Cities are the economic powerhouses of society and home to more than half the world’s population. As they continue to grow, how will they adapt and change to new technologies, climate conditions and the population demands of the future? By Stuart Matthews
It’s the future and like the estimated six billion other urban dwellers by 2045, you live in a city. As a lucky citizen of the developed world you may look forward to a commute involving a combination of mass transit and smaller scale node transport to get you from office – or remote hot-desking work station – to home. A driverless metro system or electric bus may cover the big distances, dropping you at a solar-powered taxi rank, where self-driving electric cabs let you share a ride home with a few other locals. You’re dropped off mere minutes from your 3D-printed home, made of recycled and recyclable materials, roofed with solar panels storing their excess power in the grid. You might work from home some days or maybe, just maybe, you walk to work.
It’s a future that is in view and yet just out of sight, but decisions the planning, design and construction industries make now will impact people’s lives for decades to come. As the pace of innovation quickens, so too must the industry’s responsiveness to change if it is to produce urban environments that match and better people’s widely differing views of what the future will look like. As the economic powerhouses of nations, cities are crucial to driving growth and sustaining large populations, but they also have to work like machines and change like a living thing if they are to be successful. Best-case scenarios where development is done right paint a picture of thriving and sustainable metropolises.
“The city of the near future will be a great place to be,” says Joseph Danko, CH2M’s Senior Vice President for Urban Environments and Sports. “More than the sum of its parts, the city will be a vibrant, accessible community that attracts business and provides an environment where people want to live, work and play.
“The city is focused on current and evolving needs to create a place that enables long-term prosperity, social wellbeing and wise use of natural resources. This future city features a transit-oriented and walkable town, water and energy conservation, renewable power sources, and a healthy quality of life while maintaining the area’s unique cultural heritage. There is tremendous potential for all citizens.”
It’s a text book description that relies on a city being more than just buildings and streets. What CH2M refers to as ‘places in between’ have come to be symbols of the successes and failures of some cities, as they try to bring their populations together in useable public spaces. They are spaces that can have a huge impact on how a city is perceived by its residents and show that attracting investment and generating growth is as much about the public experience as the transportation, buildings, and other infrastructure.
“Integrating the historic and cultural fabric with creativity and innovation will create a sense of place in the public realm. This is what creates community – that sense of belonging to something special about ‘my place’,” says Danko. “This is what attracts and retains the people and ultimately enables a city to thrive.”
Dank believes that the future industry will have to deliver urban design grounded in local culture and diversity, involving public, private, and other partnerships to foster creative, practical innovation, with inclusive housing strategies encompassing all income levels.
“We must accentuate what is unique about each city and intentionally build from their special assets and ‘strengthen their strengths’,” he says. “This will enable them to attract investment and create long-term core jobs consistent with their special qualities.”
Smart technologies will have a growing role in creating the cities of the future, making mobility easier and also enabling city control centres to better manage traffic flow, natural resources and operating costs. The Internet of Things (IoT), big data and smart cities are the new buzzwords, while sensor technology provides real-time data that can influence everything from personal comfort to clean water and energy. The trick though is bringing all of this information together and deploying the insight it can bring alongside a host of other considerations spanning social, environmental and economic benefits.
“It’s really the harmonisation of technology with a sustainable environment in the broadest sense of the word – including the social, economic and environmental aspects – by knitting together technology to deliver ease of living and economic success,” explains Christopher Seymour, head of markets and development – Middle East, at Arcadis.
As technology stands today Seymour believes the greatest impact the idea of the ‘smart city’ might have will be found in the management systems that drive everything from governance to physical infrastructure, urban mobility, waste, energy and even parking. Its an area where the developing cities of the GCC have a distinct advantage.
“The GCC is quite young in development terms, so they are probably going to take on the systems faster than the West because they don’t have legacy [systems],” says Seymour. “It means that we are quite often seeing developments in the GCC emerge a bit quicker. And we’re seeing it around physical infrastructure because the investment in that infrastructure has the biggest positive impact on gross domestic product (GDP).”
A boost to GDP and other economic benefits are one of the key areas where advances in planning, infrastructure and the associated technologies can have a significant impact.
“It’s been proven on a number of occasions that investment in mobility particularly has one of the biggest positive impacts in GDP there is,” says Seymour. “Transport oriented design is really something that knits together mobility and the best of very modern urban living and when you connect those, then you start to see the real advances that smart cities can make. The easier you make something the more people use it, the more it improves economic success.”
Delivering this kind of success in the development of the smart city is likely to take more than just technology. While technology can look impressive in isolation when you come down to the practical use its limitations can be exposed. Companies that can get the balance right may be best placed to have their ideas have the greatest impact, as Seymour explains.
“Not only do companies need to have a vision, they need to have their feet on the ground. I’ve seen suggestions that have been well worked around technological improvement for a city and would have an impact in a number of ways, but when you actually think about the practicality the need is low: sometimes you find a technological improvement that is an an answer looking for a question.
“We’ve got to make sure that that is not the case. Those systems that have the greatest impact are those that are simple and tackle real needs.”
