The ongoing health crisis has had a devastating impact on governments, economies, and civil societies across the globe. While the struggle against this pandemic continues, public and private sector organisations are deliberating how new technologies can be used to help cushion the impact now and in the future. Among the proposed solutions, smart city initiatives are being considered to see how critical data is and can be utilised to anticipate and mitigate future outbreaks and build urban resilience.
Smart technologies for smart cities
Before the pandemic, many city authorities had plans to make their cities smarter and more sustainable, driven in a good part by the need to tackle urban migration. The United Nations estimates that 68 per cent of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2050.
Indeed, rapid urbanisation all across South Asia is already bringing growing density levels, which are taking their toll on infrastructure, and bringing issues like congestion, water and air quality levels, poverty, rising inequalities, urban-rural divide, digital divide, citizen security, and safety to the fore.
The pandemic has emphasised the need to fast track digital city planning and find ways to sustain large and more diverse populations in the future.
Developments in Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, the urban population is already approximately 61 million, a number that is set to reach over 100 million by 2050. While this phenomenal urban growth is contributing significantly to growing national GDP, it also poses severe challenges for essential services that can't keep up, is causing environmental degradation, and worsening living conditions. This will likely impact Bangladesh's aspirations for becoming an upper-middle-income country by 2041.
These issues need tackling urgently, otherwise they will hold the country back from the next chapter of its growth; and for Bangladesh, as well as other South Asian countries, it will require the government and private sector to work together.
This is starting to happen.
Under the vision of "Digital Bangladesh", for example, the Bangladesh Government plans to develop several metropolitan cities into smart cities. Through partnerships that are centred on people, 'The Bangladesh Smart City' project concentrates its efforts on bringing revolutionary changes to cities through the co-creation of smart cities with efforts that integrate citizens' participation, technology, infrastructure, and public policy.
Hyperconnectivity is the future
Another key factor is the need for the people that run our cities to realise that data is their most vital asset. It can provide insights needed to advise and influence the decisions or actions required to resolve the significant issues facing our cities. Indeed, the current data explosion, if managed efficiently and promptly, has the potential to offer the most valuable way of finding new solutions and accelerating innovation in a smart city.
As a result, tech-savvy 'smart cities' are developing new capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), big data, blockchain, and sensor-driven analytics, gathering previously hidden data. Its insight is then enabling governments to shift resource allocation and utilisation to provide improved citizen services and a higher quality of life. Cities that have adopted these smart technologies are already seeing less congestion and pollution, as well as improvements in public health, productivity, and living conditions. Much of these are coming from the fact that the new insights are helping authorities look at old problems in new ways, and behind the scenes, cloud computing is making these efforts affordable and realistic.
But becoming a smart city is not enough.
Hyperconnected cities have to leverage new digital technologies to transform and securely interconnect critical elements of an urban ecosystem. In doing so, they can unlock the greatest potential across several areas, be it economic, business, environmental, or societal. By using these technologies in conjunction with wider and richer sets of data, cities are driving high performance across their urban ecosystems - from smart buildings and roads to smart energy grids and water systems, and smart mobility, public safety and health - and facilitating real-time interaction among residents, businesses, and government entities and services. This is called hyperconnectivity, and it is the future of smart cities.
And we can see the benefits. In Malaysia, the government has embarked on a smart city initiative, across Greater Kuala Lumpur, Iskandar Malaysia, Selangor, and Putrajaya cities. In most of these projects, the government will be utilising technology to harness data from multiple sources to transform these cities into intelligent ones, allowing for more effective urban management. It also serves to further elevate these cities into attractive investment destinations in the ASEAN region.
We are at a historical transition point with the potential to assist in our recovery from the pandemic, as well as tackle climate change by moving towards a future that is sustainable, resilient, and includes everyone.
In such a context, South Asian countries, including Bangladesh, have a vast potential to achieve success through the contribution of cloud services. These will enable the use of advanced analytics, AI and IoT, and vast amounts of data bringing a better understanding of urban ecology, the emergence of a data-driven economy, and faster adoption of Industry 4.0.
The writer is the Country Managing Director of Oracle Bangladesh. [email protected]
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