World’s Largest Coal Port to Transform Into ‘Smart City’

Disruptive new technology is becoming a reality in Newcastle, Australia. Jessie Zhang/The Epoch Times

With the help of American multinational digital communications technology corporation Cisco, Australia is transforming Newcastle into its first digitally active ‘smart city.’

Smart cities are innovative and digitised model cities that promise high-tech infrastructure, better broadband coverage, and transparency by unifying otherwise disparate data of city maintenance and governance into a single database.

Newcastle council’s smart city coordinator Nathaniel Bavinton said he wanted to open Newcastle up for innovative experiments in order to thrive in the 21st century.

“We really want to turn the city into an environment where people come to experiment,” Bavinton told Australians vs. The Agenda.

He wants to build an Internet of Things (IoT) platform to better plan for the future, manage events better, and run the city more efficiently and sustainably.

“We’re not in the situation anymore where you need to buy from your next-door neighbour. It’s a global marketplace, and we’ll need to be competing in that global marketplace,” Bavinton said.

“So we’re gonna get smart parking, smart lighting, waste management, building and innovation hub.”

Cisco has agreed to provide that reach for them.

“The number one thing that they’ve brought to us is time. They’ve invested time in the city to understand Newcastle,” Bavinton said.

An Indian visitor looks at a model of a 'smart city' at the Smart City Expo in New Delhi on May 20, 2015. The expo is showcasing sustainable living and environmental projects. Sajjad Hussain/Getty Images

Newcastle has the world’s largest coal port and is currently governed by the Labour Party, led by Councillor Nick Kemp.

The government says budget deficits, congestion, and lost jobs in the manufacturing sector, resources and energy sectors are the reasons for the genesis of its Smart cities plan in early 2017.

This follows the establishment of this model in Japan, Latin America and South Asia, with more Australian cities planned for the near future.

Surveillance Program

While smart cities propose improved investment and sustainability, it comes with costs to privacy and some freedoms.

Dr. Sean Lin, an assistant professor in Biomedical Science Department at Feitian College—Middletown, NY and a veteran who served as a U.S. Army microbiologist, says that China is aggressively driving the development of smart cities.

“There are a whole array of concerns on data privacy, data compatibility, data security, IoT stabilities, network stabilities, and challenges in future upgrades,” Dr. Lin said.

Surveillance cameras are seen on a corner of Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Sept. 6, 2019. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

He said that smart cities do not give time and opportunity for some concerns or vulnerabilities to manifest in a natural way that can be handled.

“If there is a severe drawback, loophole or weakness that emerges in the system design or specific technology in the future, then it might not be a sporadic outbreak, but rather a widespread endemic,” Lin said.

Intelligence Alliance

The World Economic Forum (WEF) launched the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance in 2019 to spawn smart cities around the world.

In collaboration with the presidents of the G20, WEF accelerated the adoption of smart cities during the outbreak of COVID-19 and recruited 36 cities across 22 countries by Nov. 2020 to the Alliance.

“This is a commitment from the largest economies in the world to work together and set the norms and values for smart cities,” President of the World Economic Forum Børge Brende said.

“We will coordinate efforts so that we can all work in alignment to move this important work forward.”