A few weeks ago we posted in our blog on publiciota.com following post. To give further attention to this article, we publish it now, a bit overworked, here.

In this article, we will continue our journey into the future with the Smart Cities. In particular, we will discuss the role that IOTA can play in this. public IOTA contacts experts for the respective topics in order to carry out a basic research. We are particularly pleased that we were able to receive guest authors Nina Pfuderer and Lena Papasabbas from the “Zukunftsinstitut”. The guest text of these authors is reproduced in the second half of the text. The “Zukunftsinstitut” was founded in 1998 and decisively shaped trend and future research in Germany from the beginning. Today, the company is considered one of the most influential think tanks in European trend and futures research. Our guest author Lena Papasabbas deals with the transformation of the network society, its people, values and technologies. As a cultural anthropologist she is interested in all facets of our increasingly heterogeneous culture and deals with central development dynamics.

From global perspective, cities are getting bigger. Every 16 months, the population of a city exceeds the ten million mark. This ongoing process of urbanization therefore creates challenges that need to be mastered to ensure a high standard of living. Without intelligent technology, giant cities can turn into monster cities. The challenge is therefore to design the city of the future to be technologically intelligent and networked so that urban living spaces can be cleaner, safer and more stress-free. The cryptocurrency IOTA will be playing a crucial role in the interconnected city of the future.

An opportunity: improving the quality of life for all residents

According to a forecast, no later than 2050, 60 percent of humanity will be living in cities. A whole range of things are desirable to improve the quality of life in a big city. In particular, the gap between poor and rich is often incredibly large in big cities. A city of the future, a smart city, uses smart and connected technologies to simplify our daily lives. They help us to save time, use new forms of mobility and breathe cleaner air. To put it in a nutshell, Smart City technologies are working to improve the overall quality of life for their residents. Less congestion, smart homes and energy efficient use of buildings are just a few of the benefits. All of this is also necessary to guide people out of the poorer outskirts of the city and to make them aware of the Smart City project — because it can only succeed if the inhabitants take advantage of it.

What exactly is a Smart City

In a Smart City, modern technologies from the areas energy/electricity, mobility, urban planning, administration and communication are interconnected in a way as to improve the quality of life for all residents, allowing the city’s sustainability and climate to benefit as well. Interconnected areas require quick data and finance transfer in order to work at their best.

The term “Smart City” is used in a wide sense and cannot be narrowed down to one definition. It originated in the political environment and summarizes the economic, technological and social concepts for a green city that’s worth living in.

Compared to conventional cities, Smart Cities aim to be more efficient, sustainable and progressive. A Smart City approaches problems arising from demographic change and growth, pollution, climate change and shortage of resources with innovative concepts and technologies. Constant interactions between the residents and the surrounding technologies allow human aspects and technology to merge and design a joint infrastructure. New information and communication technologies are employed in order to protect resources, improve the quality of life for every resident and to increase the competitiveness of the city and its economy.

However, not only do technological factors play an important part, social aspects are a crucial matter of interest to a Smart City. Central focus points of a Smart City are the following areas:

Mobility and infrastructure

Energy efficiency

Protection of the environment and resources

Economic appeal

Resident-friendly administration

Residents’ quality of life

The concepts of a Smart City influence many areas of modern cities. One of the goals to achieve in the energy sector is to stop employing fossil fuels on a long-term basis, and to establish electric mobility. Integrated energy strategies are being created for public, private and commercial areas. Interconnection between infrastructure, mobility and energy creates additional synergies. Residents are actively included and taking part in the measures. In order to achieve its goals, a Smart City will become some kind of Internet for all things and services and will be equipped with sensors to perform an extensive collection of data as well as execute payments. Collected data will be analyzed and shared with each of the areas and measures via the cloud. Digital systems manage whole infrastructures in real-time, or building structures turn into energy suppliers.

Another aspect included in the concepts are the different circulation processes e.g. for the water and wastewater/sewage regime or for recycling garbage. The mobility area mainly focuses on promoting emission-free vehicles and mobility concepts. All services will be available online to provide a resident-friendly administration. The entirety of the public administration will represent a service provider and provider of innovative urban applications while fully involving the residents in their activities and services. This also includes areas of public security and health care.

Slowly Implementing the Concept of Smart Cities

Today, many cities are already working towards different concepts of Smart Cities and are actively implementing projects from the different areas: In order to provide more mobility, flexible carsharing, charging stations for electric cars or traveling routes optimized by actively accessing users’ app data are already available. In the field of delivery services, projects exist, which create central locations with warehouse boxes for delivery services as reloading and collecting points. This enables recipients to collect their delivery at any time or let bike couriers take care of the last stage of delivery.

Street lamps, which automatically turn on when a vehicle or person approaches, or traffic lights with longer green phases for buses, ensure more energy efficiency, safety and mobility.

Many cities install photovoltaic systems on public buildings such as schools or city halls to avoid using fossil fuels and to foster regenerative energy sources. If the municipality also operates the urban power supply system, it may become a provider of electricity for its residents.

