April 2017 to March 2018

Tadashi Shikimori(Chief Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies)

   By 2050, it is expected that 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities, and addressing urban issues such as the provision of convenient administrative services, efficient transportation and environmental safeguards in cities is a major challenge. Therefore, in this study, we surveyed and analyzed how a smart city that solves urban issues through data usage can be implemented by employing techniques such as cross-domain data usage, the provision of data on open systems, mutual sharing of diverse types of data, and service cooperation to create new data services.

   Specifically, we present an outline of (1) the definition of a smart city, (2) the smart city policies of Europe and the United States, and (3) the current status and future prospects of smart cities in developed countries with regard to data utilization, and we propose the role of cities as bases for innovation. We also surveyed and analyzed the following cases: (4) Columbus and Chicago, two smart cities in the United States, (5) Copenhagen, in Denmark, Europe, and (5) Aizuwakamatsu, in Japan.

   Finally, our proposals to the government are as follows: (1) build a hub organization as an infrastructure for the configuration of a smart city ecosystem, (2) develop a common IoT infrastructure, and (3) prepare a flexible public procurement system for enabling the creation of innovation including start-ups and individual entrepreneurs on an urban open platform.

   Some of the results of this study were published under the title “AI and urban transportation: The emergence of polymorphism in the Columbus Smart City experiment” at the IISE Symposium on “Realizing a New Society with AI/IoT: The Emergence of Polymorphic Networking in Urban Organizations”, which was held on February 14.