Anatomy of a Smart City

Unless new cities are developed to accommodate the burgeoning number of people, existing cities would soon be unlivable.  - Finance Minister’s budget speech, July 2014

 There is a crying need for the cities to get smarter to handle this large-scale urbanization and finding new ways to manage complexity, increase efficiency, reduce expenses, and improve quality of life. -   Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India

Urban India accounts for about 31 percent of the country’s population, but in the next 15 years it is expected to contribute nearly 75 percent of the national GDP. The global experience is that a country's urbanization up to a 30 percent-level is relatively slow; thereafter urbanization picks up speed till it touches about 60-65 percent. India stands at a point of transition, where urban growth will most likely step up gear. This is the context in which the government has decided on developing 100 smart cities in the country.

Following are the most distinguishing characteristics of a smart city:

• A smart city makes its citizens feel safe and happy.
• Citizens of a smart city benefit from efficient civic services. (e.g., water, sanitation, utility services).
• It will be easy to do business in a smart city because it has simple, online processes for approvals.
• A smart city, above all, is sustainable.

There is need for an entrepreneurial approach to building smart cities through the public-private partnership (PPP) model, in which city administrators are joined by private sector players like cloud, Internet and mobile services providers, software vendors, and app developers.

Citizen safety

Governments and citizens are concerned about rising crime and increasing threat of terror attacks. Public-safety professionals need integrated surveillance systems to more effectively identify, prevent, and respond to these and more threats. Such systems comprise CCTVs, GIS, sensors, and an integrated crime database at the backend – all of which are consolidated in the cloud.

Over the years, New York Police Department (NYPD), for instance, has paid particular attention to reducing the culture of crime by taking to technology in a big way. NYPD’s effort has paid off, for crime in the city has gone down significantly. Among NYPD’s line-up of technologies for detecting and repelling crime is a custom software to alert officers to crime, as it happens. If someone calls 911 about a suspicious package in a subway, the call will appear as an alert on a dashboard. The location of the “job” is displayed on a map and footage from surveillance cameras within 500 feet of it is called up. The officers can connect the dots to possible suspects by mining previous crime records and license plate numbers of vehicles leaving the crime scene.

The success of the system, developed by Microsoft programmers with NPYD assistance, in New York City, the United States’ most populous, is drawing the attention of cities around the world facing similar threats. Public safety organizations in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Germany, Australia, Thailand, and Egypt have adopted similar solutions and more nations are considering buying. These solutions reduce the response time to an emergency, besides helping improve the community’s perception of the security force. Importantly, they work in low and high bandwidth scenarios.

Among Indian cities, Surat is a frontrunner in using technology to deliver a safer urban space to citizens. Surat city’s police-to-population ratio stands at 93 cops per 1 lac citizens, which means there is still a shortage of policemen. To bridge this gap, Surat Police is using technology as a force multiplier. This involves using 600 cameras, including night vision ones, to keep an eye on the city and live-stream video into the police data center. The police commissioner’s office is being fitted out with a 280 sq. ft. video wall, so law enforcement can see the streets of Surat live.

Cloud-based communication architecture

The security solutions discussed above are all cloud-based. Cloud computing – employing remotely hosted servers, data centers, and applications – can help relieve city agencies of the costly burden of owning and maintaining hardware and some software. And because these are hosted out of the cloud, client organizations pay for what they use, nothing more, thus saving on IT capital expenditure (capex). Using cloud computing, a city does not have to own a huge data center or develop a massive application to launch a service millions of citizens can use. The services are based on an operating expense (opex) model, so it is ideal for cash-strapped government organizations, especially municipalities that face a huge cash crunch.  

In addition, setting up local data centers will go far enough in addressing data sovereignty issues in cloud-based storage. This year, Microsoft plans to offer commercial cloud services out of local datacenters in India.

Citizen services on mobile phones

The government is working on plans to ensure a smartphone in the hands of every citizen by 2019. Morgan Stanley’s projections show 519 million mobile Internet users by 2018. Mobile apps, by their very nature, are suited for running in the cloud. Making more government data publicly available on the cloud will encourage developers to create useful apps, at a fraction of the cost, for a variety of devices, so citizens can find and consume information when and how they want it. For instance, Customers of Transport for London (TfL) typically want to know what routes are congested and which mode of transport – bus, rapid transit, rail, or cycle – is most appropriate.

TfL opened up its public data to the developer community. The move inspired a number of transport apps and these are getting the information out to commuters on their mobiles even before they set out on their journey. By passing the load of app creation to developers, TfL saved millions of pounds, sparing taxpayers from having to bear the cost. In association with Microsoft, the city of Surat organized a hackathon, where citizens built Web and mobile applications to tackle their city’s challenges. The winning app will be implemented by the city government.

Business friendliness

City processes are simple for the city employees because they use it often, but not necessarily for the citizen. Take the case of a building plan approval. For this, often the citizen must work with several agencies, and the failure to get even one permit will delay the construction. 

Individual departments in a municipality use siloed apps that do not “talk” to apps in other departments. The result is an IT Tower of Babel full of legacy apps that do not benefit citizens much. The solution lies in doing away with silos. Diverse back office solutions in municipal offices can be enabled to speak the same language, say XML. The front end can then interface through Web services to get results from back offices. High speed broadband can connect offices within each municipality. Backed by this integration, municipalities can put an increasing number of services online, from applications for building permits to water bill payments. This will make it easy to apply for all permits online at one place, ensuring single-window clearance for projects. Salt Lake City, Utah’s capital, has reduced the time for building permit approvals by 50 percent and Surat is working toward this.

It is important to strengthen a city’s ability to attract capital and talent, making it more competitive, globally. Microsoft Ventures’ 4-month business accelerator program, for example, provides select startups with the tools, expertise and seed fund they need to create new products. The startups are chosen from across cities based on a rigorous selection process that ends in a face-to-face interview, and they get an opportunity to showcase ideas to influential investors.

Energy efficiency

Buildings, no doubt, call out the character of a city, but they also tend to consume a lot of energy. Accommodating a growing population means cities must provide more electrical power. But smart cities like Seattle, for example, have decided they don’t want to invest in building expensive and environmentally risky power generation plants; rather the city would make better use of the hydroelectric power it already has as well as adopt some energy-saving measures.  

The city identified five strategic buildings in its commercial area in 2011. Terabytes of energy data generated by building management systems, sensors and controls in these buildings are stored in the cloud. Analytics is applied to this data to identify system inefficiencies. A reporting portal alerts building managers to areas of wasted energy and tells them how to improve the efficiency of each piece of equipment to reduce energy consumption. Although the program is in its infancy, the city is generating savings of between 10 and 25 percent for energy and maintenance expenditure.

In case of large deployments, cloud solutions have the potential to reduce energy use and carbon emissions by more than 30 percent when compared to corresponding on-premise installations.

Going forward

Be it power generation, road and building maintenance, or construction, municipalities must consider models that involve more revenue sharing and pay vendors on a per-transaction basis. With the tightening up of their capital expenditure, city corporations around the world are partnering with private players when building and operating civic infrastructure. The Indian government must take steps to make the commercials more attractive and provide opportunities for upfront revenue, especially in the initial years. In the past, the country’s PPP projects have been riddled with distortions and it is hoped that the new flexible model, the government is working on, will safeguard public interest while staying attractive for the private sector.

A focus on getting brownfield city projects up to speed on smart technology can help reduce spend. Such projects happen relatively faster, show results citizens look for in the short term, and sit in well with their aspirations. It will also generate a groundswell of opinion that also supports building a few smart cities in the form of greenfield ventures.