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11 of 35
By Greg Lindsay | 12-22-2010 | 11:20 AM
1. Songdo, South Korea
1. Songdo, South Korea (cont.)
2. Lavasa, India
2. Lavasa, India (cont.)
2. Lavasa, India (cont.)
2. Lavasa, India (cont.)
3. PlanIT Valley, Portugal
3. PlanIT Valley, Portugal (cont.)
3. PlanIT Valley, Portugal (cont.)
4. Skolkovo, Russia
4. Skolkovo, Russia (cont.)
4. Skolkovo, Russia (cont.)
4. Skolkovo, Russia (cont.)
4. Skolkovo, Russia (cont.)
4. Skolkovo, Russia (cont.)
4. Skolkovo, Russia (cont.)
5. Masdar, United Arab Emirates
5. Masdar, United Arab Emirates (cont.)
5. Masdar, United Arab Emirates (cont.)
5. Masdar, United Arab Emirates (cont.)
5. Masdar, United Arab Emirates (cont.)
5. Masdar, United Arab Emirates (cont.)
6. Wuxi, China
7. King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia
7. King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia (cont.)
8. Dubuque, Iowa
8. Dubuque, Iowa (cont.)
9. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
9. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (cont.)
9. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (cont.)
10. Nano City, India
10. Nano City, India (cont.)
10. Nano City, India (cont.)
10. Nano City, India (cont.)
The world’s most expensive privately developed city (cost: $35 billion and climbing) is also the flagship of Cisco’s Smart + Connected Communities initiative, which some analysts believe will eventually propel the company to an incredible $100 billion in revenue. The instant city was the star of Cisco’s pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai this summer, which hosted seemingly every mayor in China. Songdo will be the test bed Cisco’s vision of ubiquitious telepresence – several thousand homes are being equipped with interactive, two-way screens. Cisco also signed a deal this fall with the surrounding city of Incheon to wire the stadiums for the Asian Games in 2014.
If all goes according to plan, next year Lavasa will become the first city in history to float itself in an IPO worth 20 billion rupees ($437 million) as part of a spin-off from its parent, Hindustan Construction Company. Three hours outside Mumbai, India’s best-known smart city is modeled on the “hill stations” of former colonialists – high altitude refuges from the summer heat. The first of five villages is scheduled to open this year with 50,000 units for sale and 25,000 for rent – all sold out. The smarts will be provided courtesy of Wipro and Cisco, with Jetsonian flourishes, according to The Wall Street Journal: “So you can wake up in Lavasa’s smart home and use the touch panels on the bedside to ”unarm” the home security systems, turn on the lights and open the window blinds. But you’ll still have to pucker up with the wife yourself.”
The first city to be designed like software – complete with its own “Urban OS” – is slated to break ground this year in the hills outside Porto. Fittingly, the first building scheduled for completion is its data center. The brainchild of software startup Living PlanIT, plans call for 150,000 residents, nearly all of whom will be its partners’ employees. In turn, they’ll be expected to experiment on themselves. Buildings, sensors, and services alike will be connected through the cloud, and obsolete buildings will be “decommissioned” an like you would junk a server. It’s purely a prototype for the smart cities Living PlanIT hopes to sell in China and India.
Scheduled to break ground next year, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s pet project is his country’s second attempt to build its own Silicon Valley – the Soviet-era version didn’t work out so well. “Technopolis Skolkovo’s” centerpiece will be the campus of the Moscow School of Management (designed by British architect David Adjaye), acknowledging the role Stanford University’s research park played in the formation of the original Valley. In June, Cisco pledged to invest $1 billion in the project and establish Skolkovo as Russia’s first smart city, focused on smart grids, transportation, education, and health care.
