Smart City

In the following smart city discussion, we will present a new framework that will form the third leg of the StAF framework - the city itself. Within this blog, you might have come across the word StAF - it has so far in the blog been used to map the interrelation between:

1. Personal System (which was first discussed in the retail blog post: here)
2. Enterprise System (bits of which was mentioned in all the other industry vertical blog post)
3. ​City System

The City System discussion or more specifically, smart city discussion wiill attempt to answer several questions:

1. What Smart initiatives should be selected and how to position each initiative?
2. When to choose what for each initiative?
3. How does real world Smart City initiatives compare?

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SMART CITY
Most Smart City initiative in discussion today emphasizes one of the following:

1. how to create a competitive city,
2. a livable city that promotes well being of its stakeholders  OR;
3. a livable city that celebrates sustainability.

Most smart city development puts a lot of emphasis on deploying technology or building infrastructure. Fortunately, that view is slowing being challenged with the need to put people community as the central focus.

City Development Model
While  there are many city development  models, the concern or rather the motivation of city planners is more or less along these lines:

1. Improve sustainability while allowing or maintaining growth
2. Improve livability that will in turn attract talents and investments
3. Improve revenue prospect for city councils so that further city improvements can be funded

To get there we need some basic delineation of the city model. Lets begin by mapping out the various macro system components of a city:

1. Population Support System - the motivation module for city planners to device ways to continuously attract people, investors and business into city
2. Socio-Economic Support System - The need to provide jobs to people and suporting industries for people, business and investors to live and thrive.
3. Utilities System - The need to provide universal access to basic utilities such as water, electricity, communication and waste management services.
4. Environmental Support System - The need to support the natural environments that is crucial for sustainability
5. Government Engine - the engine that is used to govern and represent the space.
   

The Tale of Two Smart Initiatives
Smart city is a large topic. Our intention is to provide some logical framework for which one can start to map and position smart city initiatives. We use various other complementary framework and model that already presented in earlier blogs to help us. For a start, this blog will break out to 2 further subtopics:

1. Smart Traffic - how a smarter transport system (as a subset of logistic system) appeals to both the Personal System and Enterprise System
2. Smart Healthcare - how a smarter healthcare system (a subset of a cities Healthcare system) creates livable cities and appeals directly to its occupants System of Hygiene and Health 

But before that, lets revisit some of the Basic Concept presented in the earlier retail blog and tweak it for the Smart City discussion.

City Space Stack
In the earlier retail blog, we briefly introduced PSS stack - which shows how a product forms part of a system and in turn the system lends its service to a particular space. While the stack remains the same, the relevance of the system is expanded to a larger space - the city space.

Our earlier blog regarding PSS stack have quietly assumed the passive role of occupants in a given space. It is extremely important for us to understand the role and the impact of systems on space occupants in a space  as large and as complex a city. In a private space, S2P services are  directed at individuals or people with relationship with the individual concerned. In a city space, individuals form part of a community and these communities in turn defines the city. The following diagram shows the relevance of each stack layer to the city components.

Communities
An individual is the most basic building block within the socio-ecological model. The rest of the tier in the model is simpler a collective grouping of individuals. In a nutshell:

1. Individual - single person level
2. Interpersonal - family, friends, social networks
3. Community - a grouping of like minded people

We pick communities as the underlying space occupant for modeling larger space scale model such as Smart City. There are many types of people communities, following is some sample community:

1. Community of Action - a group of connected individual that wants to change something in the world, e.g. Greenpeace
2. Community of Circumstance - a group of people who find themselves in similar circumstances, e.g. cancer groups, refugees, stuck in a traffic situation
3. Community of Interest - a group of people with common interest or passion in their lives, e.g. games, fashion, etc.
4. Community of Place - a group of people bound by a common location, e.g. housing community
5. Community of Practice - a group of people in the same profession or people who participate in the same sport, collect similar items, etc.
6. Business Community - a group of people who is gathered around due to their business or professional interest/needs
7. Hybrid Community - a group of people with mixed interests or needs. This may be a combination of 1 to 5.