Technological innovation abounds all around us. Think of the cloud. Communications networks. Artificial intelligence (AI). The evolutionary steps that each of these, plus many other facets of IT, have taken, have been totally transformative for those developing them as much as for those using them. It can be argued that the trend of digitisation over the past decade has provided homes, businesses and whole communications with new opportunities.
And this really has been the driver of the smart city, a place, according to common definition, where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunications technologies, allowing the sharing of information to improve the quality of citizen welfare, the quality of government services and business opportunities.
But with these opportunities there are also challenges. While smart cities are evolving, what steps must be taken to foster trust and acceptance from residents? How does a surge in the use of digital technologies square with the constant driver of energy efficiency and sustainability? How can the benefits of digitisation be made universal and not the preserve of the traditionally richer countries and regions?
The recent Digital with Purpose Global Summit aimed to offer some answers to these questions. Based on the fundamental opinion that digital is the key to address the most pressing sustainability challenges and to empower worldwide leaders in building a more sustainable future, it looked to show how technological innovation and digital services were being put to good use around the world.
While focusing on a range of subjects – including education, biodiversity, startups and a meeting of a high-level advisory council, billed as the thinkers behind the agenda – the key focus was on smart city offerings. Not just in terms of technology and deployment, but also in the context of the political aspects of digitisation. That is to say the gaps in terms of political understanding of how important it is to build an infrastructure that has the capacity to use technology in an effective and safe way, and provide a basis from which to experiment and innovate.
Offering an explanation why digitisation across communication is on a roll, Jeff Merrit, head of the centre for urban transformation at the World Economic Forum (WEF), noted that smart cities are not a new concept, and that the conversation regarding on future and past smart cities has been in flow for about 10 years or so.
Indeed, he pointed to the recent fifth anniversary of the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance on Technology Governance for which the WEF serves as secretariat. The alliance is designed to unite local and national governments, private-sector partners and city residents around a shared set of principles for the responsible and ethical use of smart city technologies. It has the mission of establishing and advancing global policy norms to help accelerate best practices, mitigating potential risks, and fostering greater openness and public trust.
Managing urban growth
Offering reasons why it was necessary to set up such an organisation, the alliance said in 2019 that as the world urbanises, sustainable development and economic growth depends increasingly on the successful management of urban growth. Yet it stressed that with the right technology – and the know-how to govern it – cities can lead the way in solving problems in energy, transportation, healthcare, education and natural disaster response, while making their communities more inclusive, resilient and sustainable. It did also issue the caveat that progress would depend on cities adopting the right set of policies to make sure technology is used responsibly. This was, it added, something that most cities did not have in place in 2019.
It was, after all, a year when the world was a very different place. In that vein, while noting that a lot had happened in this decade, Merritt believes that while mass digitisation had brought smart cities back to the fore, the real game-changer was the then totally unpredicted and unprepared-for Covid-19 pandemic.
“Some 10 years ago, I was working in City Hall in New York and heading our smart cities [programme],” he said. “Everything at that time was about leveraging technology for better situational awareness: ‘How are you going to actually effectively govern the city and deliver services if you don’t have real-time information about what’s happening around you?’ I think that was the logical place for the smart city movement.
“The big game-changer was Covid. It moved almost every city in the world into a rapid technology adoption phase because you had no choice. It was a matter of life or death. If you did not know if there were empty hospital beds, you wouldn’t be able to accommodate patients effectively. You wouldn’t know how to plan in the days ahead; how to make sure that you have enough vaccines or medical support. Obviously, I wish that we didn’t have to go through that, but I think our cities are stronger, smarter and more resilient as a result. Now, a lot of cities have understood the power of real-time data and how to leverage that to make better decisions.”
The work of the alliance has carried on apace. Recent developments have included best practices developed by pioneer smart cities in reducing carbon emissions from urban development projects; model policies and regional networks helping to accelerate the responsible adoption of smart city technologies to transform cities; pilot governance and policy programmes for responsible and ethical technology adoption in governing smart cities with use cases for urban transformation; and policies for ethical and responsible governance of their smart city programmes, including ICT accessibility, privacy impact assessments, cyber accountability, digital infrastructure and open data.
