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Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist
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The role of future IT in
city development
Ian Pearson,
BT
IT is developing faster than ever and will be a useful tool
in the redevelopment of cities. Short term developments such as wireless LANs
may be unglamorous but have large potential for opening up new areas of
opportunities, both in social and business uses. In the mid term, these
networks will combine with ambient intelligence to make a smart digital air
overlay, making every part of a city electronically enabled. The result will be
big improvement in public transport and city architecture. Other IT
developments will improve health, governance and security. If managed well,
future urban society will be happier, less lonely, more prosperous, healthier
and more involved in decision making.
Cities are a combination of various physical infrastructures, and a wide variety of very diverse communities that inhabit and use them. There is no common factor among the resident people and businesses in a large city other than that they share the same physical environment, but a healthy city will foster synergistic relationships between businesses, encouraging interworking in business parks, and supporting developments that provide for the special needs of particular communities. Urban infrastructure therefore must cater for a wide range of needs, fairly balancing the allocation of finite resources to meet these needs across the whole community, and all the while trying to ensure continuing wellbeing by looking to the future too. If a city is to flourish, it must provide not only for present needs but also encourage front line businesses to locate there, enable existing businesses to expand into new areas, and attract people and resources to the city.
This article considers the part that information technology can play in maintaining the wellbeing of a city and ensuring its healthy development into an even more attractive and prosperous place to live, work and visit.
Any modern city requires modern IT infrastructure to support its businesses. Today, that means a large installed base of fibre networks, mobile telecoms infrastructure, universal broadband access across PSTN or cable networks, and of course a ready supply of support businesses across the whole IT sector that can set up and maintain all aspects of IT provision. Without a good IT infrastructure a city simply canÕt compete in the modern world. The same is true of any significantly large area of a city. People will avoid setting up companies there if there is inadequate IT infrastructural and service provision. The IT community is also a significant part of the modern business population of any city as well as support for other sectors. Of course other areas such as good public transport, roads, refuse collection, energy and other public services must be high quality too, and many of these will use IT to improve their efficiency too.
One of the areas expanding fastest at the moment is the spread of wireless LANs. These are extensively used internally within companies and homes already, and the number of public access wireless LANs is increasing rapidly too, especially in rail stations and airports, even in coffee shops. This will continue for some time until most of the urban area is covered by wireless LANs. A new generation of telephones is capable of using voice over the internet (VoIP), to give low cost calls without the direct use of a computer. BT will soon release Bluephone, a new type of phone that uses Bluetooth to wirelessly connect to a fixed line when it is within range, and when it moves outside of that range, it will seamlessly switch over to the mobile phone networks. This phone will be followed in due course by a phone which will access wireless LANs of the 802.11 series. This convergence between the fixed and mobile networks is called Fixed-Mobile Convergence. It will be accompanied by a convergence of the fixed networks with the internet as BTÕs 21st Century Network rolls out, which will use internet protocol across all parts of the fixed network. One of the results of this convergence will be a much more seamless integration of voice and data, fixed and mobile, telephone and PC. Users care little about technology per se, but the effect will be the ability to access any kind of service anywhere at high speed with the minimum of fuss. It can also mean much cheaper calls when people are within a wireless LAN overlay area. But the main advantage of wireless LANs is that they give wireless access to the internet, and the enormous range of services connected to it.
Wireless LANs are thus an important step in the realisation of a city where key services are available anywhere at high speed.
Engineers who design technology arenÕt always good at working out what society will do with it. Many of the most widespread or innovative uses are created by ordinary members of the public. Anyone can have an idea, and if they have reasonable technology skills themselves or know someone that does, they can create and implement a new idea very quickly, and change society. Social groups, clubs and societies or niche industries can often start off a new craze or a more persistent activity. These may overtake the anticipated value of a service, much as text messaging has become the biggest money-spinner for mobile network operators.
