It has been more than 7 years since the country launched the first batch of smart city pilots in 2013. After 7 years of exploration and massive infrastructure investment, the crux of resource waste and "unintelligence" still appears - many smart city-related facilities have been paralyzed in this epidemic prevention task; some smart city projects have become "land acquisition" "As a gimmick, some local governments have used smart city projects as a means of attracting investment in order to complete the task of attracting investment, and have built many similar projects, resulting in waste of resources and unfinished projects; some local governments have established big data management bureaus, but due to the boundary of responsibilities and powers, Data silos are still difficult to break; and because project funding generally focuses on "construction" rather than "operation", the day when some projects are completed, they become empty shells.
This article has been widely discussed since it was published, and we have also received a lot of feedback from front-line practitioners:
"How to form a data closed loop is the core and the most difficult"
"Operation and maintenance have been hard at the front end for a long time"
"Too few connections, too many brains"
"It's all algorithmic competition, but it's just a little bit about operations. The abacus is just buying and selling basic equipment at a high premium and engaging in infrastructure construction. When you collect money, your eyes are bright, and when the platform is actually operating, you don't say anything."
"Re-operation is the key"
"Smart city really can't follow the idea of infrastructure, don't forget to have a new word"
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It can be seen that the traditional "smart city" is an ideal and realistic proposition. After a period of development, the city's intelligence is looking forward to a new round of upgrading and evolution. "Smart city" urgently needs a clear redefinition: who will do it? How? where? It is a common problem to be solved by all decision makers. Thousands of people have a thousand opinions, and there are different opinions. The "Western (Chongqing) Science City" laid out in Chongqing presents the latest practice from the front line of urban intelligence to "Jiazi Guangnian". According to Terminus, one of the important participants in the Western (Chongqing) Science City, the smart scene service provider Terminus, "the intelligence of the city" is not a theoretical proposition, but a practical proposition - what is the correct truth? It depends on which road is the first to run through the real feasible practical case. In other words: the intelligentization of cities urgently needs "model rooms". After all, technology believers are only a minority in the crowd, and the change of a city involves all beings from all walks of life. For most people, you have to see to believe.
"China's smart cities are already developing from local wisdom to overall wisdom." Wang Yonggang, deputy secretary general of the China Smart City Forum, said in a message to "Jiazi Guangnian". This statement coincides with Terminus' view. Terminus believes that the development process of urban intelligence is constantly evolving, and has spawned a new species of urban intelligence - AI CITY. "AI CITY" is Terminus' core business - compared to the "divide and conquer" puzzle logic of traditional smart cities, AI CITY needs to be comprehensively considered from the top-level design, while building the AI, IoT and data capabilities necessary for the city, On the one hand, we will cooperate with various partners to co-exist and build together, and use the method of "drawing a circle" to build a smart new city from scratch and in an integrated manner. It's like building a product from scratch. If the traditional smart city is to add intelligence to the city, it sells "smartness"; for Terminus, an intelligent city itself is the final product.
1: Who: Who is the "operator" of urban intelligence?
Zhang Fan, the global director of McKinsey Consulting, gave a data: In the past three years, the total investment in the field of urban technology has reached 100 billion US dollars, and China has accounted for 1/3. China's expectations for smart cities are beyond words. China has the world's fastest-growing cities and urban agglomerations: According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in 1979, at the beginning of the reform and opening up, China's urbanization rate was only 19.99%. By the end of 2019, this figure had risen to 60.60%. Among China's 1.4 billion people today, about 850 million people already live in cities. In recent years, an average of 14 million people "come to the city" every year. The city is the carrier of people's imagination of a better life, and it is related to the quality of each person's life. However, "urbanization" and "urban disease" are like twin brothers. On the one hand, infrastructure such as high-speed rails, planes, subways, and tunnels are making great strides. On the other hand, there are difficult problems such as traffic congestion, air pollution, and safety hazards .
Taking traffic congestion as an example, according to the relevant data released by the Ministry of Communications of China, the economic losses caused by static traffic problems account for as much as 20% of the disposable income of the urban population, equivalent to a loss of 5-8% of GDP; Residents, on average, spend 2.88 billion minutes more time on their way to and from get off work every day than in developed European countries; crude oil consumption caused by traffic jams accounts for more than 20% of China's total consumption. This is just part of the way cities are "not smart enough". The amount of losses caused by fires and environmental problems caused by hidden safety hazards is also huge every year. In the face of the largest urbanization in human history, managers desperately need better tools. It is against this background that a truly intelligent city has entered the stage of history. People expect cities to use technology to reduce inefficiency, chaos and danger in life and work.
