In connection with last year's Global Smart City Conference, Shanghai and Shenzhen were able to break through from 450 participants from 54 countries and regions around the world and won important awards, indicating that China has made some achievements in the construction of smart cities.
Of course, smart cities are still in their infancy.
After a lot of trial and error earlier, we gradually understand that smart cities span countless disciplines and are asked by universities of any enterprise or government agency.
The idea put forward by internet companies is not a golden rule, and Party A's unit should also have clear planning and lasting responsibility for the project. Only by looking at it step by step and thinking about where to change, can we finally fail to make a smart city operation project with sustainable vitality.
Facing the trend, we should have expectations and confidence in smart cities; However, for at least hundreds of smart city pilot projects in China, it is particularly important to sum up experience and avoid stepping on the pit for this project with large investment scale and long construction period.
Therefore, this paper focuses on three "failure" cases of global smart city projects, and then thinks about the key issues of smart city construction.
Case 1: A project with a scale of 654.38+75 million without a target will be terminated after 3 years.
On July 8, 20 19, the case that Wuhan Smart Ecology Technology Investment Co., Ltd. (Wuhan Smart Ecology) sued Beijing Huasheng Tiancheng Technology Co., Ltd. and Microsoft (China) Co., Ltd. for returning 35.074 million yuan and stopping performing the contract came to an end.
According to the contract List and Price of Products and Services of Microsoft Smart City Project, the total amount of products and services purchased by this project is 65,438+075,370 850 yuan, most of which are used for purchasing IT software, IT integration and cloud services. In addition, the contract also stipulates that Digital China is the software product supplier designated by Microsoft. As the only authorized operator of Microsoft, Yun Lan Company provides public cloud leasing services; As a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huasheng Company, Tianchang Technology Co., Ltd. provides comprehensive services for Huasheng Company.
No one expected that after the companies started to unify their work, the compatibility and feasibility of the software and hardware systems that were criticized for purchasing were almost zero when the project was accepted, and the purpose and effect of use could not be achieved.
In addition to purchasing a large number of IT infrastructure products, in the three years after the signing of the project contract (20 13-20 16, the first phase of the project is 35 million), we can't even see what long-term goal this smart city project wants to achieve. During the implementation process, it was found that the project was difficult to advance until Party A began to ask for a refund.
Case 2: Data privacy concerns that have remained unresolved for three years.
In 20 15, Larry Page, the former CEO of Google, announced the establishment of Sidewalk Labs, a new smart city company, mainly to develop new products, create platforms and cooperative relationships, and solve many problems such as living costs, traffic efficiency and energy use. Larry Page believes that setting up a new smart city company is a "moderate investment" for Google, hoping to "improve the lives of billions of people around the world".
But there is a saying that the ideal is full and the reality is very skinny.
In 20 17, Sidewalk Labs announced that it would invest 50 million dollars to start Quayside, the world's first smart block project, from a community in downtown Toronto. It is planned to install a large number of sensors and intelligent devices in this living space to collect all kinds of information, so as to better understand people's life and travel problems and provide accurate matching intelligent services.
According to the report at that time, the vision of the future city designed by the project covers smart home, residential construction, road traffic, underground pipe gallery, building structure, public space operation and other aspects, and there is an unprecedented huge demand for ICT software and hardware and AI algorithm.
However, in 20 19, a non-governmental organization named "Block Sidewalk" petitioned to stop the project of Sidewalk Labs, and the whole project was caught in a long-term dispute about whether data privacy could be guaranteed, although Sidewalk Labs emphasized that it would not adopt face recognition technology and would not use users' personal information for commercial purposes.
In the end, until the project was closed in May 2020, people thought that the issue of data privacy had not been credibly explained. After nearly three years of tossing, the whole plan is equivalent to a "stillbirth".
What's more sad is that as long as the data privacy problem is not solved, Sidewalk Labs' projects in other cities will be difficult to promote because of the same problem.
At the end of February this year, foreign media revealed that Sidewalk Labs abandoned the smart city project with Portland, Oregon, USA due to data privacy disputes. The project started from 2065438+May 2009. The original intention is that the government wants to use the replica software products owned by Sidewalk Labs to obtain valuable location data, such as the number of people on local streets and the modes of transportation they use, so as to support the government's decision on the location of public facilities and the optimization of traffic management.
Although a spokesman for Replica once said that the project is not interested in individual sports, but mainly analyzes collective sports in specific areas, it may have experienced a strong demand for data privacy from citizens. Replica would rather terminate the project cooperation, but also refused to enjoy the request of too detailed data from government departments, although the Portland municipal government has not paid any service fees for Replica so far.
Case 3: Building a new city from scratch, but no one comes to live in it.
