Last February, the Toyota Motor Company broke ground on what it calls Woven City, a built-from-scratch futuristic urban center on 175 acres in the shadow of Mount Fuji. Woven City is a reference to the way the project plans to weave together cars, robots, data, and computers to create a city that the builders say, is highly efficient, pollution free, and sustainable.
The new city will be carbon neutral, Toyota says. Autonomous cars will run on non-polluting green hydrogen, while solar and wind provide other energy needs. And sensors embedded throughout Woven City will gather a range of metrics and process them with artificial intelligence to help the city constantly become cleaner and run more smoothly.
Woven City is one of a burgeoning number of smart cities that have been recently built or are now being planned or constructed. NEOM is a $500 billion sprawling futuristic city for a million people under construction in Saudi Arabia. Egypt is building a new smart capital near Cairo that planners say could eventually be home to 6.5 million people. Telosa, proposed by a former Walmart executive, would be a city of 50,000 in the western United States in a place yet to be determined. Numerous smart cities have been or are being built in China.
Theres no single concept of a smart city. But the basic definition is a city filled with sensors that monitor myriad aspects of life, from traffic to pollution to energy and water use. In the case of the Woven City, smart homes will feature sensors that will monitor the occupants health. All the monitors in these cities are connected to the backbone of these prototype communities, the Internet of Things (IoT), meaning the interconnection of tiny computers placed in everyday objects. The massive trove of collected data will be interpreted with artificial intelligence to make cities greener and more livable.
While proponents say these communities represent the future of a healthier planet, some prominent smart cities have faced serious obstacles to realizing their utopian visions. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi abandoned its smart city master plan because of financial problems that began in 2008 and continued because the cost of some aspects of the city was far more than forecast. Songdo is a completed smart city with a population of 170,000 in South Korea that has not been able to fill its buildings. Its sometimes described as a ghost town, or, variously, as cold, impersonal, homogenous, and dully predictable.
One recent paper on smart cites grappled with ways these cities can introduce serendipity into daily life to combat their monotonous nature.
There are a lot of good things that can come of smart city concepts, especially for the environmental applications, said Shannon Mattern, a professor of anthropology at The New School for Social Research and the author of A City is Not a Computer. But it really limits your [ways] of intervention to the types of things that lend themselves to quantitative measurement, she said. When you take messy ambiguous dimensions of human nature and try to find ways to algorithmicize them, there is always a failure there, something that slips through the cracks. History, culture, and the spiritual aspects of life are among those aspects that critics cite as missing from or are diminished in smart cities.
There has been criticism, as well, of smart cities being alien to the landscape on which they are built. In her book Spaceship in the Desert, about Masdar City, Gckc Gnel, an anthropologist at Rice University, said both Masdar City and Neom share the vision that the desert is an empty zone on which any kind of ideal can be projected, she said. Thats why I compared Masdar City to a spaceship insulated from the rest of the world.
A street view in Masdar City, United Arab Emirates, showing a tower that circulates cooler air. Hufton+Crow / View Pictures / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Despite the fact that trillions of dollars are being spent to create these spectacular, Oz-like, all-encompassing cities of the future, some leading analysts believe in a very different concept of smarter cities.
I hate almost every effort at building a greenfield smart city, said Boyd Cohen, a professor at EADA, a business school in Barcelona, who is one of the pioneers of the smart city concept and a longtime climate strategist. A smart city without people is a dumb city. You are building a smart city in the absence of people, in the absence of history, in the absence of culture. The developers say, We are going to build this great, amazing city and people will come, and they dont. People want to live in communities and have culture around them.
An alternative to a spanking new city rising on virgin land is to incorporate smart technologies into existing cities, Cohen said. Singapore, London, and Barcelona, are among the cities that lead the world in adopting smart technologies to more efficiently operate their infrastructure and become greener. In London, for example, sensors on light poles monitor air pollution and show particularly polluted spots that can be avoided. Because collecting trash is the most expensive part of the waste disposal process, Barcelona adopted smart bins that signal when they are full and ready for pick up. But technology is not always a be-all and end-all.
Cohen believes cities are on the front line of climate change and need to become smarter to survive it. In 2009 [at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen] everyone thought Obama and the United Nations were going to save the world with agreements to restrict CO2 emissions, he said. It didnt happen and still isnt happening. So I turned my attention to cities. Thats the place where we will get faster action on climate change.
Urban planning, says Cohen, may be the single most important way to reduce fossil fuel pollution and consumption. Effective urban design density, walkability, mixed use so people dont have to drive long distances, and efficient, clean electric or hydrogen public transportation is the foundation. Then you layer in tech, he said. Technology around renewable and distributed energy. And to make our buildings more energy efficient. If you tackle energy consumption and transportation and urban planning, you have gone a long way toward solving the climate problem.
Smart grids are a key component of smart cities. These power grids optimize the delivery of electricity by receiving information from users over the IoT. This data provides experts with information about how, where, and when energy is used. In some models, it interprets that data with artificial intelligence. But as energy sources are diversified solar and wind from large and small sources, even individual homes, as well as traditional sources it makes it harder for electrical systems to efficiently sense where power is needed and to allocate it. Because it can better manage available power, a smart grid avoids waste and can make the most of renewables.