What engineers can do is to encourage such public creativity by making platforms on which services can be built easily. In the case of wireless LANs, this is very simple. The LAN itself is a sufficient platform provided that it covers the right geographic area, with enough bandwidth (the amount of simultaneous capacity that the LAN can offer). The degree of openness is entirely user configurable. Wireless LANs can be made available to a single individual, or absolutely anyone, a select group, or to subscribers. Airports and rail stations often offer wireless LAN coverage to good effect, normally on a commercial basis, but the access fees can be quite high. In an urban community support role, such high fees would be a strong deterrent. If a LAN is provided by a city council, as a free public benefit, this could be used by a range of social and community groups in support of their activities. It allows them to communicate with each other, providing access to their web sites at high speed within the LAN coverage area via laptops or PDAs, or future mobile phones. This type of access already exists. But potential uses are evolving quickly now with improving bandwidths and now that more devices have wireless LAN access capability.
One exciting potential development is in linking wireless LAN capability to positioning information from new navigation devices or mobile phones. This makes a simple wireless LAN into a smart electronic overlay on the geographic environment. Depending on the location this could provide shopping assistance and adverts, cultural overlay (e.g. electronically mediated tours), tourist information or business support services. Types of overlay can be as varied as imagination. Much of the hype surrounding third generation mobile (3G) arose from the potential uses of the positioning information that 3G provides. With ongoing integration of 3G with wireless LANs, this information will be available to PDAs and laptops accessing LAN overlays. Christmas 2004 saw a massive effort in selling personal navigation systems. These will gradually integrate better with road traffic information systems to give real-time navigation around town that adjusts to current traffic loading and bottlenecks. For pedestrians, they can show what is available in the nearby urban area, and could show scenic routes rather than necessarily the fastest. Media Lab Europe developed a prototype of a system called Walk-time, which shows a map of the local area showing points of interest, with an indication of how long it would take to walk to any location. So there will be a variety of ways of getting hold of information associated with geographic locations, buildings or other facilities.
When people are at a location, wireless LAN overlays can provide
any type of information that can be stored on a database or web site. This can
be made fully context sensitive. Context is one of the hottest current IT
development areas, and is basically about making sure people get the
information appropriate to them given their current preferences, circumstances
and location. So one person might be fed an alert about a new exhibition in a
nearby gallery, while someone else might be shown details of a charming
restaurant just around the corner, or that a No. 6 bus is just about to arrive.
In a few cities around
Tourist information is obviously a useful service to provide over wireless LANs. Given the location of some tourist destinations, they may not be included in the normal urban wireless map. It may therefore be appropriate to have tourist information beacons at some places. These could offer a local wireless LAN, or Bluetooth, but may also have USB or infrared ports too so that people can easily connect to them by a range of mechanisms. Tourists could thus download electronic guides, which could be fully interactive and positions sensitive.
Even public meetings or demonstrations could benefit from wireless LANs. Within a building such as a council building or conference room, visitors could read documents made available to them via the LAN, or check out facts on the internet to enrich the debate. Leaders of particular groups in the audience could communicate in real time with their members distributed throughout the room via instant messaging. And of course, the same would apply to open air meetings within the coverage are of the LAN.
A lot of the services appropriate to wireless LANs are also suited to provision via 3G. The main differences are that 3G is generally associated with small display size, and that data downloads would be more expensive.
Community networks are one of the most promising developments on the internet. When local clubs and societies hold meetings, there are always people who would like to attend but canÕt. But if meetings are broadcast on the net using web cams, anyone (with password based access if necessary) can access the meeting from anywhere in the world. They can also participate by text messaging, email, instant messaging, videoconferencing or audioconferencing. The community network can provide access to local government too, allowing anyone to be tele-present at a council debate. By opening up access to the whole community, rather than just those who are readily mobile, community networks can make for a fairer society. Encouraging involvement in local politics by making debates available on-line can only be a good thing. Even theatres can benefit by putting their productions on-line. People from other towns and cities may visit on-line, perhaps even paying a fee. This is a form of cultural export that advertises the merits of a city, bringing in business and tourism.
