The secret to building smart from the start

The property industry risks building places and spaces that “don’t resonate with people in the digital world”, says Telstra’s smart cities lead, Merrick Spain.

The potential for smart cities is undoubtedly enormous – but how big is anyone’s guess. One recent report, from MarketsandMarkets, suggests smart cities will become a $1.2 trillion market by 2022, up from $424 billion last year.

The Asia Pacific region is on track to seize the largest market share and the highest growth rate.

But Spain, who has spent his career working with emerging technologies, says “boiling smart cities down to market potential is a bit one dimensional”.

“If you think smart cities is about building something and making sure it is filled with high tech, then you’ve missed the point.

“We are moving from a place in time where technology is about the smart phone in your hand, the laptop on your desk and the server in your backroom, to a time where technology is about everything.”

“We are headed to a place where ‘smart’ will be normal and there will be no place for anything else.”

Spain, who will be sharing his insights at Green Cities next month, says the built form is a key strategic player in the “global smart cities movement” – one that “grabs any sector whose core business is people and place”.

While property has been “a bit slow off the mark”, now is the time to step on the accelerator.

“Ten or 15 years ago, when people made a decision to invest in a home, they were thinking about how many bathrooms a place had, or what the off-street parking was like. In future, people are more likely to make decisions about where they live, work, learn and play based on digital amenity and services underpinned by smart technologies.

“This is a challenge, because we don’t build infrastructure with digital amenity in mind.”

The risk for the property industry is building places that “don’t resonate with people and don’t deliver on the digital aspirations of businesses and communities”.

A “technology-saturated” future is before us, but that doesn’t mean property companies should focus on “getting a tech company to install widgets in their buildings”.

“That won’t work.

“It’s about embedding ‘smart’ into the design of precincts and communities. It’s about leveraging the huge number of data resources that already exist out there to generate insights that inform the design of place.

“Telstra is making strong investments in big data and is using its significant data assets to better understand how groups of people engage with place and space,” Spain says, adding that “aggregated and anonymised data insights provide valuable intelligence to governments whilst protecting privacy and security”. But how that influences the planning and design of precincts is “still early days”, Spain admits.

The design of precincts has previously been a “hit and miss affair”, Spain says, but data mining changes all that. Our opportunity is to leverage the technology that already exists to make evidence-based decisions.

“Then we can be more certain about what we build, how and where we build.

“Some property companies are starting to harness the value of data, and are applying a different lens to the design process by incorporating insights generated from data. However, this practise is still in its infancy and needs to be more broadly adopted.”

While some regulation needs to be addressed, Spain says Australia’s great opportunity – and great challenge – is to work more collaboratively across different sectors of the economy.

Australia has a “healthy and growing innovation ecosystem”, he says, but “sometimes innovators struggle to get a leg up in the local market”.

“The smart city, by nature, requires close collaboration that breaks down silos within organisations as well as between organisations across sectors,” he adds.

“Smart cities – and smart homes, communities, precincts and nations – are largely dependent on whether we can be smart from the start.”

Hear how smart companies using technology, data and intelligent design to drive innovation, connect communities and boost the performance of cities, when Merrick Spain joins us at Green Cities, 13-15 March in Melbourne. Register today.