Reducing emissions and meeting the needs of a changing climate is where urban technology is headed. It is guided not only by the exigencies of the crisis, but also by government incentives, regulatory requirements, civil servants, and even capital markets.
Johan Schwind, managing director of URBAN-X, MINI's climate technology and cities platform, said climate change and other challenges are forcing cities to “look at technology in the context of how it can solve real problems. “It has re-centered the discussion.” URBAN-X is an accelerator for startups reimagining urban life.
“It's no longer, 'Oh, we can do all these really interesting things with technology.' We don't know what we're going to do with it, but it's a great technology,” Schwind said. “It really happened. There are some difficult problems that need to be solved, and we need to solve them quickly.”
Schwindt tends to downplay the nickname “smart city,” a sometimes vague and negative term full of virtue symbols.
“I've never really liked the term 'smart city,' because it always seemed to imply that a city without technology is a kind of 'stupid city,'” Schwind said. he said.
“More recently, we've seen that the original idea of smart cities doesn't really work and isn't really viable, at least in the Western Hemisphere, at least in Western cities,” he added. “And in other parts of the world, it has essentially become synonymous with surveillance cities.”
This perspective is shared by many who monitor the smart cities movement, which has been in place and developed for more than a decade. It has gone from being a garbage can equipped with sensors to a system relevant to the task of mitigating the effects of human-induced climate change.
Eliminating fossil fuels from the energy system and replacing them with renewable energy and grid management solutions “is creating an entirely new and highly dynamic technological system. And it's incredibly complex,” says CleanTech. said Doug Davenport, founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization Prospect Silicon Valley. Davenport was moderating a panel at the Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo in November.
“There is a smart city aspect of managing the grid infrastructure locally and that is needed to make this work,” he added.
Indeed, large cities like San Jose, California, an urban technology hub, are developing clean energy microgrids with the goal of not only reducing fossil fuel use but also increasing resiliency. But smaller cities are also pioneering innovative approaches to energy production.
The small town of Cohoes, New York, is moving forward with a project that will cover most of its 10-acre man-made reservoir with a system of floating solar panels, similar to efforts in Walden, Colorado. City officials say it will provide more than 4.1 million megawatts of electricity annually.
Government laws like the Inflation Control Act are layered with incentives to grow clean technology. Regulatory measures like the California Air Resources Board's Advanced Clean Fleet Rule will move the state's massive port industry, which supports more than 30,000 drayage trucks that drive more than 1 billion miles a year, away from diesel power generation. It will transform into electric mobility.
URBAN-X participating startups are introducing innovations in areas such as curbside EV charging, secure bike storage, and electric transportation shuttles. All of these areas can directly or peripherally influence the environmental impact of urban systems.
Urban “It's about showing that something is true,” Schwind said.