A well designed and supported community network can also provide chat rooms, socials support services, local information, host sites for local clubs and societies, and so on. Most councils already provide lots of information to their community in this way, but there is always room for improvement in broadening access and awareness. There is little point in having first class services on-line if few people know they exist. It is well worth councils subsiding such services so that everyone can afford access. Access to high speed networks is quickly becoming a necessity for modern living, so not having such access is a big disadvantage. In the interests of avoiding haves and have-nots, councils can provide community networks to all, if necessary subsiding infrastructure in poorer areas.
And of course, at least some of these services are useful to people on the move, so would benefit from wireless access via LANs or 3G.
At village or estate level, community networks can provide a means to link cameras and other sensors together into a neighbourhood watch system. The ability now to automatically detect and recognise car number plates allows communities to log traffic in and out of their area, helping to control crime, especially in conjunction with ubiquitous video cameras.
In the short term, many new technologies such as electronic paper, the semantic web, flexible displays, storage based nets, symbiotic nets, and various incremental advances in terminals will also reach the marketplace, but they probably wonÕt have reached sufficient penetration to have any dramatic influence on urban development. In the mid-term future they might well have significant impact.
The wireless and community network technologies outlined above will still be around, but as other technologies develop in parallel, they will evolve into parts of much more useful systems. Perhaps the most significant development will be the growth of ambient intelligence, also known as pervasive ICT, pervasive computing or chips everywhere. This will use microelectronic technology such as sensors, communicators, storage and processor chips all over the urban environment. These chips will monitor what is going on and bring useful information to everyone. The key common factor is that ambient intelligent systems put people and peopleÕs needs right at the centre of the design, rather than making technology and then trying to find a market for it. The technology is also largely invisible, only becoming apparent when it needs to. A good early example is a gadget that BT has designed which glows and is an attractive part of the household ornamentation. When an email or voice message comes in, it simply changes colour and makes a pleasant sound. It is much less offensive than conventional IT.
Sensor networks will collect data on all manner of things,
from traffic levels to air temperature and rainfall, making it easy for someone
to decide whether to go into town now or leave it until later. Video cameras
may even be able to show real time video of the situation at any location in
town. Sensors can measure almost anything, from pollen counts to UV radiation
level, pollution and noise, or the delay on accessing a web site. Networking
these and making the processed data available to residents can improve quality
of life across a wide field.
Some cities already have bus stops that show exactly when the next bus will arrive, since GPS systems in the buses can tell exactly where the bus is, and knowing current traffic levels, the computer can calculate an estimated time of arrival. This data can be made available on web sites so that people can stay at home until they need to leave to catch the bus. This is already here today. In the mid term future, it is expected that for some services people will be able to place a request on a web site for the bus to stop outside their door. Such a personalised and responsive public transport system would give mobility to a lot of people who currently are unable to walk to a bus stop and who canÕt afford regular taxi fares. Since the community network has put everyone on-line with 24/7 access to the internet, and its public services sites, via a simple interface, placing such requests should be pretty simple.
It would make a lot of sense to reconfigure bus routes into a different architecture to make the most of such promising technology. Today, buses often use very circuitous routes that take a long time to get into town, because they have to visit many places with few buses, and need to get reasonable occupancy on those buses. But this is inefficient and a strong deterrent to many potential bus users. If instead, small buses just made continuous loop around a village or estate, picking up people at their homes and dropping them at a node where they can get a big bus direct into town by a fast route, then more people would use buses because they would be faster and they would have to walk less. This type of architecture is actually used in some telecoms networks as an efficient mechanism for traffic routing.
