To create truly smart cities, we must first define what a smart city is

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of small towns and cities across Europe were transformed by industrialisation. While most developed ad hoc, with little planning, and quickly became blighted by slum tenements that provided nothing more than the bare minimum, there were also a number of experiments in more benevolent developments such as Bournville in the UK, near Birmingham, built by the Cadbury family as a model village for their workers. As utopian as the ideals behind Bournville were, there was also a profit motive: the family patriarch, George Cadbury, hoped that Bournville would alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living conditions, make his workers happier and boost production.

As recently as 2013, Bournville – which has a population of around 25,000 – was chosen as the best place in the UK in which to live, suggesting that Cadbury got much right.

Later, the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier had his own vision of the ideal city. In the early 20th century, he hit upon an idea he called purism, in which architecture would be as efficient and simple as the industrial machines that had ushered in the modern age.

Central to Le Corbusier’s vision were enormous apartment blocks which would house millions of people, both rich and poor. The Czech city of Zlín, developed in the 1920s and 1930s around the Bata shoe factory, can trace its lineage to Le Corbusier’s vision of urban modernity. The urban plan of Zlín was the creation of František Lydie Gahura, a student at Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris. Le Corbusier’s inspiration was evident in the basic principles of the city’s architecture, however. On his visit to Zlín in 1935, Le Corbusier was appointed to preside over the selective procedure for new apartment houses, and received a commission for creating the plan for further expansion of the city and the company.

While the hundreds of thousands of apartment blocks which appeared across emerging Europe in the two decades after World War II also drew on Le Corbusier’s vision, most were built in great haste at minimal cost with little consideration for quality of life. There are exceptions, such as Eisenhüttenstadt in Germany, Dimitrovgrad in Bulgaria and Dunaújváros in Hungary – all modelled to some degree on the Soviet Union’s Magnitogorsk. Nowa Huta, in Kraków, Poland, however, is perhaps the best example of a communist-era planned city.

The city is laid out in a star-like pattern that spreads out from a vast central square (Plac Centralny) and is built in a grand architectural style that combines renaissance elegance with the functional elements of socialist realism.

Even here though, the huge steel works whose workers lived in Nowa Huta made life difficult, coating both the new city and historic Kraków with a corrosive smog, negating the effect of the many green spaces which were designed to make life more attractive than in the narrowed, cobbled streets of Kraków.

Nowa Huta nevertheless remains one of very few exceptions to the rule in emerging Europe. Even today, the vast majority of the region’s population live not in garden suburbs but in high-rise apartment blocks that are energy inefficient and prone to creating social unrest. Most have collective heating systems which, deprived of funding for repairs, break down frequently. Many of the Romanian capital Bucharest’s collective housing blocks went weeks without heating and hot water in January as the city’s central heating system failed.

If contemporary urban planners are to be believed, the creation of smart cities is about to solve such problems. The idea is simple: that the existing urban environment can be transformed by the use of technology, driven by the Internet of Things and 5G connectivity.

We can all live in Bournville, is the promise, even if home is on the 16th floor of a poorly-built high-rise apartment block.

And yet as the experience of Bucharest this winter demonstrates, we are still a long way from getting there. For a start, while the phrase smart city has been on the lips of just about every mayor and urban administrator for a number of years, across the globe we seem further away than ever from defining what the term actually means.

In its most earnest form smart city is a designation given to a city that incorporates information and communication technologies to enhance the quality and performance of urban services such as energy, transportation and utilities in order to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs. The overarching aim of a smart city is to enhance the quality of living for its citizens through smart technology.

The range of technologies that can be incorporated into a city in order for it to be considered smart is likewise so broad that some critics believe that the phrase has yet to develop any real meaning. What’s more, it can often used to obfuscate or cosmeticise technological developments that might in fact be implemented to the detriment of citizens.

In China, for example, the phrase has been used to make increases in surveillance and control appear more palatable.

Neither is becoming a smart city a one-way street. Citizens and communities have to use the technology that cities make available to them. In many parts of the world, including emerging Europe, large numbers of people are reluctant to do so, eschewing even simple bank accounts.

This is not the case in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, which has long been hailed as the first genuinely smart city in the region. Indeed, the entire country can itself claim to be smart, with almost all government services available online.

The Intelligent Community Forum, a think tank, recently ranked Tallinn as one of the leading seven intelligent communities in the world. The others were Adelaide in Australia, Sunshine Coast, Hamilton and Markham (Canada), and Hudson and Westerville in Ohio, United States.

As the ICF admits, the seven communities are not necessarily the most advanced technology centres, the most wired cities or the fastest growing economies in the world. “Instead, each exemplifies best practices in broadband deployment and use, workforce development, innovation, digital inclusion and advocacy that offer lessons to regions, cities, towns and villages around the world. They are charting new paths to lasting prosperity for their citizens, businesses and institutions.”

In the coming weeks and months, Emerging Europe will be chronicling the continent’s progress towards creating genuinely smart cities in a special Urban Tech report.

For the purpose of this research we have defined urban tech as all technology available that directly improves a city’s sustainability and city life on key fronts: mobility and infrastructure, connectivity and digitalisation, education and work, government and governance, real estate and the environment. It is the smart solutions and technologies that offer new opportunities for businesses and communities to operate within a city and to be more efficient, effective and streamlined.

The report structure will be based on the cities’ goals and objectives and reflect findings on future trends and initiatives that drive urban tech developments and opportunities. Our analysts will conduct first and second degree research in different areas, such as (but not limited to) urban mobility, smart cities, infrastructure, real estate, healthy living, green energy, town planning, community development, data science, public services and governance, smart homes and public safety.

The report will also analyse the local ecosystem, digitalisation, data security, policy and regulations and smart tech to understand what role they play in creating an advanced and interconnected urban tech ecosystem based on hundreds of interviews and surveys.

We will look at the vendors and start-ups creating the technology that will make smart cities possible, and profile best practice across the region. Tallinn may be the current gold standard, but the city (and Estonia’s) small size has made the implementation of smart technology easier.

Larger cities face different challenges, and it is clear that there is no ‘one size fits all’ smart city masterplan that can be adopted globally. Cities will need to prioritise areas for smart development, applying solutions piecemeal, such as the Hungarian capital Budapest which is currently rolling out a smart parking technology to ease congestion and encourage the use of public transport.

What is clear is that for emerging Europe – home to some of the continent’s most polluted cities – the need to get smart is arguably greater than other regions. This creates an opportunity for the bright minds behind the region’s start-ups to provide those solutions. According to IDC, a financial intelligence think tank, global spending on smart city initiatives will total 124 billion US dollars in 2020.

We are about to find out if they are up to the task.

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