The bedrock of these programmes, and indeed smart cities as a whole, has been technologies such as 5G, AI and the internet of things (IoT). The former element is perhaps the most important of the three. In 2024, 5G mobile networks have been celebrating five years of commercial availability, racking up over 1.5 billion users around the world – around a fifth of the marketplace. From their inception, they are designed to bring continuous enhancements in mobile network capabilities, such as higher data throughputs, massively increased capacity and low latency.
Mobile network capabilities
Current 5G networks, and the soon-to-arrive next evolutionary step in 5G-Advanced, are fundamentally designed to bring continuous enhancements in mobile network capabilities such as higher data throughputs, massively increased capacity and low latency. They already support applications such as extended reality (XR) and promise monetary opportunities to both the consumer markets, with use cases such as gaming and video streaming, and enterprise opportunities, such as remote working and virtual training.
For Rafael González, chief marketing officer at fixed and mobile network testing and benchmarking provider MedUX, 5G connectivity was very much front and centre in advancing the green transformation and enhancing competitive advantage across industries. And while he says that it may be a bit of an oversimplification, he notes that the ambition for cities, and in particular those in Europe, should be to live in a 5G decade, with robust targets for 5G roll-out as seen in Asia.
“I think it’s important from a political perspective,” says González. “I’m talking as a [technology] expert, not just a MedUX representative in this case, but it’s important that their targets are very ambitious because it’s all about strategy and vision for what we want to become as a region. However, as an expert, as an engineer, as an economist, I think that they are not enough. They are not enough from many senses. Basically, on the one hand, it is overly simplified what 5G means.
“Coverage, by at least one operator, is just having signal in any of the spectrum bands,” he says. “And that is if you’re really talking about next-generation networks, next access-generation networks. Dynamic sharing spectrum (DSS) 5G with 20 MHz is not improving in terms of speed. It’s not really bringing much benefit to the end user groups to empower the digital transformation of governments and businesses to improve the lives of the citizens, etc. So, if we just focus on basic KPIs [key performance indicators] on coverage and any spectrum only by one operator, I think that’s not enough, just focusing on coverage and ignoring connectivity or quality.”
As a remediation, González notes that the European Commission recognises that current KPIs for 5G networks have methodological limitations because they don’t take into consideration the actual quality that can be provided with the different kinds of deployment of 5G. He adds that the report highlights that there are huge differences among major European cities, and invites analysts to imagine what this might imply by extrapolating that to a massive deployment at Pan-European level, or even at a national level in countries such as Sweden, or Spain with swathes of rural areas.
Fixed gigabit-capable networks
The European Commission has targets for 5G roll-out with a deadline of 2030, but González insists that the current way to look at the roadmap is to also consider connectivity for smart cities in the round. That is to say fixed gigabit-capable networks. This then reveals a mix of countries achieving those targets by 2030, but with a large amount lagging behind even with overly simplified targets about basic 5G coverage. These huge differences, he says, represent a wake-up call.
“There is a need for adjustments and improvements and setting more efficient, ambitious objectives in the national [roll-out] strategies, which is the roadmap to get to the 2030 objectives,” he says. “All member states have to comply with that present a new roadmap, how they are going to get there. And then you will see how the different countries will tackle their own problems. Although [they] will try to use a one-size-fits-all solution, that’s impossible.
“We already know the particularities of the countries and the differences among the islands in Greece, and let’s say the Netherlands or Belgium, that are very small countries that are very flat,” says González. “Or you compare that with Sweden, which is a huge country with lots of mountains and fjords. And Spain. You will need somehow to be flexible from a practical perspective. The strategy and the vision should be there and as ambitious as possible.
“The positive point that I see is that they have already introduced a new KPI which is about mid-band coverage,” he says. “So, in 3.6 GHz, we are very far away from the objectives. It’s 51% for the latest average figure of coverage. We are not even speaking about the quality perceived when using day-to-day services such as streaming, cloud storage, gaming and video conferencing.”
Concluding, González says use case-driven discussion is basically what is needed to take into consideration to meet more ambitious targets and bring about enriching and productive digital experiences for everyone. That is going one step beyond and introducing quality into the equation.
