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>>Parag Khanna: To me, smart cities are to real cities kind
of like what formula one is to ordinary cars. You know, you would love to see the technology
trickle down to what you drive, but chances are it's going to take a long time. We just
sort of have to make do. So what are the things we have to think about
as we want to retrofit our own cities and improve the quality of life for ordinary citizens?
We have to think about scale. It's great to be enamored by the kinds of smart city projects
that are being planned around the world. But if you add up the estimated planned potential
population of all of these smart city projects, just take a few of the ones in China, though
there are ten more, it barely adds up to one district of Shanghai. So we have a long way
to go before we can scale up these kinds of technologies to actually affect the lives
of ordinary people. If we're going to think big, though, we also
should perhaps think small, particularly in the transportation space.
On the left, you see what MIT has developed. It's the Hiroko car, electric car, that's
being built and deployed in Bilbao, Spain. And a lot of what's special about it, of course,
is it's so small, it can park just about anywhere. What a lot of European cities are starting
to do is to design, deploy, acquire fleets of these in shared spaces so that people can
take them from the home, to the railway station with, you know, special pooled parking and
rental service areas. So it's sort of Zipcar of the future. No one needs to necessarily
own them. But this is what the future of sustainable intermodal transport is. And what you can
see on the right is what -- the ultraglobal pod, sort of the light rail that's being used
at Heathrow Airport right now.