Global COVID Economy

One notable feature of this year’s unprecedented pandemic has been its ability to condense potential decades of social change in matter of months. The role of cities, transport and economy as centers for commuting and commerce has been questioned and we were presented with the idea that the daily commute into overcrowded and expensive city centers may be a thing of the past. While the pandemic has brought tragedy and disruption to millions of lives, it would be a mistake to imagine that it has disrupted the global trend towards city living to any great extent. Today, 55% of people worldwide live in cities, a proportion that’s expected to reach 66% by 2050.

The truth is that smart cities can be great places to live. Their concentrated populations offer access to healthcare, social facilities and varied food sources on a scale that is simply not possible for rural areas or smaller communities. However, in order for cities to be great places to live, their infrastructure and transportation has to work properly. For Cities that have simply sprung up and then ‘sprawled out’ over centuries, such as London, don’t often work as well as they could. Congested roads and public transport systems, oversubscribed schools and healthcare centres and infrequent rubbish collections can damage health and life prospects as well as degrading daily life experiences. 

The Smart City Movement

Over the last decades, technology has given us the chance to revolutionise urban environments and turn our cities into pleasant places to live. Adding city-wide layers of infrastructure that can monitor the flow of people, vehicles and energy, in addition to planning cityscapes, can mean we benefit from the dynamism, creativity and energy of cities without the negatives. As well as this, transport networks become smarter, water supply and waste disposal are upgraded and city administrations have the information they need to meet the changing needs of the population.

This is known as the “smart city” movement. Governments and enterprises worldwide are pouring billions into such initiatives, with smart city technology spending expected to grow to $135 billion by 2021. Smart cities with projects that are seen as world-leading include Boston, Seoul, Calgary, Singapore, Florence and Amsterdam.

Other estimates go even further. Navigant Research has tracked at least 444 smart city projects in 288 cities worldwide, and has calculated that the cumulative global smart city technology market will reach $1.7 trillion.

Smart Transportation & Homes

Smart Transportation will revolutionize many industries and provide next economic boom. Citizens can engage with smart technology ecosystems in a variety of ways using smartphones and mobile devices, as well as public transpiration and smart homes. Like Hyperloop Transportation Technologies which have a clear goal: to revolutionize mobility by offering super-fast travel speeds at ground level, safely. They have developed frictionless electromagnetic levitation technology that can propel passengers and freight at up to 1223km/h, silently and emission free. Robots, too, will have a role to play in the smart home of the future. Smart vacuum cleaners like iRobot’s Roomba are already picking up after us, while products like the Aibo, a robotic dog for children, show how they might help keep us company like a pet. As for the future? Robotic-furniture company Ori Living is working with Ikea on pieces that change based on your needs, getting the bed out of the way when you need a desk, or hiding your closet when it’s dinnertime. Veego Software, an Israel-based startup that brings artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to enable self-care in the smart home, today unveiled its predictions for smart-home support in the coming year. As an example of the integrated benefits that can improve the lives of smart citizens, think about sensor-aided parking, where your car can be guided to the nearest available parking spot before you set off to your doctor’s appointment.For drivers who are less confident parking in tiny spaces, auto-valet parking using robots and sensors can help maximise the use of space in multi-storey car parks, meaning less land has to be given up to automotive parking. As a side note, it is worth mentioning that China’s global positioning satellite alternative to GPS, named Beidou, is even more accurate with a fault tolerance of only 10cm or so, it allows for excellent precision evaluation of available spaces.

Of course, reducing demand for parking spaces is one thing, but reducing the number of journeys and speeding up those journeys is another. Amsterdam and Utrecht have sophisticated systems of smart traffic lights, which use road-mounted sensors that detect patterns of approaching cars and bicycles, and can optimise traffic flow by prioritising one set of road users over another. Unobtrusively separating cycle traffic from car traffic by using ‘nudge’ behavioural psychology is another way smart cities can keep cyclists safe and traffic flowing.

 The COVID effect of Global Economy

While COVID-19 has not slowed the overall ambition to make cities smarter, it has heavily impacted local projects. The impact of coronavirus is increasing around the world, at the same time, the economic impact is also increasing. Most of the effect of economic impact is not derived from the virus itself but from the measures taken to prevent it’s spread. For example; most countries have opted for lockdowns or self-quarantine as preventive measures, encouraging people to keep away from themselves, closing schools, colleges and universities, and strict restrictions on international travel as well as business travel. Additionally, they restrict the movement of workers, goods, and consumers. Due to the pandemic, most countries are closing their restaurants, cinemas, transportation services, hotels, shops, and industries. For this reason, people try to work from home.

This year, Toronto’s Sidewalk Labs, who had partnered with city authorities to develop the project, pulled out, citing economic uncertainties triggered by the pandemic. And in neighbouring USA, research by Kagan shows that investment in smart city projects is set to fall by at least 7% in 2021.

The slowing of investment does not mean that there is any less intent to push forward with the idea of connected cities, and other various initiatives have shown how crucial forward-facing digital infrastructure can be in tracking the spread of disease and finding public health solutions. For example, as cited here, there are examples of “high-density cities, including Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei, where robust and widespread interventions (such as social distancing, mask wearing and contact tracing) successfully limited COVID-19 cases and deaths”.

