For Detroit, becoming a smart city would allow it to fully live up to its name as the Renaissance City. Rising from the ashes of its 2013 bankruptcy to become a city others emulate instead of mock. It might seem far-fetched if you haven’t been to Detroit recently but the city, native Detroiters, and its largest private companies have been making steady progress toward reaching this goal. The city has been actively working to reduce its carbon footprint, improve job opportunities for its citizens, and create better and more transportation options. While there are areas to improve, even the smartest cities in the world will always be works in progress. But has Detroit changed enough? Is Detroit a smart city? What makes a city smart?
What Makes a Smart City
Most people could probably explain the difference between a cellphone and a smartphone, however, these same people would most likely struggle to explain the difference between a city and a smart city. So, what exactly is a smart city? How does a city become a smart city? The definition of a smart city varies, depending on where you look, but a simple baseline to judge if a city is smart should depend on three things:
- Does the city have widespread broadband access allowing people and objects to send and receive information?
- Does the city have objects or devices capable of generating, exchanging, and analyzing data?
- Does the city have a healthy collaboration between citizens and its government?
To put it more simply, a smart city is dependent on interconnected smart devices that the city’s government and citizens utilize to operate city services at peak optimization. It is at least fairly difficult, if not literally impossible, to understand how this works without a basic understanding of the IoT (Internet of Things). The IoT can refer to any and everything connected to the internet but with regard to smart cities, it more specifically refers to objects that have the ability to gather and send data over a network with little to no human interaction.
For example, a smart city may have a smart street light that is capable of:
- Lighting based on motion detection.
- Monitoring the weather.
- Parking assistance, both to find citizens’ spaces and alert the government of illegal parking.
- Enhancing wireless communications around the streetlamp.
- Real-time data analysis, capable of aiding traffic flow and alerting emergency services in the event of an accident.
And this is just one example, of the potentially unlimited IoT devices, that a city can utilize to improve services and gather information. Since the goal of every smart city is the optimization of the city’s resources, economic improvements, improved transportation, increased quality of life for citizens, and improved environmental sustainability; the advancements in technology, specifically the IoT, and the sheer amount of data that is able to be collected and analyzed has made these goals reasonably attainable.
So, Is Detroit a Smart City?
The city has made noble efforts:
- Detroit has lowered its carbon footprint and planned for no emissions by 2050.
- Detroit has created more economic opportunities reaching the lowest unemployment rate since the year 2000.
- In 2018, it became home to the “World’s Smartest Intersection” and after the implementation of the initial tech, Detroit saw its travel times reduced by 30 percent.
- Ford bought the long-shuttered Michigan Central Train Station and teamed up with Google to create a 1.2 million-square-foot innovation and mobility campus.
- According to CNBC, Michigan is on pace to be a top 3 battery-producing state by 2030.
But even with all this change including its nostalgic, but seemingly successful, efforts to reclaim the Motor City, or Mobility City, title, it has not been enough. If you remember earlier when discussing the bare minimum requirements for a smart city, the very first component was wide broadband access, which unfortunately Detroit is severely lacking. So despite great effort and change, the answer would have to be no, that Detroit is not a smart city.
While it has made improvements, with companies such as Rocket Fiber, helping to bring more internet access to Downtown and Midtown, the neighborhoods are left largely to their own devices, quite literally in some cases; with most school children only having internet access through a smartphone. Detroit has regularly ranked among the five least connected cities in the country. The numbers are disheartening, with one in four Detroiters not having internet access and up to seventy percent of school-age children not having home broadband.
The City Must Have a Plan
The city does have plans to possibly build out the fiber-optic infrastructure itself as a utility managed by the Department of Digital Inclusion. This would allow private internet providers the option to provide services on the city’s infrastructure. Whether this will make an impact in neighborhoods in Detroit has yet to be seen.
For years big telecom companies have not thought it worth their investment to provide these services for Detroiters. It may be wishful thinking to believe they will change their mind now. If the city’s plans do not come to fruition or perhaps don’t work as planned, thankfully there are alternatives.
The Community Solution
One such alternative is a community mesh network. A mesh network is something that could be particularly effective in Detroit neighborhoods where connectivity is scarce. It would provide faster and cheaper internet, that would be wholly community controlled. This would remove the need for telecom companies’ belief or investment in Detroit and truly give power to the people in each neighborhood. This would also allow IoT devices the ability to improve life in the areas that always seem to be left out of revitalization projects and give Detroit an opportunity to become a truly Smart City.
The Detroit Blockchain Center partnered with Althea and DBC membership company EOS Detroit, to build the necessary infrastructure for a community mesh network in late 2019. The plan would create and use a community DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to govern the network and use a certified training program focused on members of the community so that local people would be installing, maintaining, and controlling any and all aspects of the network. While the resulting worldwide pandemic shortly thereafter caused their efforts to be put on hold; the plans for the network, the accompanying DAO, and the training program, can be viewed here; for even more information on how Althea’s network can benefit Detroit communities, visit their site.