Smart cities won’t need dumb buildings

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Darwin, one of the many pioneers across Australia leading the charge for smart cities, has revealed data showing how residents have complied with lockdown restrictions.

The data was taken from ‘smart poles’ which showed pedestrians remained on the move with the average visit time in Bicentennial Park dropping from 74 minutes in January to 34 minutes in April.

While the need may be pertinent now, this kind of application will eventually become part of an interoperable network of connected devices, applications and people that make up smart cities in Australia.

Robert Linsdell, managing ANZ for Vertiv.

When we break down what’s in an actual city, and thus what will be in a smart city, one of the key components is, evidently, buildings. If we want to get smart cities right, we need to start thinking more about them.

We must question, and potentially re-examine, how we design buildings in the lead up to this new wave of Internet of Things (IoT)-led innovation. After all, dumb buildings won’t be very useful in a smart city.

Bandwidth is one obvious prerequisite. Research from McKinsey estimates that the use of office IoT applications could have an economic impact of between $100bn to over $200bn per year by 2025, with better security and energy management some of the key benefits to gain.

Being able to use these applications efficiently and effectively will require far more bandwidth and IT infrastructure than today’s typical server room.

The Edge

In Amsterdam lies a building known as The Edge, widely recognised as one of the world’s smartest and greenest office spaces. The office building has 28,000 sensors which track movement, lighting levels, humidity and temperature. It can tell staff and visitors how many parking spots are available, prepare coffee just the way everyone likes and even has a robot security guard on patrol at night.

While we can’t expect builders, planners, architects and others involved in designing buildings to design everything to a high standard in Australia, there are certain lessons we can learn to ensure buildings can at least be primed and ready to become smart as the technology becomes mainstream.

The foundation

The foundation is the data centre, the hub of any organisation’s digital services. These are set to become more complex and resource-intensive as smart buildings develop.

At the centre of Amsterdam’s famous Edge is a humble, yet powerful, data centre connecting all the sensors and smart applications that make the building so special.

It’s less important what is in that data centre – there are a multitude and indeed a mix of suitable technologies that can do the job – but more-so where it is located.

Keeping a data centre close by means applications that are designed to provide services and make decisions in real time actually do so. If the data centre is far away, the lag created by that distance can ruin the experience.

We need to start thinking about building design that includes – or at least has the capacity for – smart, modular data centres that can effectively power that building’s digital assets. These aren’t the clunky, oversized data centres of old, and making room for them in the design phase wouldn’t actually be very difficult.

The right space

Most buildings we use today weren’t built with smart city applications or data centre capacity in mind. We haven’t always had IT in the workspace and we certainly haven’t always understood how valuable it would be. That means in many cases we need to work with what we have.

Architect Charles Fortin has highlighted how architects and builders are scouring CBD locations across Australia to increase inner-city data centre capacity and keep this infrastructure closer to the action.

While finding available space in CBD areas might seem near impossible, Fortin highlights that data centres can slot in almost anywhere.

There is no need for views or natural light that might be a factor in other real estate decisions. These data centres also wouldn’t be low-rise, sprawling buildings like large data centres we typically find in suburbs or business parks outside the city. They can slot into a series of floors within a high-rise hotel or even above or behind existing office towers.

Future-proofing

This practice may provide some relief as businesses and office buildings seek more IT capacity to power smarter working environments. However, it’s important that organisations start thinking about putting their own capacity in place so that they can quickly deploy new services and applications when they need them.

Queensland’s Redland City Council, for example, has built a self-contained, eco-friendly data centre as the foundation for IoT and smart city applications.

While the facility has yet to flex its muscles completely, the Council has smart apps on its agenda and knows it needs this kind of capacity now to do the fun stuff later.

It’s important that other government organisations and businesses looking to drive smart city applications follow this recipe and consider what resources they can, or will have in place, to do so.

The likes of facial recognition, AI-enhanced security, smart heating and running a building with the equivalent of a powerful brain don’t switch on like a light. We’re talking about buildings that can think for themselves, buildings that know who is walking in and out, connecting to the five-to-ten connected devices each person will have on them.

We need to think and build smarter, and include fully integrated data centres in our building design. Approaching development in this way could see Australia create the right foundation for smart cities and cement a leading role in what will soon be a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Robert Linsdell is managing director Australia and New Zealand for Vertiv