“Smart” Isn’t Good Enough:  Building a Scalable Tech Foundation for Enduring Urban Solutions

It’s time to get smarter about smart cities.

Technology is changing the way we build, manage, and upgrade urban spaces, but too many “smart” cities look more like a hodgepodge of shiny objects and cool ideas. The promise of better cities through technology is real, but so is the risk of short-sighted investments that work in isolation, cannibalize each other’s resources, and inflict death-by-a-thousand-pilots.

Successful smart city innovators pay as much attention to building scalable technology foundations as to specific solutions and applications. Without flexible, forward-looking tech platforms upon which to build, today’s breakthroughs become tomorrow’s cautionary tales.

This is why Intel Corporation has joined City Tech Collaborative as a Member and Solution Partner to co-develop technology-enabled responses to pressing urban problems based on world-class tech foundations.

Any great chef can name the standard, “go-to” ingredients that lay the foundation for culinary genius. Proteins, produce, grains and dairy. Oils, spices, and basic flavors. But no one creates an award-winning dish by starting with the garnish and working backwards.

Yet too many urban tech solutions (and sales pitches) focus on flashy widgets while overlooking the underlying capabilities that often make-or-break their usability, maintainability, and ability to evolve over time.

Nearly all successful solutions rely on five foundational layers for urban tech innovation: physical design , sensors , network , compute , and analytics . Some of these exist in fixed locations, while others may be virtual and offer digital access from anywhere. Regardless of the problem they look to solve, smart city innovators must consider each of these enabling foundations, how they interrelate within and across solutions, and how they might adapt as needs and technology change.

Individual solutions and products incorporate most (if not all) of these foundational layers, but they often do so on an ad-hoc basis, in isolation from each other. Without an integrated technology foundation, multiple overlapping solutions can become too complex and resource-intensive for urban planners, public officials, facility operators, or residents use effectively. Furthermore, siloed solutions with separate, conflicting, or incomplete technology foundations can complicate or altogether prevent coordinated governance and risk management, including privacy, interoperability, and cybersecurity.

These five foundational elements not only shape solution functionality but also affect solution cost and related investments. Implemented at facility- or community-scale, these tech foundations systems can support faster, cheaper, and more flexible solution development, piloting, and widespread deployment.

Achieving this goal requires new ways of working across sectors, between competitors, and among stakeholders that don’t always speak each other’s language. In the absence of centralized investment in and control of urban tech infrastructure, we need to adopt new expectations and methods for collaborative innovation.

A strong technology foundation is only as good as the solutions it enables. Each aspiring smart city, community or facility must prioritize the problems and solutions to address its unique needs, opportunities, and culture.

The following examples and case studies illustrate a broad range of smart city applications and the ways in which they rely on foundational technology:

Fortunately, cities with common challenges can learn from each other, but public officials and vendors should be as eager to discuss foundational technologies as the solutions that sit on top of them. Broadening smart city dialogue to focus more on core capabilities can facilitate rapid piloting and rollout.

In light of these examples and many more possibilities, Intel and City Tech are teaming up to seize opportunities for new solution development, beginning with the parking and mobility sectors. Combining City Tech’s cross-sector consortium with Intel’s cross-industry technology expertise, the partnership will develop, deliver, and scale tech-enabled solutions to pressing urban needs.

Together, City Tech, Intel, and our partners are using foundational technologies to enable faster and more scalable solutions to urban challenges.

Intel is the ideal partner to bring the knowledge, products, and capabilities necessary to strengthen the cyberphysical foundation for smart city innovation. While the company is perhaps best known for processors found in PCs and data centers, it also supplies computing power that can scale out to cost-efficient edge nodes, as well as storage and network connectivity. Beyond hardware, Intel leads the OneAPI initiative, a unified programming model intended to deliver a common experience for developers across the many platforms used for smart city deployment. Intel’s leadership across foundational technology layers yields a deep understanding of the opportunities and next steps for solutions.

Building smarter cities is within our reach, but good intentions won’t bridge the gaps among disconnected, siloed solutions. Technology is often spread across multiple providers, vendors, and hosts; closed systems do not account for or complement each other; and many-to-many partnerships are always more complicated than they seem. Without resolving these issues, however, stakeholders miss opportunities for economies of scale and expansion of successful solutions.

No single company specializes in all the ingredients needed to make a smart city. Architecture and planning firms design our buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. Utility providers supply energy, water, and hardwired connectivity. Technology companies build new sensors, processors, and other tools to collect data and make sense of it. And local governments have the daunting task of coalescing all of these into a vision for the future and regulating cities to serve their residents and the public good.

Against this rich and complex landscape, City Tech and Intel are committed to cross-sector collaboration, to strengthening urban tech foundations, and to creating innovative solutions that are greater than the sum of their parts.

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About City Tech Collaborative (City Tech): City Tech is an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone. City Tech’s work uses IoT sensing networks, advanced analytics, and urban design to create scalable, market ready solutions. Current initiatives address advanced mobility, healthy cities, connected infrastructure, and emerging growth opportunities. City Tech was born and raised in Chicago, and every city is a potential partner. Visit www.CityTech.org and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Intel Corporation: Intel is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. We stand at the brink of several technology inflections—artificial intelligence (AI), 5G network transformation, and the rise of the intelligent edge—that together will shape the future of technology. Silicon and software drive these inflections, and Intel is at the heart of it all. Data has emerged as a transformational force in an era where an explosion of devices permeates all our interactions. Government agencies, hospitals, manufacturing plants, and even automobiles are becoming factories of data. That data must be moved, stored, and processed faster and more securely than ever before. We are unleashing the potential of data to unlock value for people and society and the governments that serve them, on a global scale.