PVAF IS ABOUT HAPPIER TOMMORROW....AND NOW CITIES ARE GEARING UP TO PROVIDE THAT WITH "SMART CITIES".... Posted by Vishva News Reporter on March 9, 2011
.....SUMMARY OF
TODAY'S PVAF
NEWS/KNOWLEDGE SHARING......
Creating smart infrastructure for cities around the world
has become the
new frontier of urban planning,
a global business estimated to be worth
as much as $122-billion over the next two years.
Smart city infrastructure is being
visioned to be created
by private companies such as
IBM, GE, Oracle and Cisco
applying high-tech business solutions
to issues such as public transit and water management.
In November
2010, India and Japan unveiled a plan to build 24 “green
cities”
with clean energy supplies and waste recycling systems,
all of
which will be built by Japanese companies such as Hitachi and
Mitsubishi.
....and costing $35 billion
A SMART CITY OF SONGDO IN SOUTH KOREA
to house 250,000 is already under construction for occupancy around
2020....
In South Korea, construction has begun on New Songdo City,
a $35-billion
instant metropolis that will grow
from a man-made island in the Yellow
Sea.
The city will have technology built into
every brick, building and
streetlight,
with everything from water to traffic wired through
a
single Internet-enabled utility, courtesy of Cisco.
PVAF was self born in 1996 and exists to search and share Knowledge
among all earthlings to empower earthlings to have a continual growth to
happiness and prosperity in a peaceful co-existence with all including
the Mother Earth which ultimately sustains humanity with its air, water,
energy and earth in the co-dependency with the solar system.....
And saying so please click on the next line to study in-depth the news of the
above news summary and also an overview of SMART CITY with a PVAF prayer
that today's sharing will empower you to
be part of this new city evolution....with your own contribution in this
latest man-made evolution....for not only your future but also to the
future of
children including universal and primary well-being of humanity with knowledge-based evolution.....
......and
now keep on scrolling for today's news
and then learning
about the meaning of SMART CITY.....
Chris Moore, Edmonton's Chief Information Officer at the Transportation
Monitoring Cnetre. The City Edmonton in Alberta, Canada is an IBM Smarter City.
The new
frontier of urban growth:
High-tech partnership
(From: Canadian Globe and Mail:
Wednesday, March 9, 2011: Siri Agrell)
In Stockholm, they needed to reduce rush-hour traffic. Cambridge, Ont.,
wanted to replace one pipe without ripping out its entire sewer system.
In Budapest, a school system required an environmentally friendly
lighting solution, while in China, they just need somewhere new for
people to live.
Creating smart infrastructure for cities around the world has become the
new frontier of urban planning, a global business estimated to be worth
as much as $122-billion over the next two years.
City governments faced with growing populations, aging infrastructure
and dwindling budgets are desperate for modern solutions, but instead of
turning to visionary new mayors, or vying for cash from other levels of
government, municipal leaders are increasingly turning to such private
companies as IBM, GE, Oracle and Cisco to overhaul city systems,
applying high-tech business solutions to issues such as public transit
and water management.
And in the process, tech companies are emerging as a new form of
public-private utility, one that may soon have a monopoly over how our
cities are run. Toronto-based urban designer Ken Greenberg even compared
IBM to the companies that built the Canadian railways, and dubbed such
public-private partnerships the new “nation builders.”
“Multinational corporations have discovered cities and it’s probably one
of the biggest market trends in the world, frankly,” said Bruce Katz,
founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings
Institution in Washington.
On Wednesday, IBM will announce the winners of its Smarter Cities
Challenge, a global contest that invited cities to apply for $50-million
in free technology services.
The City of Edmonton is the sole Canadian name among the list, which
ranges around the globe from Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Bucharest, Romania
and Milwaukee, Wis.
The contest is part of the company’s Smarter Planet program, a core part
of its business that aims to sell technology to cities rather than
individual consumers.
Although the majority of IBM’s work with cities is straight-up,
charge-by-the-hour consulting, IBM has positioned the business as a form
of high-minded charity, asking city residents to imagine “safe
neighbourhoods, quality schools, affordable housing, traffic that
flows.”
At the recent Greater Toronto Summit, IBM’s vice-president of strategy
and business development Michael Littlejohn described the company’s
information analytics service as the “new government ecosystem.”
“Under the old regime, there was government, and there was everyone
else. We’re talking about a new world order,” he said. “We’re very
bullish on information analytics changing cities.”
Mr. Greenberg, who was also on the panel, acknowledged that cities may
not be in the position to think about the long-term ramifications of
inviting private enterprise into city hall.
“Cities are often so far behind and overwhelmed that they can’t even
think about big-picture stuff,” he said. “A lot of this is born out of
the fact that municipalities have their backs against the wall.”
It doesn’t take a business degree to recognize that being backed against
a wall is not a strong bargaining position. But the potentially
monopoly-forming future of “smarter city” initiatives has less to do
with retrofitting old cities than the possibility of creating entirely
new ones.
While companies such as IBM and GE focus on helping Stockholm introduce
congestion pricing, and building wastewater treatment plants in
Victoria, governments in the Eastern Hemisphere are building new cities
from scratch, and technology companies are getting in on the ground
floor.
Last November, India and Japan unveiled a plan to build 24 “green
cities” with clean energy supplies and waste recycling systems, all of
which will be built by Japanese companies such as Hitachi and
Mitsubishi.
In South Korea, construction has begun on New Songdo City, a $35-billion
instant metropolis that will grow from a man-made island in the Yellow
Sea. The city will have technology built into every brick, building and
streetlight, with everything from water to traffic wired through a
single Internet-enabled utility, courtesy of Cisco.
Urban performance currently depends not only on the city's
endowment of hard infrastructure ('physical capital'), but also, and
increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge
communication and social infrastructure ('intellectual and social
capital').
The latter form of capital is decisive for urban competitiveness.
It is against this background that the concept of the "smart city"
has been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban
production factors in a common framework and to highlight the
growing importance of
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs),
social and environmental capital in profiling the
competitiveness of cities.
The significance of these two assets - social and
environmental capital - itself goes a long way to distinguish smart
cities from their more technology-laden counterparts, drawing a
clear line between them and what goes under the name of either
digital or
intelligent cities.
Smart(er) cities has also been used as a marketing concept by
companies and by cities.
