Smart ports & smart cities

First, the smart city concept has tremendous traction, many leading city regions presented their strategies and many solution providers presented their latest offerings.

The smart cities concept is holistic and includes aspects such as better use of information and communication technology to manage infrastructure (such as the energy grid), flows (such as passenger flows) and the use of assets (such as streetlights).

Smart city also has a ‘governance dimension’: it allows direct interaction between city governments and residents and empowers residents (for instance enabling jointly investing in sustainable energy generation).

While there is no defined ‘end state’ (this is what a smart city looks like), it is clear that major improvements to the functioning of cities can be achieved, with huge effects for the way we live.

For instance, think about what happens to our cities if we can get rid of many parking places in cities, reduce traffic densities through much improved utilisation of (shared) vehicles, dramatically reduce emissions through switching to electric vehicles and re-use waste to create value (for instance using used materials in construction and re-use food residues).

If we connect all the dots, it becomes clear that the smart cities transition is a major transition; Rifkin (an influential academic and consultant) closely links smart cities to the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’.

Second, smart cities and ‘smart ports’ (another concept with substantial traction), are deeply related. Most major ports are located in and mainly serve one or more urban regions.

The evolution of mobility, waste management and processing, energy generation and distribution and construction has major implications, for the volumes handled by ports serving metropolitan regions (where around 80% of global consumption takes place), for the role of ports play in energy distribution and production and for port operations, especially the landside flows of goods.

In short, for most ports a ‘smart ports in smart cities’ approach may be better than focusing on smart port operations in isolation. This calls for much closer cooperation between ports and cities than is currently common practice.