With Singapore aiming to become the world’s first ‘smart nation’, Australia needs to embrace technology for its cities to prosper

FROM buildings that construct themselves to self-emptying bins, Australia needs to embrace technology if we’re to be a smart nation of the future.

IN THE future, life in Australian cities will be very different.

For starters, your apartment, built by robots, will be constantly monitoring its own wellbeing checking for water leaks and instantly aware if even one light bulb has blown.

At the local coffee shop, you will always be able to get a piping hot flat white because the coffee machine will predict when it will need maintenance and order a new part before it breaks down.

When you jump in your car, you’ll be able to pre book a parking spot right outside the skyscraper you’re having a meeting in. As you travel towards the city you’ll be guided away from traffic jams onto less busy roads — and you’ll pay less in tolls in the process.

Or, if you’re on the train, you’ll be able to work just as easily as you can from home. So you’ll be paid for the time you travel.

And when you get home, you won’t have to worry about putting the bins out because your rubbish will be sucked out of your unit by giant vacuums.

These could be the hallmarks of the “smart cities” of the future.

Currently Asia is on the cutting edge of this urban transformation with experts saying Australia needs to keep up if it’s to transform its economy.

While a global leader in using technology to transform our urban centres says the successful roll out of the National Broadband Network (NBN) is “critical” if Australia is to become a “smart nation”.

Songdo in South Korea.

At a conference at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney last week global experts gathered to discuss how our cities will look like in decades to come.

But what is a smart city? The co-convener of the Smart Cities research cluster at UNSW, Scott Hawken, says definitions can differ but it comes down to making more efficient and clever use of our urban spaces.

“It’s information and communication technology integrated within the city so it means we use the city in a completely different way.”

Traditional neighbourhoods will now be overlayed with digital neighbourhoods where technology rather than location were paramount.

“It won’t all look like Blade Runner, we’ll inhabit the same cities but more efficiently and in a different way.”

An example of how Australia was already embracing the smart cities concept was the NSW Government’s decision to not develop a travel app for public transport users.

It might seem counter intuitive, people want to know if their bus is running on time, after all.

But instead, the government embraced the concept of “open data” and let app gurus create their own apps, which tells you when your train or bus will arrive, and all at no cost to the taxpayer.

But Australia is still someway behind other nations in our backyard.

“The thing about Singapore is everything works,” Sekhar Kondepudi tells news.com.au. “From the minute my plane lands at Singapore Airport I can tell you, to the minute, how long it will take me to arrive home.”

Singapore aims to become the world’s first “Smart Nation”.

The city-state of five million aims to become the world’s first “smart nation” and is already well on the way.

Mr Kondepudi, an Associate Professor of smart cites at the National University of Singapore, said many cities were getting on the bandwagon but only Singapore was bringing all the different ideas together in one place.

“A smart city to me is not just about technology, just because you’ve got a smart phone doesn’t mean you’re doing something right, it’s about improving the lives of your citizens.”

Singapore is focusing on a range of different areas to make smarter, from urban living to transport and healthcare. Sensors and cameras dot the city, monitoring traffic but in real time spotting snarl ups and turning red lights green.

As the population ages, the country is looking at remote consultations to free up room in hospitals. It’s even possible that in the future an operation could be conducted by a surgeon a continent away from the patient.

“A smart city, the internet of Things and big data are inseparable,” Prof Kondepudi says.

While Singapore is an example of a “brownfield” smart city, where technology is being retrofitted over a pre-existing urban landscape, “greenfield” smart cities — built from scratch — are now cropping up.

The residents of Songdo, near Seoul in South Korea, already have their rubbish sucked away never to be seen again rendering pongy smells from bins a thing of the past. While the somewhat coldly named Gujarat International Finance Tec-City will be an Indian test bed for some of the world’s most modern infrastructure.

Giant pipes suck away people’s rubbish in South Korea. Picture: BBC

Singapore hopes being a smart nation will not only help it maintain its status as a global gateway, and help it cope with a rising population, but also lead it to become a knowledge hub. Already start-ups and entrepreneurs are taking root in its new Jurong Lake District tech precinct

It’s a concept Sydney hopes to emulate in its Bays Precinct project, a plan to turn rundown old docks to the west of the CBD into one of the world’s key centres of new and emerging technologies.

Prof Kondepudi said without the wealth of data that can be funnelled through the NBN it simply won’t happen.

“It’s critical. Singapore has one of the fastest broadband networks in the world because that’s the foundation, data has to flow and data can only flow through a fast broadband network.”

Although, in what would probably be music to Malcolm Turnbull’s ears, Prof Kondepudi said fibre to the node, which the Coalition is building, rather than all the way to the home, was sufficient — for now.

“You can get fairly decent speeds in copper in the last mile (but) what we don’t realise is that there’s going to be 10s of 1000s of sensors in everything, they’re all putting up data, and at some time when they’re going to start to converge. So that pipe had better be big enough.”

A gardener waters the plants in the satellite town of the emerging Gujarat International Finance Tec-City in Gandhinagar, India. Photo: Doreen Fiedler/DPA

Dr Hawken said Singapore was already using technology to make the city more efficient.

“If Sydney wants to be a world leader it has to engage with technology because the economy of tomorrow is going to be digital.”

With the city’s finance sector employing fewer people over time, Australia’ largest city needed to find the new job-creating industry of tomorrow but it had to go beyond the Bays Precinct and enrich the entire city.

“We need to keep up and develop that digital identity, have that conversation with other cities,” he said.

But, as ever, there are downsides. What about the people who haven’t embraced technology? Are censors and cameras on every corner and GPS in our devices whittling away our privacy? And, says Dr Hawken, do we even want to be on all the time?

“There is a danger technology will take over and we will never switch off and we need to be mindful of that”.