Vision: Smart City

The rapid development of information technologies changes the image of modern cities profoundly. In order to ensure a normal urban life, an infrastructure, which is essentially different and uses intelligent networks, is necessary. Smart technologies will become the foundation for the construction of future mega cities. In 10 years, many infrastructural measures will have been implemented.

Smart Cities and Smart Homes will then be benefiting from the introduction of a digital ledger technology such as IOTA. By combining sensors, smart contracts and high security in Tangle, the management of mega cities will be able to visibly improve the quality of life of the population.

McKinsey’s predictions demonstrate that in 2020, there will be at least six hundred cities with smart technologies on this planet. Until 2050, these urban clusters will provide for around 70 percent of the GDP. The market for those cities will amount to around 400 billion per year. We assume that in 10 years, all big cities in this world are interconnected and linked with IOTA in many aspects. Of course, it’s still a way to go, but following visions may already be reality in 10 years’ time.

Intelligent buildings: Locations where information networks and technological communication are administered in a unified control system. This enables interaction between different service systems. For instance, an office building can be heated before the workday begins and the climatization can be adjusted to the current temperature of the rooms. The control system considers the amount of people in the building and rates the quality of the air in order to enable a pleasant stay. After everyone has left, the building automatically turns on the energy-saving mode. It’s true that the Smart City requires a considerable technological capacity, in order to enable millions of Smart Homes to work.

Intelligent infrastructure: Intelligent networks monitor traffic, gather traffic regulations and immediately react to incidents. There’s no need to worry about the innovative parking lot, since the system calculates the most logistic route.

Appropriate consumption: Innovation in energy and water consumption. This could refer to progressive programs, which manage the consumption of water and technologies in relation with renewable energies. They make for control the water consumption and improved communication networks in order to provide environmental safety of the system.

In the next few months, all IOTA projects that have been started today will become pilot projects for the beginning of countless new Smart City projects. To name a few:

Haarlem

Last year, the Netherlands were the first country to implement IOTA (MIOTA) in their governmental organizations, starting with the city of Haarlem.

Commissioned by the municipality of Haarlem, ICTU and Xurux developed a Proof of Concept to administrate and verify legal documents regarding housing within public registers via the open source network “Tangle” created by the IOTA Foundation.

Taipei

Taipei signed a partnership agreement with the Germany-based IOTA Foundation to explore Smart City solutions based on Tangle. The city has already launched a number of projects including digital identification and air quality monitoring systems. Taipei has become one of the first cities in the world to test out IOTA.

“A lot of people probably have the notion that blockchain technology is universal, but it’s not,” said Lman Chu, the co-founder of Biilabs, a start-up looking for a better Smart City solution than blockchain. The Taiwan start-up is collaborating with the Taipei City government and working with the IOTA Foundation to provide the core technology for the smart city projects. See our article BiiLabs ID System based on IOTA supports Taipei on the way to Smart City

+CityxChange

The consortium/syndicate +CityxChange, which the IOTA Foundation belongs to as well, received financial help for a lighthouse project as part of an EU research and innovation program.

In order to try out smart energy innovations, seven EU cities have been given a total of 30 million euro. 25 companies and organizations including the distributed ledger technology IOTA form the consortium “+CityxChange”. The group lead by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) competed with 11 other suggestions for the development of energy-independent cities. The blockchain technology will be used to improve the quality of life in European cities.

In the next five years, the European cities Trondheim, Limerick, Alba Iulia, Pisek, Sestao, Smolyan and Voru will be testing digital services in order to improve the quality of life and to generate more energy than is being used. They will share their experiences with cities in all of Europe in order to drive forth the further development of the “Smart City”.

Funds of 20 million euro will be provided by the European research and innovation program Horizon in 2020. Some of the project partners will provide 10 million euro in kind for the local implementation of display projects in Trondheim and Limerick. The project +CityxChange has been praised by independent experts for contributing to a further diffusion in the future.

All submitted energy solutions include local authorities and residents who will “include the entire energy supply chain of the district and doesn’t extend to profit organisations, but to high-ranking political decision makers, cities, universities, large businesses, distributed network operators and KMU”.

Based on IOTA

Wilfried Pimenta, Head of Business Development of the IOTA Foundation describes the project as “based to 100 percent of the IOTA Foundation”:

Smart Cities belong to the fastest growing innovation areas across sectors for IOTA. Basen on our work and our partnerships in mobility, energy or the data market, the smart urban ecosystems unite everything.

The Norwegian co-founder of the IOTA Foundation, David Sønstebø, is looking forward to the project and cooperation with Norway’s biggest university, the NTNU:

“The opportunity to explore and showcase IOTA’s potential in the context of Smart Cities in numerous European cities will be of high value to the future.”

The Future of Smart Cities Belongs to IOTA

The time has come where an increasing number of Smart Cities will come into existence. IOTA may be the key for a future concept of data transfer and payments.

