. Amongst the major drivers for this change is the ongoing rapid rate of urbanization, which has serious implications for countries across three key growth parameters -economic, social and environmental:
In terms of economic development, because the key focus for labor (skilled and unskilled) migrating to urban areas is to tap into some of the assumed economic prosperity that a city is supposed to provide.
health, education and utilities. Perhaps, most importantly, for the long
term,
in terms of environmental
impact, because people moving into cities consume more
energy and emit more carbon.
As a result, governments (and cities, in
particular) need to rethink the way they develop their
infrastructure to support this influx of people in a socially,
economically, and environmentally sustainable model. A lot of
the responsibility in this respect is shifting from central and
regional governments to the local level, specifically
to mayors, urban planners, and local councilors.
Unfortunately, historically, local governments across the world have
treated technology as somewhat of an afterthought for the
majority of these large projects, meaning that successfully
introducing ICT in a strategic fashion at this stage of the game
will require a paradigm shift. Fundamentally, however, there
are massive infrastructure constraints out there, so ICT
will have to play a much larger role in terms of delivering the
next generation of citizen services.
This IDC White Paper will examine these
issues, their impact on various stakeholders across the ecosystem,
as well as how technology is evolving to help those
stakeholders build the future city in a more sustainable
fashion.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
Global society as we know it is undergoing
fundamental changes at multiple levels:
Urbanization: Over 700 million people will be added to urban populations over
the next 10 years.
Hyper-growth in emerging
markets: A shift in the locus of economic activity
from the west to the east.
Ubiquitous connectivity: With mobile devices threatening the primacy of the PC as an information-access mechanism that requires
more service-oriented architectures.
Instant gratification: Individuals demanding unique and customized levels of service – not only from businesses but the
government, too.
Alongside these dynamics is an understanding
that the supply of resources are finite – so the new approach to community development and revitalization should have a
major focus on sustainability. The United Nations defines sustainable
development as the interdependent and mutually reinforcing
pillars of economic development, social development, and environmental
protection.”
In the 21st century, these three pillars are becoming
increasingly important for policy makers as they look to develop their
economies in a more sustainable fashion. This is
filtering down to the city level, where local government officials are not only
dealing with increased levels of urbanization, but also
improving living standards, ease of doing business, and per capita income, in
the face of increasingly ageing infrastructure (i.e.
roads, buildings and utilities). In line with this, cities are beginning to
outline clear targets across the three pillars of sustainability
(and starting to realize the critical role that ICT will play therein). Certain
cities are further along the line than others in this respect.
Examples include:
As it relates to a focus on linking the
usage of ICT to drive economic growth, the Incheon Free
Economic Zone in Korea (IFEZ) is aiming to become
Northeast Asia’s leading international business city. It is
setting up four hubs (business, logistics, IT and
tourism/leisure) with a focus on leveraging networking technology to create
more jobs and increase foreign direct investment
(FDI). As part of Singapore’s Intelligent Nation 2015
(iN2015) 10-year master plan to realize the potential of
infocomm across the country over the course of 10 years,
the government is looking to achieve the following key
economic outcomes: a 2-fold increase in the value-add of the
infocomm industry to S$26 billion; a 3-fold increase in infocomm
export revenue to S$60 billion; 80,000 additional jobs;
and 90% home broadband usage.
In the context of the environmental pillar,
as part of the Amsterdam Smart City initiative, the
government has outlined some very clear targets around
carbon management at the city level. For example,
the use of 20% renewable energy by 2025, to be climate
impact neutral by 2015, and to achieve 40% C02 reduction
by 2025 compared with 1990. The government has
identified four key areas to meet these targets – namely
sustainable living, sustainable workplace, sustainable public
place, and sustainable mobility. These are important
external messages to be sending citizens in terms of how they
shape their own behavior as part of their individual
contributions to meeting these goals.
In terms of driving the social development
agenda, Waterfront Toronto’s regeneration of its
docklands is aimed at creating specific collaborative clusters
around healthcare, intelligent buildings, gaming, and digital
media to drive innovation as well as social inclusion in
an area of the city that previously was not viewed as very
desirable to live. In China, the Chongqing Municipal
government plans to restructure its income distribution system
and has set the goal of bringing down the Gini Coefficient
(the index used to measure the gap between the rich and the
poor) from the current 0.42 to 0.35 in its own 12th
Five-Year Plan (2011-2015).
