CISCO – Smart Cities

Over the next five years, around 700 million people will be added to the world's cities, and by 2050, at
least 100 new cities will be inhabited by more than a million residents. This urbanization presents a
number of great prospects. The cities of the 21st century will be defined by Internet access and
broadband, with the ability to connect virtually anything to the network: cars, hospitals, buildings, energy,
home appliances and schools. This is the premise that Cisco is showcasing in its pavilion at World Expo.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/global/asiapac/news/2010/pr_07-08.html

Cisco, Inc. is planning on spearheading the idea of building “smart cities” from the ground up, centered
around energy efficiency and high-tech citizen communication. With video phones built into walls in every
building and home, traffic lights that talk universally to each other to help traffic flow, and smart water
faucets, it will supposedly emit only 1/3 of the greenhouse gases as equivalent populated cities of around
300,000.

From the article: “When buildings, power lines, gas lines, roadways, cell phones, residential systems, and
so on are able to talk to one another, that information can expose patterns of waste and ways to avoid it.”

This is a definite gaze into a possible future, given the idea turns into a practical reality and doesn’t
manifest into mere vapor, especially after construction. It looks like Cisco is going full speed ahead with
their idea, with their first city, named “New Songdo” set to finish in 2015.

There are concerns that Cisco would be a natural monopoly in that they get a small slice of every
transaction that happens in the city. Kind of a “Cisco tax”, if you will.

From the article: “Utilities are often natural monopolies, profiting endlessly from captive markets. Smart
cities hold a similar fascination for Cisco, as places where basic services such as water or power might be
repackaged as value-added products, throwing off lucrative consulting contracts essentially forever.”

Cisco and Gale plan on standardizing everything possible in the city, and then using it as a template for
cities they build in the future across the globe. Individuality would be put on the back burner, for the sake
of convenience and standardization. In my very humble opinion, a society who is surrounded by template
houses and template trees will rub off and create template people. If our collective sense of cultural
individuality in the future is less than what it already is today, this project might just be a recipe for
disaster. Human nature is being content knowing that you are different than the person next door. The
balance of sense of self and community must be nurtured.

From the article: “It would be one thing if New Songdo were a one-off experiment, but Gale has
assembled his dream team of architects and technologists with an eye toward cracking the code of
urbanism itself. “There’s a pattern here, repeatable,” he tells me. He won’t be content until he can
standardize and mass-produce his cities in half the time for China.”

http://www.logicalnetworking.net/?p=413

Wim Elfrink, Cisco Services’ chief globalisation officer and EVP added: “Over the next three to five years, as
more people around the world migrate to urban centres, 3 billion individuals around the world will connect to
the Internet. Cisco envisages a future where successful communities and cities will run on networked
information, and where information technology will help the world better manage its energy and
environmental challenges. Cities of the future, and many innovative cities now, are addressing the issues
and opportunities of this new world by thinking about the network as the platform for economic
development, better city management and an improved quality of life for citizens. Everything connected to
the network in these smart+connected communities can be greener.”

One of the key initiatives of the announcement this week is the Cisco Network Building Mediator, a solution
that provides the intelligence to interconnect and enable building systems such as heating, ventilation and
cooling (HVAC), lighting, electrical, security, and renewables over the IP network to build smart and energy
efficiency buildings.

The Cisco Network Building Mediator communicates “southbound” with building systems using a variety of
industry open-system protocols. It then converts the data to open XML/SOAP Services which connect
“northbound” to applications, utilities, enterprise management systems and cloud services.

According to one user, David Shroyer, controls engineer at NetApp, the Cisco Network Building Mediator was
able adjust the energy consumption of the company’s facilities to match utility capacity, reducing lighting by
50% and raising the temperature set point by 4 degrees, shedding 1.1 megawatts of demand.

“In conjunction with other systems, the Cisco solution has helped us reduce energy consumption in our
Sunnyvale location by 18 million kilowatt hours in 18 months. We have reduced our carbon footprint and
have saved an estimated $2 million in energy costs,” Shroyer said.