Also in the mid term, personal identity cards are expected to be deployed and even be compulsory. The design and content of these is under discussion. It may be possible to have an RFID chip (radio-frequency identity) included to allow remote interrogation. While there would obviously be some issues with civil liberties and the desire to safeguard the rights of criminals, it would certainly be technologically feasible to include a field that says whether the card holder is known to the police as a potential mugger, sex offender, or anyone else that wouldnÕt be ideal to share a car with. If car owners and pedestrians could be sure that someone was safe, they might be much more tempted to car share with them. Even if the ID card doesnÕt contain this in formation, it would be possible for communities to set up who positively vet their members so that members could pool cars with each other. Anyone who becomes suspect for any reason could easily be ejected from the community. Cars themselves are likely to have simple black boxes in this time frame too, so that the identity of the passengers would be known. It would be possible to automatically share the costs of the journey as well as ensure safety. In this way, private cares could become part of the public transport infrastructure.
The GPS system that most car navigation systems rely on uses a collection of satellites to give positioning accuracy of a few metres. The new European positioning system, Galileo, will have better accuracy and when combined with 3G positioning (based on triangulation between cell phone masts) should be accurate to within 10cm. This is more than adequate for most purposes, but within a city, there are many places where a clear signal canÕt be obtained from satellites because they are obscured by tall buildings, the urban canyon effect. An urban positioning system can be constructed that uses land based beacons as triangulation points. These beacons could simply be mobile phone masts. The new types of mast are very small indeed, and there would be many more of them to compensate, so they would be ideal in this capacity. There may also be some of these inside large buildings to ensure mobile phone coverage in malls, department stores and the like. So it is reasonable to assume we will eventually have an urban positioning system with almost total coverage and an accuracy in the centimetre range. With this level of accuracy, a device will know not only where it (and hence its user) is in a particular shop, but also in which department, which shelf and which products are nearby. This extra context information is crucial to precision marketing, especially since the shop will know exactly who the customer is because of their loyalty card, so will have a full record of their preferences and recent purchases. And the credit card company can also offer services to the person too in collaboration with the shop.
Digital air is simply the realisation that with accurate
positioning and the knowledge of who a person is, the air they pass through
effectively becomes digitised. Personalised information can be delivered to
them that is associated with that particular location. This would be a far more
precise service than those currently available with wireless LANs. Hewlett
Packard demonstrated the principles in a project they called
As portable DVD players are gradually superceded in a few years by video iPods and other hard disk or memory card video players, we are very likely to see a parallel development in personal displays. People will have a wide choice. Already Philips have a flexible display that is only 0.3mm thick. Its successors may be rolled up into a tight scroll and put in a pocket like a ball point pen. Or they may be attached to a coat sleeve or even stuck onto a forearm. We might even have video T-shirts! Other siplays will be based on wireless headsets. Some already exist, with quite low resolution compared to a computer monitor, but with 300 lines or more, higher resolution that most mobile phone screens, and they are improving all the time. These various displays will make it taken for granted to be able to access the net public services on the move. People will use the net everywhere they go, it will just be a constant companion. They will feel isolated and out of touch if they canÕt get on-line.
In this world, only a few years away from today, many people will wear head-up displays as they wander through town. Their emails will appear on them, along with navigational directions and tourist information and anything else they might be interested in. Ugly people could be digitally replaced by more attractive versions. More importantly, augmented reality techno logy will have developed substantially from today. People will naturally expect to see buildings with dual architecture. There will still be the real physical architecture, with the building appearance regulated by local authorities. But there will also be a cyber-architecture, which is designed by company marketers and image consultants. This is what people will actually see through their head-up displays. It could be personalized, so that different people would see different versions of the same buildings. It could be a lot more fun, with kaleidoscopic materials, or elaborate imaginary structures that could never exist in the real world. It need have nothing in common with reality at all. It doesnÕt even need to be constrained to the same physical dimensions. A McDonalds restaurant may be apparent to a mother with three young kids at lunchtime because she can see Ronald McDonald having a party in the virtual street. We will see a seamless merging of the video games world and the real world, with all the imagination available from both domains, linked together only by a positioning system and personal and company preferences.
