Cities and the Digital Revolution by Zaheer Allam

Author:Zaheer Allam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030298005
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Digital Urban Infrastructure

It has been established that before the advent of technologies as it is known today, the emphasis on cities and urban areas was for to establish hard infrastructures, as they were seen as the potent solutions to urban problems. For this reason, a majority of municipalities and local governments strived to have the most expensive and elaborate infrastructures such as bridges, road networks, airports, ports and harbours among many others. Despite the importance attached to these infrastructures, their construction was marred by a number of significant challenges that most cities had to put up with. First, as Ehlers (2014) explains, financial burden has always been one of the main challenges; hence, cities around the world have been observed to have different levels of infrastructural development. For this reason, Kingombe (2014) expounds that most hard infrastructure and their key nodes have been characterized of delays, quality issues, and in some cases, plunged some economies into debts which some have struggled to pay, noting that most hard infrastructures are not meant for profit-making but for social and economic support. Ansar, Flyvbjerb, Budzier, and Lunn (2016) argue that debt-financed infrastructure, especially those that have no economic value or are unproductive, have been, in most cases, a precursor for economic fragility and unstable financial markets, thus making many economies to struggle to catch with others. On a different issue, with local governments tasked with other numerous hard infrastructural demand requiring financial input, some local governments have been found to lack sufficient impetus to initiate any tangible infrastructural development—a case that is synonymous with most cities in low-income and underdeveloped economies (Gurara et al., 2017).

Today, most of those hard infrastructures are present and do present a need for upgrading. The interchange of Shanghai (Fig. 3.1) depicts this as substantial investments made to erect complex engineering feats, but which would soon require upgrading due to increasing number of vehicles and the resulting urban pressures. However, the notion of hard infrastructure as being the sole purveyor of solutions is now obsolete. The advent of technologies allowing the usage of data to solve most urban challenges has been embraced as it offers some relief to the financial constraints that a majority of cities face, where in the case of Shanghai, a more efficient use of vehicles and movement flows can be provided. The potential demonstrated by data have prompted cities to piously seek ICT-oriented companies that could provide technologies that would help the data useful in solving the eminent problems (Z. Allam, 2017, 2018, 2019). In line to this, most ICT providing firms are seen to have been strengthening their operations to maximize the economic potential that is associated with the rising urban technology market. Those include companies like IBM, Cisco, Tesla and Microsoft among many others (M. Z. Allam, 2018; Z. Allam & Newman, 2018). As noted in the report by Singh (2019), a majority of these ICT providing startups are based in North America, followed by Europe, then Asia and other regions. Surprisingly, Henke et al.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.