As part of the announcement, Cisco says more than 20 technology partners have signed up for the Cisco
Development Technology Program for the Mediator. The company intends to introduce an Authorized
Technology Provider Program for channel partners and system integrators to support the initiative.

The Cisco Network Building Mediator is orderable now and is available in two configurations; the Cisco
Network Building Mediator 2400 and the Cisco Network Building Mediator 4800. Pricing starts at USD $4995.

http://www.greentelecomlive.com/2009/07/02/ciscos-new-target-market-connected-buildings/

Cisco and The Climate Group to develop new Connected

Urban Development alliance
September 28, 2009
New alliance will foster further collaboration, innovation
The Climate Group announced last week that it will work with Cisco to build on the success of its Connected Urban
Development (CUD) initiative by bringing together additional cities and business partners around the world in a new CUD
Alliance.
 The new Alliance will tackle urban emissions where they are highest -- in buildings, transport and power consumption. Research
by The Climate Group (www.smart2020.org) last year indicated the vital role of information communication technology (ICT)
can play in addressing urban climate change and energy challenges. The research found that re-thinking the way we use
technology at home and across industry could cut global emissions by 15 per cent by 2020.
Over the coming months, The Climate Group will reach out to its extensive global network of corporate partners, cities and states
to develop the CUD Alliance and scope a new program to further advance its existing cities-focused work it currently delivers
under the five-year HSBC Climate Partnership. Once the Alliance is in place, a new program - to be formally launched next year
- will deploy urban demonstration projects in transformational technical areas such as smart connected buildings, smart
transportation and smart grid.
John Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco says: "With urban areas contributing at least 60 percent of global carbon
emissions, cities are ground zero for addressing climate change and environmental issues. The Connected Urban Development
global community has successfully collaborated to test how innovative ICT solutions can manage environmental challenges.
Cisco is committed to furthering this progress and asks other public and private sector partners to join us in this effort."
Steve Howard, CEO, The Climate Group says: "Deploying smart low carbon technologies within world cities is central to
unlocking energy efficiency at scale, and the transformation to a cleaner, greener, and more prosperous society and economy. The
new CUD Alliance will align a global armoury of innovators, policy-makers, financiers and businesses necessary to pilot and
scale carbon resilient systems, policies and practices for millions of citizens."
Under Cisco's leadership, the Connected Urban Development program has enabled eight unique and innovative pilots with seven
cities around the world over the last three years.
 Smart Transportation Pricing (STP): Currently being run as a technical pilot in Seoul, STP encompasses a set of
technology-based pricing reforms to encourage more efficient travel behavior and demand management solutions.
 Urban EcoMap: A co-developed pilot with the City and County of San Francisco, the Urban EcoMap provides cities
with relevant data regarding primary GHG contributors - transportation, waste, and energy - to help city residents take action to
reduce their emissions. The forthcoming development of the Amsterdam Urban EcoMap scales the application globally.
 Personal Travel Assistant (PTA): The PTA is a web-based service that allows residents in Seoul and Amsterdam to
make on-the-go travel decisions based on time, cost, and carbon impact. The PTA offers "virtual assistant" features that provide
transit guidance based on user preferences via any Web-enabled device, from any location.
 Smart UrbanEnergy for Schools: Through partnership with the city of Lisbon and the Portuguese Ministry of
Education, this project aims to showcase how technology can improve global energy efficiency in both the built environment and
energy networks. Energy savings of 33.4 percent were achieved during the first few months of the pilot.
 UrbanEnergy Management: This pilot with the city of Madrid explores how energy is generated, managed, and
consumed. A 33-apartment building is being outfitted with bioclimatic design and design innovations based on a broadband
infrastructure that shares information about energy generation, consumption, and usage. These innovations can deliver estimated
energy savings of 75 and 85 percent.
 Smart Work Centers (SWC): Currently in pilot in Almere and Amsterdam, the SWC is a regional network of
neighborhood professional work and community centers supporting travel virtualization and enabling mobile working practices.
Integrating Cisco TelePresence with virtual office solutions, the SWC offers a professional work environment near residential
areas to lower energy use and carbon emissions. Thus far, users have saved an average of 66 minutes of commute time per day.
 The Connected Bus: In the City and County of San Francisco, The Connected Bus pilot is a landmark public
transportation innovation aimed at enabling people, traffic, and public transit vehicles to flow more efficiently.

