Every time I go to Singapore, I’m really amazed how efficient their small city is especially their public transport system. It’s not just their railway or bus transit that I would love to be implemented here in Manila but more particularly their EMAS or Expressway Monitoring Advisory System that can inform motorists in advance of traffic situations.
Recently at a media party hosted by IBM, they talked briefly about Smart Cities. What it takes to be one. How the government or a city could harness the abundance of technology already present within us. There was this Smarter Cities Summit early this month where DOST and IBM Philippines held a forum to tackle different ways to advance technology into different areas of our urban system greater sustainability, growth, and social progress.
There are four key factors to help us achieve a Smart City status:
- Smarter Investor. Invests in IT for infrastructure systems to make them more intelligent, instrumented and interconnected.
- Smarter Citizen Services. Transform government through IT, enable real-time data
analysis and improve government services in a secure citizen-focused efficient manner. - Smarter Regulator, Policy Maker. Use intelligent systems to restore faith in financial markets, protect privacy and civil liberties, enable smarter health, grids, etc.
- Smarter Global Participant. Collaborate with other governments and international
organizations to create “œsmart” policies and solutions for global issues: public health, climate change, energy, global trade, disaster recovery.
There were some representatives from the government who attended the summit and I’m really hoping that a change for a smarter city would soon come. The main thing is, Governments can help create Smarter Cities through forward-looking policy decisions.
If we couldn’t implement something simple such as a centralized database for official IDs so that we don’t have need to have our fingerprint and pictures taken in different government agencies (i.e. NBI, LTO, etc.) then I guess we’re not yet headed into a smarter future.