Connected Towns and Cities - Dr. Jonathan Reichental

Hello everyone. I'm Dr. Jonathan Reichental and I'm thrilled to be with you to be part of this connected towns and cities event in Ireland. I was born and raised in Ireland, so it's always a great privilege and honor to be able to give back in some small way. I'm going to spend the next few minutes speaking with you about the global smart and connected cities movement. I want to tell you about things that are working well and and perhaps some of the things that need some work during my time together. I'd love for you to tweet. Here's my Twitter handle and I will retweet and respond to the best messages that I see posted. So our future belongs to Cities. Today, over 50% of all people live in an urban context and that's going to grow considerably over the next 20 and 30 years. About 3 million people move into cities every single week. And we're building the equivalent of Manhattan somewhere in the world with infrastructure every month. And we'll do that for the next 40, 40 years. Cities are probably the most complicated thing that humans have ever built, and they are probably the most successful of all human inventions. They've brought billions of people out of extreme poverty, creating opportunities in education and in health care and economics, and access to more free time and entertainment. In fact, in the period 2008-2015, about 200 million people in India were brought out of extreme poverty. That means earning less than $1 a day. 200 million people were brought out of extreme poverty into the working classes and beyond. Cities have been very successful and this will be the century of cities. However, during the 20th century, we had a great big party and now in the 21st century, we've got a bit of a hangover. Our cities have been successful, but they have also created a lot of of challenges, including challenges that we have yet to solve. For example, we began a love affair with cars and that love affair continues to this day. But it creates a lot of congestion and frustration. Plus, all those combustion engines are pumping carbon emissions into the atmosphere and creating part of the contribution towards our current climate crisis. We can't add millions more cars to this picture and expect that the situation is going to improve. In our cities, we have hyper consumerism. We've created factories that are producing an abundance of products for people and communities all over the world. But the byproduct of that, of course, are things like bad air quality. It's anticipated or estimated, excuse me, by the World Health Organization, that air quality or poor air quality contributes to the death of about 8 million people around the world, directly and indirectly each year. And a lot of this production happens because of and within our cities. Well, when you produce a lot of things, you produce a lot of waste. And our cities are places of incredible wastage and we have to take care of that every day. What do we do with it? And some of it, in fact the vast majority of it is not easily disposed of. Plastic, for example, can last for thousands of years. We end up putting it in landfills and just hoping it disappears if we can't see it. But it also makes its way to our rivers and our lakes and our streams and the oceans. That's terrible because it damages the fish ecosystems and the sea ecosystems which are so important for humans. And we end up, because the fish consume the plastic, we sometimes eat the plastic too. And it's thought that each of us eats the equivalent of about a credit card of plastic each week because of plastic making its way back into our food ecosystem. And even though our cities have provided amazing opportunities for billions of people, not everybody is prospering. We do not have equality and inclusion in all our communities. Much, much work needs to be done. Even in great American cities and European cities and Australian cities and cities all over the world. Some part of our societies are not being included. And until everyone has opportunity, our societies are not equal. We don't have opportunity for all of us. And that's something that needs to be resolved. And it's our cities that are magnifying, excuse me, amplifying the problem. And it needs to be resolved. Of course. The 800 pound gorilla in the room is the climate crisis. I think we've all now come to the conclusion through the scientific consensus that human behavior, particularly the production of carbon emissions, has contributed greatly towards the average temperatures of the earth increasing over the last century or so. And we're reaching a critical point now if we're going to solve or at least manage this problem, because perhaps it's not reversible anymore, we can slow it down a lot. So it's manageable. We're going to do that in our cities also. Cities are at the brunt of this. We have about 535 cities on coastlines, representing about 1 1/2 billion humans. And it's coastlines that are already experiencing the effects of something like sea level rise, but they also experience the impact of hurricanes when, when they happen more frequently. And when they do happen, they're stronger. And some communities, of course, around the world are suffering from drought when it, when there's drought. It's. It's longer and more severe. So it's our cities that are at the front line of climate change, as well as being where a lot of this problem can be innovated around and we can begin to find solutions and start to manage the issue being tactical for a second. Getting down to sort of what it looks like in a lot of our towns and communities is your typical government office. This one here being where San Franciscans get their driver's license, either get a new one or get one renewed. And this is how we often think about