A Smart Business is Smarter, by not locating to a Smart City

Let's not building Smart Cities, lets Live Smart instead

Just as humanity is starting to deal with business processes that should never have been digitised we might also consider the huge waste in making Smart Cities when we no longer need cities.

Watching humanity evolve in retrospect it is easy to spot the errors and poor judgement, but humanity is on the cusp of a revolution so profound it calls into question the structure of our societies.

Why do we need Cities?

Think for a moment, why do we need cities? They create centralisation of people and resources, however they also drive costs as often space is insufficient for demand. There is a huge dependency on the need for workspace, shops and local living accommodation.

In a Smart Economy with people engaged in Smart Living people rely on digital communications not face to face engagements. Unless direct physical contact with another person is required for your job you don't need to be physically present. Most work can be distributed to multiple locations across the planet, even surgery can now be done through a physical / virtual interface.

What about the time of Day?

Time is a construct, instead on narrow thinking around working day, working time is more productive.

Preparation for Smart Business

The assertion “Let's not building Smart Cities, lets Live Smart instead” is completely correct however the preparation to deal with this change and timeline are another matter. There is also geographies and infrastructure to consider.

Working from Home

Corporations who are already seeking to reduce or remove their huge overheads and dependency upon city office space are offering their staff the ability to work from home and have done for some time. The natural extension to this is the end to centralization completely. This represents a complex issue for Enterprises as they also tend to have large property portfolios maintained in their Enterprise Treasury Assets. While divestment strategies are being established, there are huge risks for those who have not understood that over time the resell value will crash, making city office property worthless.

Working from the World

There are significant problems in the structuring of the world due to notions of status, long held wealth and existing infrastructure. Working from the world will be a lot harder than working from countries that have large investments in infrastructure, hence cities will still exist, becoming an indication of old thinking and technology poverty.

Summary

The cost of creating Smart Cities is huge and relates to infrastructure for jobs and services that won’t be required in the mid term, they will not make a profit and may even not cover their cost of creation and installation. The Smart solution is a distributed model not a centralized one. Creating these types of services takes a huge investment and without the confirmation of a captive customer base, it should be interesting to see how capital can be raised and who will take this risk.

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About the Author

Karl Smith is Computer Scientist or as he describes himself a Creative Scientist. He has a BA in Design from the 1980's and an MSc in Interactive Technologies for E-commerce from the 2000's. He has been programming since the 1970's, his MSc was technically focused with a large portion given over to Transformation and Very Large Databases, data warehouses, Data Mining, online analytical Processing (OLAP), web browsers and search engines, optimisation, recovery and backup, database connectivity technologies. Including writing SQL in three forms (including the Edinburgh Napier University, version).

Karl Smith is an acknowledged leader in the field of Human Centred Design, User Experience and Usability and has been honoured with a Fellowship by the British Computer Society. He is also the Founder of several organisations including The Human Centered Design Society and UCD UK Conferences in the UK.