Community networks will have developed substantially in the 5-10 year time frame. Today, many people are still novices as far as the web is concerned, and some people have never used the net at all. But as each new computer is cheaper, but more powerful and easier to connect, as people see more and more advantages of being on-line, they will gradually absorb it into their everyday lives. Then with more potential customers on-line for more of the time, the net becomes more attractive for companies to invest effort in, so their web sites become better and they will invest more in providing faster service and better support. And thus a virtuous circle makes the net more useful and attractive to everyone. And it will therefore be a natural platform for people to develop their own ideas. Someone who might be challenged in setting up a new club in the real world because of administrative or logistical barriers, can more easily get on-line and do it there. We will thus see more social opportunity and diversity as more clubs and societies appear. People will get more involved with their local communities and will probably be happier as a result, meeting new friends and having more contact with the ones they have.
Local government can certainly help these beneficial activities by providing advice and assistance to people wanting to set them up or in advertising them, or providing the IT resources such as server space for web sites. The rewards for the local government are a happier population, stronger community, lower crime and reduced loneliness. These would seem well worth the investment. In addition, a strongly IT aware population is a necessity to provide a stream of good employees for future companies.
Loneliness itself is one of the biggest problems in any city. It appears to be a result of modern society, notably with cars making it easier for people to have distant friends, and thus reducing emphasis on the local street as the source of social networks for most people. Consequently, some people, mainly the old and frail, have been disenfranchised from a healthy social life. New technology promises to greatly reduce this problem. One of the key developments is in large flat screens at low cost. These offer much bigger display areas, but take up much less living space. Another is the rapid spread of low cost broadband access, which will increase in data rate and probably reduce further in cost in the next few years. People will make new friends through the web as a matter of course, in clubs and societies that they might frequent on the community network. They will then be able to use simple webcams to hold video communications with life-sized images of their new friends, almost as if they were in their living room. Similarly, broadband will make it easy for them to keep in touch with their families and with friends who live far away, also using video communications. With life sized pictures, communication includes body language and facial expressions, giving a much richer communication that is offered by simple voice telephony. It will still not be as good as meeting people physically face to face, but will be a lot better than not having any communication at all, which is todayÕs usual alternative. Social services can assist people in making friends on the network if they arenÕt able to do it by themselves. There already exist many software tools that can match people up with others that they are likely to get on with. These were first used by companies such as Dateline, but are now much more ubiquitous.
One kind of novel gadget starting to arrive in this field is the personality badge (with various other names depending on manufacturer). This stores various aspects of a personÕs personality on the badge and can communicate with other peopleÕs badges and exchange information with them. When two people meet whose badges have agreed should be introduced, the badges introduce them (by a sound, flashing, ringing their phones, romantic music, whatever). This obviously has strong dating uses, but is already being used to match business executives at conferences according to their areas of interest so as to maximize business opportunities during networking times at conferences. In the future, many people might use badges such as this routinely as just another way to meet interesting people.
Some of this can be done in the short term, but the most rapid growth is likely to be in the mid term future, because of the timing of the various technology platform developments.
Artificial intelligence is often dismissed as bad 1980s sci-fi, but in niche areas, it is moving ahead very rapidly. Web searches use a great deal of AI, as do web sites that allow users to shop around, and a number of computer games such as the Sims use AI to good advantage. Chat bots allow computers to hold fairly convincing conversations with people. We are not far from the point where a lot of public services could be based on AI, with the mental work being done by computer software and automated voice recognition and synthesis as the human interface, packaged in attractive avatars (computer generated pretend people). Again, while this is achievable in part already, in the mid-term we will see rapid acceleration of the use of such tools. And although this will mean that a lot of public servant work can be done by machine, a more socially sustainable view is that such technology upskills people rather than downskilling jobs, though it does both of course. One of the key advances that will enable machines to take over a lot of administrative work is the development of the semantic web. Other tools such as neural networks, inductive logic programming, evolutionary programming and so on will help in the automation of large parts of professional jobs too. There are very few areas of intellectual endeavour where computers cannot make substantial inroads. Computers have even demonstrated good skill levels in music and romantic novel writing, as well as making a number of patentable inventions.