Much has already been written about Abu Dhabi’s smart, green city in the desert, which has alternately been judged a trophy, a hedge against a Peak Oil future, and a folly. Masdar is low-tech in its design, deploying traditional Arabic building principles to create shade and catch breezes, and high-tech in its execution, most notably its prototype fleet of driverless electric cars. The overall effect is a bit disconcerting, according to The Guaridan’s Rowan Moore: “The Masdar plan has been accused of being gated and exclusive. It is not, although there is something spooky in the controls it employs in the name of the environment – a touch of eco-Orwell or at least eco-Huxley. A hidden brain, for example, knows when you enter your building, so that your flat can be cooled before you arrive, while in public places flat screens broadcast uplifting news on the environmental performance of the complex.”
“Little Shanghai” is the epicenter of China’s evolving strategy to own the Internet of Things, an effort which kicked into high gear this summer after Chinese premier Wen Jiabao gave a speech in the city in which he offered the equation “Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth.” Wuxi was already way ahead of him. Taihu New City, a smart eco-city planned in conjunction with the Swedish Ministry of the Environment broke ground in July, followed by the city’s “Cloud Computing Center of the Internet of Things of China” . China appears ready to win the smart city market as surely as its manufacturers conquered solar panels.
Rising from the sands near Jeddah, King Abdullah Economic City – abbreviated KAEC, pronounced “cake” – is just one of four new instant cities explicitly intended create a million-plus jobs and to house nearly half of the 10 million Saudis under the age of 17 -- a largely uneducated workforce described as a “human time bomb.” To that end, KAEC was conceived as Saudi Arabia’s Silicon Valley (along with a port expected to open next year). KAEC’s developers have promised a smart city that is “7-24-60,” as in services are ready to go 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and are ready within 60 minutes. “This will be the front desk of governmental services in economic cities,” Yahya S. Hamidaddin, the smart cities development director at the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority, said earlier this month. “This was part of the mandate issued by the royal decree. We plan to implement this in a phased way.” Piece of KAEC.
In 2009, IBM declared Dubuque would become the “first integrated, smart city” in America, with interlocking systems watching the interplay between water, electricity, and transportation. This year, the city embarked on the first phase of the program, installing smart water meters in the homes of 311 volunteers. The meters measured consumption and wirelessly transmitted data to IBM servers every fifteen minutes, which homeowners could check online. The point was to see whether awareness of their usage encouraged them to conserve. The results haven’t been published yet, but next year IBM intends to roll out similar experiments as part of the Dubuque 2.0 initiative.
IBM dispatched a SWAT team of executives to Vietnam’s largest city this year on a mission to develop a strategy for upgrading the city’s infrastructure. They left as members of the company’s Corporate Service Corps, in which employees donate their time and expertise to assist developing nations. They returned with a 10-year redevelopment plan and a contract to unsnarl the city’s traffic using algorithms originally used to monitor Singapore’s. The plan is to create a software model capable of predicting when the city’s busiest thoroughfares will clog with motorbikes – so the city can change traffic signals as needed or dispatch extra traffic cops to the scene.
Maybe 2011 will be the year Hotmail creator Sabeer Bhatia finally starts construction of his dream city, which he hatched in 2006 as – you guessed it – India’s answer to Silicon Valley. Since then, Bhatia has spent nearly half a decade negotiating the labyrinthine Indian bureaucracy, while his plans for a smart, green city of almost a million people are lapped by projects such as Lavasa and Songdo. Or perhaps he’s taking his time to get it right. After all, only 15 miles away from the 11,000-acre site is the city of Chandigarh, planned from scratch by Le Corbusier in the 1950s, and considered a monument to his hubris by many.
WSTAYWSTAYLavasa BrochureLavasa BrochureLavasa BrochureLavasa Brochureliving-planit.comliving-planit.comliving-planit.comSKOLKOVO Moscow School of ManagementSKOLKOVO Moscow School of ManagementSKOLKOVO Moscow School of ManagementSKOLKOVO Moscow School of ManagementSKOLKOVO Moscow School of ManagementSKOLKOVO Moscow School of ManagementSKOLKOVO Moscow School of ManagementSwedish Environmental Technology in ChinaUnique Buildings Unique Buildings SD DirkSD DirkDan SearleThomas SchochBrian Snelson
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