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What is it like to live in a smart city?

Bristol’s commitment to smart cities is clear. It is a prominent theme running throughout the Bristol Housing Festival and the city recently won a bid to become a host for the Nesta Climate Smart Cities Challenge. Coinciding with this, the second in our series on the challenges and ambitions of the housing marketing in Bristol, sees Director, Niamh Hession explore what living in a smart city might actually look like.

The term smart city for me brings to mind a place of flickering neon, automatons and Asimov, where technology rules our lives, a dystopian future designed by Fritz Lang. But what does it actually mean to live in a smart city and, are we already there?

Consider how ubiquitous technology is in our daily lives and how stealthily it appeared. In 2021 there is a generation of adults who have no memory of life without PCs and smart phones. But does this provide an opportunity to tap into this context as a resource, and adapt how we live, work and play to create cleaner, greener and healthier cities to live?

There are considerable opportunities for smart cities. Fundamentally for me, smart cities mean the opportunity to have strategically managed mixed-use towns and cities that can function efficiently – using data to manage uses and resources over time and location. For example, can retail outlet car parks situated on the edges of cities host distribution vehicles for overnight charging while functioning as a car park during the day? Can multi-storey car parks provide storage for Autonomous Vehicles (AV), thereby reducing the need for on street car parking? What are the mechanisms to realise these opportunities and what can be done with the resulting newly released land?

We expect the number of households to continue to increase at a significant rate over the coming years. Densifying our urban areas sustainably will be reliant on the smart cities to model for success, to build and manage efficient and fair communities, designed to respond to the needs of those who live, work and play there and to deliver the numbers of homes needed. These models would provide a responsive check list of considerations when strategically managing and planning a city. Could this process lead to a new structure for co-design with those who live there?

Understanding that the technology can be used to assess how, why and when people use spaces should create a feedback loop – identifying opportunities and ensuring that they are efficiently implemented to enable communities to access and generate renewable and more affordable heat and energy; enhance digital communications and potentially reduce the need for private car use; and make public transport more accessible and useable through live timetables. Will we see new efficiencies in how buildings are designed and constructed, through 3D printing, or AI/automaton construction management? Will movement of goods be serviced by AV and efficiently managed through GPS and timed co-ordination? Will people be shipped around by driverless cars? And will that release land, e.g. highways that are no longer needed, that could be used for new development or place-making and new parks and planting?

I expect my experience of living in my home in a smart city will be much as I experience it now, and, in all probability, I will willingly allow my data to be used to contribute to societal decisions. We sign up to sharing our data on an hourly basis, to access a website or buy a pint of milk. But I do worry about the ethics of “big data”: can I choose whether my data is used or not, who will ensure that safe guards are in place, and how will I know? There will be many things happening underneath the surface that will make my life more efficient, and it is likely that I will take these for granted as soon as they happen.

Whatever the changes that living in smart city will mean to daily life, I hope that investing my data will contribute to creating a cleaner, greener, diverse and more affordable place, rather than vision of a flickering neon lit future.

For more information on urban design and smart cities please contact Niamh Hession.

Click here for more in our series focussing on the ambitions and challenges of the housing market in Bristol.

18 October 2021