SMART CITIES

Today, urban development is facing unprecedented challenges due to exponential growth and consolidation of the global population. More people are moving to the city. By 2015, the worlds urban population will grow by 72 percent to 6.3 billion. This will result in additional environmental pressure being placed on our infrastructure and thus force designers to think SMART on how the city of tomorrow will need to be designed to accommodate the forecasted growth. However, smart cities require participation from a wide array of stakeholders not only the designer. Public governance is naturally critical but participation of private sector and community are important.

Smart cities need to be built on the three pillars of sustainability:

•Social

•Economic

•Environmental

The three pillars form the basis of all Verve master planning efforts and today, Verve has an array of projects at different stages of development adopting smart city strategies.

FivePoint’s San Francisco Shipyard District redevelopment at Hunter’s Point aims to set the standard for urban sustainable development and serve as a benchmark for smart cities of the future and Brownfield Redevelopment. The Phase 2 development encompasses in excess of 5,500,000 square feet of Office, Research, Technology and Retail, as well as 3,523 residential units to be built over, a tentative ten year schedule, of four sub-phases and hundreds of acres of open spaces.  Hunter’s Point will be a city within a city and the latest in a small number of highly planned, mixed use, research and technology-intensive municipalities that incorporate a multi residential living environment, similar to Kaust, Saudi Arabia and Tsukuba Science City, Japan. FivePoint’s early vision adaptation for the large scale development presents the unique opportunity for the international Developer push the envelope of its industry and target the development as a Net Positive Energy (NPE) Low Carbon (LC) City.

Stakeholders

The concept of a smart city cannot be imposed or decreed, as the city is shaped by a number of decisions and social and technological changes cannot be fully accounted for within this concept. With the advances in telecommunications, information and communication technology (ICT) and available energy efficiency and energy production tools are changing relationship between citizens and city services. Citizens are increasingly becoming providers of city services and not only users. This means that city planning needs to allow for bottom-up processes of modernization.

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Horizontal as well as Vertical Integration

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Verve identifies the need for completed utility and systems integration. Horizontal and vertical integration of electric grids, gas, heating/cooling, water distribution and recycling systems, automated trash collection systems, public and private transportation systems and power generation systems.will play a major role in shaping the city’s livability and sustainability.

The successful development of a smart city will require a combining of a bottom-up systems approach with a top-down service development and data centric approach