Global Cannabis Legalization & Investment Opportunities 

New Frontier's report predicting the impact of global legal marijuana suggests that global legalization could generate millions of jobs by 2030. These jobs would likely come from the quickly growing industry which would spring up across the nations. Workers would be needed to farm, process, distribute, and sell marijuana-based products. Further, there would be ample opportunities for secondary industries that are related to legal cannabis although not directly involved in its production and distribution. These might include software developers, financing services, construction companies, and many others.

Legal marijuana presents the possibility of tremendous benefits to economies on a local and a international scale. It also could help to secure the investment portfolios of investors across the nations and further afield as well. While marijuana remains illegal in most countries, it is difficult for investors to capitalize on the growth of the industry. The number of marijuana-related companies trading on public stock exchanges is minuscule, and while investors do have the option of working with over-the-counter exchanges, many of the most successful businesses in the early legal cannabis space have been based in Canada or other countries.

Should marijuana become legal on the international national level, marijuana companies would be free to list their stocks on all global stock exchanges, thereby enhancing liquidity and opening up access to many more investors. Should the growth rates for the cannabis space continue as they have in recent years, it's likely that investors would express a keen interest in the industry an expand investments in trillions.

Government Cryptocurrency Development & Data

The move from fiat to cryptocurrency is inevtable. To date, countries that have issued their own cryptocurrencies include Ecuador, China, Senegal, Singapore, Tunisia, though these countries will not be standing alone for long with Estonia, Japan, Palestine, Russia and Sweden looking to launch their own national cryptocurrencies. Some of these countries are likely to take it a step further and replace paper tender altogether with China being one nation that is looking to take one step beyond a virtual and paper version. Of the countries looking to introduce their own cryptocurrencies, the world’s largest economies could force the hands of smaller nations and we would expect momentum to build in the years ahead. Central banks now looking closely at the successes and constraints faced by those who have already stepped into the light, though only in early September, ECB President Draghi stated in a press conference that no member state of the Eurozone can introduce its own digital currency, with the Data is crucial. The US Governments control the economy through central banks. In the U.S., that's the Federal Reserve a.k.a the Fed. The Fed controls the economy through a relatively arcane system in which it tweaks interest rates to control the money supply. It’s a multi-step process that attempts to influence spending and saving behavior by consumers and businesses. But since financial resources are held by private institutions, the ultimate effects of the Fed’s decisions are filtered through these other organizations. The major upside of a CDC is that central banks would be able to directly change the interest rates on the currency, meaning it’s incentives for saving and spending would pack a much bigger punch. And not just that, it could easily turn the interest rate negative — something central banks can't really do now — when it really needed to stimulate growth. 

After the financial crisis and the ensuing global economic slowdown, these measures did not prove terribly effective at stimulating growth. Central banks did what they could, lowering interest rates about as much as they could in order to try to goose their economies.As we have seen throughout the pandemic, ready access to data is crucial for controlling the spread of the virus, and smart cities have proved their worth here. For example, an epidemiological investigation into an outbreak of COVID-19 in Seoul, that would have normally taken a day to complete, was achieved in less than 10 minutes.

Seoul residents are able to access a dashboard of highly localised information that can alert them to positive cases, right down to the restaurant table or cinema seat number of the person with the positive test. The goal is to provide citizens with the information needed to take precautionary measures, self-monitor and report if they start showing symptoms after visiting one of the “infection points.” This dashboard can also direct them to the nearest testing centre or can reassure them that the restaurant or cinema has disinfected its premises and is safe to visit.

In a less obtrusive way, the Italian city of Florence was able to analyse the changing flow of traffic in the city to see how quickly the population responded to new guidelines, or to their relaxation, thus enabling local government to intervene when needed.

Alessandra Barbieri, Replicate Project Manager and Chiara Lorenzini, Replicate Mobility and KPI Data Analyst, both for the City of Florence, were in charge of talking about how Florence measured the “temperature” of the city with traffic flows in the time of COVID-19.

“The cameras are able to count the vehicles and measure the speed of them and we want to expand this by adding 200 camera sensors and 300 Bluetooth sensors for travel time estimation. Thanks to this technology, during the lockdown days, traffic flow reduction has been observed day by day to monitor citizen and city users activity,” explained Lorenzini.

The more real-time data that can be captured about a city and how people, vehicles, energy, water and waste flow around it, the more this can be used for modelling purposes, to ensure that changes to infrastructure genuinely produce the expected result. City planners talk of these models as ‘digital twins’ of cities’ physical manifestations, and as cities become even smarter, this allows for much more accurate predictions. –

Having talked about the many positives, however, it is also important to think about the negative consequences of humans living in these highly connected places, with the inevitable surveillance and lack of data privacy. Critics refer to‘captured cities’ rather than ‘smart cities’, arguing that this trade-off is too high, and suggesting that better solutions for data privacy should be in place. We also have to consider that a smart city that depends heavily on technology is also a vulnerable city, for instance, to a cyber-attack or hack into a critical system.

It therefore may be that while smart cities are a powerful tool in our battle to adapt to the abrupt economic change brought by the pandemic, we need to heed those who warn of the negative consequences, too. In short, as soon as we overcome this crisis, we must learn and work both in terms of potential pandemic preventive measures and in improving sustainable economic development through clean technology and innovation before it is too late.