government. It's a little bit. Well, it's quite a lot inefficient. Right. And it needs to be upgraded. We don't like to sit in a room like this and spend our day, you know, waiting for our number to be called. And perhaps when we do go up to the counter, we're missing a document and then we have to go home and come back again. It's not something we look forward to. It's quite inefficient when in reality, what we want to do is we want to be able to use our digital devices. Government is due for a significant makeover. We need to move from this sort of analog world that we have today to a digital world. And cities and towns and all levels of government are beginning to get on this journey of digital transformation. So you can access a large number of services just from your device. This represents a lot of opportunity for cities and towns, but also for providers to help make this happen. And this is actually one of the areas where we see good results. So this is things that are going well. It's easier to digitize an analog service like a form that you would typically need to go to an office for, put that form on a smartphone than it is, say, to apply a. A massive Internet of Things infrastructure or upgrade all the streetlights. Those are harder projects. Now, the towns, the connected towns and cities movement is an incredibly diverse topic, impacting things like our buildings and health and education and energy and public safety. And so these are things that are very deeply connected, if you like, to every one of us. These are not abstract things. These are things we think about all the time for ourselves, our family, our friends, our organizations. In each of these areas, there is a lot of room left for innovation. In fact, we need mostly innovation to be able to tackle the problems and challenges we face in each of these in our communities. So it is a great opportunity. Frost and Sullivan says that over the next four years, only the actual market value for providing Supporting innovation, particularly technology to support our connected towns and cities being worth about $2.45 trillion. That's with a t trillion over the next decade. This activity to improve and upgrade and enhance our community so it provides better services will generate over $20 trillion in economic value around the world. Right? Not in Ireland, around the world. To communities in every country in the world. So what's actually working right now? What things are we doing? I love this example of the great city of Paris, not too far there from Dublin. I visited many times myself. And what you're looking at here is a future rendering of a project that's been approved. And this is the creation of an urban garden at the center of Paris. Here you see the Champs Elysees in the foreground. There you see, excuse me, Right in the distance you see the Arc de Triomphe. And you know, there's been a significant reduction in cars here. Lots more trees, a lot more support for people. Because what's happened is, you know, the center of Paris has become very popular and there are a lot of accidents and it can be polluted and noisy and there can be a smell because of all the combustion engines and all the vehicles. There's just a lot going on and that can't be the future we want. We want cleaner air and we want more green space and we want it to be quieter and more social. We want it to be more about place making. Making it a fabulous area to hang out with your family and friends and not just be a place for tourists, but be a place for Parisians to come visit. Now, as we innovate greatly in our communities all over the world, we will see them shift as we begin to enter an energy revolution. I another good news story, another positive story of good innovation making a difference in our communities. Look, there's no question, I don't think anyone would argue that we are not losing our appetite for energy as our cities grow, as we create mega cities of over 10 million people and have more and more of those in the world, we need more energy. We want it to be abundant, we want it to be clean and we want it to be safe and non carbon services like wind, solar and geothermal, thermal and tidal and even nuclear. These offer an alternative to oil, gas and coal, which have dominated energy around the world for the better part of the previous century and more. We are in the beginning years of this rapid transformation. Here you see the city of Freiburg in Germany, where a lot of people have made the migration to solar, which will be the dominant clean energy in the future, it's wind right now, but it will be solar. And in this community, these homeowners, they don't get bills every month, they get a check. They get paid for producing excess energy, which is used for other purposes. I think I'd like that. I currently get a bill every month here in San Francisco, and I think I'd like to get a check instead. I think you would, too. Now, the other thing we're doing is we're sensorizing our urban environments, and that's taking the form of the Internet of things, putting devices strategically around our communities for things like helping with better traffic management or for measuring the quality of air and being able to report on that, to provide better public safety services appropriately and with attention to privacy. You see that just the general phenomena of the Internet of Things today represents about 35 billion devices. And over the next 40 years. Did I say 40 years? I meant four years. Over the next four years, that will go to about 75 billion devices, which is 40 billion more. That's where I got the 40 from. That's an incredible growth of these connected devices to the Internet. And that's what, 10 billion a year? Almost a billion new devices every single month. And this will be across industries