15 Dec PERIPHERY : The Periphery Report: Smart City Infrastructure Edition

Media Source : PERIPHERY

Autumn 2022

CHINA: Dam Impressive

Infrastructure projects in China have always been conspicuous and by design are often impossible to comprehend. Take the recent news of how Chinese engineers will in a mere two years finish building the world’s largest 3D-printed project, the Yangqu hydropower plant, a 183-metre-tall dam on the Tibetan Plateau built entirely by robots.

Dams, tunnels, walls, bridges — when it comes to mega projects nothing has changed in over a millennium with the exception of scale. Today Beijing plans its smart infrastructure projects in units of hundreds, and in the 2021–2025 period that means US$1.5 trillion to be spent on more than 1,300 new facilities that make use of emerging technologies such as 5G, AI and IoT.

According to data from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, there are currently more than 2,400 5G industrial internet projects underway in the country, with wireless technology being applied to a wide range of sectors including transportation, mining, medical care, education, culture and tourism.

A New Frontier for AI

One of the 500 smart cities well underway is Cloud Valley, designed for China’s Terminus Group by Danish architecture firm BIG. The 135,000 square-metre development is located in Chongqing, a sprawling megacity in southwest China that is one of the country’s leading robot industry bases. Speaking with Landscape Architecture Aotearoa, BIG founder Bjarke Ingels said Cloud Valley “is envisioned as a city where people, technology and nature thrive together with spaces designed for all types of life: human, plant, animal, even artificial life.”

According to a recent report by AI consulting firm Quantum Black, by 2030, AI could disrupt transportation and other key sectors in China, adding significant economic value — but only if strategic cooperation and capability building occur across multiple dimensions. The McKinsey-backed study adds that leaders Alibaba and ByteDance have become known for their highly personalized AIdriven consumer apps and that AI applications have been widely adopted in China, propelled by the world’s largest internet consumer base and the ability to engage with consumers in new ways.

Hundreds of Smart Cities Planned

Naturally, smart cities are where China will display its tech chops and advances at head-shaking scale. Setting what is an unlikely pace for the rest of the region, the country has invested heavily in its own Smart City Program earmarking US$39 billion by 2023 to accelerate the construction of 500-plus metropolises. Beijing believes with technology and big data in charge of its smart cities, success is assured.

China’s 5G network has entered a critical phase of scale resulting in an enormous economic driving force. It was only three years ago that Chinese telecom authorities permitted a first release bundle of 5G licenses for commercial use. Today, over 1.6 million base stations have been installed, with the number of 5G mobile phone subscribers edging toward 500 million.

China has become the first country to build a 5G network based on the scale of its independent networking operation. Many players in the sector have made significant advances, such as telecom carrier China Mobile, which has installed and opened over 850,000 base stations — roughly 60 percent of the world total.

Along with the widespread deployment of base stations, 5G applications have expanded greatly since 2019, covering transportation, medical care, education, tourism and many other areas. There are now more than 20,000 applications, according to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Driverless Robotaxis Launched

The behemoth search engine Baidu recently declared it had obtained permits to operate driverless robotaxi services on open roads in Chongqing and Wuhan, a first for the country.

As part of the roll out, Baidu will deploy five fee-charging robotaxis in each city. Baidu’s Apollo and Toyota Motor Corp– backed Pony.ai are the EVs selected for the service.

One thought leader in China’s mobility space believes the country is now set to transform the global automotive industry. The Shanghai-based founder and CEO of Automobility Ltd., Bill Russo, envisages that the combination of urban mobility, high penetration of mobile internet, and the rapid and aggressive introduction of shared mobility solutions will give China the ability to scale like few other countries. Russo told Periphery, “Public-private partnerships are essential to spark innovation and to de-risk investments in new technology sectors such as intelligent, electric and autonomous vehicles, and China has leveraged investments in infrastructure to accelerate the commercialization of such new mobility technology.”

Cashless Society Saves Face

The notion of China as a fully cashless society took a big step closer to reality this year after two private banks ended services for banknotes and coins. Beijing has been overseeing a nationwide pilot program for the e-yuan, with more than 261 million people downloading the wallet app early this year.

Chengdu, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, is at the forefront of China’s digital economy as the first city in the country to have a gigabit network, which is able to transfer 1,000 megabits of data per second. Residents of the city manage traffic, education, health, employment, and commercial services through an application.

And 20 years on from the sci-fi film Minority Report, we are living in Spielberg’s biometric vision of a retail future. “Paying with your face” will be adopted in more and more stores, replacing QR codes with face scans. Catching on globally, facial recognition is just one of many technologies being trialed by retailers, banks and payments firms to eliminate cash and reduce fraud.

A balance will need to be considered for China’s smart cities. While utilizing technology to overcome the growing urban challenges is at the core what smart cities are meant to achieve, transparency in tech, public engagement in the implementation process, and data privacy will be essential.