“Smart cities need smart visions,” states Terry Bennett, Autodesk’s lead strategist for the infrastructure industry.
Bennett was speaking to Decoding The New Economy about how cities will evolve with smart technologies however he believes that data is not the answer.
“Smart doesn’t mean putting sensors on everything and collecting terabytes of data,” he says. “Just putting sensors in the road doesn’t make it a smart city. To have a smart city you need smart people with a smart vision.”
S.M.A.R.T
“We see smart as more as an acronym. The ‘S’ is for setting science based targets for the data being collected,” he explains. Those targets could be financial, environmental or quality of life, “you have to set targets to see that your plan is being carried out.
The M is for measuring against those targets while the A is for absorbing or analysing that information and using it effectively.
R is for retrofitting, with Bennett seeing that valuable existing assets that still have long lives ahead of them being best refitted with smart technologies to get better information out of them.
Shifting demographics and tastes
One of the challenges ahead for planners and designers are the changing demographics and usage patterns of cities as the next generation of workers promise to be far more mobile and not as fixed to central business districts.
An advantage for smarter cities is they have much more data available to make informed decisions and as patterns change, those municipalities can see the differences occurring sooner.
Coupled with newer construction methods that allow infrastructure to be built faster, cities are going to be able to quickly respond to changing usage and demands on services.
Contracting out innovation
Those fast construction methods create another need for change in contracting methods. “We have to start thinking more as manufacturing rather than construction,” he says. “We get bogged down a lot in the ‘contract’ part of contracting. We have contracts written in the 1950s that are today’s standard contracts.”
“You can’t build fast enough given the changes in demographics and technology using those older contracts. You basically contracting out innovation.”
For government this can be an opportunity, Bennett believes. If clients allow builders freedom in techniques and methods then costs can be reduced with more resilient results.
Ultimately it’s that resilience that matters with infrastructure being designed for decades, “if you’re designing for traffic patterns for today then you’re wrong.”
Paul travelled to Autodesk University in Los Vegas as a guest of Autodesk