However, the first difficulty is the "subject" question: who will run it? The traditional definition of smart city believes that a smart city is "using various technologies and innovative tools to connect and integrate urban systems and services to improve the efficiency of urban resource utilization and optimize urban management and services." But this definition does not make it clear who is the subject of "using technology and innovation tools". The subject obviously cannot be a person. People are willing to pay for C-end products to make part of their lives more intelligent. But at the level of urban infrastructure, individuals are more beneficiaries than investors; the subject is hardly a single enterprise. Internally, companies can invest in internal digitalization and intelligence, but externally, the problem is much more difficult. Intelligence is not something that can be achieved overnight, and uneven development is the norm. For example, Teng Yifan, CEO of AI property management platform Aiwuguan, once told "Jiazi Guangnian" that only 1% of communities in my country may have completed basic informatization. The willingness of each individual to deploy is also different. Some businesses feel that they must start intelligentization as soon as possible, while some businesses don’t even care about informatization and need external forces to urge them. It is obviously impossible to have so many relying on a single enterprise alone. the underlying technology, capability and production capacity;
Although government agencies are more suitable for this subject in terms of roles, the more macro management functions determine that it is difficult for the government to intervene in the operation status of every "capillary" in the city, such as managing the length of time when a traffic light is on at a certain intersection. . There are hundreds of millions of subdivided actions in cities, which require extremely sensitive and flexible technological innovation practices, and it is impossible for government agencies to carry out comprehensive planning and control. Urban intelligence is an extremely complex project: it involves the personalization of customers, the compounding of products, the diversification of scenarios, and the complexity of the supply chain. The needs of everyone and every enterprise are ever-changing, and it is impossible for any "single subject" to meet all needs - to complete the intelligence from "aorta" to "capillaries", it must be a linkage supply system, supply alliance, and supply ecology.
On "Jiazi Gravity" on November 14, 2020, one of the judgments made by Zhang Yijia, founder and CEO of Jiazi Guangnian in his speech, is the "necessity of ecological development": only enough "all-encompassing" can satisfy enough Lots of "weird shapes". Therefore, the "main body" of the city's operation should be a set of combined fists - led by a "leader" and completed by an ecology. What conditions does the lead need to meet? This leader should have both technical accumulation and innovation flexibility, resource scheduling ability and ecological appeal, and rich practical experience. specifically:
First, being able to build - requires knowledge of technology and the ability to build the underlying operating system of an intelligent city. For the builders of smart cities, only by possessing the underlying technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Everything (IoT), and big data can they finally be qualified for this role. Ability to build: can drive partners, introduce various applications, and build the ability to serve all walks of life and people in every city; third, have experience - have mature and rich experience in urban intelligence projects, and have deep scenarios Insight, and accumulated a lot of industry Know-How.
According to Zhang Fan, "UrbanTech covers almost all conceivable high-tech fields, including transportation, medical care, education, environmental protection, etc., and is a broad ecosystem", only relying on AI, IoT, cloud computing, etc. Only with a new generation of technology and a complete underlying structure can an intelligent city have the ability to iterate and upgrade itself and become a "living body". Under the guidance of the government, as the leader, it will take the lead in implementing new technologies, and help the local government to coordinate the relationship between all parties to introduce applications and implement the daily management and operation of the city - reaching a cooperation with Chongqing, Terminus is hoping to play this role leader" role.
2.How: how exactly?
After answering the subject, the next is the predicate: how to do the intelligentization of the city? IBM believes that a city consists of six core systems of different types of networks, infrastructure and environment related to the main functions of the city, including organization (people), business/government, transportation, communication, water and energy. These systems are not fragmented, but are connected to each other in a collaborative manner. Observing every single scene in the city, it can be found that after about 10 years of construction, many details have revealed the appearance of intelligence: vehicles can freely enter and exit highways and parking lots, and pay fees without stopping; smart security cameras can monitor the city. Real-time monitoring, analysis and even prediction through AI; smart gates can use face recognition to make the community take into account both convenience and safety... Intelligent scenes are constantly piled up, each scene is constructed by specific hardware and software, but each The scenes are relatively closed and lack sufficient coordination - each scene realizes intelligence independently at its own rhythm.
The original intention of urban intelligence is "people-oriented", but in the context of "decentralized intelligence", "people" have become passive adaptors. As people travel through the city, they always have to constantly adjust their software and hardware to adapt to each scene, which is inefficient for each individual. Not only that, for the city as a whole, decentralized intelligence means duplication of construction and waste of resources. How to completely connect decentralized intelligence and make it a unified urban intelligence? There are two key points that cannot be avoided: First: it must be top-down rather than buttom-up.