The semantic web is the creation of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, and some other less well known engineers. The idea is that information written for humans can be translated into machine readable form. Today, web sites are mostly designed to be understood by people, and the information may be shown in a wide variety of formats and places, often making it impossible for a computer to capture key data that is needed for automated processing. Sites that use XML to mark data for computer processing are the exception rather than the norm. The semantic web will allow automated interpretation of data in a variety of different forms, even plain text, and will allow computers to understand the information on a site, extract useful meaning from it, and use this to make decisions or even create new knowledge. The semantic web is already starting to make some progress, but the main thrust will be later this year. In the few years following, we will see most web sites starting to use this technology. Well within the 5-10 year time frame, we will consider it a fault if a web site cannot easily be processed for us by our computer. So we will be able to easily automate tasks such as negotiating diary slots, shopping around and booking suitable flights, arranging a hire car and booking a hotel for a trip. Many other clerical and administrative tasks will become automatable.
This potential displacement of people in intellectual and administrative tasks is likely to accelerate dramatically during the 5 to 10 year time frame. It is possible or even likely that by 2015 we will have computers that are broadly equivalent to people in overall intelligence terms, with some areas where they still under-perform, balanced by other areas where they greatly out-perform humans.
If we do see such growth of AI, then the nature of the economy will change. If information is cheap to create, manipulate and distribute, then it will gradually lose its place as the basis of the economy. It will still be essential, like air, but like air it just wonÕt cost much. The economy is generally based on those things that people do, since people are generally the highest cost. If robotics gradually automates physical jobs, and computers gradually automate intellectual jobs, then what is left are those jobs that are based on core human skills, interpersonal skills, personal contact, personal services, caring, policing, teaching, leadership ad motivational skills.
This is called the care economy and it will start in earnest around 2015, though we are already seeing rapid growth in some of these areas such as personal services. There were few Feng Shui or lifestyle consultants a few years ago. We also see growth in personal fitness instructors. While some of these are passing fads, others will be created to replace fads that die out. These and other areas that no-one has even imagined yet will see creation of many new jobs in the 2015 time frame. So there is no reason to expect that the care economy will have massive unemployment, just that many more people will be working in roles where personal contact is a much more important part of the job, and intellect much less so.
Terminals are getting ever more sophisticated, and in the few years time will have better displays, faster processors, faster communications and more storage. Many people already walk around with MP3 players holding their entire music collection. In the mid term future, this might also include their entire photo and video collections too. This casts skepticism on ideas that people will use 3G to download movies or music on their train journeys. The chances are they will do so across high speed connections at home, or simply rip them off a disk, then store them on their portable devices for the day or week ahead. There will still be a lot of use of networks for a wide range of services, but it will be balanced with the use of very high capacity storage on the devices themselves.
Storage based networks seek to make good use of both the high capacity storage and high speed connections to ensure that the user gets very high speed whether they have the content with them or need to access it online.
Storage based networking will make good use of high capacity DVDs and hard drives, as well as broadband access over fibre, DSL or wireless nets. They may well also make use of another upcoming technology, symbiotic networking, also knows as ad-hoc networking. An ad-hoc network is set up by devices themselves, with no need for a public network. Two devices can easily talk to each other by a straightforward radio connection and if a third device joins, messages can be routed among them all. As further devices join, a network may extend across a wide area, with any device on the net able to talk to any other by routing the calls via other devices, hop by hop. Wireless LANs can also play a large part in such networks, acting as bridges between symbiotic nets and extending their effective reach, possibly right across town. This will enable services such as text messaging free of charge between network members. It may (and much less certainly) allow voice calls across a town too. This has been identified as a potential commercial threat to public communication networks, and though it hasnÕt happened in large scale yet, improving technology and gradual adoption in the marketplace might make it a serious network contender in the 5-10 year time frame.
