'Airports can become the new rivers and ports'

Cape Town might reconfigure itself as an "aerotropolis" one day - while Johannesburg might find itself home to one of the most sophisticated national control centres in the world, not unlike the one in Rio de Janeiro that has eight government departments all working in unison.

These were just some of the visions expressed at a Smart Cities talk given at the Cape Town International Convention Centre last week as part of the 43rd South African Property Owners Association (Sapoa) convention.

Airport Company of South Africa managing director Monhla Hlahla described the vision of an aerotroplis - an "airport" city - that would develop around the airport in much the same way that cities historically developed around their sea and river ports.

"The best way to change the apartheid legacy lies in the way we deal with transportation," she says, explaining that the impact of an airport city is evidenced by the fact that daily consumer populations at some airports are bigger than many cities and some generate more revenue from non-aviation activities at the airport than through aviation itself.

She says that while many might have forgotten about the World Cup, the country developed integrated airport management systems as a result that still benefit us.

According to Andrew Boraine, chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership, however, "the jury is still out among urban planners as to whether the "airport city" is a good idea or not".

He says it is a popular concept that has been around since 2000. "It challenges the old-style city form and recreates the airport as an economic hub that is not just for passengers and tourists but as a business or economic hub unto itself," he says.

Leading the talk was international smart systems expert Guruduth Banavar, who heads up the Global Public Sector project at IBM, and who says cities can measure how "smart" they are by assessing their "quality of life, economic growth and urban infrastructure systems".

And, he says, developing systems that converge the physical and the digital worlds will become increasingly important as urbanisation grows exponentially.

"Global integration has been galvanised by a series of 'shocks' felt around the world, including 9/11, climate change, energy geopolitics around oil prices, the financial crisis, and global supply chains.

"Demand in China can make or break the economies of other countries," he says.

And, he adds, urbanisation is causing unprecedented challenges. In 2007 it was the first time that the majority of the world's population - 3.3 billion - was living in cities.

"By 2050, city dwellers are expected to make up 70 percent of the earth's total population."

Already, 80 percent of greenhouse gases are emitted by cities around the world, and the average amount of water lost in cities through leaks in the infrastructure is 20 percent.

"The core idea of being 'smart' is developing systems that collapse the boundaries between the digital and the physical so that problems like this can be prevented," he said, referencing Rio's innovative control centre that has integrated the police department, the medical response units, and various other government units to deal with flood disasters that hit the city.

He says that when the city's mayor said that flood rescue should be "solved as the city's number one problem", it gave birth to a whole new way of thinking about how the city's digital and physical worlds could be converged.

Boraine says that for developing countries like South Africa, it is critical to consider the specific circumstances of each individual city when developing plans to become smarter.

However, Jacquie Subban who heads up the geographic information and policy unit at Durban's eThekwini Municipality says that any plan to smarten a city should include job creation as a major component or else it would have "lost the plot".

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