Building for the future – smart cities as showrooms
Building for the future – smart cities as showrooms
Although the term ‘smart city’ is loosely defined and interpreted in vastly different ways, they are still hailed as the future. But, why? What’s in it for everyone?
There is money to be made in creating smart cities. Construction companies will have to continue to change and adapt their processes to fit into an increasingly modern and changing world. The technology that is implemented in smart cities requires physical infrastructural changes to support it. This technology that is being created is clearly innovative and in demand. But, it is a lot easier in some places more than others.
Profitable cities
Tech companies are creating thousands of products that they hope will be used in smart cities in the future. The Smart Cities Council states that the smart city sector already generates more than $1 trillion in annual sales worldwide. Multinational corporations like Samsung, Toyota, Cisco, Siemens, and Microsoft are all helping to build smart cities. They are using this broadening market to expand their growth. This has led some people to suggest that the creation of ‘smart cities’ is nothing more than the production of showrooms for vanity projects rather than replicable, applicable, urban progress.
The idea that building smart cities – high tech, automated, and efficient cities – is a vanity project may seem slightly far-fetched at first thought. Tech companies require profit to survive. Their technology that is integrated into smart cities supposedly benefits the citizens of that city. And, the economy benefits as cities become more productive. It’s a win-win-win situation. However, if we take a look at cities that have been built from scratch specifically to be ‘smart’, their use as showrooms for powerful businesses becomes slightly more explicit.
Smart cities as showrooms
Masdar City in Abu Dhabi hasn’t turned out to be the 0% carbon city it was first designed to be. But by hegemonic standards, it can certainly be considered a smart city and eco-friendly.
Constructed in the middle of the desert, Masdar City is filled with the technology that is said to soon transform cities across the globe. More than 535 companies from 6 different continents have operations based in Masdar. Despite this, few people are living there who aren’t involved with these companies, and no one seems to mind. Masdar City has been described as an ‘experiment’ and a ‘showroom’ for those who design, build, and test their smart city products there for the world to see, but not to use.
Building a smart city like this from scratch, and using it to show the latest innovative technology is a clever idea for businesses looking to prove themselves as leaders in change. However, integrating smart city tech into an old city like London, that wasn’t built in the past decade specifically to support this type of tech, is a different issue and far more challenging. Only the future will tell how much of this new technology we see in show cities like Masdar will have a positive effect on the improvement of existing cities across the globe.
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