Another new technology that might accelerate such a trend is
software radio. This allows a fast (digital signal processing) chip in a device
to create any type of radio signal on request. So the device might emulate
a 2G or 3G phone, or access any kind of wireless LAN, or join a symbiotic net.
Its versatility means that the device can search for a free network that it can
use, or attempt to set one up with devices nearby. If that is not possible,
then it might reluctantly use a commercial network. Although a terminal that
includes such functionality would be considered extremely powerful by todayÕs
standards, it might well be standard equipment in the mobile device in 10 years
time.
A huge amount of technology development is ongoing in the health area, not only in biotech, but also in IT and nanotechnology. On-line expert systems can already do a good diagnosis, and these may well become the first line of care for an overstretched health service, allowing self treatment in many cases. Monitoring systems are also becoming widespread. Many old people live with various sensors in their homes to monitor their behaviors. If they donÕt get out of bed, or boil a kettle often enough, alarms can be raised and a nurse sent around to investigate. These systems are being developed so that in the mid term future, the home will be able to detect quite subtle changes in life style that might give clues that something is going wrong. This technology is not invasive. People are aware it is there since they have to authorize it, but it doesnÕt appear in their field of view, being hidden away or disguised. Yet it allows people to maintain a degree of independence and dignity that they wouldnÕt otherwise have, to a much greater extent than the simple alarm buttons that many old people carry today. Future sensor networks will become ubiquitous, so that people could even be tracked and monitored when they are out and about. Provided that such systems are consensual, they could offer significant improvement in quality of life for many.
Community networks are an important development for local government to make sure that they stay in the loop as far as the provision of local services and information goes. It would be easy for alternative networks to capture many such services and thus local power, if government does it badly or not at all. Political power isnÕt something that local government has a monopoly of either. Many other organizations have influence too. There have already been many examples of demonstrations and direct actions that have been orchestrated via the web or even via text messaging. Flash mobs are an unusual social phenomenon, where people arrange to meet up at a given location at a particular time, do something whacky, and then disperse. It is just fun, but can cause some congestion and some inconvenience for businesses and individuals. As people use the net more and more, and can access it more easily at high speeds, everywhere they go, all of the time, it will become a much more powerful political weapon. Mass demonstration could be coordinated very quickly, giving authorities very little time to react and making the result of the action more powerful. Once a few such demonstrations have happened and been see to be effective, more and more pressure groups will begin to use them. They will be backed up by direct action on the internet too, such as coordinated denial of service attacks.
But it is not all bad. Community networks will make it easier to involve people in decision making even without them having to leave the comfort of their homes. So local democracy could flourish.
Increasing use of the net to commit crime is obvious. We arte seeing more identity theft, more posing as back web sites to steal bank account details, lots of imaginative ways of luring new and na•ve users into giving up their money. This is a non-geographic problem, so has little relevance to cities per se, except in that it undermines the trust that people have of the net, and therefore undermines some of the advantages that the web would otherwise confer.
A bigger IT security threat is in bringing down the city networks. This might be via a few well placed bombs or via an internet based attack. As we become ever more dependent on IT in every aspect of our lives, so the threat becomes bigger, since there is more incentive for enemies to attack the IT infrastructure. Fortunately, IT companies such as BT take such threats very seriously and have large numbers of people employed to keep network threats at bay.
Other new threats are devices such as GPS based bombs, which could be attached to any vehicle (such as a petrol tanker) and go off once it arrives at a particular location (such as a city centre, important building or a key bridge). This gives all the efficacy of a suicide bomber but kills someone else instead of the bomber.
IT offers a range of surveillance tools. Video cameras are already commonplace, many of which are so tiny they are hard to spot. RFID tags on clothes and DVD cases are helping to reduce shoplifting, and these will become very widespread in the near future. Face recognition systems are also already being used in some stores to spot regular shoplifters and in football stadiums to spot known hooligans. Airports and banks are trialing iris recognition techniques, and these may well be one of the biometric systems used on the future identity cards.