http://www.theclimategroup.org/our-news/news/2009/9/28/cisco-and-the-climate-group-to-develop-
new-connected-urban-development-alliance/
Cisco's Big Bet on New Songdo: Creating Cities
From Scratch

Stan Gale is exultant. The chairman of Gale International yanks off his tie, hitches up his
pants, and mops the sweat and floppy hair from his brow. He's beaming like a proud new
papa, sprung from the waiting room and handing out cigars to whoever happens by.
Beckoning me to follow, he saunters across eight lanes of traffic toward his baby, delivered
prematurely days before.
Ten years ago, Gale was a builder and flipper of office parks who would eventually become
known for knocking down the Boston landmark Filene's Basement and replacing it with a
hole in the ground. But Gale's fate began to change in 2001 with a phone call from South
Korea. The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer
everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea's banks and
its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of
downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea.
When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.
New Songdo City won't be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on
the 100-acre "Central Park" modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan's. Climbing on
all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires -- condos, offices, even South Korea's
tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park's canal,
we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask
whether he's stocked the canal with fish yet. "It's four days old!" he splutters, forgetting he
isn't supposed to rest until the seventh.
As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city
since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose,
monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better
because there's a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been
hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green
city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases
of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It's an "international
business district" and an "aerotropolis" -- a Western-oriented city more focused on the
airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it's supposed to be a "smart city," studded
with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its "Smarter
Planet" religion.
Being seriously ahead of the curve explains why Gale had such a hard time finding a tech
partner to bring this dream to fruition. First in line was LG, one of Korea's homegrown
conglomerates. None of its ideas had made it past the prototype stage. Next up was
Microsoft, which signed a deal giving it carte blanche to mold the city in its image.
"Designing an entirely new city from the ground up provides a unique opportunity to create
an ideal technological infrastructure," Bill Gates boasted. But before he could even measure
for drapes, Gale decided a plumber would be a better fit and threw Microsoft over for Cisco.
Last spring, the networking giant became New Songdo's exclusive supplier of digital
plumbing. More than simply installing routers and switches -- or even something so banal
as citywide Wi-Fi -- Cisco is expected to wire every square inch of the city with synapses.
From the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching through every
wall and fixture, it promises this city will "run on information." Cisco's control room will be
New Songdo's brain stem.
And that's just the beginning. No longer content to sell just plumbing, the company is
teaming up with Gale, 3M, United Technologies (UTC), and the architects of Kohn Pedersen
Fox (KPF) to enter the instant-city business. At a Cisco event near New Songdo last
summer, Gale stunned the room by announcing plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities
across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. In the spirit of Moore's Law, he
says, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year.
Cisco calls this Smart+Connected Communities initiative a potential $30 billion
opportunity, a number based not only on the revenues from installation of the basic
infrastructure but also on selling the consumer-facing hardware as well as the services
layered on top of that hardware. Picture a Cisco-built digital infrastructure wired to Cisco's
TelePresence videoconferencing screens mounted in every home and office, with engineers
listening, learning, and releasing new Cisco-branded bandwidth-hungry services in
exchange for modest monthly fees. You've heard of software as a service? Well, Cisco
intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities -- water, power, traffic,
telephony -- into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every
resident's bill.

