1.

INTRODUCTION

1.1. THE SMART CITY CONCEPT

Caragliu (2009) stated that a city is considered to be smart when a city’s sustainable

economic growth and a high quality of life is fuelled by the investments in human and

social capital; traditional transportation and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure

with a wise management of natural resources through participatory governance. Frost

and Sullivan (2019) defined smart city as “a city that has an active plan and projects in at

least five of the eight functional areas of energy, buildings, mobility, technology,

infrastructure, healthcare, governance and citizens”.

There are many studies that list similar characteristics of a smart city. The most

agreed characteristics are smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart

mobility, smart environment and smart living. The first characteristic, smart economy

covers a city economic growth and value creation; innovation economic growth, equitable

wealth distribution and entrepreneurship initiatives. Meanwhile, smart mobility is when a

city is efficient on road accessibility, public transportation and use non-motorized

accessibility as well as availability of ICT infrastructure.

Smart governance indicate how the city’s govern the city transparently and allow

public participation, has efficient public and social services, encourages private public

partnership. Smart people mean that a city’s citizens live in a caring community, racial

harmony and have a skilled, talented human capital. Furthermore, smart environment

indicates a city has a clean environment with an implementation of environmental

protection. A smart city also needs to encourage green development, infrastructure and

1
 economy. The last smart city’s characteristic is smart living where the city has

implemented safety and security in its quality housing and educational system, promotes

health conditions, cultural facilities as well as tourist or recreational attractiveness.

Today all developed and developing countries are competing to transform their cities

into smart cities. IESE Business School University of Navarra has conducted a research

to rank the world top smart cities. According to the research, the top three smart cities in

2018 are New York City followed by London and Paris. Two cities in Australia also have

been mentioned in the list where Melbourne and Sydney are the twelfth and fifth place

respectively. Most of these smart cities have excelled in their human capital, social

cohesion, economy, governance and et cetera.

2. PERTH AS A SMART CITY

Perth is a capital of Western Australia and one of the region’s most vibrant centres of

growth (Perth, Australia Smarter Cities Challenge Report, 2014). The population of the City

of Perth has been rising at annual growth rate 3.64 present in 2018 (Population Australia,

2019) and the total residential population is expected to reach 2.385 million in 2019. In

parallel with residential population growth, the workforce is increasing, and investments

continue to move into the city. To respond with this growth, Australia’s government has come

out with a smart cities plan.

2.1. INITIATIVES

The Australia’s smart cities plan consists of three pillars which are Smart

Investment, Smart Policy and Smart Technology (Smart Cities Plan, 2016). In smart

2
investment initiative, the Australia’s government aim to become smarter investors in the

cities’ infrastructure. In order to achieve this target, the government priorities projects that

can bring wide economic and city objectives. It also view infrastructure funding as a long

term investment and pursues this funding early in order to create opportunities for urban

renewal and raised private capital (Smart Cities Plan, 2016). The government also plans

to leverage its balance sheet and deliver more essential infrastructure in the near future

by drawing on innovative financing approaches.

To coordinate and derive smarter city policy is also one of the initiatives to

transform Australia’s cities including Perth into smart cities. The Australia’s government

plan to develop City Deals by working with all levels of government and unlock both

public and private investment in its key economic centres. The government plan to

generate additional benefits for cities that have great contribution to the economy as

better places to live in and do business by incentivising reforms. The government also

will measure its policies’ success and respond to new needs by collecting and analysing

the cities’ performance.

The last initiative is smart technology where the Australia’s government plans to

drive the take up of smart technology and improve the sustainability as well as innovation

of its cities. In order to do so, the government revolutionise how its cities are planned,

function. The government also plan to insert technology in transport, communications

and energy efficiency as well as leverage real time data driven solution while

commercialising new innovations.

3
2.2. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

The city of Perth faces increasing logistical challenges (Perth Australia Smarter

Cities Challenges, 2014) brought by the transition of Australia’s economy beyond the

mining investment boom, along with the growing population and the increase of

knowledge-based industries. All of these factors present both opportunities and

challenges in economic transition, jobs opportunities, green urban spaces, housing,

transport and human capital.

