In this concise keynote, Dr. Jonathan Reichental outlines the pressing challenges facing rapidly urbanizing cities—traffic congestion, parking scarcity, carbon emissions, waste, and inefficient government processes—while emphasizing that these issues are universal across the globe. He argues that citizens now demand digital, on‑demand services comparable to commercial platforms, which requires a sophisticated digital infrastructure. Reichental surveys the current connectivity landscape, contrasting legacy wired networks with emerging low‑power wide‑area networks (Sigfox, LoRa, Zigbee) and Wi‑Fi, and makes a strong case for dense 5G deployment as the catalyst for truly seamless, city‑wide data exchange. He illustrates how 5G can enable autonomous vehicles, pervasive environmental and safety sensors, and smart‑grid energy management, essentially connecting “everything.” The talk concludes with a promotion of his book, Smart Cities for Dummies, which expands on these themes and offers practical guidance for stakeholders seeking to transform urban environments.
Chapters
Hi. Hello. I'm Dr. Jonathan Reichental. I'm very pleased, I'm very honored to be here today to speak to you about connecting smart cities. In my short presentation today, I'm going to speak about what is the genesis and motivation for creating smarter, more sustainable cities. But I want to specifically focus on connectivity and in particular 5G. So that's what my talk is going to be about today. Now, what's going on with cities today? Well, we know already that over half the world lives in cities. And over the next 20 years, about 70% of all human beings are going to live in a city context. Our cities really matter and people want a high quality of life. But we have some challenges. I mean, when you look at a city today and you see something like this, we see lots of transportation challenges, lots of congestion. We have problems finding parking spaces. When you look at a downtown area and there's traffic, 30% of the cars are likely looking for a parking space to support our cars. Anywhere from 40 to 50 to 60% of our urban area is paved over just in support of cars. We need better solutions. And not only that, these cars are spewing carbon into the environment, which is heating up to the earth and contributing towards our climate crisis. Our cities have been enormously successful, but they also have created a lot of exhaust. To function today, our cities have to produce a lot of materials. They consume a lot, they create a lot of waste. And in the process of that, we're spewing chemicals into the environment and spoiling our beautiful, beautiful landscapes in China, in America, in Europe, and all over the world. The World Health Organization says that lots of people suffer in cities because of air quality. And so we need to make sure that we're focusing on better air quality. That's a big challenge ahead of us. And of course, our cities are very successful. They are the most successful human invention that has brought billions of people out of extreme poverty. We should be very proud of that. Our cities have, for the most part, been very successful in that. But there is this byproduct. Our cities create far too much trash. And you can see this example here of a community in a developing nation where so much waste is just flooding beautiful. What should be beautiful streams and clean water. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we have an area the size of Texas, or bigger than France, that is made up of beads of plastic. And those beads of plastic are consumed by fish. And then we eat the fish. In other words, we're also eating the plastic. And when you think of government process within cities, you probably think of this inefficiencies, right? Inaccuracies, expensive, a waste of time for you to sit there waiting for hours when you probably should do it online. So we have a number of issues that are great in scale, and by the way, they're not unique to any particular city or country. As I've traveled around the world, I see these problems everywhere. What people want are efficient services. They want the same types of services that they expect today from commercial services, and they want those services to be digital, and they want them on their smartphones and on their computers, assuming they have access to them. They want a digital, improved, higher quality of service from their governments. And that's a great challenge because there's so much work to be done. There's still a lot of work to be done to engage in a digital transformation in our cities. And work is being done. The good news, work is being done to digitize our environments and get smarter about how we use technology and new ideas to solve some of these big issues with transportation and energy and analog paperwork. Here you see, for example, a $70 million project in Singapore to create a digital Singapore, or what we call a digital twin, an exact replica of the city so it can be managed better by city leaders and different participants. We are thinking in the right way, but we have a long road to go. And the city space is so incredibly rich. When I worked for a city as a technology leader for many years here in Silicon Valley, what excited me was not only were there many different types of services, you know, it's not like a private business where often there's just one type of service or product. A city has multiple services, like, as you can see, energy and buildings and public safety and waste management. And both the good news and the bad news is there's lots of problems. The bad news is there's lots of problems. And the good news is we have opportunity to solve them. We have opportunity to build businesses and be creative, to be able to solve all of all these problems. And inherent to all of this is the future requires a sophisticated digital infrastructure so that cities can be better connected. By connecting people and machines and ideas, we can really solve these problems, create more efficient services. But our telecommunications isn't exactly in a great shape as you look across the world. This image is just one example of how it looks in many, many cities in the world. What we want is seamless connectivity. We want our systems to be connected, to be able to exchange data easily. We want to be able to interact with our infrastructure. We Want to be able to call up services and produce input and have a voice. We want it to be wireless for the most part and we want it to be seamless. That's what we expect now. That's what our commun are increasingly expecting. So how do we get there? Well, we need improved infrastructure. We need really huge investments in how we connect our cities and our infrastructure and our people. Some cities are doing a very good job, but there's a lot of space for improvements in the future. Now there are many ways to connect of course. There's the traditional copper wiring and traditional wiring that's underneath the street and that's hung from light posts in many, many communities and as I showed in my last picture, but increasingly we're using wireless. It can be deployed faster, it interferes less with the infrastructure. We don't necessarily have to dig up every single road and we're using technologies like Sigfox and Lora and Zigbee and Wi Fi of course. And whilst we've been using a variety of cellular technologies now the exciting technology to connect our cities could be those that I've just mentioned and the addition of 5th generation cellular or 5G. And we have to deploy these in many, many more places because 5G, as you probably already know, requires density. So we have to put up these little cells all around cities. So there's a major investment involved. But the potential possibilities are actually really important and, and could be transformational in solving our problems and creating a better quality of life. Here are just a few examples. For example, you have autonomous vehicles, right? The future is self driving cars. I really believe that we're going to have sensors all around our cities for being able to detect the quality of air and noise and be able to do things like monitor traffic and be able to like in the US have sensors that detects gunshots. So we know when we're solving a crime where that crime may have been committed. And we want to have better energy, of course. So connectivity allows us to connect our electrical systems with homes and offices and that allows us to deploy power in a much more improved way dependent on usage and demand and supply. And that's what's called a smart grid. And so something like 5G contributes highly to that. But here's the real answer. When asked what are we going to connect in our cities? Well, the answer is probably everything. At some point, everything is a candidate to be connected. When 5G is ubiquitous, it's fast, it's reliable, it's everywhere. Why would we connect everything and try to get benefits. That way, the use cases and the examples will start to occur with greater frequency as people have an infrastructure that will help them to innovate. Now, finally, as I wrap up here, if you liked my presentation, you want to learn more about this. I'm very, very excited to share with you that I've published a book called Smart Cities for Dummies and it covers everything I spoke about today and much, much more. I cover the entire field of the future of cities and all the incredible opportunities with buildings and with data, with artificial intelligence and with blockchain and community engagement and the future of energy and so, so much more. So I would be thrilled if you were interested and you like to learn from my book. And There's a link smartcitybook.com to get you to Amazon. You can buy it anywhere where great books are sold. Again, that comes to the end of my very quick and brief presentation today. I'm so glad to have been with you today. I wish you a lot, a lot of continued success and if you'd like to reach out to me, I would love to speak with you. Please feel free to find me online and or contact the organizers and I will be very happy to have a conversation with you. Again, thank you very much for the privilege and have a great rest of your day and a great rest of the conference. Bye Bye.