So, what role will ICT play in terms of this
three-pronged strategy to sustainability? In order to meet these targets,
governments need to look at ways of working smarter and
driving citizen centricity in a more proactive fashion. IDC believes that
technology will play a critical role in this process – and that
the -city or community of the future’ will have technology embedded across all
critical city management and operational functions.
The City of the Future: What Will It Look Like?
In building a city of the future, IT will
have an underlying role to play in the context of sustainable urbanization as well
as the larger context of economic growth and environment sustainability. The
adoption of hardware, software and services in this new light gives way to the
creation of a new IT ecosystem which IDC refers to as Intelligent X.
IDC defines Intelligent X as a technology
ecosystem that integrates the following three areas:
Smart devices (involving M2M/telemetry
capabilities)
High-speed ubiquitous communications
networks
Intelligent software and services to
process, consolidate and analyze data in order to transform industry-specific business
processes.
At the core of Intelligent X solutions are
three key enablers. First, increased computational power available through
high-performance chipsets and hardware, as well as
high-performance networks. Second, improved maturity in business intelligence
and analytics solutions; and third, the introduction of new
delivery models like cloud computing. As such, implementation of Intelligent X
can enable the social, economic and environmental
agenda for city governments. While Intelligent X solutions will need
coordination across multiple technology owners, the key
enabling factor will be ubiquitous connectivity that is secure, scalable and
resilient.
The City of the Future: What is Required?
The Service Delivery Platform
IDC believes that in most potential
implementations, the local telecom service providers (SPs) will play an
integral role in providing the bandwidth and operational know-how needed
to run a smooth, reliable and secure Intelligent X ecosystem of services. The challenge for SPs will invariably be in
integrating their legacy OSS/BSS and network management systems to the future
scalable needs of Intelligent X communities. Another
huge challenge for the architects of the connected cities will be the exploding
mobile and embedded devices coming on to the market
at an accelerated pace Locations
Order Management
The Service
Delivery Platform: Underlying Components
Routers, switches, storage and
authentication, caching and firewall servers will all be needed in abundance to
manage the largeamount of information that will flow through
the Intelligent X ecosystem. Ideally, the local communities will seek to
migrate as many of the public and citizen services as
possible to the technology-driven ecosystems. In order to operate such an
ecosystem efficiently, IDC believes that, in most cases, cloud
computing provided through fault-tolerant cloud datacenters is the general
direction that mostof these implementations will follow. The
datacenter will have to deliver new video and Web 2.0 applications, with the
speed and flexibility to meet the service provider’s
operational requirements while enhancing revenue growth. The service provider’s
datacenter also needs to leverage the advances that IT
is making in the datacenter today. It includes infrastructure components such
as industrystandard server platforms, the use of virtualization,
and best practices in datacenter design. Pervasive server virtualization for
servers is the backbone of the future datacenter. The
movement toward virtualization allows service providers to quickly deploy
servers, increase utilization rates that maximize
capital investments, and move virtual machines across a physical layer of
compute resources as demands for processing ebb and flow. In
conjunction, service providers are looking for logical abstraction of storage
assets between the physical storage elements and
services that are deployed. The network is evolving as well in how it can be
optimized to support server and storage virtualization.
The network will play a leading role in enabling service providers to increase
the speed and agility of bringing new services to
market.
It goes without saying that it will be
necessary for both wireless broadband and fixed broadband connectivity to be
pervasive throughout this community. Thus, cities and
towns where both mobile (e.g. 3G/HSPA and LTE) and/or wireless broadband (802.11n or WiMAX) is available ubiquitously
along with an underlying fiber optic local loop that reaches deep into the neighborhoods and high-density residential
apartment or condominium buildings will provide for the optimum implementations
so that engineers and planners can mix and match
fiber with wireless connectivity. IDC believes that a unified network
architecture will help service providers move away from
individual compute clusters and enable an architecture that can be provisioned
based on business demand.
Apart from the datacenters, it will also be
necessary to operate customer contact centers and Network Operations Centers
(NOC). IDC believes that in the cases where the
local SPs choose not to participate, such as building and operating the cloud
datacenters, new business opportunities will arise for ICT
companies and vertical specialist companies. This will, in turn, have the
fortuitous result of creating many new jobs for ICT and
vertical professionals. An ecosystem that is built from a flexible and open SDP
will also have the added impact of creating many new
business opportunities for local and small businesses such as software
development, devices, customer service, vertical
specialists, environmental specialists, education, banking and finance, as well
as city planning and management.