We have the hardware in place and what we need now is the software," Gale beseeched the
Cisco execs in New Songdo. "It's going to be a cool city, a smart city. We start from here and
then we are going to build 20 new cities like this one, using this blueprint. Green! Growth!
Export!" Jaws dropped. "China alone needs 500 cities the size of New Songdo," Gale tells
me. And he has already done the deal to build the next two.
--------
China doesn't need cool, green, smart cities. It needs cities, period -- 500 New Songdos
at the very least. One hundred of those will each house a million or more transplanted
peasants. In fact, while humanity has been building cities for 9,000 years, that was
apparently just a warm-up for the next 40. As of now, we're officially an urban species. More
than half of us -- 3.3 billion people -- live in a city. Our numbers are projected to nearly
double by 2050, adding roughly a New Songdo a day; the United Nations predicts the vast
majority will flood smaller cities in Africa and Asia.
"Cities are becoming unsettled," warns Saskia Sassen, the Columbia University sociologist
who's the leading expert on cities' collision with globalization. "They will be the sites of new
wars -- wars for water, for a clean environment, and not to mention room for some 700
million people displaced by climate change." Sociologist Mike Davis prophesied in his
apocalyptic Planet of Slums that "the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass
and steel ... [will be] instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic,
cement blocks, and scrap wood." In many places, they already are.
It was this crushing demographic trend that drew Cisco into the instant-city business. Gale
first approached Cisco CEO John Chambers five years ago, "but we weren't ready," says
Wim Elfrink, Cisco's chief globalization officer. It wasn't until 2006, after former President
Bill Clinton challenged the company to act on climate change, that it started thinking of
building smarter cities. "Now," Elfrink says, "we're in catch-up mode." Two years ago, Saudi
Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz charged Cisco with helping to plan four new cities
around the country, at a total cost of $70 billion. The aim was to establish a Saudi Silicon
Valley, one designed to create a million-plus jobs and increase non-oil GDP by almost 50%
in barely a decade. These "economic cities" were explicitly intended to house and employ
nearly half of the 10 million Saudis under the age of 17 -- a largely uneducated workforce
described as a "human time bomb." Cisco's job, improbable as it may seem, was to help
defuse it. The first of these cities began opening last year, but none are as far along as New
Songdo.
While the developing world wrestles with its impending population boom, the entire world
is confronting an explosion of another sort: climate change. The battle against global
warming will be fought in city streets. The world's 20 largest megacities consume a
staggering 75% of its energy. Buildings alone contribute 15% of all greenhouse gases, more
than all forms of transportation combined (13.5%). Barring simultaneous breakthroughs in
a raft of clean technologies -- including solar cells, biofuels, and batteries -- the fastest way
to shrink cities' carbon footprints is through conservation and efficiency. Unlike Walmart,
which has a real-time glimpse into every store, truck, and warehouse in its system, cities are
nearly impossible to parse. But hook them up to the right mix of sensors and software, the
thinking goes, and who knows what efficiencies might suddenly be revealed? When
buildings, power lines, gas lines, roadways, cell phones, residential systems, and so on are
able to talk to one another, that information can expose patterns of waste and ways to avoid
it. Just as wiring corporations made them leaner and meaner, wiring cities may be one way
to tease efficiency out of dumb networks like the power grid.
For the last year, it's been impossible to watch a football game without being exhorted by
IBM to "build a smarter planet." And it's true that even a relatively simple retrofit of existing
cities can make a substantial dent in emissions. In Stockholm, a high-tech congestion-
pricing scheme that IBM helped implement has increased tax revenue by $80 million while
reducing traffic and CO2 by 18%. An IBM smart-grid test in Washington State concluded
peak loads might be trimmed enough nationwide to eliminate the need for 30 coal-fired
power plants over 20 years.
"Everything can be connected and everything can be green," promises Elfrink, who
calculates that in addition to creating millions of jobs, smartening up cities could reduce
emissions worldwide by 15% over the next decade, saving a ton of CO2 per person and nearly
a trillion dollars. The smart-grid market alone "may be bigger than the whole Internet,"
Chambers has said.

