Llewellyn King: Smart cities need to be walkable, too

Gauchetiere Street, in very walkable Montreal.

— Photo by Gene Arboit

It is coming as surely as cars changed the way we live, as airplanes revolutionized transportation and as the cellphone has conquered all.

It is the smart city of the future.

While it will look much like today’s cities, it will in fact be a digital construct; a place where sensors, interactivity and hyper-electronic speeds replace what will come to be seen as today’s leisurely pace of city operation and communication.

Imagine a place where police cruisers know the location of gunshots before anyone has called 911. Or, as Morgan O’Brien, chief executive officer of Anterix, a creator of private telephone networks for utilities, says, “By using broadband private networks, utilities can know a transmission wire has snapped before it hits the ground.”

Electric utilities, sometimes seen as wedded to the old ways of generation and distribution, have already laid the groundwork for cities’ electronic refurbishment. The first wave of the future, the smart meter, is in more than 60 percent of homes, and deployment continues apace.

The home smart meter does much more than simply record electricity use and ready a bill. It generates data on the local demand and flow patterns in the neighborhood. The smart meter has become vital in helping people save money when electricity prices are low (such as the middle of the night in many jurisdictions), but also helping to integrate the diverse new sources of generation from solar farms, solar panels on rooftops and wind turbines. Keeping tabs on this intermittent generation requires very smart electronics.

“Interconnectivity is the future,” says Clinton Vince, chairman of the U.S. energy practice and co-chairman of the global energy sector at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. Basically, he points out, electric utilities must be very nimble to deal with the new microgrids and with individual generators using rooftop solar. The same applies to wind turbines, where the flow of electricity can be cut off instantly with a wind drop and other sources have to pick up seamlessly.

Chris Peoples, founding and managing partner of the Baltimore-based innovation strategy firm PP&A, says all this hyperactivity in the smart city will be recorded and preserved by blockchain, the ledger system of the 21st century.

To come are electric vehicles and autonomous ridesharing — so important that the big tech companies Cisco, Google, Uber and Amazon have invested in smart cities technologies, and have high hopes for growth there.

The smart city will want an even more reliable electric supply than we have today. Rapid response has been the modus operandi of electric companies down through the decades. Outages are handled with speed and big outages, such as after hurricanes, are dealt with by mobilizing restoration crews from unaffected areas.

But that may not be enough with greater reliance on electricity for things like autonomous vehicles and electric-powered delivery drones. These will have self-sufficiency through their batteries, but they also will need to have control systems that can operate in a blackout.

Anterix, for example, will provide secure broadband communications to utilities, enabling them to communicate when all other systems have failed.

There are two existential threats to the electric grid and, therefore, to the electricity-hungry smart city. One is cyberattack by enemies known and unknown. The other is a magnetic pulse, generated by an act of God in the form of solar flares, or an act of evil in the form of a nuclear weapon detonated overhead. Either way, the grid must be hardened, as far as science allows, against such eventualities

I would submit that this amounts to a brave new world. But I would implore the designers to remember people also want simple things of their cities, like walkability and mobility.

If you get walkability you get livability and, yes, lovability. Think Paris, San Antonio and San Francisco. Get smart, smart city designers.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington.

Llewellyn King: Let's hope that blockchain lets us keep our messy humanity

Depiction of a “smart city’’ — an urban area that uses electronic data-collection sensors to supply information that is used to manage assets and resources efficiently.

Blockchain, the decentralized, open-ledger system that can record permanently multiple transactions, is about to come into its own as the world’s cities move towards digitalization. It portends the kind of urban revolution that cities haven’t seen since water-borne sewage enhanced city livability.

These “smart cities” of the future, big and small, will compete to be the most-wired, most-attractive places for high-tech talent and investment. From Orlando to San Antonio and from Boston to Seattle, the race is underway.

The big telephone companies such as AT&T and Verizon want to wire cities for their 5G and universal WiFi, involving new “short towers.”

Smart cities are cities that are getting ready for the future. The infrastructure that needs to be developed and deployed includes:

An electric grid that senses and manages demand instantly; that allows for two-way flows, as from a self-generator into the utility grid or a customer who wants green power only.

5G technology which will operate on any device and carry city communications to a new level, such as knowing the location of every ambulance and which traffic lights must change to speed one through without hitting a firetruck barreling toward the same destination.

Traffic lights that dim when there is no one on a street, or street lighting that dims when the moon is full or when there is no traffic.

Monitors linked to computers that can identify potential failures in old water or sewer pipes.

Holding it all together -- the sinew of smart cities -- will be blockchain. It’ll be the recording system that will tell whether electricity is flowing from a community generating facility (like a solar farm) and how it’s blending with the utility company’s own generators to the amount of power flowing to street lights.

Blockchain is set to become the ledger of everything, from the billing for your local taxes to keeping track of parking tickets. It will also be a data treasure trove for future planning.

Blockchain is associated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. That’s because it’s not only the system on which those cryptocurrencies were based, but it’s also a powerful tool with multiple uses far beyond them. The original developer of bitcoin, believed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, used blockchain to guarantee the integrity of the new money.

Some blockchain enthusiasts, including many in the big tech companies like IBM, believe and have often said that it can be a bigger disrupter than the Internet. They’re passionate about the blockchain future, as are the big financial institutions where use will speed and verify transactions.

Others, working in the trenches of bringing about the blockchain revolution, are more cautious. Chris Peoples, founding and managing partner of the Baltimore-based innovation strategy firm PP&A, says that one must be wary of the hype. Blockchain, he says, “does promise to open new avenues of value for both organizations and the common good. However, with the technology still undergoing rapid development in the areas of speed, consensus and scalability, it will require the continued support from industry and government to reach its full potential.”

The smart city upside: Cities will become more livable, more manageable and the quality of life for all should improve. The downside: All the sensors and electronic surveillance could represent a new and very real threat to privacy.

There are also questions how much of the brave new urban world we want to have. Proponents of smart cities believe that a time will come when, with autonomous vehicles, the family car will disappear in favor of driverless, ride-sharing vehicles. An app on your phone will summon one and off you’ll go, probably reading your emails as you’re driven safely, thanks to artificial intelligence and blockchain, to your destination. Maybe. People haven’t abandoned their own cars for public transportation.

My view is people want their own stuff in a car -- the old newspapers, the box of peppermints and the fury dice hanging from the mirror. A blockchain-enabled future of smart cities is dandy if we can keep our inefficient humanness.

We aren’t all yearning to be efficient in everything. We treasure a bit of muddle. I hope we can teach that to the computers and put it into immutable blockchain.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a veteran publisher, columnist and international business consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.