LIVING 35
of the opportunities offered by a strong technology- based backbone,” says Groves. Indeed, Rwanda’s on a mission to transform its capital into a smart hub where urban living is optimised. Already, technology is part of daily life in the city and several often onerous administrative tasks that would ordinarily require reams of paperwork and a trip or three to a government office – such as registering a marriage, death or birth – are increasingly being done online. Felonious motorists can also pay their speed fines with mobile money. But the city’s flagship smart initiative is Vision City,
Rwanda’s largest housing project, which will comprise an array of villas and townhouses (all fitted with motion sensors that switch on the electricity when someone walks in) arranged around a town square offering free wifi, while a 36m-tall antenna (also solar- powered) beams 4G LTE to residents. The streets, meanwhile, will be lit by solar-powered street lamps. The long-term plan is for the rest of Kigali – and more of Rwanda – to replicate this tech-enabled way of life within the coming two decades. In Nigeria, the Smart City Initiative aims to increase the country’s ICT innovations and identify ways in which these can be linked to physical infrastructure to improve service delivery.
In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which struggles with a
shortage of car parks, the city implemented “smart parking”, which uses Chinese technology to park cars in a steel structure building using an automated lift. Meanwhile in Accra, Ghana, IBM deployed a Smarter Cities Challenge team to assess the ways in which technology can be used to implement economic and social reform. In SA, Cape Town has a lot of smart tech in place,
having looked to Singapore as a role model. The Mother City, in a bid to achieve proper smart city status, initiated a four-pillar project, these being digital infrastructure, digital inclusion, e-government and the digital economy. The Cape Town Emergency Dispatch Centre is a prime example of innovative tech, using resource planning software SAP to create one integrated public safety solution that facilitates operations and data-sharing – the data used for fire and rescue, traffic, metro police, law enforcement and disaster risk management. Africa’s serious about smartening up. At the 2017
Transform Africa Summit, 20 countries signed a pact called the Smart Africa Alliance, agreeing to make technology a part of their national development plans. The African Union also made smart city adoption one of the tenets of its 2063 development plan. Experts believe that digitalisation affords African nations the opportunity to leapfrog traditional development trajectories, driving radical changes that boost access to much-needed social infrastructure in the short to medium term and using innovation to deliver more complex and sustainable projects in the long term. Groves says that building a smart, sustainable city is a complex undertaking for any economy. “On a micro-economic scale, a town or city has layers of impact that extend far beyond the boundaries of individual building projects, including on the atmosphere, built environment, urban infrastructure, natural attributes and social impacts,” she says. “It’s only by designing and planning for the homogenous growth of all these layers together that we’ll achieve future cities which are ergonomic, more sustainable and innovatively smart for a future in which society can really thrive.”
THE WORLD’S 10
SMARTEST CITIES According to the IESE Cities in Motion Index 2017, these metropoles lead the way in smart status: 1. New York 2. London 3. Paris 4. Boston 5. San Francisco 6. Washington 7. Seoul 8. Tokyo 9. Berlin 10. Amsterdam
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