On Tuesday morning, Vice Mayor Anu Natarajan was featured on a “Smart
Cities” Panel at the Frost & Sullivan GIL 2013: Silicon Valley
Conference (Global Community of Growth, Innovation and Leadership)
featuring executives from cities, utilities and suppliers. The
conversation focused on what compels a city to make an evolutionary and
sometimes radical change to a smart city.

Vice Mayor Natarajan
talked about America’s mid-sized cities and their transition from
suburban to urban, or in other words, “suburbia to cyberbia.” An
emphasis on transportation, integrated growth patterns, public/private
partnerships and the utilization of technology are all imperative to
providing more efficient public services.

Real-life examples provided by other panelists included:

  • Smartphone
    Transit Apps as a partnership between a regional transit agency in
    Texas and Google to provide real-time bus schedules and route
    information.
  • A “Green City Index” compiled by Siemens featuring best practices from the world’s largest 40 cities.
  • A “Biggest Loser” contest in Houston sponsored by IBM to encourage less energy use through smart meter data.

The
LEED program (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is still
an important driver for community sustainability, but panelists talked
about the need to interconnect city systems more broadly. Vice Mayor
Natarajan discussed the shift taking place from certifying individual
buildings to a more encompassing certification for entire
neighborhoods.

So what will smart cities look like 25 years from
now? Vice Mayor Natarajan painted a back-to-the-future picture with less
separation of uses, and more places to interact. Other panelists
emphasized that sustainability efforts have tobe sustainable themselves
and contribute either to cost savings or revenue generation. Such
efforts also need to drive the key priorities for cities, namely
security, congestion reduction, clean and reliable water, and energy
efficiency. It was noted that the main innovations are coming from a few
industries – energy/utilities, health care and mobile. While the
progress has occurred at different paces, they will all eventually
merge.

This merging is starting to happen on a regional level in
California where Natarajan talked about the “Plan Bay Area” and the
linkage between transportation funding and urban planning. Here again,
engaged citizens are our greatest asset in creating a smart city. It
turns out that smart cities really begin with a simple question: “What
can I do?”