It may be the case that people carry varying degrees of identification. Someone who is able to prove absolutely who they are, with a clean criminal record and top security clearance might qualify for a first class identification. An illegal immigrant with a completely unknown previous identity that has since been convicted of serious crimes might qualify for a very negative identification. The rest of the population would qualify for grading somewhere in between. Even if the government identity cards donÕt carry such graded data, there would be a strong business incentive to create such a scheme in order to create trusted customer groups. While this may sound big brotherish, on-line companies such as e-Bay already run schemes where people establish trust credentials over a period of time, and can lose them if they misbehave. Extending this sort of idea into the everyday world would be quite easy. Ordinary businesses may then choose to do business only with people with a particular trust rating. Over time, everyone would be forced to carry such trust verification with them, or else be excluded from some desirable services, such as car pooling or access to desirable places.
The benefits of these technologies would be a potentially more secure city, with lower crime, and clear social and financial rewards for good behaviour. The downside is equally obvious. There could be haves and have nots, with some people being electronically excluded by a society that doesnÕt trust them. There may be a great deal of resentment about the intrusiveness of surveillance and identification technology and the consequent loss of privacy and freedom. As tension grows, it is possible that there could be an anti-technology backlash. This would be more likely still because of other impacts of IT such as the impact of AI forcing people to retrain or lose their job. An anti-technology backlash could take the form of civil resistance, strikes or even violence. If it happens at all, the most likely time period is between 2010 and 2015.
Future IT will play an important role in maintaining and increasing the desirability of living and doing business in a city, so should be a key part of any urban regeneration plan. If done well, it can improve social cohesion, reduce loneliness, increase the happiness level of the population and increase prosperity. If done badly, it can increase division, create a Big Brother atmosphere, with haves and have nots, rising tension and ultimately social breakdown.
In the short term, cities must ensure that they have the highest quality IT infrastructure, across as much of the city as is possible. Areas that do not have it will not prosper. This means a good fibre infrastructure, full broadband availability, and total mobile network coverage should already be in place, and if not, this should be rectified. Next, councils should aim for extensive coverage of non-residential areas by public wireless LANs, starting with areas of highest visitor density. These should be made free to air as far as possible for non-commercial (public service, tourist information and social communication) uses, and commercial wireless LANs should also be encouraged.
Cities should also develop extensive community networks, subsidizing access and IT resource provision where necessary to ensure that the whole population have fair access to public services across the nets, as well as access to clubs, societies and cultural activities. This will foster social inclusion and cohesion, reduce loneliness, improve local democracy and stimulate social and business innovation. It will make the city a nicer place to live and work and attract new businesses and investment. The increasing prosperity of the city will more than pay for the subsidy cost.
In the mid term future, much more can be done, but there are more opportunities also to make things worse. The rewards will be a very healthy city, but only if IT is used sensitively, so as to avoid a strong anti-technology backlash.
Ambient intelligence, digital air, dual architectures and urban positioning systems can help make a digitally rich city, with an extensive information overlay. This could add significant value to almost every kind of activity, while remaining invisible to people who have no interest in it. However, over time, people may find that they are effectively forced to use such facilities or else fall behind, in much the same way as people have little real choice about having a mobile phone or email today. Cities should nevertheless cautiously invest in these technologies as they come along. The timing for most of these is flexible, and there is no need to be the first, so it is reasonable to wait and see how some other cities adopt them before investing significantly.
Beyond the control of any city, the care economy, caused mainly by the rise of AI and the semantic web, will force people to re-skill, and will greatly change the nature of the businesses in a city. While cities cannot stop this global trend, they can certainly prepare for it by ensuring resource flexibility. In an evolutionary environment, it is important to note that flexibility is a much more valuable attribute than optimization. This will be profoundly true in the next decades.
IT has a strong part to play in every business and social sector, the details of which are largely beyond this paper. However, health, transport, security, education and governance will all be strongly affected.