“Smart Cities” are places with extensive personal and public usage of high-end information and communication technology (ICT) that leads to achieving elevated operational efficiency in how citizens do things and how government delivers services. They’re “smart” because of how they ubiquitously use ICT in their daily affairs: how they live, pursue livelihoods and learning, and how they link their interests. (https://www.twiglobal.com/technicalknowledge/faqs/what-is-a-smart-city).
EMPLOYMENT AND ENGAGEMENTS IN SMART CITIES
“The purpose of a smart city,” says Forsythes Employment, “is to improve and simplify the lives of its citizens by combining technology with physical infrastructure and services”. It offers opportunities for employment but requires that public and private sectors (and individual citizens) are “technology and digitally fluent” (https://www.forsythes recruitment.com.au/blog/employment-opportunities-in-the-time-of-smart-cities/).
Office workers, teachers, bureaucrats, professionals, janitors, delivery workers, managers, and public transportation drivers need to be skilled in ICT-based work, scheduling, reporting systems, payments, and performance tracking and evaluation. Locals that don’t have these skills could be left out and non-locals with better ICT competencies would dominate the job markets.
COVID AND THE SURGE OF OUTSOURCING AND REMOTE WORKERS
Many people today work for firms whose offices are elsewhere in the world. ICT and global interconnectivity make it possible for them to work across places. They’re “remote workers”.
In two years since CoViD, 26 percent of the American workforce work remotely. It’s 25-30 percent globally (https://www.apollotechnical.com/statistics-on-remote-workers/). This year, 55 percent of global businesses offer some remote work; 18 percent of the workforce telecommute full-time; 77 percent of them say they’re more productive working offsite than when working in offices; 30 percent save upward of $5,000 a year; companies are saving as much as $11,000/year for each employee who works remotely half-time; those working remotely earn $4,000 more per year, on average; 99 percent of remote workers want to keep telecommuting in the future; 90 percent of remote workers recommends working remotely to a friend.” (From: https:// review42.com/ resources/remote-work-statistics/).
CoViD’s a terrible scourge. But it has created a surge in remote work and engagements including in commerce, investments, public services, and education. They’ll likely linger beyond CoViD. Even if much of primary production and manufacturing are still riveted in places and time, more jobs and human interactions are no longer tied to a place.
This leads to a question: If the intention is to have a “Smart City” (and none other), couldn’t any place that invests on good ICT, good interconnectivity, and building up good ICT skills among its own residents, become “smart” even if it were a place of humble cottages, or high-rise condos, an urban sprawl, or a scattering of beachside barangays?
It seems the smarter thing to do to build “smartness” in an existing place where people have already evolved and invested life-long personal, cultural, ecological, and institutional capital and relationships. – NWI
