How are smart cities delivering the future?

Cities around the world are looking for ways to increase their sustainability. Everything from how we live to how we work and play is being re-evaluated and re-energised to make our cities cleaner, greener and more relevant to the times.

Major cities are often incubators of ideas and innovation, attracting the best and brightest minds from around the world. Looking at some of the cities at the forefront of innovation gives an indication of where the rest of the world is heading. The world's most forward-thinking cities are inspiring trends which almost inevitably will spread across the planet.

 We’ve taken a look at just a few of these cities of the future – places which incorporate sustainability into energy, transport, food, architecture and economy in new ways from which we can all learn.

 

Helsingborg, Sweden

Helsingborg is a city of 112,000 people in southern Sweden with ambitions to become one of the most innovative cities in Europe: inspiring residents and businesses, as well as global partners, to engage in creating a more sustainable city.

Development is based on a principle of sustainable innovation and life between the buildings. Helsingborg was opened as a testbed with an intention of being climate neutral by 2030.

The Swedish city was awarded second place in the European Capital of Innovation Awards 2020 for demonstrating its ability to harness innovation to improve the lives of its residents.

In terms of smart digital transformation, Helsingborg has installed sensors on objects all around the city – monitoring everything from the location of shared bicycles and water and air temperatures to available parking spaces. The city has also developed impressive digital crime-fighting tools, like the Incident Map which offers data visualisation on the location of incidents based on reports from police, fire department, security companies, and insurers.

Other examples include the zero-emission electric ferries between Helsingborg and Helsingör, a unique three-pipe sewer system, city-wide tree-planting efforts, and a social living project that brings young adults and senior citizens together to reduce loneliness and promote generational and cultural integration.

 

The Urban Tech Republic, Germany

A research and industrial park for urban technologies is emerging on Berlin’s former Tegel Airport site: the Urban Tech Republic. By reclaiming a piece of the city and creating spaces for industry, business, and science, the Urban Tech Republic is intended to be a home for the next generation of innovators, whose primary driver will be collaboration.

As many as 1,000 large and small businesses with 20,000 people will work in research, development, and production. More than 2,500 students will move into the former airport terminal building along with the prestigious Berliner Hochschule für Technik University.

Berlin TXL will focus on what keeps the 21st century’s growing major cities alive: efficient use of energy, sustainable construction, planet-friendly mobility, recycling, networked control of systems, clean water, and application of new materials.

The park will be surrounded by a smart residential sector to test the innovations developed there. This will contain 5,000 homes with another 4,000 being built in two other districts nearby. E.ON and Berliner Stadtwerke will supply heat and cooling to TXL using a pioneering low-temperature network called LowEx.

 

Toyota's Woven City, Japan

Carmaker Toyota is building a prototype city of the future in a manufacturing site which closed down in 2020. The $10 billion, 175-acre Woven City is said to be a ‘living laboratory’ where people can live while also testing out futuristic projects. Phase 1 of construction is now complete, with the official launch planned for 2025.

Toyota first announced its Woven City concept in 2021 as a “prototype city of the future” where it could test autonomous vehicles, innovative street design, smart home technology, robotics, and new mobility products on a population of real people.

Located at the base of Mount Fuji, the Woven City site includes buildings by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and has a goal to build enough housing and facilities for up to 2,000 people to live year-around, with utilities powered by hydrogen fuel cell technology. 

Only fully autonomous, zero-emission vehicles will be allowed on the city's main thoroughfares and roofs of all buildings will be covered in solar panels to supplement the power generated by hydrogen fuel cells. Native vegetation will be planted indoors and out, and hydroponics used for food supplies.

 

Songdo, South Korea

Built on land reclaimed from the ocean, the South Korean city of Songdo is a multi-billion dollar megaproject that aims to provide a blueprint for cities of the future while also taking some inspiration from great historical cities – including the Central Park concept from New York and the canals of Venice.

Songdo houses approximately 210,000 people where everything within the city is connected to a central computer network, with the connectivity even extending to waste collection which is sucked directly from rubbish bins through a series of underground pipes, eliminating the need for refuse trucks.

Songdo Smart City was envisioned as a city integrated with advanced information and communication technologies, and it attracted IT companies eager to contribute to the concept.

It was developed as a sustainable city with more than 40% of its area reserved for green space, including the central park of 100 acres, 26 km of cycle lanes, and charging stations for electric vehicles. It is also the first district in Korea to have all of its major buildings on par or beyond the requirements of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design programme (LEED). Although the city is not yet complete, Songdo is home to 106 LEED certified buildings.

 

Porto Alegre, Brazil

Away from technology and interconnectivity, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre is ground-breaking for its approach to more direct governance and decision-making.

While citizens of most countries might grumble about the how and where their taxes are spent (and passing the blame to elected representatives for not following their wishes) since 1990 the 1.3 million citizens of Porto Alegre have been able to directly decide where public money is spent – with this forward-thinking scheme already providing remarkable results.

In 1990, just 45% of Porto Alegre's residents had access to sewers, compared to more than 90% today. Education and transport links have seen similar improvements.

Porto Alegre has seen a massive drop in tax evasion. Seeing the good their taxes have funded, many citizens have even requested to pay more.

 

Singapore

The island city-state of Singapore is another self-contained Asian metropolis which has embraced futuristic technology at a dizzying pace.

Singapore is a hub of finance and technology. The World Economic Forum has ranked it as one of the world's most network-ready countries, with internet and mobile technology permeating all facets of daily life. Singapore is also home to some advanced technologies that you would struggle to find anywhere else in the world, including robot masseuses.

In its annual Smart City Index, the Swiss business school International Institute for Management Development (IMD) ranks Singapore as the smartest city in Asia and the fifth smartest in the world.

Since the 2014 commencement of Smart Nation, the government initiative to transform Singapore into a tech-driven sustainability powerhouse, a number of strategic projects have leveraged the latest technologies to improve the lives of citizens.

One is the use of wireless sensors to collect water data transmitted from smart meters in homes, with results showing that smart meters can help homeowners save water by providing near real-time water use data and detecting water leaks through a mobile app. Another involves sensors and infrared cameras installed in swimming pools across Singapore to detect possible drowning incidents and alert lifeguards so they can react faster to swimmers in distress.

 

Silicon Valley, USA

The birthplace of modern technology is undoubtedly California’s Silicon Valley.

All of America's major tech players have some connection to the cities and towns which make up the San Francisco Bay Area tech hub, including Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft (Silicon Valley is also home to E.ON’s own Innovation Garage in Palo Alto where we test new sustainable technologies and foster relationships with tech startups)

Silicon Valley is a community worth around £2.3 trillion thanks to the tech giants in this famous part of the San Francisco Bay area. Each year, Silicon Valley invests around $80 billion in venture capital, creating 22% of the world’s unicorns (a unicorn is a startup company valued at $1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market – named after the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successes). 

Of course, in such an environment and with resources like world-class universities and a tech workforce of more than 400,000 on the doorstep, innovation is so much more achievable and is just one reason why the major tech firms clustered here attract the brightest minds from around the world.

All this makes Silicon Valley one of the most diverse areas in the world, with the population of some cities being as much as 50% foreign-born.