Get Smart
Source: Texas Architect Magazine
Smart buildings are a missing link to reaching citywide sustainability goals.
Smart technology is proliferating across the United States in municipalities large and small. While the hype is huge, the reality is more humble. At its core, the term “smart” simply means applying data and analytics to systems. In the context of smart cities and buildings, digital sensors are embedded in the physical environment to collect data, and that data is then transmitted — often via wireless networks — to be analyzed, managed, and shared by decision-makers.
When it comes to mitigating the impacts of climate change and progressing toward sustainability goals, the information and insight that smart technology can provide are critical. Data can be collected on everything from air quality to energy usage — by building, by city block, by neighborhood, and across a metropolitan area.
About Smart Cities
From a municipal point of view, smart technology is a part of public infrastructure. Smart sensors can provide data on vehicular and pedestrian movement to improve urban mobility and traffic congestion. Smart lighting can allow operators to save energy and money by dimming lights on command or by streamlining maintenance and operations. Sensors on aging pipes can help crews prioritize repairs and reduce water loss. Air quality monitors placed in high-traffic areas can assess carbon dioxide emission levels. These are only a few of the thousands of uses and applications for smart technology at the city service level.
Since the beginning of the smart city movement around 2010, cities outside of North America including Barcelona, London, and Singapore have been widely recognized as global leaders. The U.S. entered the movement in 2016, thanks to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, which encouraged any city to apply for a combined $50 million in grants to design and implement smart city technology. From an applicant pool of almost 90 municipalities, seven finalists were named, and Columbus, Ohio, was selected as the national winner.
This first move inspired a wave of activity that continues today as municipalities discover and designate their own unique approaches to integrating connected technology with their city systems. While seven years later there is still no singular “official smart city,” there are thousands of pilots, projects, and large-scale deployments of smart city technology across cities and even across regions. The North Texas Innovation Alliance was one of the first regional smart city organizations in the country to pool the collective wisdom of dozens of local municipalities in search of collaborative approaches and shared learnings.
Across Texas and across the country, no two cities are alike, which creates an interesting tapestry of how to think about and how to implement technology. One encouraging evolution is that most city leaders are insisting on a people-first agenda in regard to smart city strategies. At the Smart Cities Connect Conference & Expo, the largest smart city event in North America, panels filled with a mixture of industry and government leaders espouse a widely accepted viewpoint that only by understanding the needs of citizens, residents, and visitors can city leadership effectively design and implement technology to address those issues.
The city of San Antonio has made considerable progress in engaging the public in its smart-city-making. The city-based program SASpeakUp encourages residents to “Connect With Your City!” and highlights areas of key concern for residents, such as property taxes, COVID-related care, and internet access. The public is invited to express their views and experiences through a myriad of surveys, in-person events, committee engagement, and a selection of technology tools. The success of this program is related to its ubiquitous presence; there is a concerted effort by the city to go directly into the community, speak to residents, and then incorporate their feedback in meaningful ways.
A challenge that almost every city in the U.S. faces is how to better address issues of inequity and how to provide better access to resources regardless of socioeconomic status. While no technology can undo decades or even centuries of injustice, the appropriate data collection tools, in combination with thoughtful community-based conversations, can offer new insights. For example, the city of Philadelphia’s SmartCityPHL program partnered with AI-focused startup State of Place on a pilot project to…