The giant investors SpaceX, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Baidu, Toyota, Tesla, Hyundai, VW, LG, Apple and Virgin are involved in smart cities in ways you would not expect. Their involvement spans making complete smart cities from scratch to robot shuttles replacing ten types of vehicle, vertical take-off taxis,
Hyperloop, vertical farming, battery elimination, solar and sensor everything and structural electronics. The new IDTechEx report, “Smart Cities Market 2021-2041: Energy, Food, Water, Materials, Transportation Forecasts” explains how $0.1 to $0.5 trillion smart city budgets are often not in the richest countries and certainly not centred on snooping.
Here is infrastructure and vehicle elimination as much as adding things for the zero-emission, verdant, independent future. Uniquely, the 320 page report analyses and forecasts the major disruptive opportunities for radically new city materials, equipment and systems totalling a $1.7 trillion market in 2041. This report investigates 151 companies radically transforming 500 cities.
Robot shuttles
CEO Raghu Das says, “Smart cities can be energy, food and water independent even in the sea or desert, eliminating pollution, traffic accidents, traffic jams, sidewalks, service staff, fuel supply chains and piping of sewerage and power. Transport is reinvented, smart buildings and city redesign are boosted by the emerging multipurpose materials arriving in walkways, robot shuttles and agrivoltaics. However, we caution about others such as viability of electricity from road movement or heat and the safety of early deployment of vertical take-off battery air taxis. Hyperloop has major challenges unsolved.”
He continues, “We give many new ideas for smart city materials and hardware based on our appraisal of the latest multipurpose materials research in universities and companies. That includes a lot on materials optically, electronically and electrically multipurpose, some functionally edit-able on arrival. Cities will get new magic from such things as transparent and magnetic concrete and electronically-darkening, electricity-producing glass. Some will even double as light-emitting moving color displays using newly viable transparent OLEDs and microLED arrays.”
Robot rooftop greenhouses
He enthuses, “Expect robot rooftop greenhouses, robot vertical farms, more varied aquaculture, saline farming, solar desalination farming and blue energy because most cities are on river, sea or saline marsh. We reveal a $100 billion opportunity for zero-emission modular gensets: distributed power is now the name of the game. We appraise ubiquitous sensor systems and information and communications technology advances supporting all this.”
There are ten infograms of the city of the future and its technologies and ten global maps of technologies and issues plus 35 detailed forecasts including primary energy, off-grid harvesting, photovoltaic materials, solar ground surface cladding, smart glass, robot bus, robotaxi, robot shuttle, vehicle robotic systems by autonomy level, electric light-commercial vehicles, key robotic components, sensors, vertically farmed produce, cultured meat grown in cities to replace living foodstock, multifunctional composites.
