oddlight

Smart cities

Move over, Industrial Revolution: there's been a technological revolution that has been sweeping up everything in its path for the past two decades and changing society irrevocably in the process.

Let's call it the Digital Revolution - it is the impact of increasing computer power, cheaper silicon chips and a massive convergence of wireless communication for phone, internet and broadcast.

This revolution has changed the way we communicate, the way we travel, the way we live - and even the way that we use public space.

Our cities are increasingly moving from a collection of inanimate buildings to a living, technologically sophisticated entity.

And the smartest and most successful cities are those that combine design features that prevailed centuries ago with innovative applications of networked technology.

Bill Mitchell, a professor of architecture and media arts and sciences at the world-renowned MIT Design Lab in the US, points out that technology does not operate in isolation when it comes to changing cities."

Technology creates possibilities, then social forces and economic forces and human desires really drive what then happens to cities," he says.

As computers become cheaper and more powerful, and free software begins to rival expensive commercial alternatives, the economic barrier to the digital revolution is slowly disappearing.

Add cheap mobile phones, wireless internet and inexpensive international call rates through VoIP and the notion of "the world village" creeps closer to realisation.

Low-cost digital technology makes global networking accessible to everyone - and it has had a rapid and sweeping impact."

Networks like the internet have grown in a grassroots way without the huge amount of topdown planning needed by other infrastructures," Professor Mitchell says.

This has been a boon for some developing nations, allowing them to introduce rapid technological change.

In Bangladesh, a development project that introduced very cheap mobile phones to people in remote rural villages, has made a huge impact on local economies.

About 15% of people there now own a mobile and wireless internet is making significant inroads into rural villages that had never before had access to phones of any kind.

While rural villages in developing nations are fast-tracking their connectivity and rapidly taking to change, introducing change to cities in the developed world is in many ways a bigger challenge.

Professor Mitchell explains that cities have evolved over thousands of years developing complex networks from transportation to water and sewerage, to electrical grids and, now, information networks."

The functionality of any place is jointly constructed by its boundaries and its networks," he says. "The focus has shifted from the preindustrial era, where the world was dominated by boundaries, to the present where networks and connections dominate our use of space."

He says the most recent development in the evolution of the city is the impact of widely available wireless networks.

Using mobiles and other portable devices such as notebooks, people are constantly "connected"; they can access information, browse the internet, make a phone call and send email."

Most of us are never disconnected these days and that's a fundamentally new thing," Professor Mitchell says.

"When the internet first began it was kind of a stand-alone thing but now it's basically locked into everything that we do. Retailing is an obvious example of this. You can log into Amazon from anywhere in the world to browse or buy books, but at the same time there's a huge logistical system on the ground of warehouses and transportation and so on, which all now works together as one system."

He points out that this generates a new type of building: the large regional distribution centre. Many of these warehouses are almost fully automated and these epitomise the integration of the digital and the physical worlds.

"Every time you buy something on Amazon, something physical goes somewhere," Professor Mitchell says. Instead of people going into a shop to buy a book from a carton delivered to a retailer, a forklift in a remote warehouse grabs just one book, which is wrapped and posted.

When there are millions of these transactions taking place every day, patterns of transportation and distribution are irrevocably changed and cities must change to meet this.



The fully wired city is yet to occur in Australian cities, says Tom Kvan, who heads the architecture department at Melbourne University.

"Australia is still lagging behind on network technology compared to northern Europe and North America," he says.

Professor Kvan believes there are some fundamental reasons why cities here have been slow to adopt changes such as universal wi-fi and remote workplaces.

"Because our cities are so spread out, people are still commuting to their work rather than working from home or from a local centre," he says.

Professor Mitchell points out that until recently, office workers truly worked in an office. But work has become increasingly less tethered to a specific location. The wireless notebook and mobile phone allow you to work just about anywhere that has coverage of phone and/or wireless internet.

Many people have structured their work lives so that everything they need to do their work is available and accessible universally and this is changing the nature of our cities.

"Public space begins to operate in a different kind of way," Professor Mitchell says. "Public space is not only public physical space but it's public cyberspace."

He says in architecture there is currently a fundamental shift away from a dominance of private space towards public space.

"There's a great increase in demand for unassigned informal space that you can just appropriate it as you need it; space for little coffee shops, more usable space set in nooks and crannies and other public space where you can just sit down and do some work."