While IBM has so far focused on the gnarly and necessary task of retrofitting existing cities,
Cisco has taken the idea a monumental step further by building new ones from the mud up.
Cisco has already demonstrated how its technology could be used to orchestrate the energy
use in New Songdo's buildings, dialing up and down the heat, lights, and electricity. Its next
step, Elfrink says, will be to create a sort of urban operating system, and then to identify and
create services that try to streamline everything from health care to education to traffic to
shopping. Cisco and Gale will take a slice of every transaction that runs through their
software.
That Cisco is staking so much on a mudflat in the Yellow Sea is a reflection of Chambers's
grand plan to move beyond the sale of routers and switches. His lieutenants are busy
chasing as many as 30 different billion-dollar opportunities, or what he calls "adjacencies."
New Songdo is where several of them intersect. "We used to be a plumber," Chambers tells
me at Bill Clinton's latest confab in New York. "And we were proud to be a plumber. It's a
very honorable profession and we made a lot of money doing it. But now we've moved from
plumbing to being the platform for innovation. And instead of taking the typical approach
that most high-tech companies do, which is to sell stand-alone products and maybe think
about how they tie together," Cisco is "filling a void in the industry, where we're providing
both the technology architecture" and the vision to governments for "how you use this
technology to change societies."

Just a few years ago, smart cities were seen as Blade Runner or Minority Reportwarmed
over. Whatever guises they took -- from "digital homes" to "ubiquitous computing" -- it
seemed no one really wanted the questionable convenience of videophones or Internet-
enabled fridges.
"It's more pragmatic now, because the overriding agenda is sustainability," Elfrink insists
over breakfast in New Songdo last August. Fluting in a pronounced Dutch accent, Elfrink, in
town for the opening of the Incheon Global Fair & Festival, an ersatz expo held in New
Songdo's honor, is comfortable switching from anthropology to technical minutiae in
midsentence. He spearheads strategy for Cisco from the company's Bangalore campus and
also runs its $7 billion services unit. "I was a keynote speaker at the United Nations Habitat
conference in Delhi a few weeks ago," he says. "They fought urbanization for years, because
they thought they should slow it down. But you can't stop it. It's not a curse -- it's an
opportunity."
It certainly looks like an opportunity if you're a technology company. A flurry of white
papers has been issued by the likes of HP, Autodesk, Oracle, and Cisco on topics including
"Digital Cities," "City 2.0," "Intelligent Urbanisation," and even a "Central Nervous System
for the Earth." The market is so new that no one can pinpoint the exact size of what's at
stake. The best guess, offered by the research firm IDC, pegs the smart-infrastructure
business at $122 billion over the next two years. A better answer may be: "How much have
you got?" Governments are looking to cash $3 trillion in stimulus checks, and behind that
comes an estimated $35 trillion in global infrastructure spending over the next two decades.
The near-term strategy of tech firms appears to be, Tap available pools of stimulus funds to
pilot a smart grid here and a smart sewer there. Sooner or later, someone will need to pull it
all together, and that means wiring cities from the ground up. IBM has chosen the unlikely
venue of Dubuque, Iowa (population: 60,000), for its prototype, which is consistent with its
more limited approach of retooling established cities, mostly in the West. Cisco is hoping to
prove its model by embedding its technology in instant cities across the developing world. In
addition to King Abdullah's, there is Qatar's Energy City and India's Gujarat International
Finance Tec-City, known by the all-too-appropriate acronym, GIFT. Six others are already
planned. Elfrink estimates that at least $500 billion will be earmarked for instant cities over
the next decade, with $10 billion to $15 billion allotted for network plumbing alone. Cisco
hopes to pocket another $15 billion from the services running atop these systems, marketed
to residents and mayors alike, starting with smart grids and meters. "The first phase will be
very simple," he says, "because people will spend money to save money."

