Smart cities: Do we have what it takes?

What does it take to build a smarter, more sustainable city? Not surprisingly, the answer depends on the specialty of the organisation you ask.

Ask information technology giant IBM, and the answer you’ll get: more and better IT products and services … LOTS of them, to gain intelligence into how we use everything and where the best efficiency improvements can be made. Pose the same question to the people behind the Transition Network and Transition Towns, on the other hand, and they’ll say the solution has to be largely people-based and local, with each community deciding for itself how it wants to address its energy, transport and resource management challenges.

Go back to another big business, one like Siemens with a wide range of specialties — from lighting to building automation, transport to alternative energy — and you’ll hear that it’ll take a wide range of strategies to build a sustainable future. And a fast-growing relative youngster with grand ambitions like Better Place will  tell you electric cars hold the key to making the most of clean energy and keeping our economy humming.

The thing is, all these answers are correct … if they also represent a bit of the “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” mindset. Our problem today isn’t a lack of solutions: we have plenty of those at our disposal now. It’s more often a lack of public resolve, a failure of political will and a dearth of adequate, comprehensive and consistent investment.

It’s a consumer culture that can’t accept a crisps bag that’s a little noisier than others, even though the new bag is compostable.

It’s pandering-to-the-sentiment-of-the-moment politicians like US Republican Representative Joe “I’m-sorry-we’re-making-you-pay-for-the-oilspill-BP” Barton for trying to reverse simple, yet effective measures like the US’s planned phaseout of inefficient light bulbs.

It’s the UK’s coalition government proposing £1 billion in startup cash for the new Green Investment Bank. While £1 billion might sound like a king’s ransom to most of us, that’s not nearly enough to pay for the hundreds of billions in energy and infrastructure improvements expected to be needed over the next 20 years.

As a recent study from the University of California-Davis concluded, relying on the markets alone to move us away from oil and towards renewables won’t get there in the time frame we need. By analysing long-term investment trends and stock market expectations, the researchers found that — at today’s rate of clean-energy development, compared to fossil-fuel spending — it would take 131 years for us to completely replace gas and diesel fuels with renewable alternatives.

“We need stronger policy impetus to push the development of these alternative replacement technologies along,” said study author and engineering professor Debbie Niemeier.