A host of other smart applications are being used in cities. Parking is the bane of urban dwellers, so smart parking has gotten a lot of attention. Santander, Spain, for example, is considered one of the worlds smartest cities because it has 20,000 parking sensors connected to the IoT. Sensors under parking spaces can tell when they are empty and send that information to antennas that beam it to a control center. Signs guide drivers to the empty spots, limiting time spent driving around looking for a space and reducing fuel use, carbon dioxide and automobile pollution, and traffic congestion.
In Utrecht in the Netherlands, people ride sniffer bikes that measure three types of particulate air pollution, as well recording their location, speed, battery voltage, temperature and humidity, road conditions, and organic gases, which are sent to a central data hub. People can choose the cleanest route and are themselves de facto sensors, providing information to city managers.
A rendering of Woven City, which is planned for a 175-acre site in Japan. Toyota
Water use is another prime target of smart applications. A smartphone app, for example, can alert residents to an undetected leak in their plumbing and allows them to monitor consumption and quality.
Barcelona has pioneered a smart water irrigation system in its public spaces. Officials inventoried the species of plants in each park and determined precisely how much water they need. Water and humidity sensors, coupled with data from weather stations and rain gauges, provide information on how moist the soil and air are, and allow delivery of the right amount of water. The city says it saves 25 percent on its water bill more than 400,000 euros a year.
But smart cities have run into trouble over the issue of who owns the data that is collected and how it will be used. A Google affiliate called Sidewalk Labs had plans for a 12-acre smart city development, called Quayside, on Torontos lakefront. The project ran into a buzz saw of opposition, largely over whether it could be trusted to manage the data. Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist, wrote a letter to the city council and said the information technology behemoth could not be trusted. The smart city project on the Toronto waterfront is the most highly evolved version to date of surveillance capitalism, he wrote. The company will use algorithms to nudge human behavior in the direction that favors its business.
Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel L. Doctoroff said the 2020 cancellation of the project was largely a result of the pandemic and economic uncertainty in the Toronto real estate market. It has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan, Doctoroff wrote last year.
Its clear that the vision of what works as a smart city is still in the early stages, especially as technology and concepts continue to evolve. It will take time to scale up the most sustainable models across a city, let alone the world, said Cohen.
Read more here:
Why the Luster on Once-Vaunted 'Smart Cities' Is Fading - Yale Environment 360
- The Smell Of Death Has A Strange Influence On Human Behavior - IFLScience - October 26th, 2024 [October 26th, 2024]
- "WEIRD" in psychology literature oversimplifies the global diversity of human behavior. - Psychology Today - October 2nd, 2024 [October 2nd, 2024]
- Scientists issue warning about increasingly alarming whale behavior due to human activity - Orcasonian - September 23rd, 2024 [September 23rd, 2024]
- Does AI adoption call for a change in human behavior? - Fast Company - July 26th, 2024 [July 26th, 2024]
- Dogs can smell human stress and it alters their own behavior, study reveals - New York Post - July 26th, 2024 [July 26th, 2024]
- Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy - Nature.com - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- AI model predicts human behavior from our poor decision-making - Big Think - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- ZkSync defends Sybil measures as Binance offers own ZK token airdrop - TradingView - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- On TikTok, Goldendoodles Are People Trapped in Dog Bodies - The New York Times - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- 10 things only introverts find irritating, according to psychology - Hack Spirit - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- 32 animals that act weirdly human sometimes - Livescience.com - May 24th, 2024 [May 24th, 2024]
- NBC Is Using Animals To Push The LGBT Agenda. Here Are 5 Abhorrent Animal Behaviors Humans Shouldn't Emulate - The Daily Wire - May 24th, 2024 [May 24th, 2024]
- New study examines the dynamics of adaptive autonomy in human volition and behavior - PsyPost - May 24th, 2024 [May 24th, 2024]
- 30000 years of history reveals that hard times boost human societies' resilience - Livescience.com - May 12th, 2024 [May 12th, 2024]
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Actors Had Trouble Reverting Back to Human - CBR - May 12th, 2024 [May 12th, 2024]
- The need to feel safe is a core driver of human behavior. - Psychology Today - April 15th, 2024 [April 15th, 2024]
- AI learned how to sway humans by watching a cooperative cooking game - Science News Magazine - March 29th, 2024 [March 29th, 2024]
- We can't combat climate change without changing minds. This psychology class explores how. - Northeastern University - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed - ScienceAlert - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Franciscan AI expert warns of technology becoming a 'pseudo-religion' - Detroit Catholic - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior - messenger-inquirer - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Astrocytes Play Critical Role in Regulating Behavior - Neuroscience News - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior - Sunnyside Sun - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior - Blue Mountain Eagle - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- 7 Books on Human Behavior - Times Now - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Euphemisms increasingly used to soften behavior that would be questionable in direct language - Norfolk Daily News - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Linking environmental influences, genetic research to address concerns of genetic determinism of human behavior - Phys.org - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Emerson's Insight: Navigating the Three Fundamental Desires of Human Nature - The Good Men Project - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Dogs can recognize a bad person and there's science to prove it. - GOOD - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- What Is Organizational Behavior? Everything You Need To Know - MarketWatch - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Overcoming 'Otherness' in Scientific Research Commentary in Nature Human Behavior USA - English - USA - PR Newswire - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- "Reichman University's behavioral economics program: Navigating human be - The Jerusalem Post - January 19th, 2024 [January 19th, 2024]