Cisco itself has spent a great deal of money acquiring the tools it hopes will lock in first-
mover advantage. What is now Smart+Connected Communities was announced a year ago
following the purchase of Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence, whose software links
buildings over the Internet, for an undisclosed sum. The cities-as-a-service piece was added
through an investment in an Australian startup called Majitek. Together, they will integrate
the babel of proprietary systems created by the likes of Honeywell, UTC, and Johnson
Controls to heat, cool, and power modern office blocks. And if Cisco's $3.4 billion bid for
Tandberg goes through, it will instantly propel Cisco to No. 1 in the videoconferencing
market, pairing Tandberg's desktop screens with Cisco's room-size TelePresence models
and possibly the set-top boxes from its $7 billion purchase of Scientific Atlanta. In the
meantime, Elfrink and his deputies have wooed mayors, recruited experts, courted
governments, and worked alongside KPF's architects, 3M's scientists, and UTC's engineers
to marry new energy-efficient materials and technologies with the urban Internet he
envisions.
In announcing Cisco's strategy, Chambers declared, "The network has become the next
utility." The metaphor is telling. Utilities are often natural monopolies, profiting endlessly
from captive markets. Smart cities hold a similar fascination for Cisco, as places where basic
services such as water or power might be repackaged as value-added products, throwing off
lucrative consulting contracts essentially forever.
--------
Elfrink and Cisco's official mission in New Songdo is sustainability -- "from a social,
environmental, and business point of view." But on the ground last summer, Elfrink was
audibly more excited by the prospect of a Boston-size sandbox for TelePresence, Cisco's
fastest-growing business. On opening day of the Incheon fair, he cuts the ribbon on his
company's pavilion with great fanfare, ushering guests inside for a glimpse of what's to
come. Although a few demos dutifully depict turning down the entire city's thermostat, the
two-way video screens are the stars of the show. In one scene, actors posing as doctor and
patient conduct a dramatized remote checkup. "The killer app," Elfrink tells me, "will be
TelePresence. If you want to talk to your neighbors or book a table at a restaurant, you can
do it via TelePresence." Or you can attend class at New Songdo's International School. Or
practice yoga with your yogi. Or work from home, as Elfrink often does in Bangalore.
It's hard to see what any of this has to do with sustainability, unless your plan to shrink your
carbon footprint is to never leave your house. Seen from Cisco's perspective, however, it's all
kinds of green. Installing screens and smart appliances in every home and office all but
guarantees demand for the fattest pipes and biggest switches, and establishes Cisco as the
gatekeeper between that underlying plumbing and every service built on top. Cisco and Gale
will own the core of New Songdo's consumer and metropolitan services, inviting third-party
developers to fill in the gaps in exchange for a slice of each transaction -- think Apple's App
Store for homes and cities. Imagine a wall-mounted flat screen, crowded with TelePresence
calls, smart-meter readouts, and whatever else Cisco has to offer. How does $5 a month for
a daily consultation from your toilet sound? "I would love to have nutritional advice first
thing in the morning," Elfrink says earnestly. "Is TelePresence going to be the next iPhone? I
don't know, but you can dream that big."
In this way, Cisco seems to be moving beyond smart cities' sustainability mission and into
something close to social engineering. Ironically, this souped-up vision is what a smart city
used to mean -- and why no one wanted to live in one. People weren't interested in
appliances talking amongst themselves, and they didn't want to run the risk of their houses
needing a reboot. Tech executives called their disinterest a failure of "education" rather than
a display of customers' common sense. Cisco hopes to get around this problem in New
Songdo by eventually installing TelePresence in every apartment whether residents want it
or not. The assumption is that folks will quickly learn to love it. Build it, apparently, and
they will come.
"The money pumped into economies under the guise of recovery packages, that's the
opportunity they're trying to seize," says Andrea Di Maio, a Gartner public-sector analyst. Di
Maio skeptically notes that none of these would-be master builders have developed new
technologies from scratch. Instead they're bolting together what they have on hand and
calculating the carbon savings that result. "Scratch the surface, and you start to wonder just
how coherent this strategy really is," he says.
