THERE are smart cities and green cities.
I learned from my studies, however, that the choice between smart and green would depend on the agenda of the cities concerned.
As I see it however, a city could not be smart if it is not green, and a city could not be green if it is not smart. The reason for that is obvious; these two approaches are now intertwined with each other, so much so that one could not be done without the other.
In between what is smart and what is green however, there is now the goal of being not only sustainable, but also safe. With all of these approaches overlapping with each other, I would say that we should just incorporate everything into one approach towards safe cities.
I think that safe cities would be a good approach, because aside from being smart, being green, and being sustainable, cities now have to be climate resilient, and they have to be disaster ready, two criteria that are all about safety.
To be practical about it, cities could really not be sustainable not unless they are safe, because destruction could come on the way to progress. Talking about sustainable, it is interesting to note that since the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were announced, the definition of sustainability has now expanded to mean not just the environment. What that means is that not unless a city could meet all the SDGs, they could not be considered smart, green and sustainable.
Based on the organizational structure of the Executive Branch, the function of providing public safety belongs to the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), because the police, fire and prison agencies are under it.
While that definition might have been good in the old days, it seems that we now need a redefinition of public safety, prospectively within the context of the SDGs. For example, we now have to include climate resiliency and disaster readiness. Aside from these two, we now have to include road safety and air safety. Come to think of it, we now have to include clean air, because air pollution is now a real threat to public safety.
Not that I would want to promote a culture of paranoia, but we should really go out of our way to find out what other threats to public safety should be included in our list, otherwise an incomplete list would still cause some problems that would endanger our people sooner or later.
I do not have space to include all possible threats in this article, but just to give a few more examples; we should really include food safety, cyber security and disease control. Considering how many and how diverse the prospective threats are, cities now would have to computerize in order to keep track of everything. In other words, this is all about data and the management of data.
Setting aside the issue of a national identification card that is very controversial, I could say without any reservation that cities need their local identification systems in order to fully ensure the safety of their citizens.
Note that I am not only talking about physical paper or plastic identification cards, but of computerized systems that could print physical cards if and when necessary, but not necessarily. It is really normal for people to think about what is obvious and nothing can be more obvious than a physical paper or plastic ID card.
In the near future however, the identification systems could become virtual, and the most probable technology that would be more popular would be biometrics of all kinds.
Aside from biometrics, the other technology that could become prevalent in the safe cities of the future would be the internet of things (IOT), in the form of devices such as chips and sensors. As a matter of fact, many technology experts are saying that the present day mobile phones that are already equipped with chips, sensors and scanners could actually be considered as the first wave of IOT devices.
There is also no space here to talk about the specific uses of IOT could be, but in general, these could be for emergency and disaster management, law enforcement, citizen services, public administration services, among others.
We could possibly have all the technologies of the modern world available for our use towards the goal of having safe cities, but all of these technologies would just go to waste if the government agencies that are supposed to work together to make the technologies work do not coordinate and collaborate with each other.
The most basic, of course, is for all of them to share data with each other, more so now that there is already an Executive Order affirming the freedom of information (FOI). Obviously, there is no legal basis yet for an Open Data protocol, but the government agencies need not wait for that to make things happen.
Meanwhile, the cities have everything within their power to coordinate and collaborate with each other and to do that; they need not wait for the national government either./PN