3.Where: draw a circle, starting from zero
After answering who and how, a seemingly simple but not so simple question is "where" - where to start? Drawing a city on a piece of white paper is much simpler than changing an old street painting into an intelligent city—in a city with a history of precipitation, the integrator coordinates the interests of all parties and makes it happen Consensus to jointly build a smart city requires overcoming a series of problems; in a city that has just begun to be built, a new urban smart infrastructure can be built more quickly in an environment from scratch. Therefore, before the closed loop of smart city practice is truly operational, a more feasible approach is to complete the "model" construction first, and then expand it to the whole region; from this perspective, "starting from scratch" Compared with the upgrading and reconstruction of the old area, the construction of the new building is a more suitable entry into the soil. Xiongan New Area is currently a key construction project in the country. From the top-level design at the beginning of construction, a series of urban intelligent planning has begun, including 5G smart bus loops, smart street lights, unmanned supermarkets, unmanned delivery robots, etc.; The planning of the Western Science City has also become a new model that dares to "start from scratch" in a rare high-tier city. What Teslink is connected to is a heavy task: Beijing Huairou, Shanghai Zhangjiang, and Anhui Hefei are the current three comprehensive national science centers, and the western region also needs to build a science city and innovation highland. The construction of the Western Science City is seen as an urgent need to make up for the shortcomings of Chongqing's innovation. This valley, located in the western part of Chongqing's central urban area, will be built into an innovative and entrepreneurial ecosystem of "government, school, bank and enterprise" coordination. In addition to the existing 28 colleges and universities, a series of new projects will be built, including a 60-kilometer-long Science Avenue and a 940-acre Science Valley. According to Chongqing's planning, these projects will reflect the characteristics of "Science City".
Terminus has raised its perspective to the level of a city-level platform, using AI CITY as a model to build the digitization and intelligence of the entire industry and city, which makes Chongqing have high expectations for Terminus. They hope to create a model smart city project after "drawing a circle". In Ai Yu's plan, AI CITY will connect different scenarios, data, content and people. The data generated by each scene in the city will be imported into a unified platform, and this platform will also realize self-evolution based on these data. In an overall planned smart city system, the operating efficiency of the entire region will be improved, and operating costs and pressures will be reduced; and for every enterprise and individual in the region, this means higher efficiency and lower losses; potential risks that may arise in life and production can also obtain social solutions that exceed their own capabilities. Based on this, Terminus first assumed the role of a builder: to provide its own mature and intelligent solutions in various industries including community, fire protection, security, hospital, and construction. Ai Yu introduced that Terminus could take on this role because of the practice of nearly 9,000 projects that Terminus had landed in various scenarios in various places.
Then there is the role of the leader. Terminus has spent a lot of efforts in ecological construction: it has attracted a number of enterprises and academic institutions to settle in the Western Science City, and some enterprises can directly use their products as part of the urban ecology to help the digitalization of the city and at the same time realize the development of enterprises . Ancaihua Energy is a company specializing in smart energy solutions, with more than 1,200 projects distributed in a large number of buildings in 165 cities across the country. After entering the Science City, its energy management projects will also be incorporated into buildings in Chongqing, becoming the city's embodiment of energy conservation and emission reduction.
Ruiqi Manton is another partner of Terminus, which can help urban enterprises to control the safety of electricity consumption, and digitize and network the electricity consumption data of residents and enterprises. It is a digital supplier of urban energy use nodes. "In an elderly apartment in Jing'an District, Shanghai, an alarm was issued through our system to avoid a fire caused by electricity consumption. Electricity consumption data is the most sensitive data for urban energy. On the one hand, it can ensure the safety of residents' electricity consumption, and also Energy saving can be achieved." said Wang Hui, chairman of Ruiqi Manton. Not only these two companies, but also 41 companies, scientific research and academic institutions are participating in the urban intelligent construction of the Western Science City, most of which can achieve in-depth cooperation on Terminus' AI CITY platform.
Ai Yu summarized this as the innovative layout of "technology + ecology" - leading the digital construction and operation of the city, and uniting upstream and downstream partners in the industry to jointly create an urban intelligent technology service ecosystem. It can even be said that Terminus is packaging the "city" into a "big product" - starting from the operating system, and continuously integrating the latest and most valuable technologies and products into this ecosystem. Like the iPhone, the first thing people saw was a fancy hardware phone. However, in the process of using it, I gradually found that its operating system, APP application store, and thousands of application developers behind it are more important. The same is true of cities, full of massive hardware devices, cameras, smart cars, smart buildings, etc. all have their own operating logic. Each item looks perfect, but when they are aggregated together, they find that these mechanical Combining "Mo Desoul", only with ecological synergy and common development can the city change from the integration of the scene into a real "life".
Dennis Frenchman, former associate dean and tenured professor of MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and founder of Tacoma Innovation Studio, believes: We are facing an information revolution, the nature of cities is changing, and various digital interactions and Sensor feedback technology will gradually enter the public domain, and various new public facilities will appear, which is one of the best ways to test urban planning. Simply put, whoever can integrate multiple forces, launch more new public facilities and make effective use of them, will be more successful in the field of urban intelligence.
Of course, compared with the rapid expansion and rapid change of the Internet world, the topic of smart cities is the combination of "bit world" and "atomic world" - both virtual and real, including both online and offline. Therefore, the exploration and advancement of this process is bound to be There are more obstacles and problems to face. Fortunately, in an urban model space designed from scratch and built according to the most advanced model, we can give each smart device the highest tolerance and adaptability to witness them like swaddling babies. growing up.
