Leading change towards smart cities is a joint effort between governments, people, technology and the environment. Not everyone’s cup of tea but do we have a choice anymore?

With urban cities caught between the conundrums of improving quality of life for citizens while also mitigating the harm caused by everyday activities of those citizens; the time has come for technology to prove its worth. And so the question remains, can Asian smart cities actually provide answers to a cleaner greener living or will they be a figment of sci-fi movies?

From 2010 to 2020 the infrastructure investment needs for Southeast Asian countries alone has been estimated at $600 billion. Moreover, though cities occupy 0.5% of the world’s land surface, they consume 75% of the earth’s natural resources. Governments will face the dilemma of making these ever-growing cities liveable as well as sustainable. It is at such a juncture that the use of technology might prove to be not just a life-saver but a city-saver. You might call this wise, but ‘smart’ is the universal term. Smart city, that is.

Although, there is no one definition of what a smart city should or should not possess, there are broadly key 'smart' areas that include transport, energy, healthcare, education, local government and security. Call it intelligent city, information city or virtual city; smart city, one that heavily relies on big data, comes the closest to understanding to urban planning. And so, a smart city will use information and communication technologies to boost performance, reduce costs, effective-ly control resource consumption, and speed up interaction between the government and its citizens.

Asia has taken quite the lead in the smart cities movement, overtaking top European and American cities in many instances. Dubai, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo are examples of this the calcu-lated progress in this digital race. The Asian continent which houses some of the most popu-lous countries has its own set of unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to the building of smart cities. Owing to its unprecedented pace of growth in terms of population and the pressure it puts on infrastructure, the Chinese government will support the crea-tion of dozens of smart cities which will house about 1 million people in a decade.

Asia-Pacific is a region with unique challenges and opportunities in the smart cities arena. China’s cities are growing at an unprecedented pace stressing their infrastructure and creating significant congestion and air contamination challenges. This has lead the nation-al government to support the creation of dozens of new purpose-built smart cities, 100 of which will have over 1 million people in a decade or so. These purpose-built smart cities are being erected in different parts of Asia.

Asia has taken quite the lead in the smart cities movement, overtaking top European and American cities in many instances. Dubai, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo are examples of this the calculated progress in this digital race.

The home of Samsung, Seoul is setting a world-class example in the smart city arena. Songdo, is a smart city that has been built adjacent to the Seoul airport. The city, com-prising 40% green space, has a universal broadband, integrated sensor networks, greener buildings and a high-tech underground system that transports kitchen waste from buildings directly to a processing facility which then converts it into clean energy.

Another smart city is Singapore. The city-state’s radical transformation is nothing but im-pressive. Having one of the lowest carbon footprints of any major city in the world, Singa-pore introduced Gardens by the Bay, consists of 18 supertrees that act as vertical gardens, generating solar power, acting as air venting ducts for nearby conservatories, and collect-ing rainwater. Singapore is an example of how a smart city can leverage public policy to inspire innovation and create sustainable economic development.

The aforementioned places may be smart in their own right, but, they are working to-wards being smarter. Data, that too big real time data, is helping these cities realign their policies and plans. Be it traffic behaviour, resource consumption, citizen & government interaction or just quantifying style of living, algorithms that help analyse big data and implement its learning, might bring the next natural evolution of smart cities. In that case, let’s throw in a few jet-packs as well. Perhaps, a ‘fly safe’ rule in smart cities is what we all secretly wish for.

Whatever the benchmarks of progress, it is clear that smart cities are the present and the future. Leading the wave in this are the technology-hungry and savvy populations of Asian cities and soon, it seems very plausible that rural Asia is also getting on to the bandwagon, especially if you consider mobile and smartphone penetration into rural India (53 million strong by mid-2025) China is still struggling with rural populations but they are picking up, even circumventing through Weibo and Baidu. The fact remains that as long as smart cities spread their smart tentacles to embrace the rest of the nation, there will always be room for growth and leadership in technology.