Move Continues to Smart Cities, Though Many Mayors Have Questions, Speakers Say at CES

The cities of today grew because of three advances -- the steam engine, the electric grid and the automobile, Aggarwala said. For a hundred years, city planners tried and failed to build the city of the future. A city isn’t a product, it’s a platform, he said. “Like a great platform,” a city “is an opportunity to co-create with users,” he said. “You have to think about all the different layers of a city and you have to make them changeable and adaptable as time goes on,” he said. “The city cannot be a product because it can’t be disposed of.”

An Alphabet company, Sidewalk Labs got started based on a five-word email from Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Aggarwala said: “The city of the future.” Too many decisions about cities are made based on “outdated” models and data, he said. “We want this to be an open platform,” he said. “We’re eager to find partners to work with,” which is why he's at CES, Aggarwala said. Alphabet is also the parent of Google.

“We’ve just the scratched the surface” on smart cities in the U.S., “but we’ve kind of broadly and superficially scratched the surface,” said Stephen Goldsmith, former Indianapolis mayor, now professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Nobody has totally integrated the power of the digital transformation to change the responsiveness of cities,” Goldsmith told us.

It's still unclear for cities whether today’s technologies will soon be obsolete, Goldsmith said. “There is some fear on ‘am I buying the right thing,’” he said. “There’s a little bit concern about how will my community react to this.” Cities also have concerns about privacy and security, he said. Digital technologies “are very broadly disruptive and I think people are a little bit tentative about that,” he said. Cities like Sacramento are pushing deployment of wireless infrastructure and cities like New York are focused on predictive analytics, he said. Some 15-20 cities are focusing on some aspect of the smart city, he said. “Melding those all together I think will be the next thing.” Goldsmith also said so far only cities above 500,000 in population have been very engaged.

Working with a smart city project in Sacramento, Verizon started by focusing on the “pain points” of local officials, the problems they need to solve, said Vice President Lani Ingram. City leaders need to be “bold,” they have to have the “tenacity” to take a chance on technology, she said.

Five years from now will see cities that deploy many more sensors than today, with systems that are more connected than today, said Hardik Bhatt, leader-smart cities and mobility vertical, Amazon Web Services, former chief information officer for Chicago. “The dialogue has shifted to be much more data driven and citizen-centric,” he said. Cities are creating lots of real-time data, he said. “How will we start bringing that together and making meaningful decisions based on that?” he asked. Cities can do a lot with technology and data they already have without having to make massive investments in infrastructure, Bhatt said.

Data is power and the Columbus Partnership is trying to put out as much data as possible in a public way, said Alex Fischer, CEO of the Ohio group. “How do you put the citizen at the center of everything you do,” he asked. The focus has to be on what the city will look like 50 years from now, he said. Michigan has spent years working on smart roads, with the deployment of automated vehicles expected this year, said Kirk Steudle, director of the state’s Department of Transportation. Everyone has to work together -- government agencies across the state, the universities and the private sector, he said.