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TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-05-22
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGOVEvm7dm0
good evening thank you very much for having me I'm very happy to share the stage with such stellar speakers who've got run the gamut from robotics rabbis and right through women's rights to vote right to marry I think I might have some of professor druids mullah Omar butterflies in my stomach right now %HESITATION so I'll be talking about smart cities and how we can build the
seas of tomorrow and how this is actually here today but first let's look at some the pressing environmental and on modern issues that face our world and why we need to have the smart cities now so as a student of the environment climate change is one of my primary focus is and %HESITATION I'm sure many of you that you know the jury is out we we
understand the climate changes happening in typing rapidly no %HESITATION preindustrial we had %HESITATION CO two emissions that and two hundred eighty parts per million now we have three hundred eighty parts per million we have rapidly receding glaciers we have sea level rise were expected to see three to seven percent odds with three to seven percent Fahrenheit %HESITATION increasing temperatures and next century so we have to
deal with these issues and we feel them now %HESITATION and then perhaps the defining trend of the twenty first century is a population growth specifically rapid urban population growth and eighteen hundred three percent of the world was an urban dwellers in nineteen hundred that was fourteen percent in nineteen fifty it was thirty percent in our two thousand eight we passed a historic mile mark and became
fifty percent urban so while we may not have been meant for an urban species may we may have been meant to be a hunter gatherers we are now in urban species and that's what I'm going with what we would be in the future and we're projected to be nine to ten billion people and %HESITATION twenty fifty that number could likely be as high as seventy to
seventy five percent urban Furthermore with so many people we have very few resources to go around and we're looking at increased on issues such as water scarcity %HESITATION energy that the needs for renewable energies and just on raw materials for construction so this is these are issues we need to deal with and then finally money makes the world go round Sweeney make these economically feasible and
and it without doing so that we will not see a return on investment and better cities of tomorrow so this is the issues that are facing us today and we have confronted with a design problem how do we design for people that there are more people never before the more people living in cities we have a deteriorating environment we have fewer resources it costs a ton
of money to build these things of what we do and the answer is smart cities and a smart city I'll have I would like to pose to you is integrating design and technology into the very urban fabric itself such that you're able to create a city that is a higher quality of life then cities of the past and this in term incomes it's that encompasses things
like an eco city or green city %HESITATION or sustainable city because all those things are inherently smart and so something I like to share with you guys today is that this is not science fiction this is happening today and so first I'd like to take you to South Korea this is song don't it's an international business district it's meant to compete with places like Singapore and
Hong Kong and this city has been built from scratch by developer %HESITATION in concert with the injured I a technology firm specifically Cisco on but what they also did is they develop a took a lot of design principles from other cities around the world so something is pretty cool they have a Central Park like New York City have little pocket parks like Savannah will be closer
to home their grand canal just like Venice %HESITATION they have a opera house like Sydney in the taken the best from all these different places and they put into one area and then integrated that with technology so you know we don't want to %HESITATION we don't want to replace real time with Facebook and face time but what they've done is this thing called telepresence which means
that you can actually communicate with other people from any building anywhere on using a screen in front of you and while this is not a silly replacing the %HESITATION they're active direct communication with people now you can have students in South Korea interacting with students in America in the same virtual classroom also you can instead of going to that nestling going to the doctor which is
something you know it's pretty difficult here in America what if you just could call your doctor and actually tell me about your symptoms and you can look at you right there and then so there's some really great things going on also they've been %HESITATION experimenting with things like pneumatic waste what if you have no more waste trucks no more missions so there's some really exciting things
happening in the happening today next I'd like to take you to the UAE forces Masdar which just meant to be a renewable energy city that's supposed to be completely one hundred percent carbon neutral so this city is actually interesting mostly in my mind because of the design in on this over the technology so this picture shows just kind of kill to current a or catty cornered
but the way that the city is designed is is a forty five degree angle to the equator so every point of the day there is shade and the streets themselves are very narrow so that you have more shade %HESITATION walking along it so you create on a area where you can you really enjoy the outdoors and one of the problems that we have right now with
increasing on global %HESITATION temperatures is something called the urban heat island effect which we all know about here in Atlanta that the more sun %HESITATION this hits impervious services like concrete and asphalt the more energy it absorbs and so what they've done is eventually created an urban heat oasis because this is built in the desert and you've created an area where it's a couple degrees cooler
walking along the streets that would be if you were walking out in the desert right next door and as you can see if not very developed further out this way on so this really great stuff going on here it's must be one hundred percent %HESITATION solar powered and this really cool things happening and that was designed by foster's and a roof but I %HESITATION but then
