It is almost five years since the cancellation of the first high-profile, controversial smart cities project.
On 7 May, 2020, Alphabet announced the end of its involvement in Sidewalk Toronto’s Quayside project, an urban development project initiated by Waterfront Toronto. Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google, issued the winning bid in 2017.
Sidewalk Toronto aimed to utilise technology to create a smart urban area that improves the quality of life of its residents, while also using it as a testing ground for future urban design projects and technology.
The high-tech plan drew criticism, particularly over data privacy issues regarding data collection in the proposed community. Announcing its departure from the project, Alphabet cited economic concerns caused by the uncertainty of the economy amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Smart cities evolve as China defines and develops its national strategy
Since then, smart cities have gone from strength to strength. The early cohort of European smart cities—London, Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Amsterdam—were joined by Boston, New York, and San Francisco in the US, Seoul and Shanghai in Asia, and Wellington in the Asia-Pacific region.
The next wave of smart cities evolved in China, and they continued to grow in size and number. By 2022, China’s central government had been piloting and promoting smart cities as a national strategy for ten years, as a result of which 100% of sub-provincial cities (four in total), 89.6% of prefecture-level cities (293 in total), and 62.8% of county-level cities (395 in total) had formulated plans for city construction as a pilot city designated by various national authorities. It is estimated that roughly half of the world’s smart city projects are in China.
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By GlobalDataChinese tech companies have led the Chinese smart cities market in recent years, helping to spur the development of AI for real-world scenarios, such as counting the number of cars traveling through intersections or spotting accidents on freeways. Chinese cities are, however, also becoming synonymous with AI-enabled mass surveillance.
A more positive adoption of technology in smart cities around the world is the use of digital twins. A digital twin continuously collects information from the built environment via technologies such as sensors, drones, and mobile devices to present an up-to-the-second picture for operations managers.
The leading smart cities in China are Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Chengdu, Chongqing, Guiyang, Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, and Nanjing. Shenzhen won the Smart City of 2024 award at the World Smart City Awards for its Smarter City, Better Life initiative, which focused on transforming the city through digitalization, advanced urban management, and sustainable development to tackle challenges like dense population, resource limitations, and environmental concerns.
NEOM and The Line showcase the Middle East’s smart ambition
The most recent wave of smart cities is in the Middle East. They include Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which combines state-of-the-art technologies with the planning principles of traditional Arab settlements to create a desert community that aims to be carbon neutral and zero waste. The 640-hectare project was established by the government of Abu Dhabi to advance the development of renewable energy and clean-technology solutions for a world beyond oil.
The other showcase project in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, is now arguably the world’s highest-profile smart city. NEOM is a visionary project that is set to transform the Red Sea coast of northwest Saudi Arabia into a futuristic city. It showcases The Line, a 170-kilometer linear city covered in reflective material that would stretch into the desert from the Red Sea.
Recent reports, however, have suggested that progress on The Line may be scaled back. One unconfirmed claim is that only 2.4 kilometers of the project may be completed by 2030. However, despite delays, Neom is regarded as a more than 50-year—or even 100-year—“totemic” project.
London, New York, and Paris are top of the league
Despite the gloss of these new projects and the scale and size of China’s smart cities, research from the Barcelona-based business school, IESE, has indicated that those old European and US smart cities remain at the top of the pile.
Its Cities in Motion Index, which evaluates cities globally based on their performance in various aspects of smart and sustainable development—including human capital, economy, governance, environment, mobility, and technology—found that London, New York, and Paris lead the global rankings for the third consecutive year.
However, Several Asian cities, notably Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, are rapidly closing the gap with the leaders.
The top ten smart cities are London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Washington, D.C., Copenhagen, Oslo, Singapore, and San Francisco. Five years ago, in the wake of Toronto, how smart cities would develop was unclear. The subsequent impact of Covid-19 created further urban uncertainty.
What we know now is that all around the world, smart cities are here to stay.
