YOUR GUIDE TO THE FUTURE

The design of our cities determines our health as the design influence our urban lifestyle. Urban sprawl, a city design and planning that separate different land use such as housing, offices, recreational facilities, retail stores, etc, have been proven to be detrimental to the public health.

Road diet is a technique to redesign the street configuration that reduces the number of vehicular lanes. The most common road diet practice is the reduction of two lanes of two-way roads that is converted into two lanes of two-way roads with an additional third lane in the centre used as a turning lane.

Reconfiguration of road design that reduce the number of lanes, or Road Diet is an approach that is widely used to improve traffic safety on the road. A study of 36 segment sites and 39 intersections by Lim and Fontaine (2022) showed that the implementation of Road Diet reduces the number of car crashes and improve the road safety for pedestrian.

Road infrastructure takes up a significant proportion of the land use in cities. This city infrastructure is essential for the mobility of people and good, yet the default program of it today is mostly centred around the use of automobiles.

The adoption of Complete Street has been proven to create safer streets for all road users of all abilities from various transportation modes. Complete Street have transformed cities to shift towards sustainable transportation by prioritising non-motorised modes of transport. Nonetheless, the implementation of this concept may not be universally successful.

City of Ithaca, New York sets out an ambitious vision to be eliminate or offset all carbon emission by 2030. This 2019 vision is followed by a US$ 100 million plan to climate proof this municipality. One method that the policymakers in Ithaca use to help achieve the ambitious goal is to create a Digital Twin of the city.

City development requires iterative process of planning, implementing and evaluating various policies and strategies. This encourages smart cities around the globe to adopt Digital Twin technology, an exact copy of a city created as a virtual model.

Roads that are planned and designed for cars are dangerous for other commuting forms of cycling. This is due to the fact that there are many points of conflict between these two forms of road users. Cars and bicycles also use the road differently, the speed and masses of the car users and cyclists make them incompatible to be gathered in the same road network.

The World’s Health Organisation estimates that there are 50 million injuries and 1.35 million deaths caused by road accidents every year. The Safe System is a widely used concept for road transport systems that put forward the reduction of the injuries and deaths of road accidents as its safety goal.

Data in Greece shows that elderly citizens account for 29% of total road fatalities and 58% of that occurs in the urban areas. Physical vulnerabilities and functional limitation of their age makes the elderly population susceptible to this road fatalities.

From the analysis of over 14 years of police reported crash from South Australia (SA) and New South Wales (NSW), Doecke et al. (2018) concluded the safe speed limit to reduce the fatality of various traffic crashes in the urban area. The study strongly suggests the correlation between increasing speed of vehicle to the injury severity of crashes.

Siokas et al. (2021) maps, evaluate and analyse local municipalities strategic action that contributes to the success of Smart City. First, the study found that having digital tools and infrastructure is significant for the success of the adoption of Smart City model.

In the implementation of Smart City, people with disabilities may experience inequality of access to information as Smart City includes massive transformation of digitalisation of many information and services. Exclusion from the Smart City may take the form of inaccessibility to affordable & reliable broadband connection, lack of digital literacy, inadequate technical support or even online content that are not designed to be easy to access and engaging for the people with disability.

Implementing smart city strategy benefits the local government in accelerating various sector of urban management. Smart City can certainly reduce the cost, maximise efficiency, foster economic development and enhance the quality of life.

Razmjoo et al. (2021) believe that implementation of Smart City not only minimise the challenges that massive urbanisation imposes but also promotes urban development that are also sustainable. Through studying the transportation and energy system in the city, the study found 5 categories of barriers that every city should investigate to accelerate the development of their smart city, which are, Governance (G), Social (S), Technology (T), Environmental (Env) and Economic (Ec).

Despite many international or national push for smart city development, it is the local context, constraint and enablers in a specific municipality that determines the degree of innovation a city will have. A study examines 22 smart cities in Switzerland to find out what elements of a city that are significant in the development of its Smart City vision.

Evidence from 282 cities in China in the span of 2009 to 2017 indicates that smart city implementation supports the improvement of urban resilience, particularly in the urban economics resiliency and social resiliency. Zhou et al. (2021) provide three recommendation for their study findings to increase urban resilience through smart city development.

Cities are expected to generate up to 2.2 billion tonnes of solid waste in 2025. City of Glasgow takes an initiative to create a more sustainable production and consumption value chain by embracing the Circular Economy Concept.

Every year thousands of tonnes of electronics, furniture, household appliances and clothing pieces are thrown by urban dwellers. Many of these items were not being processed properly or recycled and ended up in the landfill. These items are also likely being tossed just because they are slightly damaged.

Increasing temperature is one of the effects of global climate change that threatens the livelihood in Ahmedabad, India. Extreme temperature put the citizen to risk of heat wave and numerous heat-related illnesses. With heat as one of disaster that significantly affect the quality of life, Ahmedabad implemented “Heat Action Plan” in 2015, that include mitigation and early warning system to extreme heat events.

The limitation of land area pushes Singapore to think innovatively in its efforts for sustainable energy provision. As a city-nation that is located on the equator with all year-round sunshine, Singapore is pushing solar technology as one of its sustainable energy sources.

The pursuit of Smart City requires partnership of all elements of city actors. City of Boston established New urban Mechanics, a civic innovation group that support the city government to create innovative human-centred design solution for the city.

City of Fukuoka, Japan utilise technology to keep up with its aging population and ensuring everyone to get proper health and social care. CareTech is a tool that helps aging citizens especially those with dementia to retain their quality of life.

To enhance the quality of life in the city, the city government must take advantage of the clustering resource and knowledge that the area accumulates. Cities as the place of clustering citizens, private enterprise, social organisation, and higher education hubs may benefit from smart cities with open governments.

The concept of smart city is about utilising the combined intelligence, skills and resources that a city possesses from the heterogeneous stakeholders that work together to find solutions to the city’s problems. Part of becoming a smart city is the ability to be more open and encouraging for opportunities for new business models and entrepreneurship.

One indicator of a successful Smart City is its ability to adapt the vision and strategies to local context. Yet, through the study of 15 cities globally, many Smart City visions and strategies poorly accommodate the local needs. Failing to incorporate the unique physical characteristics, demography, and culture of a local area in the Smart City implementation, a municipality risk themselves in loosing the comparative advantages with other cities.

Cities are noisy. With various social activities and traffic, noise level in urban areas can reach a point where it is detrimental to our physical and mental wellbeing. The Municipality of Berlin developed a tool to help its citizens locate places of quiet in their neighbourhood, called Hush City Mobile Lab.

By comparing four American cities and four Chinese cities with advance level of smart city implementation that represented the countries’ major geographic regions, Hu and Zheng (2021) compares the similarity and difference of these two countries that have differing legal, political and institutional elements.

Clear vision with specific goals and objectives combined with clear division of role and responsibilities is critical in establishing Smart City. However, only 11 out of the 69 councils in Sydney dan Melbourne that Dowling et al. (2019) study, that shows local municipalities are equipped with appropriate Smart City Strategy for their local areas.