Future Challenges in Urban Spaces — How Technology can help us to live better lives

Cities are the states of tomorrow. More and more people worldwide live in urban spaces, making cities powerful economic players and political stakeholders and the most important problem solvers in our globalised world. But cities are more than places: They are the most important living spaces of humans all over the world, which makes the problems of cities the most urgent problems of humankind.

The Challenges of the cities are the challenges of the future

The challenges we face in our cities decide over the future of our planet, our economy and our future quality of life. Already 70% of the world’s population live in urban spaces — by 2050 according to United Nations the total amount of the world population living in cities will be more than 6 billion. One could say, cities are the future labs of the world, the condensed spaces act like a catalyst for change.

Unlike rural life, urban spaces are so densely populated that we need the help of smart technologies and environments to ensure a high quality of life. The faster a city grows the more urgent become problems like pollution, traffic jams, noise and shortage of space. And especially in the developing world, cities grow bigger and bigger too fast, because people from rural areas strive to come to the city to try their luck. The tale of the man leaving for the big city to find success and happiness is as old as the existence of cities itself. However, it has also never been more accurate. Many rural areas lose their attractivity in an economical, but also in a social or cultural sense.

This immense influx of rural populations is creating cities with over a million inhabitants. Megacities are cities or metropolitan regions with more than 10 million inhabitants. According to the UN, the largest ones are the Tokyo metropolitan region with around 37 million inhabitants, followed by Delhi with 29 million, Shanghai with 26 million and Mexico City and Sao Paulo with 22 million inhabitants each. The UN predicts that by 2030 there will be 43 megacities, most of them in developing countries (UN 2018).

From Megacity to Gigacities

A development towards future gigacities with more than 100 million inhabitants is being driven primarily in China. While in other regions of the world cities are growing more and more due to the individual migration of the rural population, in China the government is pushing the rural population to move to the cities. For this purpose, not only the controlled growth of existing metropolitan areas is promoted, but cities are designed from scratch. However, these cities have little or nothing to do with historically grown cities as we know it. The planned Giga region of Jing-Jin-Ji, consisting of the cities of Beijing, Tianjin and the surrounding province of Hebei, is to accommodate over 130 million people on an area of more than 200.000 square kilometers. This is not just a demonstration of power, but above all an attempt to relieve the city centres. Beijing is in a traffic collapse: a permanent traffic jam on the streets, the subways hopelessly overcrowded, air pollution omnipresent — nevertheless, rents have skyrocketed to such an extent that they have become unaffordable for huge parts of the population.

The interrelation of sustainability and quality of life become more and more obvious in cities. Clean air, little noise, unobstructed mobility and enough space for everyone — these are in fact the big challenges of the future that to some extent every city faces and that decide on the quality of life a city can offer.

Will technology save us?

Some of the technologies we need to build a better future in the cities of today are already here. Possibilities digitalisation gave us are waiting for us to use them and make some steps towards a smarter way of living. Digital tools for sharing cars and rides to dramatically reduce the noise and air pollution in cities for example are already existent. If people would use these services to share rides the traffic in inner cities could be halved, which means less noise, less pollution and less need for multi-laned streets. It would also mean less need for parking space, which would open room for more attractive uses of space like broad walking lanes, street cafés or art. And less cars with more people in them would also speed up the traffic, that is so often stuck in the roush hours. Add e-mobility to the scenario and you get a more clean, quiet and sustainable place to live in.

But a technological innovation alone is not enough to make a change. Especially in Europe a social innovation is needed: Making use of sharing providers, changing everyday mobility habits and — maybe most difficult: losing the idea that you need to own and drive your own car as a status symbol or as a matter of comfort. Cities have to get smarter, technologically and socially. All the connected smart devices are futile, if we don’t use them intelligently.

Other technologies, which could immensely contribute to solve the big challenges of the cities are just in the making. Blockchain-based technologies make the distribution of electricity smarter and include local prosumers and renewable sources for example. Other projects, like Iota try to enhance the machine to machine communication, which is crucial when so many gadgets and machines have to get entangled for example to ensure the seamless mobility of so many vehicles and people that all together form a network of cars, parking lots, E-Bikes, public transport, traffic lights, gas stations and so forth. Could they interact more efficiently with all the needed data being present when needed, the whole city could change into better.

Imagine, somewhere in the near future, your e-car drives you autonomously while you can do your daily meditation routine, chat with your friends or share the ride with people who make the same routes through the city regularly. Imagine the self-driving car will pay the smart electro stations itself, the electro stations being integrated in a smart energy grid which in turn operates with renewable energies, that include local producers. Smart data could control the traffic lights so all sorts of traffic (cars, bikes, pedestrians) would intertwine seamlessly. Cities would get safer and more enjoyable.

One smart device alone doesn’t make a smart city nor a smart future. Only the coworking and interlocking of many different smart devices within the internet of things makes the next step. Cities are basically dense networks of people, things and technology. Making these networks smarter, in the sense of the different agents working together more effortlessly and with less space, time and natural resources being wasted is the key to provide a high quality of life. by Nina Pfuderer and Lena Papasabbas (Zukunftsinsitut)

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