But with these technologies comes the need for more information about every step in the development and operation of the built environment. While BIM has gradually caught on in the GCC it represents the tip of the information iceberg. BIM can model a building but those models are being extended to cover an entire environment, adding in details and building up a picture that takes in each and every asset. As technology develops and, crucially, integrates, everyone from landowners, tenants, residents and visitors could gain a greater understanding of what a city has. It’s an area of development that could have a significant impact on contractors.
“The contracting companies that need to create these assets have to start first with the base technology,” says Seymour. “We’re seeing a very rapid up-skill in the construction sector already, with people who understand how to develop and build information models, not just as a design tool, but as a tool which will enable that asset to be built and helps you actually run the building. If you can run the building you can extend that and run the city.
“I have seen a significant advance in that type of staffing, with that expertise, over the last year in a lot of construction companies and it’s driven by need.”
As well as finding the right people a key challenge will be finding the right time and place to deploy the technologies, with the biggest opportunities occurring around new city areas. There new ideas can be woven into designs and if included at an early stage can be in a stronger position to provide good economic outcomes at the end.
“It’s really a matter of knowing about it early,” says Seymour. “It’s very similar to the environmental challenge where it is possible to show very easily there’s a very low increase in cost in terms of achieving an environmental standard if you think about it early enough.”
Retrofitting may present more of a challenge. Although in the case of energy conservation there is a clear need and a usually definable pay back period, it is a tougher economic equation than in most new builds. The benefit of the investment has to be considered in the much longer term.
“Generally speaking retrofitting usually looks a very long term play,” says Seymour. “Whereas if you are incorporating ideas in new designs you are getting an impact pretty quickly, with a much faster payback. One of the reasons we sometimes see the developed world being a bit behind in smart solutions – sometimes further behind than developing regions – is it’s really about bang for the buck and how fast you’re getting that bang that really matters.”
Bundling these ideas into a future environment labelled a ‘smart city’ is a tough ask, not least because there is so little clarity about what a smart city might actually be. There is no one definition and interpretations change to align with agendas, with much of the discussion driven by tech companies. Without clarity anything substantive may be tough to deliver.
“There’s a lot of exploration trying to figure out what ‘smart cities’ actually mean,” explains Steven Velegrinis, director of urban design, Perkins+Will. “A lot of people don’t have a clear idea of what it means, including most professionals in the industry.”
Velegrinis cites a project experience where a development had been identified as a pilot for smart cities. With few people clear on what that meant, much investigation and research was needed to identify the factors that would help to deliver a meaningful result.
“Smart is not necessarily about information technology, but really looking at every disciplinary area, every aspect of a city and trying to build smarter cities,” he says. “It’s an approach that’s saying everything has a relationship through smartness.”
The impact of climate change and how it is handled will be crucial to the future development of cities. As people think about the future of their cities and the environment around them Velegrinis suggests that the idea of resilience in terms of climate change and how a city might responded will be crucial.
“That translates to smartness about the way cities are designed,” says Velegrinis. “I think there’s some parts of the world, such as the US and Europe, where there’s very advanced thinking about resilience. In other parts of the world, like a lot of the emerging markets in the Middle East and Asia, there’s not a clear understanding of how important it is and how much it means.”
Addressing issues of resilience could mean anything from looking at seasonal flooding problems, or examining the potential impacts of sea level change, while facilitating urban development at the same time. Future solutions may involve floating buildings, or adjustments to ground level for plots close to the coast.
“Those examples are looked at in a multitude of ways and we need to look at a multitude of issues, usually revolving around energy cycles, water cycles, or material cycles,” explains Velegrinis. “Locally we’ve worked on projects where the project is coastal and in particular there’s a clear understanding of how we should plan for future sea level rises.
“One project we’ve worked on in the Western Region required that the levels of the site be increased from the current one metre above sea level to two metres, as a platform. So there’s already a lot of things happening regionally and locally, but there is a very poor understanding in the industry about how we respond to those things.”
It’s an approach that could influence how the various disciplines that make up the wider design and construction industry work together. Velegrinis describes the challenges of resiliency as being multidisciplinary, requiring a combination of the skills of master planning, engineering, landscape architecture and hydrology among others. Catering to such a broad array of skill sets means companies have to think differently about how they hire, in order to be able to grasp with the complexities of the challenges future cities will face.
“It’s a shift in the way that urban planning in particular is happening,” he says.
“We recognise that you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what the city of the future will be, you don’t even know what will happen in the development industry in ten years time. The kind of approach we’re taking accepts that the masterplan can and must evolve over time. So what you design is really a robust framework and a vision for what it will be – you accept there will be significant change – and a system that’s open enough to accommodate as much change as possible.”
If you have to accept that a city will change in unexpected ways how will organisations be able to deal with the challenges this will create? Velegrinis says that one of the challenges is that the construction of infrastructure and other developments is often separate: there are companies that deal with one or the other.
“The construction industry needs to evolve into one that understands that everything they do is an addition to an existing city, which is a conceptually challenging idea for companies that typically just want to have and work on defined tasks,” says Velegrinis. “They need to understand that everything they do has an impact outside of the place they are working.”
Companies that grasp this and other evolving ideas that will influence the development of urban habitats stand a greater chance of being the ones building the cities of the future. Regardless of what form they take or what technologies they contain, the only certainty is that these cities will be full of people. Making a successful, comfortable and sustainable environment for them remains the challenge.