Putting people at heart of future urban planning

By 2018, the world’s urban population grew from 751 million in 1950 to 4.2 billion and today, the number climbs steadily on. Spearheaded by economic growth as much as digital transformation, urban planning initiatives have addressed this ongoing shift from countryside to city, as cosmopolitan areas expand in size and sophistication.

With mass industrialization on the rise across emerging markets and developed countries continuing to innovate on their existing infrastructures, challenges pertaining to sustainability, overpopulation, congestion, and resulting environmental implications such as pollution and increased waste production, to name a few, have taken their toll.

Smart cities are seemingly well-positioned to address these conditions, with their emphasis on real-time optimization, ongoing data measurement and analysis, and interconnected, digitalized services. Not only emphasizing greater efficiency, smart cities hope to offer a better quality of life for their inhabitants.

With the help of information communication technologies and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and machine learning, smart cities are able to efficiently collect real-time data to allow for operational improvements and monitoring at an unprecedented rate.

Data gathering practices

This is especially crucial when it comes to addressing issues such as traffic reduction and improved efficiency in public services and transportation.

With such a reliance on data, more attention needs to be paid towards data gathering practices.

There is no doubt that the human soul is the core driving force for urban development — to be future-proofed, cities must, first and foremost, be designed with the needs of its people in mind.

No matter the benefits to be reaped from efficiency and convenience, ensuring that personal privacy protection remains intact is ultimately most crucial.

As the urban landscape grows ever more interconnected, the application of increasingly sophisticated technologies such as blockchain and cryptographybased, privacy-preserving computation will be needed to better secure the large quantities of data being collected at a given time.

By optimizing these processes with privacy in mind, cities can adequately mitigate any possible privacy threats and cyber-security concerns.

At PlatON, we specifically apply a blockchain-based, privacy-preserving computation solution to ensure that data can be shared seamlessly yet securely, in order to digitally integrate public services, track and manage battery life cycles to ensure eco-friendly waste disposal practices, and much more.

Used as the technical blueprint for Wanxiang Innova City, PlatON hopes to enable smart manufacturing, smart buildings, and smart traffic with data privacy guaranteed. The importance of data across smart cities cannot be understated, but with this importance comes greater accountability.

Big data is the cornerstone of tomorrow’s cities and with the help of emerging technologies, we can ensure that people remain at the heart of progress of future-oriented urban planning initiatives.

The author is the founder and CEO of PlatON, bringing almost a decade of experience in blockchain development and commercialization. Previously, he served as the deputy general manager of the third-party payment and clearing subsidiary of China UnionPay, one of the largest card payment organizations in the world.