This article was taken from The WIRED World in 2016 -- our fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what's coming next. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.[/i]
If you're travelling around Helsinki in 2016, the city's new Mobility-as-a-Service initiative will allow you to simply buy a "mobility" ticket to your destination via text message or app, and the service will plan the ideal route from your starting point, combining public transport, on-demand services and private vehicles. "The price of transport may vary, for instance, based on time or comfort level," says Sampo Hietanen, CEO of Intelligent Transport Systems Finland, and head of the project.
The big idea: all public and private transport options will converge around you to get you home -- on-demand mini-buses called Kutsuplus will deviate according to an optimal route, dropping you off to a public bus stop or a taxi or bike rank. "The city delivers a service to get you home, but it's agnostic to transport type," says John Gibson, director of government innovation at Nesta, who recently completed a study ranking the world's most innovative cities.
Helsinki's data-driven transport system is unique in 2015, but as migration boosts urban populations, more cities will need to adapt. By 2030, five billion people will surge into cities. In 2016, more cities will be "smartified" -- either built from scratch, like Songdo in South Korea, or existing ones upgraded with intelligent infrastructure, such as in Amsterdam. "The word 'smart' is used a lot for cities already, but that's limited to technical data -- sensor inputs, control systems, apps," says Gerhard Schmitt, professor of information architecture at ETH Zurich, and leader of the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. "Cities need to be responsive - this is a human-focused approach, where citizens can give feedback on the functioning of the city to those who run it."
The 670km<sup>2</sup> state of Singapore is the poster child for a city in upgrade mode. "We are not supposed to be here," Vivian Balakrishnan -- who was minister for environment and water resources until October 2015, as well as the head of the Smart Nation Initiative -- told the audience at an innovation event that WIRED attended in April 2015. "What you see in Singapore is an exercise of desperate imagination. It's not about innovation because it's sexy, but because it's survival."
His plan: to turn Singapore into the international guinea pig for smart technologies. "We are trying to virtualise the whole city," says professor Low Teck Seng, CEO of the National Research Foundation (NRF), the national research funding body. "We will be building 3D models of each building, including glass, cement and the internal geography of the building. We will integrate live data from cameras and can use it for traffic or disaster management."
In 2015, Singapore's government wired up a single precinct -- the Jurong Lake District -- to use as a test bed for a range of urban digital experiments. Over 1,000 sensors were deployed to monitor everything from traffic to street lights.
New data hubs, known as Above Ground Boxes, provide high-speed fibre connectivity and power at the street level, and accommodate all the sensors. An automated sanitation system, built by local institution Temasek Polytechnic and ZWEEC Analytics, is being tested to determine the cleanliness of public areas by using advanced video analytics and smart bins. A driverless buggy built by the National University of Singapore and Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) is already ferrying passengers.
Autonomous vehicle trials have now expanded to university campuses around Singapore and, in 2016, will be tested in the One-North district, a hub for biotech, media and R&D companies. "A recent paper by the SMART team showed that the mobility demand of a city such as Singapore could be met with 30 per cent of its existing vehicles," says architect and smart-city researcher Carlo Ratti. And this seems to be the goal of the Singaporean government. "We don't want to increase the number of cars on our roads," says Professor Seng of the NRF. "Autonomous public transport makes more sense than autonomous private cars."
About 65km southwest of Seoul in South Korea, another city has taken a very different approach to getting on the digital grid. It's being built from scratch on 600 hectares of reclaimed land, with sensors, high-speed fibre optics and high-tech public urban systems designed in.
"From an infrastructure perspective, we could lay the very latest connectivity technology into the ground before construction," says Tom Murcott of real estate developer Gale International, which is building the Songdo International Business District. Partnering with Cisco, Gale has spun out a separate company called u-Life Solutions that will provide the internet-of-things backbone for Songdo's buildings. "This will allow the occupants to control their air conditioning, their televisions, even their elevators," Murcott says. "Cisco also built an HD telepresence system that we have installed in 14,000 residential units, which citizens can use to interact with city administrators, shopkeepers or healthcare workers."
To run services such as waste disposal, engineers designed a system that uses pipes to suck rubbish from homes into processing centres that sort the material and recycle it. "In 2016, there will mass implementation of all these services, and new ones being prototyped by SparkLabs, a Korean hardware incubator whom we are working with," Murcott says. "Songdo has this 'living lab' aspect -- there's a pioneering spirit in the people who move here."
It's not only developed economies that are reinventing urban living. Large, growing cities in developing countries are also adapting. "Sensors with sophisticated control systems can work in cities such as Melbourne or London or Sydney, but 90 percent of people in cities don't live in cool, temperate climates -- they live near the equator and there, most of this smart tech does not apply," says Gerhard Schmitt of ETH Zurich. "These cities can be smart, but the innovations need to be affordable and useable."
Schmitt's lab has projects underway in 20 equatorial cities including Addis Ababa, Lagos, Mumbai, Yangon and Jakarta. "In Addis Ababa, there is a long-term project called Addis 2050," Schmitt says. "We will be partially implementing plans related to a new energy grid in the city over the next year."
Ultimately, though, it's not enough for a city just to have "smart" technologies. "We need to use cognitive designing as well -- citizens should be involved in design of their cities," Schmitt says. "Technology will just extend and support human sensors." 2016, then, will not just be the year of smart, but of transhuman cities.
Madhumita Venkataramanan is head of technology at Telegraph Media Group
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