- Of trees, symbols of humankind, on Tu BShevat - The Jewish Star - January 19th, 2024 [January 19th, 2024]
- Tapping Into The Power Of Positive Psychology With Acclaimed Expert Niyc Pidgeon - GirlTalkHQ - January 19th, 2024 [January 19th, 2024]
- Don't just make resolutions, 'be the architect of your future self,' says Stanford-trained human behavior expert - CNBC - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Never happy? Humans tend to imagine how life could be better : Short Wave - NPR - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- People who feel unhappy but hide it well usually exhibit these 9 behaviors - Hack Spirit - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- If you display these 9 behaviors, you're being passive aggressive without realizing it - Hack Spirit - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Men who are relationship-oriented by nature usually display these 9 behaviors - Hack Spirit - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- A look at the curious 'winter break' behavior of ChatGPT-4 - ReadWrite - December 14th, 2023 [December 14th, 2023]
- Neuroscience and Behavior Major (B.S.) | College of Liberal Arts - UNH's College of Liberal Arts - December 14th, 2023 [December 14th, 2023]
- The positive health effects of prosocial behaviors | News | Harvard ... - HSPH News - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- The valuable link between succession planning and skills - Human Resource Executive - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Okinawa's ants show reduced seasonal behavior in areas with more human development - Phys.org - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- How humans use their sense of smell to find their way | Penn Today - Penn Today - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Wrestling With Evil in the World, or Is It Something Else? - Psychiatric Times - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Shimmying like electric fish is a universal movement across species - Earth.com - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Why do dogs get the zoomies? - Care.com - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- How Stuart Robinson's misconduct went overlooked for years - Washington Square News - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Whatchamacolumn: Homeless camps back in the news - News-Register - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Stunted Growth in Infants Reshapes Brain Function and Cognitive ... - Neuroscience News - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Social medias role in modeling human behavior, societies - kuwaittimes - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- The gift of reformation - Living Lutheran - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- After pandemic, birds are surprisingly becoming less fearful of humans - Study Finds - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Nick Treglia: The trouble with fairness and the search for truth - 1819 News - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Science has an answer for why people still wave on Zoom - Press Herald - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter? - Livescience.com - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Augmenting the Regulatory Worker: Are We Making Them Better or ... - BioSpace - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- What "The Creator", a film about the future, tells us about the present - InCyber - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- WashU Expert: Some parasites turn hosts into 'zombies' - The ... - Washington University in St. Louis - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Is secondhand smoke from vapes less toxic than from traditional ... - Missouri S&T News and Research - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- How apocalyptic cults use psychological tricks to brainwash their ... - Big Think - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Human action pushing the world closer to environmental tipping ... - Morung Express - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- What We Get When We Give | Harvard Medicine Magazine - Harvard University - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Psychological Anime: 12 Series You Should Watch - But Why Tho? - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Roosters May Recognize Their Reflections in Mirrors, Study Suggests - Smithsonian Magazine - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- June 30 Zodiac: Sign, Traits, Compatibility and More - AZ Animals - May 13th, 2023 [May 13th, 2023]
- Indiana's Funding Ban for Kinsey Sex-Research Institute Threatens ... - The Chronicle of Higher Education - May 13th, 2023 [May 13th, 2023]
- Have AI Chatbots Developed Theory of Mind? What We Do and Do ... - The New York Times - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Scoop: Coming Up on a New Episode of HOUSEBROKEN on FOX ... - Broadway World - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Here's five fall 2023 classes to fire up your bookbag - Duke Chronicle - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- McDonald: Aspen's like living in a 'Pullman town' - The Aspen Times - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Children Who Are Exposed to Awe-Inspiring Art Are More Likely to Become Generous, Empathic Adults, a New Study Says - artnet News - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- DataDome Raises Another $42M to Prevent Bot Attacks in Real ... - AlleyWatch - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Observing group-living animals with drones may help us understand ... - Innovation Origins - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Mann named director of School of Public and Population Health - Boise State University - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Irina Solomonova's bad behavior is the star of Love Is Blind - My Imperfect Life - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Health quotes Dill in article about rise of Babesiosis - UMaine News ... - University of Maine - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- There's still time for the planet, Goodall says, if we stay hopeful - University of Wisconsin-Madison - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]
- Relationship between chronotypes and aggression in adolescents ... - BMC Psychiatry - March 31st, 2023 [March 31st, 2023]