As the director of design and urban environment for the City of Melbourne, Rob Adams is heavily involved in the future planning for Melbourne.

He believes there are a number of elements that make a smart city, but the most important is sustainability.

"The smart cities of the future will be cities that not only have technological advances but that work with the environment to create a good living space for the people who use them, one that can be sustained," he says.

Mr Adams believes the strong divisions between work space, public space, recreation space and living space that currently characterise modern Australian cities such as Melbourne must change in the future.

"Nobody goes to the big commercial office blocks for a good night out," he says, adding that these areas might be deserted outside business hours but they continue to occupy space and use resources.

The time for the deep division between commercial and residential functions in cities has passed, he says - and many experts agree.

US architect Arrol Gellner argues that modern architecture is responsible for breeding urban isolation, blaming postwar planners who saw mixed-use neighbourhoods as old-fashioned, developing sharply drawn boundaries between residential and commercial zones.

"Under this doctrine, neighbourhoods - once self-contained social units - were quickly replaced by vast and isolated housing tracts bereft of services and accessible only by automobile," Mr Gellner says.

"The result was sprawling yet lifeless suburbs by day, forlorn downtowns by night, and a previously unknown schism between work and life in general."

The architect is scathing about the gated communities that abound in the US where "vast but barely utilised houses stand sequestered among acres of setback land".

Meanwhile, he says, Americans spend hours trapped on freeways where walls on either side shut out any view of the world beyond.

Urban sprawl generates all sorts of logistical issues, not the least of which is sustainable transport.
Professor Kvan says that here Australia also lags behind Europe.

"In Europe, as you look across the urban landscape there are vast numbers of small cars, but you don't see that here in Australia. People still are driving large vehicles."

He says densely populated European cities offer limited parking facilities and drivers value the ability to wedge into small spaces whereas here, where parking ratios are more generous, small cars are seen as less safe.

But with global concern about climate change on the rise, Professor Kvan believes this may soon change, adding that growing inner-city density will also have an impact.

"Over the past 15 years Melbourne has experienced a dramatic growth in inner city population - from 15,000 to about 80,000. That brings an increasing acceptance of smaller cars because the commuting distances are much smaller," he says.



Professor Kvan believes that car-sharing will also increase.

"The technology is not the issue," he says, adding that cultural change is needed to reduce urban sprawl.

The City of Melbourne's Mr Adams agrees that urban sprawl is unsustainable and says the solution is to move people closer together. "To make cities work you need higher density of population."

He says the technology to make high-density living work in a sustainable way already exists.
Solar collection, water harvesting and reuse, and sustainable urban transport systems together with energy-efficient housing are all keys to this, Mr Adams says.

"We have moved from the industrial revolution to the ecological revolution," he says.

Mr Adams was heavily involved with the development of Australia's greenest office building, Council House 2 (CH2), which opened in 2006 on Little Collins Street to international acclaim.

The building consumes just 15% of the energy and about 30% of the water of its non-green peers and is an example of bio-mimicry architecture, where a building uses sustainable technology copied from the natural world.

A facade of solar-powered sun-tracking louvres shade the western side of the 10-storey building and a variety of other technologies combine to control temperature; such as thermal mass and vaulted ceilings, windows that open at night to cool the building and wind turbines that draw hot air outside.

In the basement, sewer water is treated and filtered on site to reduce mains water supply. Throughout the building, light is filtered through plants.

"Technologies like on-site water purification means that as you increase population density in the city, you don't have to build new infrastructure," Mr Adams says.

He believes that much of the change can happen through policy - such as encouraging building owners to collect solar energy by paying more for power put into the grid through the day and discounting power drawn down at night - reducing the base load on the power station supplying the city.

Mr Adams says that one of the smartest cities he has seen is Barcelona, which is an old city with a high population density.

"The entire city is built to seven storeys," he says. "The whole roof of the city can be a solar collector so there is democratic access to solar energy, which is the technology of the future."

Mr Adams says that much of that city's advantages lie in "blindingly simple" configurations in which public life and private life are well defined.

Streets are set out with buildings surrounding a private shared courtyard so pedestrians walk around the periphery of the block.

Simple controls in cities such as a mix of street frontages and a combination of major streets with lanes and arcades can make a big difference, Mr Adams says.

"Smart cities are more about smart thinking than about smart technology," he says.

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