"Cities are highly complex systems, and one of the elements of highly complex systems is
that when you monkey around with them, their predictability goes to zero," says Pip
Coburn, a technology analyst whose bookThe Change Function argues that the reason so
many technologies fail is because the pain of changing old habits outweighs any benefits.
And when it comes to something as complex as cities, he says forget it. "If you're trying in
advance to define a future city, you're out of your mind. You'll spend years and money
disrupting people's lives."
It would be one thing if New Songdo were a one-off experiment, but Gale has assembled his
dream team of architects and technologists with an eye toward cracking the code of
urbanism itself. "There's a pattern here, repeatable," he tells me. He won't be content until
he can standardize and mass-produce his cities in half the time for China. Indeed, New
Songdo's first clone will break ground this year on the outskirts of Changsha, a provincial
capital larger than Singapore. The Meixi Lake District will be larger than New Songdo and
just as dense, smart, and green -- and eerily familiar. This and every subsequent city will be
standardized around Gale's partners' products: the same light fixtures, traffic signals,
elevators, fuel cells, central air-conditioners -- and TelePresence screens. The scope of his
ambitions dovetails neatly with Cisco's. "We're trying to replicate cities," Elfrink says
bluntly, but "we have no standards. Every city is a new project, a new process, a new
interface," he continues, marveling at the inefficiency. "You shouldn't spend time on an
elevator. You shouldn't spend time on lighting."
Gale's timetable is, if anything, too slow for Elfrink, who expects to sign deals with an
additional half-dozen municipalities this year. "We want to create an ecosystem of partners
who standardize the things that can be standardized, and then spend their energy on
customization. Because a city in Korea has a different social dynamic than a city in China, or
a city in Brazil."
--------
It's true that Korea is different, which is why Cisco chose New Songdo as its test bed.
Korea has always been a ravenous adopter of technology -- it has had smartphones, social
networks, and universal broadband for nearly a decade. But the country is also something of
a boneyard for big ideas that never quite caught on, including smart cities that look pretty
dumb in retrospect.
"It's quality of life as a service," complains Adam Greenfield, the head of user-interface
design for Nokia and the author of Everyware, a Ninety-Five Theses for ubiquitous
computing. "Everything we think of as organic and emergent in cities is absent. In Korea,
everything is just dropped onto a map. They clear out a rice paddy and suddenly it looks like
the Upper West Side."
Take Tomorrow City, an $82 million showcase for the abandoned "U-Life" demos by Gale's
original partner, LG. On my last day in New Songdo, I enter the place just as Elfrink is
leaving with a pack of customers in tow. Tomorrow City is the Ghost of Smarter City Past --
the product of a vision in which the uses for a given technology are concocted in a lab or a
marketing department and pushed down onto consumers. In this (now frozen) vision, our
U-Lives will boast U-Galleries for our art collections and U-Libraries with wall-size screens;
U-Health confirms we're getting fat and recommends a U-Workout on the treadmill; after a
shower, U-Beauty grafts our faces onto the heads of Korean teenagers and suggests a new
hairstyle for the day; our U-Closets propose outfits for the office.
Smarter-city flaneurs such as Nokia's Greenfield or Carlo Ratti, who directs MIT's Senseable
City Lab, doubt anyone will ever be able to dictate a killer app for cities. Even in the
incubators Cisco is building across the Arabian Peninsula and China, the inhabitants are
likely to have their own ideas for the uses of things.
Greenfield envisions three scenarios for Cisco's smart cities, including New Songdo. "One,
you install the screens and nobody uses them, ever -- people are set in their ways and the
technology dies from disinterest. Two, there's some initial uptake, but because you designed
the system so rigidly, they give up. Three, the best case is that people take it up in some way
that it is enormously successful, but it has nothing at all to do with what the planners and
strategists ever imagined."

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/the-new-new-urbanism.html?page=0,4
Cisco’s Wim Elfrink put a price on the return on investment of taking a ‘ubiquitous city’
approach, claiming a jump in revenue for developers from the standard $3 per square metre
ROI to $8 per sqm if you retrofit technologies, up to $15 per sqm if you design with it in mind. He
also claims energy efficiencies of around 30%. 

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2010/01/notes-on-new-songdo-city.html