The demand of housing and land rises as economic activity becomes more

concentrated. In the city of Perth, rapid house price growth in inner city has led to living

near work unaffordable for the Australians. The Australians have taken high levels of

household debt or moved to outer suburbs to deal with rising prices. This challenge can

also give the city an opportunity to improve its infrastructure. The city council can

increase housing supply near to job opportunity and has transport connection. For

example, the construction of The Perth-Fremantle and Perth-Mandurah passenger rail

lines traverse the South West Metropolitan Region. This infrastructure investment can

help Australians live closer to their work, with easy access to transport and services.

Create housing supply near job opportunity also can create opportunity for the citizen to

choose active transport such as walking and cycling.

Another challenge that Perth needs to face is human capital where the city start

losing its valuable asset, human skills and experience and enterprise drive productivity

growth. According to Smart Cities Plan (2016), Perth is not only competing with

Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney but with Singapore, London, New York and other

world cities. Perth must offer access to career opportunities, education and training to

4
 secure the human talent as well as attract talent from overseas. For example, the city

council collaborate with local university such as the Curtin University to create a

program to leverage human skills and secure local human capital.

3. OPINIONS

In my opinion, it is possible for the city of Perth to become a smart city in the near future

like Melbourne and Sydney. This is because of the city has a committed city council that

willing to invest hundred per cent to transform the city into a better place to live and do

business. The expand of economy growth as well as the increase of infrastructure

investments into the city also widen the opportunities for the city to become a smart city. Not

only that the city of Perth can transform into a smart city, the city also has the potential to

become international business hubs. This is because of a smart city plan can attract many

investors to invest in the implementation of this plan.

Many infrastructure and technological system need to be implemented to become a

smart city and all this infrastructure came from the domestic and international investments.

For example, the mining business in Perth is blooming and this can give the opportunity for

international and domestic investors to collaborate with and invest in the mining equipment,

technology services sectors. This collaboration also can attract many businesses to supplier

raw materials to the development of the mining sectors and the mining sectors is one

example of many other sectors that will emerge when Perth become a smart city.

5
4. RECOMMENDATION

4.1. BENCHMARK OTHER SMART CITES

One of the way to become a smart city is the city of Perth can benchmark other

smart cities in the world. For example, the New York City where the city has been

placed as number one smart city in the world. The New York City has successfully

implemented smart city initiatives such as Smart Water Metering, Smart Waste

Management, and Air Quality Monitoring. Or the city of Perth doesn’t have to look far but

to other smart cities in Australia which are Melbourne and Sydney. The city of

Melbourne has implemented smart city technology such as City Lab, Technology test

beds, Open Data, Free WIFI, Melbourne Urban Forest Visual, et cetera. The city of

Perth can try implemented any of these initiatives accordingly.

4.2. IMPLEMENT SMART ENERGY: RENEWABLE HYDROGEN

The city of Perth also can focus on implementing smart energy by using

renewable hydrogen. Renewable hydrogen is not just as a possible technology of the

future, but as a breakthrough technology now in action, in Brisbane, Australia. Western

Australia’s diverse geography offers abundant sources of land and solar, wind, wave

and geothermal energy, which is essential to produce renewable hydrogen. Perth’s city

council, The South West Group, has also listed this initiative as a longer term

opportunity to capture and share of increasing global demand for sustainable and clean

energy by exploiting the possibility of manufacture and export.

6
REFERENCE

(2014). Perth, Australia Smarter Cities Challenge report. United States of America: IBM

Corporation.

(2016). Smart Cities Plan Australia. Australia Government: Department of Prime Minister and

Cabinet.

Caragliu, A., Bo, C.D. and Nijkamp, P. (2009), “Smart Cities in Europe”, Proceedings of the 3rd

Central European Conference in Regional Science, Košice, October 7-9, available at:

www.inta-aivn.org/images/cc/Urbanism/background documents/01_03_Nijkamp.pdf

IESE Cities in Motion Index. (2018). Retrieved May 10, 2019, from IESE Business Shool:

https://media.iese.edu/research/pdfs/ST-0471-E.pdf

Population Australia. (2019). Retrieved May 10, 2019, from Perth Population 2019:

http://www.population.net.au/perth-population/