also I look sick look at some other cities that currently exist because one of things is you know we'll see this is coming to existence for example and by twenty thirty the urban population of China's expected to double that's why they're building cities but there are also places where there is the urban population that's argue set and the city itself needs to be upgraded so Rio
de Janeiro is a great example of this and what happened was back in about two thousand seven doesn't eight there were some really heavy rainstorms knows the tropical environment and they experience some severe flooding and in response the mare and work of art of has said that we need to have some sort of response this never happens again and that the response to that was the
%HESITATION operations center the operations center of Rio de Janeiro and what this does is it takes all of the public systems and services and integrate them into one place where he can actually remotely sense and control what's going on so he is someone there who is looking at all the traffic conditions so they can reroute traffic also looking at the weather patterns they can predict where
they're going to be heavy rains also looking where the waste management is and they can all be %HESITATION taken at all looks up from birds eye view and managed so this is a perfect example of better data equaling better decisions for the governance of the city itself and then I like to bring you to this idea fix my street which I you made if you live
in a place like New York or LA or London have already heard of this is an example where you as citizens are actually the people who are making the change so if I can just get a brief employing the audience raise your hand if you have a smartphone virtually everyone you can make the change so what happens with fixed my street is you'd be walking down
the street you know does a pothole he said I don't like that pothole could take a picture of it you send it in the aft and all the sudden get sent off the government and then later on it will be fixed and that way your crowd sourcing the data using smart systems that are in your pocket you know the the computer we have in this phone
is better than the computer that we can produce you know for for a bit you know to work with normally had like twenty years ago this is an incredible device that you have in your pocket you have the power to do that as isn't citizenry you'll have to rely on your government to produce all these goods and services because you can get yourself request them so
these things are happening today and there are many other case studies of urban operating systems or ways that you can be and vault as a citizenry but on thing I'd like to just look out for a moment is how urban form dictates one's life so we have two examples here one is New York City one is Beijing %HESITATION the same distance from the yellow star to
green star but they're actually very far apparently when you try to walk this distance also you have issues with any of Beijing has a horrible air pollution so you're not really wanting to be out there and walking these distances and if you think about it you know you can either walk on a small road that has you know some shops things like that and enjoy your
experience as a pedestrian or you can brave the streets that have no twenty five percent of the twenty five percent increase in the cloud car fleet in Beijing every single year more more cars and it's necessitated by the urban form itself the form of the city is not expected to change for over a hundred years whereas if you're creating it so that means that if you're
creating things from scratch you need to keep this in mind as you design those cities and cities that are currently this way should be retrofitted so if you could include a walking corridor through some of the super blocks in Beijing for example that would change your experience with the city itself so through urban design and urban form you can it affects one's own experience in the
city itself you can make it possible to get the exercise will make you less depressed for example also integrating technology into the system itself allows you to have a better on experience with the city and get more feedback from the from the sea itself and enjoy that experience there's our example of a city in nam Portugal for example that has an urban operating system run by
formula one's sensors to gain the most efficiency from the city itself and that's how we'll be able to combat issues like resource scarcity and climate change like giving the most efficiency from all of our systems and services and the idea behind this is that better data because by decisions not only for your governance but also for you and when you make your personal lifestyle choices and
so the fact of the matter is that this is not top down as we've seen with some of these developments of new cities buttons existing cities like Atlanta for example it can be bottom up the what you request as a citizenry that can change the way that you live in a city so other tomorrow and that is that of the self is smart and that is
what I call democratic design so if I can leave you with one thought about this is what you know how has the world changed you know we've seen there's rapids %HESITATION urbanization of people now we are increasingly %HESITATION an urban species we've seen all this stuff happened and one of things I was thinking about when I was single this talk is this the math I grew
up with this the map that I had my roommates National Geographic it shows you the whole world I enjoyed looking at and I you know with find various places in the world but one thing that struck me nothing is math is what is actually emphasize emphasizes the boundaries between us the national borders that divide us that's what is jumps out at me immediately and I think
that's not the city of the world that we live in is it should be the cities that we will I think personal connections are much more significant than the boundaries that if they come to define nationality so here's another math and this is why we say is the map of the twenty first century and this is the after magenta planet this is the planet connected by
people all over the world and this is what how we talk to each other through trade how we talked with communications travel a cultural exchange and this is what the world is going to look like in the future because people not anyone events not economics not %HESITATION climate change are the defining feature of our planet today and as such we have a responsibility to live in
the most smart efficient sustainable way possible and that's why this city and this idea of smart cities is what we need to have happen and the exciting thing is because urban populations are growing in the developing world what's happening is not the silly I innovation here in America but innovation in places like Southeast Asia China and India so I think that we're gonna have a really
