Smart Cities Face Expert Backlash as Songdo Development Nears Completion
Smart Cities Face Expert Backlash as Songdo Development Nears Completion
  • By Timothy Daniel (daniel83@koreaittimes.com)
  • 승인 2015.05.15 00:21
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Building and IT experts have been speaking out about the perceived security dangers posed by smart cities ahead of the completion of Songdo’s much-feted smart city project.

Songdo’s smart city has been a decade in the making and its estimated construction cost is thought to be over US$16 million. Some of the features of smart cities include ubiquitous WiFi coverage, remote-controlled heating and refrigeration systems, as well as sensor-regulated street lighting, closed-circuit television and traffic control. The city project has won global acclaim, and similar projects have been initiated in cities in the United Kingdom, Brazil, the United States, Canada and Iran.

However, architects and tech experts have spoken out about issues that they feel urgently need to be addressed by smart city project managers as work on Songo draws to a close. Writing for a publication curated by the EU’s European Commission, Rem Koolhaas, architect and professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, said, “If you look in a smart city control room, like the one in Rio de Janeiro by IBM, you start to wonder about the extent of what is actually being controlled.”

Koolhas also noted, “Smart cities and politics have been diverging, growing in separate worlds. It is absolutely critical that the two converge again.”

Author Alan Greenfield, meanwhile, has claimed that big businesses have too much to gain from smart city projects, saying, “The notion of the smart city […] appears to have originated within these businesses, rather than with any party, group or individual recognized for their contributions to the theory or practice of urban planning.”

Smart cities may also have potential flaws in their security systems, say experts. Cesar Cerrudo, chief technology officer at IOActive Labs, has explained that up to 200,000 traffic control sensors in cities such as New York, Lyon and Melbourne, Australia, could be hacked from up to 450 meters away due to poor or non-existent data encryption.

Proponents of smart city projects claim that their efforts represent the fusion of urban planning and the latest in cutting-edge technology. Purportedly, planners are now working on a method that will allow city authorities to monitor foot traffic rates on sidewalks, and will even allow advertisers to monitor pedestrian demographics in a given area to provide real-time targeted advertising.

Meanwhile tech giant IBM has recently named 16 cities as part of its smart cities program that sees it send experts to chosen cities for three weeks as part of collaborative data analysis efforts. The cities on the IB list included: Amsterdam and Athens in Europe; Denver, Detroit, Memphis and Rochester in the United States; Melbourne in Australia; San Isidro and Santiago in South America; Sekondi in Ghana; as well as Asian cities Taichung, Xuzhou, Huizhou, Surat, Allahabad and Vizag.

Songdo’s International Business District has also hit headlines recently with the news that it has so far developed some 1.8 million square meters of Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certified space, a coup for the city’s green development efforts.

By Timothy Daniel


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