Around 2003, in Incheon, which is more than 50 kilometers away from Seoul, the Korean government intends to build a completely intelligent city-Song Dao New Town by reclaiming land from the sea. On the one hand, it is to ease the population pressure in Seoul, on the other hand, it is convenient to build a smart city model on a global scale and attract global capital, enterprises and people to join.
From the very beginning, South Korea planned to invest 40 billion dollars to design a smart space with highly integrated software and hardware, including smart home, intelligent transportation, intelligent office and other aspects.
The biggest feature of Song Dao New Town is that it has completely got rid of the historical burden that may exist in the old city, and can be armed with subversive technology from head to toe, achieving unprecedented high-tech and intelligence. Including the garbage disposal reported by the media: there is no garbage disposal vehicle in Songdo, but it is connected through an underground pipeline system, and the garbage is directly sucked into the factory from people's apartments, where it is automatically disposed of.
Unfortunately, the real estate developer (American Gael Company) actually operates the new town construction project, which shows high occupation cost and weak population agglomeration effect after paying too much attention to science and technology. Over the years, even the initial goal of attracting the permanent population of Song Dao New Town has been difficult to achieve.
According to earlier reports, Song Dao New Town was originally designed to accommodate 300,000 people, but by the end of 20 19, the population was only150,000, only half of the original design. It is conceivable that most of the infrastructure in this city often fails to reflect the original investment value because of its "vast territory and sparsely populated".
Cause analysis of three "failure" cases
The reason for the failure has been mentioned more or less above.
First of all, taking Wuhan Smart City Project as an example, the key problem is that Party A lacks a clear top-level design concept of smart city construction, but is simply attracted by the superior IT product infrastructure of large factories, which leads to the purchase of tools over commercial operation, and even the reasons for the cooperation projects between the two parties are related to earlier investment attraction, in other words, the financial investment projects are exchanged for the local landing of enterprises. In this mode, it is hard to say that Party A has done sufficient pre-project evaluation and investigation, and finally got into the quagmire of unclear rights and responsibilities, unclear purpose and unclear path.
The second is that Google Sidewalk Labs has been frustrated repeatedly because the data privacy problem cannot be solved. Both the Toronto project and the Portland project are not too grand and difficult to complete in essence, and they can even bring benefits such as environmental protection, increasing employment and increasing income. But perhaps Google itself has long faced the controversy of data privacy, and its Sidewalk Labs is more likely to be considered as collecting data of residents and tourists.
Finally, let's talk about the reason why Songdo New Town in South Korea has fallen from a "global benchmark" to an "idle city". In essence, the ridicule of the outside world is that the "industrial new city" has become a real estate project, from which it is difficult to see the coordination of the entire smart city industrial chain, which leads to the unobvious industrial agglomeration effect, slow population growth and insufficient development momentum.
Moreover, this idea of "starting a new stove" to build a new city has avoided many historical problems left over from the unreasonable planning of the old city. However, due to the long construction period and huge capital investment, once it lacks commercial appeal, the previous investment and construction will become meaningless. Although it is a shortcut, the risk is not small.
What is the correct posture for building a smart city?
Contrary to all the above-mentioned "failure" examples, Kendra Smith, a scholar at Stanford University, believes that the success of a smart city is closely related to its residents.
Only a smart city that puts residents' real needs and feelings first can develop into a mature urban construction template.
As a typical example, Shanghai has established a "One Network Operation" platform in fine urban management, which has accessed more than 2,000 government services. A "one network management" platform has been built, which is connected to 33 special applications of 22 units in the city, more than 1.400 drainage pumping stations, more than 27,000 kilometers of underground drainage network, more than 1.000 flood control teams and vehicle information, as well as important public plug-ins such as map service, meteorological service, traffic security and emergency response.
But in fact, the focus here is not only intelligent traffic signal system, but also intelligent street lamp system and intelligent building system. The deep connotation of smart city lies in whether different systems can be connected and integrated as much as possible, and its responsibilities include government supervision, enterprise leadership and ecological participation.
Therefore, from all the materials about Shanghai's smart city construction, we can see the deep participation of various companies in the industrial chain, such as Shanghai Smart City Construction Leading Group Office, Shanghai Smart City Development Research Institute, China Unicom, Huawei Cloud, Shanghai Yidian Group, Aishu Information, Shangtang Technology and CLP Digital Intelligence Technology.
Obviously, this is a firm force from top to bottom, which not only has the ability to make enterprises gain commercial value from it, but also can really bring new development vitality to the city.
Finally, let's look at the market research company Frost &; Sullivan's prediction in 2020:
I believe that although the road to building a smart city is relatively long, it has reached a growth trend.