Outside In | Hong Kong’s plan to become a ‘smart’ city needs some fresh thinking
Hong Kong should look to Tokyo, as well as Huawei and ZTE, for guidance on how to build a ‘liveable’ city
So, what is a “smart city”? We hear the phrase all the time. In Tokyo meetings last week, I sat through four separate presentations on the subject of smart cities. Everyone wants them. Everyone tells you they are building them. But with no agreed definition of what constitutes a “smart city”, heaven knows whether everyone is talking about the same thing.
Getting the definition right is not just a matter of semantics or academic curiosity. Much is at stake. China alone is in the process of developing over 500 smart cities, with investments in the trillions. Japan’s “Society 5.0” initiative is about retrofitting existing, but ageing, communities with a combination of e-Government, e-Health and e-Education. So too with “Digital Canada”, and Singapore’s “Smart Nation 2050”.
What they build now will define future communities for decades – if not centuries. Get it wrong, and the lives of hundreds of millions in countries across the world will be affected for the worse.
For many, the idea of large cities and urban living sits uncomfortably. Over centuries, poets, novelists and painters have depicted the countryside as the “moral core” of their society. In contrast, cities have, from Dickens down, been seen as dangerous, squalid and polluted, congested, isolating and anonymous, harbouring crime and inequality. They are homes for Theresa May’s infamous “citizens of nowhere”.
And yet, despite all that bad press, people have over recent centuries, voted with their feet, not just for the diverse employment opportunities and opportunity for affluence, but for the convenience, the service efficiencies, the improved education and health services, the cultural diversity, the gregarious anonymity.