At DWP, these use cases were shown, brining gains from the use of smart technologies in not only urban environments, but also in specific industries. Angelo Fienga, director of sustainable solutions for Cisco EMEAR, revealed work that his company has undertaken on the Brescia Mobilità project, optimising transit for a million commuters with the Meraki networking service.
Brescia Mobilità is responsible for the operation, upkeep, optimisation and improvement of multiple transit network systems used by more than a million commuters per day.
Eight years ago, all the critical components of mobility that keep a city moving – such as bus lines, rail lines, car sharing, bike sharing, parking management, traffic monitoring and more – all worked in silos, an unsustainable issue from a network administrator’s point of view. Network admins, meanwhile, had to manage a call sheet of supplier for each disparate system. No single person on staff could see or diagnose issues across all the services they used. Upkeep costs were quickly eclipsing the city’s transit budget.
As a solution, the authority worked with Cisco Meraki to refine the system to better respond to commuter needs using connectivity and data, building a network of services that it regarded as capable of rapidly responding to change. A network of updated cables and Wi-Fi access points was stretched across all the city’s transit spots, said to virtually eliminate dropped customer connections while providing administrators with full visibility into all systems.
The impact and success of this first step enabled Brescia Mobilità to begin focusing on its goal of providing safe, streamlined, secure access to all the elements of transit. Next, IoT sensors and cameras were integrated into the network, offering the ability to change and improve using data insights. Furthermore, the efficiencies gained over the years has meant the authority has been able reinvest as much as €90,000 into other services.
Saving salmon
On a completely different scale and environment, Selina Wen, chief representative to European institutions at Huawei, showed how 5G and AI was helping Norwegian hunting and angling association Berlevag JFF (BJFF) to save wild Atlantic salmon in protecting it from being overwhelmed by its invasive Pacific cousin.
Traditional methods for protecting wild Atlantic salmon stock are labour-intensive. Volunteers would stand or dive into the river to try to identify humpback salmon by their humps, for males, or the spots on their tails, for females, and remove them by hand. This made it impossible to accurately monitor and quantify the threat and risked harming other marine life.
In 2022, the two partners deployed an automated gate system that, prompted by the AI system, lets wild Atlantic salmon and other fish pass upstream to spawn, but filters the invasive humpback salmon into a holding tank for removal. By being able to collect images and video from the river bottom, a real-time AI-based automatic fish filtering system has brought about a 90% reduction in manual labour, with over 6,000 invasive salmon captured.
Wildfire detection
At DWP, Huawei also showed how its 5G, AI and drone technology was seeing use in preventing wildfire detection in Greece; protecting an oasis of biodiversity in Italy; and protecting cetaceans from marine traffic off the coast of Ireland.
In addition to the technology benefits, both the Cisco and Huawei projects highlight the power of partnerships. Jeff Merrit believes that going forward, the way in which private sector and government authorities work together will be crucial, in particular how private businesses can underscore the importance of the business case. It can, he adds, also provide an understanding of change management and go towards making smart cities work.
“The private sector has a key role to play in helping government understand not only the business case for [smart city projects], but also exploring new ways of leveraging these technologies,” said Merrit. “Too often, government is simply seen as a customer, and we often default to procurement as the necessary interaction in which it engages. I would like to see us move in the direction where the private sector is viewing government more as the manager or the facilitator of access and looking at ways in which you can take things off of the plate of government.
“With every passing day, there’s more and more of a burden on government,” he says. “There are more challenges that it’s trying to address, but the amount of resources that governments have is not increasing at the same rate. If at the end of the day technology is making [smart cities] more efficient and generating cost savings, then that should be an incentive for the private sector to step in and then take a lot of this work off the plate of governments.
“Change management is also a way in which the private sector can help a lot here,” says Merrit. “The biggest challenge with adoption of technology is not the technology itself. It’s all of the changes that you have to go through as an organisation, and if the private sector has already gone through that transformation and changed their processes, it can also support government in understanding how to do that in a gradual or modular way.
“I think too often in the smart city space we talk about pilots. I actually think that’s the wrong way to do things,” he says. “It should be how can we think about a gradual progression.”
