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Startupfest 2014 - Cities are one of humankind's greatest inventions. More than four thousands years ago, we began the process of separating ourselves from the forces of natural Darwinism. By concentrating large numbers of people with wide ranges of interests, beliefs, and skills into high density living, we created the framework for driving forward our civilization. In the 21st century we will come close to completing our evolution into a species of city dwellers. Since 2008 more than 50% of us live in urban areas and by 2050 predictions suggest reaching 80%. To achieve this the world will build in the 21st century as much new urban infrastructure as existed at the end of the 20th century. We are entering the Age of Cities. However, architects, urban planners, public administrators, agency leaders and many other stakeholders in urban living struggle to understand the impact that Information Technology will have on cities. Their thinking is naturally rooted in the permanence and immutability of concrete and steel and in 19th century organizational methods. But we live now in the Age of Intelligent Systems, which we expect to have characteristics such as awareness, responsiveness, adaptation, personalization, and so forth. In the smart cities movement the Internet of Things is instrumenting a myriad flows of information in cities. How can we leverage the new visibility of these flows to help cities evolve into intelligent systems? How can we re-invent how we live together in cities? In this talk Distinguished Engineer Emeritus and inventor of IBM’s Smarter Cities architecture, Dr Colin Harrison, will share observations of these trends and offer suggestions for a wide range of start up opportunities based on viewing cities as intelligent systems that touch all of our lives.
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Re-Inventing Cities
Colin HarrisonIBM Distinguished Engineer EmeritusStartupFest, 10 July 2014, Montreal
A few successes and (mostly) failures
• Successes– 1974 Distributed, real-time control system (CERN)– 1978 First clinical MRI system (EMI)– 1992 Mobile Wi-Fi MAC-Link protocol– 2008 Smart Cities Architecture– … and so forth
• Failures– 1980 Magnetic Bubble Memory– 1985 Medical Imaging business– 1993 Mobile Web– 1996 Intelligent Agents– 2003 eLearning– … and so forth
The world’s greatest innovation…
Gilgamesh built the city of Uruk…
Cities exist to allow large numbers of people to live in close proximity.
Why?
Cities have interesting scaling properties…
Fig. 1 Scaling of urban infrastructure and socioeconomic output.(A) Total lane miles (volume) of roads in U.S. metropolitan areas (MSAs) in 2006 (blue dots).
L M A Bettencourt Science 2013;340:1438-1441
Published by AAAS
Invention scales faster than population
Metropolitan Patenting, Inventor Agglomeration and Social Networks: A Tale of Two Effects by Deborah Strumsky, José Lobo, Lee Fleming
The Urbanisation Challenge
The Urbanisation-Innovation Challenge
1. Today 3-4 bn people live in cities2. Some 200,000 people per week migrate into cities and
increase their resource consumption (become richer)3. If nothing changes, by 2100 we expect to add another 3-4
bn urban residents4. If nothing changes, there will not be sufficient water, food,
and raw materials for that urban population5. Not to mention the environmental impact6. Implicitly, we are assuming that we will innovate our way
out of this problem7. The size of the “innovation gap” is hot research topic
Ladies and gentlemen of the Start Up community…we have work to do!
