Cities that are more technologically equipped find themselves more adept at managing the pandemic, whether it is real-time crowd management, temperature-taking, diagnosis and treatment, to just supporting the functioning of day-to-day urban life in this new normal. It is said that technology will play a big part in helping us cope with living with the virus in the short to mid-term and evolve to help mitigate the onset of the next big health crisis in the long-term.

As Indonesia’s pace of urbanization accelerates throughout the years, so has its smart cities ambition. Presented with the pressures of making growing cities livable, Indonesia has set in motion plans to evolve into a smart nation in order to keep pace with the scale and acceleration of today’s urban challenges.

In 2017, Indonesia kicked off an ambitious digitalization program called “100 Smart Cities”. However, a recent survey conducted by the Institute for Management Development (IMD) and Singapore University for Technology and Design (SUTD) revealed that Jakarta, Makassar and Medan had dropped places in the Global Smart City Index. Notably, Jakarta lost 13 places from last year to end up at 94.

This World Cities Day, as COVID-19 continues to disrupt our lives and livelihoods, there is a great urgency in reviewing our smart city approach and ensuring that our urban infrastructure and technology is robust enough to manage the worst of what is to come.

While there are many factors to consider when it comes to transforming cities, it is important to address the most fundamental of them all – water.

Water is undeniably essential for our survival, but the demand for water has skyrocketed as a result of the pandemic, with increased cleanliness and public health standards in the form of handwashing and the sanitation of public and private spaces, and not to mention rampant use in the healthcare sector. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of reliable access to safe, clean water and how any form of disruption can be detrimental.

It is this need for reliability that makes the digitalization of our water systems the way forward. Digitalization enables optimization of resources in water infrastructure systems as well as improvements in wastewater management.

Through the Internet of Things, advanced real-time data collection and sensors, water networks can access information that allows them to operate in a more predictive manner, reducing downtime and avoiding serious societal, business and environmental consequences.

Water solutions providers have been applying intelligence when developing their solutions. One example is a cloud-based platform that allows water and wastewater utilities to connect their pumping solutions to the cloud. By leveraging advanced analytics and algorithms to predict leaks, the application helps fix problems in the water network before they happen, preventing wastage of resources and energy.

These predictive models have wide reaching effects – it is not limited to how we sell, distribute and consume water. It can also impact how we manage the wastewater coming from the other end, how we collect, treat, recycle and eventually discharge it. They can also be applied to cities’ reactions to natural disasters and the use of water throughout industries.

There is also the issue of having too much water – in the form of flooding. Indonesia is no stranger to flooding and other natural disasters, where frequents floods have often paralyzed entire cities and displaced thousands of people.

Notably, Jakarta’s “sinking city” status has brought to light the vulnerability of Indonesia when it comes to wet weather events. It will be the world’s most populous city by 2030, but in just a mere two decades later in 2050, it will also probably be largely under water.

However, to prevent Jakarta’s fate it is crucial to review a city’s ability to manage with excess water. Further complicating this is the nuances behind Indonesia’s flooding issues. The country experiences a range of urban, coastal and river flooding across its states, with each situation calling for specific approaches.

For example, pumps play a vital role in mitigating flood waters, by collecting and quickly moving as much of it as possible. In this day and age, pump solutions can be highly adaptable, providing different pump capabilities depending on the type of flood water, whether it is an area dealing with muddy or sometimes polluted confluences, or in sea water barrages and freshwater lakes. Such solutions have demonstrated success in China, where rapid urbanization has led to the country’s landmark “sponge cities” initiative to combat flooding.

This has been gradually put in place throughout the country. Notably, the Jakarta Public Works Agency collaborated with Grundfos to install a pump gate in the city, the first such installation in Jakarta. The innovative design consisted of a floodgate on an existing waterway equipped with submersible pumps. This combines the function of a floodgate with the function of a pumping station and reservoir, all of which would take up space if installed separately – an issue for the densely populated city.

However, building smart cities is not just about implementing technology. There are a number of critical dimensions to unpack behind a successful smart city process.

One is identifying the right partnerships. It is no longer efficient to innovate in silos, and so smart cities cannot take off without the collaboration with the appropriate innovators and solutions providers, leveraging on the right expertise.

It is also important for city planners to engage with local partners that can work on translating these solutions for your smart city – solutions that have been borrowed from other cities and countries need to be adapted and repurposed to fit your city’s unique challenges.

Lastly, there needs to be more conducive governance arrangements in place. Policies need to be put in place to encourage greater data and best practice sharing, foster government agencies that are supportive towards innovation, strengthen digital literacy for all, as well as create opportunities for researchers and start-ups to bring with them new solutions.

 ***

The writer is general manager of Grundfos Indonesia. The views expressed are his own.

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