Intelligent X Core Competencies Needed in
the Ecosystem
In order to plan, design, implement and
operate an Intelligent X ecosystem, at the city or community of the future, many
disciplines and expertise will be needed and carefully coordinated.
Below is ID C’s opinion on the
set of skills required by the various stakeholders in
this evolving ecosystem:
LOCAL GOVERNMENT: (i.e. city officials).
Mayors and vice-mayors need to lay out a
clear roadmap for the future development of the city. However,
political pressures may delay this process. As a result, some
city officials (in collaboration with central ICT agencies) are
working towards creating an ICT framework for their city
governance that will outlast election cycles and changes in the
political landscape.
This ICT framework needs to include a
component that focuses on city operations management as well as the
delivery of citizen services across the various
verticals mentioned earlier. Pilots and mini-projects need to be
put in place to assess the viability of certain solutions and
services. Local governments are also assessing their core
competencies as part of a potential outsourcing strategy for
specific services – for example IP-based emergency services and
forensic IP tracking. These entities also need to think
about financing and marketing the new developments and
revitalization projects. The government or its appointed
agencies will also need to create the regulatory framework and
jurisdiction norms for setting up special purpose vehicles
(SPV) to fund these projects. They also need to decide how
private players participate in projects and funding
mechanisms for financing these large-scale engagements. For
example, in Canada, U$30 billion has been set aside for
investment over the next 20 years to rejuvenate
Toronto’s old docklands into a new community. This project is jointly
funded by the central, state and city governments, in the
form of a Public- Private Partnership (PP), with the aim to
promote economic development and create jobs in what was
previously a wasteland. The objective is to create
specific collaborative clusters around healthcare, intelligent
buildings, gaming, and digital media. William G. Hutchison, the
Executive Director of Intelligent Communities for Waterfront
Toronto, has highlighted how they are planning to provide 1GBps
connectivity to every home (and how this effectively doubles
the market value of these properties), which has helped
to finance the whole project.
URBAN PLANNERS AND DEVELOPERS:
The core work of execution for building the
infrastructure where these types of solutions can be
deployed is in the hands of real estate and construction companies. Large construction companies that are undertaking projects to
build roads, water-ways, ports, and buildings form an integral
part of the entire ecosystem. While such firms leverage government guidelines for building out fresh infrastructure, there
is an increased level of collaboration with IT firms to extend
the monetization value of their projects. This is
increasingly relevant in the context of more Build-Operate-Transfer
(BOT) or Build-Operate-Optimize projects where real estate and construction firms are looking to monetize value in the post-project completion stage. Solutions in demand
include building management systems which offer not only higher
onetime sale/square feet value but also provide an annuity-based revenue model for maintenance services. In addition,
greenfield projects are looking to deploy integrated communication systems and community-based solutions that enable better citizen experience. For example, one of Cisco’s partners in the property development space, Gale International, is working with Cisco to create what it calls
Smart+Connected Communities (S+CC) on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land at Songdo, which is part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone and about a 15-minute drive away from the Incheon
Airport. Here, Gale is looking to build a city of the future for
65,000 residents. Each home will have a Cisco TelePresence unit
in the same way that each home has a dishwasher installed. There will be an international school high-speed network
that will enable real-time collaboration globally. The city is
also expected to attract a working population of 300,000 as
part of an initiative to establish Songdo as a hub for
Northeast Asia. The interesting thing about this project is that it
was kick-started in 2003, which gives a sense of how long
these types of projects have been in the cards. Tom Murcott,
the Chief Marketing Officer of Gale International, said,” TheCity of Incheon hired Gale when there was nothing there on the ground, and when Stan Gale (the chairman of Gale International) flew over to look at this with the Mayor
of Incheon, the only thing that was there was the Yellow
Sea, and they said -Imagine if!’ Now, there are already 7,500 people living in Songdo, and the international school
opens in August of this year, so this city of the future is
already a reality in the present!
SERVICE PROVIDERS: As highlighted earlier, IDC believes that in most potential
implementations, the local SPs will play an integral role in providing
the bandwidth and operational know-how needed to run a
smooth, reliable and secure ecosystem of services. The ICT
community at large forms the foundation, which is critical
to the successful implementation and operation of these
projects. For example, a smart-grid installation is as good as the
processes, tools and technologies implemented and managed.
Similarly, as urbanization or smart city solutions start to
depend on IT for their success – technology players will build
out their strategies to address the growing opportunity.
