The challenges facing Dubai’s Smart City dreams

Experts say the biggest challenge in making Dubai's Smart City project a reality is how to manage resources

Electricity tower near Meydan Racecourse in Dubai. Pawan Singh / The National

DUBAI // Experts believe that Dubai’s plans to create a “smart city” could create one of the world’s most-connected and sustainable urban centres.

Amr Salem, managing director for Cisco smart cities business, said the main challenge Dubai could face is how to oversee resources to implement the project, which would feature free Wi-Fi in all public places.

“Let’s first create efficiency in how we manage our resources, let’s then create efficiency in how we distribute these resources to the citizens and businesses,” he said.

“Then let’s educate citizens and businesses on how to consume and how to save, and then let’s introduce recycling in a more efficient manner. It’s a process, and once you finish one you have to start again from the beginning, because the technology will be there to help you do more.”

Cisco is currently involved in more than 90 smart-city projects around the world. Its two flagship projects are in Nice, France and Barcelona, Spain.

“The second-highest source of revenue, after taxes, for the city of Nice is parking. People in Nice on average spend four years of their lives looking for parking. About 30 per cent of the traffic congestion is people looking for parking, and only 14 per cent of people were paying parking fees,” Mr Salem said.

Cisco implemented a smart-parking system, similar to the one announced by Dubai Roads Traffic Association on Wednesday.

“With one simple app and a bunch a sensors, we created an automated way of doing this and a service that tells you where the nearest available parking spot is,” he said.

To learn about smart-city technologies in action, a delegation of Dubai government representatives visited Barcelona last year, one of Cisco’s most prominent smart-city engagements.

“Barcelona is a young city, in terms of the average age of its residents. They are so excited about being green and efficient that they are willing to pay for the sensors to be put on their balconies to measure things like noise, temperature, humidity. They each pay €200 (Dh1,020), half of which is tax deductible, to contribute back to the city, in a country that is bankrupt.”

Cisco is in talks with a number of government departments in Dubai to install service booths equipped with video conferencing and document scanning and printing, allowing people to complete all official paperwork in shopping malls.

“You have all these branch offices, and you go to one place for a document and then to a different place for a licence and then to another place for something else. These should all be centralised government services under one roof, and I don’t mean by any means for it to be physical, it can be virtual, in front of a screen with the customer-service guy helping you,” he said.

All the cities that have smart initiatives will have different priorities depending on the type of city.

“Most developing cities will have safety and security as their top priority, while developed cities will look at energy, transportation and the environment as their most important areas and safety and security will be much lower down the list.”

Dubai’s first step should be to look at easy gains, he said.

“When you start such a complex project you have to look at a lot of quick wins that are available to very quickly execute. Then you look at the long term and things that will have a big impact, these are called special efforts.

“The quick wins for Dubai are plenty, but water is very scarce in Dubai and it has to be dealt with at the grass-roots level, all the way from production to distribution to consumption. Electricity is the same. I think those are the first and second things that have to be dealt with in Dubai.

“Water and electricity follow the same journey – source, distribution and consumption. On average, in most networks, 30 per cent of the water is lost in distribution and 60 per cent of power is lost in distribution due to the legacy systems we have in place today.”

Technology plays a role at all levels of that supply chain, Mr Salem said. Installing specialised sensors across the entire network to detect leaks was the best way to control this.

“If you build a ubiquitous wired and wireless network that has the capability to aggregate all these sensors seamlessly as well as other sensors from other systems, you will be able to pull this data into some kind of intelligent analytic software and pinpoint areas that need to be fixed. The next layer would be to have an intelligent management system that can utilise your resources in an efficient way, technology will enable these solutions.”

To close the cycle “you have to go from the toilet back to the tap”.

“Singapore has managed to build a system with zero loss, all the waste water is treated and sent back into the system. It is efficient.”