Richard Zambuni, global marketing director-geospatial at Bentley Systems gave an address this morning at the Geospatial World Forum about the creation of intelligent cities. Getting cities right means that we achieve the best possible environments for man, with improved social interaction, better business, better education, better health, and greater cultural interaction.
We’ve been through positive and negative times of city building, and the trends at the moment are toward mega-city growth. The scale of change is dramatic – there were just 20 large cities in India in 2001, and now there are 40. In China they’ve been building 20 new cities a year over the past 20 years, with 70% of the population in urban areas by 2035.
Building cities from scratch is a luxury that many countries don’t have, but these all-new cities represent pilot projects for how we might change our approach. Geospatial technologies are critical to city management, and the move from 2D to 3D is shifting what we can achieve.
The creation of 3D models are superior, and the costs are dropping quickly. Generating realistic visual rendering aids the communication of projects to stakeholders, and allows for accurate modeling and analysis. Integrating 3D city models with BIM allows you to model and route both through the city and within the building as well.
Geospatial technology at high resolution allows you to manage engineering operations within the city from transportation management, to water infrastructure, to communications networks. The model approach provides a means for “joined-up thinking” that combine many disciplines and aids in the efficient planning and execution of city management.
