The nervous system of urban habitats
Greenhaviour was the first example of a real time tracking system of environmental
information over several countries. We translated what we learned into a suite of products for
smart cities.
Our first focus is transportation because 80 % of noise pollution comes from transport and
it is responsible for 75 % of air quality pollutants. We believe that crowdsourcing is key for
future cities to become more efficient. Social networking will mean that citizens will see
that daily actions do make a difference. Sensors will render visible what used to be invisible
or ignored. By mapping such data in user friendly and meaningful ways, city governments
can now use web services to engage citizens in interactive and collective decision making
processes. Best of breed practices can be compared and adapted to suit location dependent
needs and constraints. Wireless sensor networks become the nervous system of urban habitats.
Serious gaming.
New actions to encourage living in more sustainable cities should be made fun: there
are many different ways of doing/having more with less resources/stress. Why not have
competitions between neighborhoods, or even between cities ?
Smart cities can better adapt to dynamics needs and provide metrics for example: what is
the water consumption per person in this office building (how many bottles would need to
be stored weekly for that purpose), how are NOx levels linked to traffic light patterns at an
intersection, what is the average CO2 emission per day for this bus line when traffic is fluid
or when it is rush hour, what percentage of electricity bill for this museum is related to air
conditioning etc. Why not combine urban gaming and augmented reality for new ways of
displaying environmental ressource information ?
The roles of city governments.
Before asking for citizens to make a difference in their own homes, cities have to educate
and demonstrate/quantify the potential financial gains realized by using WSNs. The role
of city governments with respect to IT will increasingly be as platform integrators for
cooperative citizen driven innovations and as providers of key infrastructure such as low cost
mobile broadband availability or cloud computing access. Starting with small but concrete
pilots, neighborhoods, campuses, businesses or corporations can establish and showcase
methodologies resulting in better quality of life. By transforming data to knowledge and
collective intelligence, Sensing/Mobile/Agile/Real Time cities will find innovative solutions
to current and future challenges.