Comparison of Smart Cities Songdo / Milton Keynes / Rio de Janiero

Milton Keynes is a young, planned town.  It is interesting that such a young town still faces infrastructure challenges from population growth.  Milton Keynes is the base for The Open University and relatively close to Cambridge.  It's little surprise to find it taking a technological and academic perspective in understanding what it means to be a Smart City.  

Songdo is a completely top-down smart city, its greenfield construction has allowed an emphasis on civic infrastructure, for example waste disposal and communication.  Yet, surprisingly, mention is already made of shortcomings in transportation and slow take-up in occupancy.  Is this simply a matter of time for people to get used to the idea of this new place?  Is it simply a matter of waiting until cost pressures or infrastructure issues push people and businesses out from Seoul itself?   Or does this point to a human factor in occupation - a Smart City can be efficient and functional, but that may not be enough for people to choose to live there.  As a relatively new development, the outcome is yet to be seen.

Rio de Janiero is the most interesting case, where both top-down and bottom-up activities are in play, it is a massive city with widely recognised problems in transportation, power and water infrastructure and in social and economic measures.

The bottom up approaches are easily cast as the underdogs, achieving useful results and minimal cost. But perhaps that perception comes because they had no burden of expectations and no targets to achieve.  It would take some careful review to compare the actual impact of the city's Operations Centre with the impact of the UNICEF mapping program.

My working theory is that bottom-up and top-down have their place.  Bottom up can achieve 'quick-and-dirty' results, alleviating immediate pressures and also serving as a prototyping platform.  But the core of transportation, power and water infrastructure requires real civil construction, with substantial investment and timeframes involved. We need to be smarter about what is constructed and how it is operated, but we can't build infrastructure the same way that we can build smartphone apps.  Lastly, the bottom-up approaches allow people to connect and collaborate to provide the flexibility that prevents cities being stunted by overly prescriptive plans.  it is worth noting that purely social bottom-up programs can be successful, but many more can flourish if enabled by high availability of smartphones and mobile data communications.