What's easier, Urban Planning or IT?

No doubt, we must control IT energy consumption but as problem solvers, IT Directors have it easy compared to urban planners and big city mayors.

Look at what they are trying to control.

Most of us are vaguely aware of urban growth headaches. But I've just been startled to full consciousness while participating in a UN sponsored conference on urbanization and the role of information technology.

A 2004 UN report found that urban population was growing by one million people a week.

                              

There are already at least 250 cities of more than a million—many of these in Asia, especially India and China.

In 2003, there were 39 cities over 5 million in population.

However, urban giants with populations exceeding 10 million dwarf cities of a few million. According to various estimates, there may be over 20 of these already. By 2020, the projections place 20 or more of these at over 20 million.

Think about this while you’re grappling with creative ways to handle extreme growth in data and applications. How would you handle 20 million people and all that supports them?

Here is a great place for information technology to help in dealing with very real world issues.

Yes we can help.

EMC has become a corporate sponsor of the UN Global Alliance for Information Communications Technology and Development (GAID). Jeff Nick, EMC Sr. Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, has been named to the GAID Strategy Council.

Jeff presented to a GAID conference last November and it was clear that EMC and the IT industry as a whole have much to offer the common cause.

(Find info about this November event in two earlier posts: IT and Climate Change - The Positive Impact and More from the United Nations ICT)

The United Nations sponsors GAID and it includes not only government representatives but also leaders from business, education, and civil society. It is a unique collaboration between the UN and non-UN interests. They are looking at how ICT can help examine and resolve the linkages between poverty and climate change.

Through our sponsorship, we see great opportunities for EMC staff around the world to contribute to GAID initiatives. Mine started recently as a panelist at the UN conference titled "Sustainable Urbanization in the Information Age".

This two-day meeting was co-sponsored by GAID and UN Habitat. The purpose was to foster information exchange on the challenges of planning for massive urban growth.

Because world's cities will see huge population increases and exploding demands upon every kind of resource, massive planning efforts are essential. And information technology is key to that planning as well as to its execution. The issues involved are complex and touch every element of urban life: land, food, water, energy, transportation, air and climate change.

Conference participants included UN delegates, urban planning experts, academics, architects and city officials. The mayors and city officials represented the global spectrum, including Istanbul, Charleston, Bogota, Barcelona, Singapore Tunis and a number of others.

My participation highlighted the role that ICT plays in supporting cities and global communities, helping to formulate policies and outcomes and to achieve sustainability goals. Closely shadowing Jeff’s November message, mine was about how IT helps environmental sustainability:

Information is more easily shared, enabling people to come together from cities around the world to devise new approaches and speed the creation of new knowledge, new resolutions to common problems.

Global platforms for collaboration have helped create virtual communities where everyone can contribute to a global dialogue that widely shares and develops ideas.

UN GAID has itself been using these technologies to collaborate across its global network. And EMC has committed to help increase these capabilities, with the intent to create a global collaborative on a vastly larger scale to advance environmental sustainability.

Creating environmental sustainability is a massive undertaking. It will demand global collaboration and cooperation, from the largest and most influential stakeholders, to every individual. In order to achieve the best possible outcomes it will require planning, research, innovation, and most of all imagination.

That’s why IT is so important. It has the potential to enable cities to drive global changes in the face of a shrinking timetable.

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