in the industrial IoT, which is part of manufacturing, and smart manufacturing, hospitals, even in our homes, where so many of us are building smarter homes by connecting things over WI fi specifically. But think about the opportunity here, going from 35 billion to 75 billion devices. We need to produce a lot of hardware, we need to produce a lot of software, it's going to produce a lot of data, we're going to have to have services. So this is all going to generate economic activities. And any town or city in Ireland can make the decision potentially to play in this space and to be a leader, to create models and, but also to produce the services and the products that communities all over the world are going to need. Part of connecting everything, of course, is going to be generating a lot of data. But look at the revenue growth that will occur here as we go through the next five years. By 2025, the forecast for IoT devices alone will be $1.6 trillion, of which, again, 20%, 20% will be in an urban environment. Towns and cities will constitute the largest consumer and users of IoT devices, solving all sorts of issues, such as, like I did when I was the head of technology for a city here in Silicon Valley. You can see, for example, this sensor devices IoT device here is on a light that is helping detect Whether parking spaces are open or closed, that can be useful, particularly since congestion in an urban environment in the downtown area, about 30% of it we think is caused by people looking for a parking space. So if we can help with that, we can reduce traffic just like that. Now what's going to happen in the future? What sort of trends do we see in our towns and cities? Well, we're going to see things like artificial intelligence, no doubt. It's going to be baked into a lot of how cities operate. We're going to see a lot more robotics. Here's an example of a security guard that's a robot. This robot never needs to be paid. This robot never sleeps on the job, is always attentive 24, 7, right. And here you see in this example, this robot is responsible for security in an urban parking lot. We're going to see drones in the sky today. When you look outside, you don't see them, but you read about them. You see videos and TV shows. But drones are coming and they're going to come in a very big way. They're going to be involved in things like deliveries, right? Which is probably the most obvious. But maybe moving, for example, a blood test from a lab to a hospital or from a hospital to a laboratory. It'll do things like help with home inspections or things like helping to extinguish fires or give intel to the fire service so that they know how to tackle a problem when they arrive there. Drones are going to play a very big role and we have to make sure that we are thinking about policy and regulation in our community so that we don't deploy these in the incorrect way. They'll be on our ground too. We see in many communities around the world already drones, terrestrial drones, the ones on the ground being used for deliveries like delivering medicine or food to people in an urban context. Again, we can anticipate this. And the challenge for all of us is to make sure that we do this in a way that's appropriate and beneficial. We, yes, we are going to move to communities of self driving vehicles. Autonomous vehicles may be the most important transformational technology of in our urban environment in the first 50 years of the 21st century. And this is no longer a question of whether it'll happen. We already have self driving vehicles. Here's Waymo in the great city of Phoenix and Arizona, providing a completely, completely autonomous on demand taxi service. Already this is coming and will come in a big way, such that we will be able to design cities differently. We probably won't own cars in the future. And we probably won't be able to drive cars in the future, not because we don't want to, but because we will be prohibited. So that's a lot to take in. I just had a short amount of time with you, but it's important for you to walk away with the understanding that we have work to do. We're making progress. There's a lot of opportunity ahead and all of us can contribute towards building incredible cities and towns in the 21st century. This is not something that you need to point to others and hope that others will do something. This is something where every one of us can participate with our ideas, with our voices in how we vote. And you could serve or work in a town or a city too. So I hope I've helped you understand the current state of our challenges and also where we're having some success and where things are headed. This was just a summary. There's so much more and I I think for the rest of today and if you're watching this online, all the other videos will be able to incredible speakers will help you understand more of the details of the topic ahead. Talking of which, if you would like to learn more, I've written many books on this topic, including Smart Cities for Dummies, which has been a fantastic success. I really recently released a book that I co wrote with Brett Hofstad which is for children to help kids understand the challenges of cities and how they can help and through fun activities and engagement. And I'll have more books coming out the topic in 2022. You can find all this on smart city book.com that's smart city book.com with that, I have to say a big thank you again. It's such an honor to be part of this event. To an important event. I hope you get a lot from it. I hope that you feel inspired to take action because at the end of the day, that's what it's about. We have to do stuff. We have to innovate if we're going to change the game for our communities. Once again, thank you to everybody. Good luck and you know, all the best you.