Smart cities in the time of climate change and Covid‐19 need digital twins

Abstract

Pre-Covid there was the beginnings of a coalescence around Climate Change as the overarching aim of advanced urban digital transformation. Climate change is a wicked problem with no silver bullet but there is one arena that adversely affects climate change more than any other; cities. Only 29% of the world is land, cities currently occupy 3% of that representing 0.9% of the earth surface. Buildings occupy between 70 and 80% of every city and we spend 87% of our life in them. Buildings, a tiny percentage of the planet, consume 75% of world electricity, 40% of global energy, are responsible for 40% of the total GHG emissions, consume 25% of the global water supply and generate 40% of total solid waste. The problem is only going to get worse as more people move to cities for economic, social, or conflict reasons. Roughly 50% of the world population of 7.7 billion people lives in cities and it is predicted to rise to 70% by 2050; this could create another 5000 cities. The greatest rise in urbanisation will take place in the developing world, which is the least well equipped to deal with issues of pollution, energy, air quality, water shortages, waste, transport, health and civil resilience. The focus on Climate has now been usurped by the effect Covid has had on the world economy and how we live and work in Cities, but an answer to both is we need cities to work smarter and to do that we need to understand them better. In the developed world there is a plethora of technologies now reaching the market. Proptech, Plantech, Digital twins, VR & AR, Ledger technologies, 5G, AI and Deep Learning, Data Exchanges and Edge Computing that will shape citizen engagement, economic growth and physical infrastructure, but we also need the basic infrastructure of power, water and connectivity in the developing world. Currently, the new enabling technologies are still siloed into point solutions with companies developing single technology value propositions around AI, proptech, Ledger et al. Whatever our working definition of what comprises ‘smart’, the market is maturing into IoT platforms where hardware captures data and software analyses it. To enable us to turn data into information allowing insight to inform impact we also need to share information in an appropriate way and surface it in the most accessible manner possible. We are capturing ever-increasing amounts of data, but our ability to share it with the correct checks and balances is problematic. This will have to change and there is an increasing need for Data Trust models that allow us to synthesise data, and Digital Twinning; where we create a virtual replica of the physical and can feed real time information into the model allowing scenario planning and the meshing of soft and hard data that creates a narrative around arenas such as Health, Wellbeing and Mobility. This leverages the new disruptive technologies mentioned above, allowing city authorities agile and informed decision making while facilitating the sharing of information between the public and private sectors. As such, it creates a market for enabling technologies while informing growth in the city. One of the things I noticed when working in the planning department of a local authority in the distant past was that if I used words to explain something I wanted to do, I would be met with blank faces and disinterest. However, if I produced a schematic, plan or map the whole atmosphere changed. Tables were cleared, eyes lit up, erstwhile disinterest turned into enthusiasm. You get the same affect with architects, engineers and developers. These are people who think visually. Nowadays, the same can be seen with the new sorcerers of IoT; data scientists and AI specialists and is the reasons why Digital Twins are both attractive and effective. We create so much data, most of which is binary, we need a way to make it talk to us. Maps, charts et al. gave us a two-dimensional view and models gave us a static 3D representation. Rel