For smart cities, measurements matter
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Nowhere is that old adage more apt than in the smart-city realm, where everyone from health-care providers to utility companies is working to make urban areas more efficient and more sustainable.
It’s a tall order even if we could freeze time and keep the city conditions we face today unchanged. We can’t, of course, which will make improving our cities — these fluid, moving and ever-evolving subjects — even harder.
We’ve now passed an historic milestone, the point at which most of the world’s population — 50.6 per cent as of 2010, or 3.49 billion people — now lives in urban areas. That’s a trend that’s expected to continue. By 2050, the United Nations estimates, nearly 69 per cent of humanity will live in cities.
This ongoing shift is putting ever-more strain on our energy infrastructure, food and water supplies, transport systems, housing stocks and natural resources. All together, these impacts form the basis for the whole smart-city movement: unless we start making our urban areas more efficient, there’s no way they can continue to support the growing demands being placed upon them.
And how can we manage efficiency in energy, food, water, transport, etc.? By measuring it first. We’re making good progress in some areas. Smart metering for electricity use, for example, is taking off rapidly in places from Australia to China, from Canada to the UK. Measurements of people (ie, population figures), while not something that can be metered, are also pretty well established through censuses, demographic studies, population modeling and so on.
In other aspects critical to the development of smarter cities, though, we have much further to go. For instance, getting a handle on how much waste the world’s urban areas produce requires a fair amount of guesswork. A 2010 publication by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme estimates it could have been around 2 billion tonnes per year as of 2006, and is likely much higher now. And measuring the consumption of water — a resource whose infrastructure is in many places even older and more rickety than electricity’s is — remains a challenge for reasons ranging from leakage and pipe failures in the developed world to an outright lack of infrastructure in many developing regions.
Making houses more efficient will take much more than smart meters and Energy Star appliances, too. Older homes, a large part of the global housing stock, are often leaky, drafty homes. All the grid updates and web-enabled interfaces in the world won’t help them become smart without basic insulation improvements … so measuring the number of buildings that need low-tech as well as high-tech fixes is also critical.
Clearly, we’ve got a lot more measuring to do before we understand the full scope of the world’s smart-city challenge, much less take the first steps toward achieving those goals. Every little bit helps, but we’re still taking baby steps. The question is, how quickly can we begin sprinting?