Significant investments have been set aside for training government
agencies as well as providing a collaborative platform
for solutions development. From a long-term perspective, the
key area of focus will be the cloud environment, and
inevitably these solutions are headed toward a cloud-based
architecture and service delivery model. Telecom players that
can support a fixed-line or wireless high-speed network
will have a key role to play from a connectivity provider
perspective. However, their ambitions will not be limited to only
the network layer, as several telecom players already have their
cloud services models in place and are, therefore, in a
competitive position to pitch for a larger share of the solutions
pie. In addition, it should be pointed out that telecom players
have probably the largest end-user reach for installation and
break-fix support in the ICT environment. A good example of
this is KoreaT elecom – which has been driving U-City
development in the Korean market for close to eight years. Jin
Park, Head of the U-City Practice at Korea Telecom, said, When
KT set up its U-City services, the idea was to create a
set of services that was more than just providing network bandwidth
to city governments. Based on this objective, KT set
out three layers of services:
City: covers operations-based city management
Space: typically at the street and buildings level
Citizen: the people who are living in there
And the critical enabler for this strategy is
the network, which becomes the fourth utility at a local
government level. Clearly, the service provider’s role in providing this
fourth utility will become increasingly important moving forward. Infrastructure & Maintenance
CREATING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES
SON GDO IN KOREA
CISCO AND GALE’S MISSION PO SSIBLE
The U-City project in Songdo, South Korea, is
a stellar example of the government and private sector organizations
working collaboratively to drive sustainable growth. A hallmark of the
project is the level of holistic planning which goes beyond creating an
economically competitive infrastructure but an environmentally
responsible and socially inclusive ecosystem for citizens and businesses alike.
Standardization of ICT infrastructure,
processes and governance norms will lead to the creation of an extensive
information-led ecosystem which can deliver uniform citizen
and business services. Here, a symbiotic collaboration model of ownership and accountability across government and private
institutions will be crucial. Going forward, U-City projects will have an
intrinsic lifecycle management process aligned to changing
business and citizen requirements, thereby driving sustained competitive edge.
SMART CITY BUILDING WITH A VISION
The vision behind Cisco’s S+CC strategy is to influence policy makers to drive job growth and increase per capita gross domestic product (GDP), whilst providing improved citizen services. It is Cisco’s mission to enable governments to transform to an economically competitive, socially cohesive and environmentally clean governance framework.
At Songdo, Cisco has been working with Gale International and the mayor’s office at Incheon to implement its S+CC solution at the residential, business and commercial market places. At the residences, each home will have a Cisco TelePresence unit with Cisco Unified MeetingPlace enabled. In addition, Cisco’s TelePresence solution will be used for government services (government to citizens and government to businesses), commerce (business to business and business to consumers) as well as citizen-to-citizen collaboration. Enabling its S+CC vision is its architectural play across the ICT environment and partnerships with key stakeholders.
Real estate property developer Gale International came into Songdo when the reclamation process was underway. Since then, Gale has maintained the shared vision to use convergence technologies to drive value for residents and the greater population in Songdo. Key initiatives undertaken by Cisco and Gale (using Cisco’s TelePresence and collaboration solutions) include:
THE HUB:
A social tool which enables businesses and government institutions to interact with residents, and citizens for sharing information and providing high ease of contracting services, be it from banks,
retail chains or directly from the government.
E-EDUCATION:
Using Cisco TelePresence and in partnership with Chadwick School in Songdo, parents use the technology to enable their children to pick up English language skills as well as monitor their children’s progress in a collaborative manner with the faculty. In addition, Gale built out LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards-based environmentally sustainable infrastructure for water, waste management, and green IT. The solutions from Cisco have also been used to enable smart transportation to lower carbon footprint.<%2 Fp>
CONECTEDNESS DRIVES INNOVATION
WATER FRON T TORON TO
INNOVATION CLUSTERS AND THE ROLE OF CONNECTIVITY
In order to meet these objectives, Hutchison said that the project needed to attract talent, industry, capital as well as a culture of collaboration. He believes that the combination of these four critical elements will drive a cluster of innovationas was the case with the Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s. As such, Waterfront Toronto has set up collaborative clusters around healthcare, intelligent buildings, gaming, and digital media. The aim is to promote economic development and create jobs in an area that what was previously a wasteland.
He also believes that a key enabling technology to the collaboration element highlighted above should focus on connectivity. Examples include:
HEALTH CARE: Use of
TelePresence technologies by charity volunteers to provide post-operation support to patients as part of the Wellspring Cancer foundation. In addition, telemedicine capabilities will become increasingly important.
EDUCATION:
