ASEAN governments recognize that their cities are facing new challenges in pressing economic and social issues, such as on disaster preparedness, traffic congestion, pollution and poverty. At the same time, cities can also be incubators for the policies to address these challenges, foster sustainable development and mitigate climate change. These challenges and opportunities were addressed by Dassault Systèmes technical experts and guest speakers at the “Building Future Cities” industry breakout track of the 3DEXPERIENCE Forum Asia Pacific South 2019 in Thailand. We bring you the key takeaways in this blog post.

The Recipe for Smart City Transformation

Guillermo M. Luz, National Competitiveness Council, Philippines, and Dr. Peeradorn Kaewlai, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Thammasat University

• Rapid urbanisation in ASEAN cities are creating multidimensional challenges that require immediate economic, social and environmental solutions. If not managed properly, issues such as traffic congestion, pollution and inadequate infrastructure for affordable housing and waste disposal will inevitably lower the citizens’ quality of life. Sustainability must be central to city development plans.
• However, substantial data sources are needed to develop and implement evidence-based sustainable city development plans with measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, tremendous data gaps plague ASEAN cities, with data on basic government service access or climate-related disaster risk entirely missing.
• As a key step towards revitalization of Thailand’s historic Charoen Krung Creative District, Thailand’s Creative Economy Agency has developed an open source repository where data from businesses, services, and building uses in the district are digitized and repopulated into charts and tables to track change and measure impact on the district.
• Digitization of data will play a pivotal role in the future development of Thailand’s Smart Cities, as it provides the best possible solution to monitor and measure the impact of a vast array of city infrastructure and amenities on citizens’ quality of living.

Thailand’s Vision for Smart City Development

Dr. Passakon Prathombutr, Senior Executive Vice President/Digital Technology and Innovation Development Executive Director of Digital and Innovation Center, Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa)

• Building a successful smart city is a co-creating process amongst an ecosystem of multiple stakeholders – local citizens, private and public sector organizations and businesses, policy and law-makers – for three key strategic outcomes: achieving a high quality of life for citizens, a competitive economy for the city, and a sustainable environment.
• Thailand’s Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa) envisions smart city development in Thailand to be driven by PPP (public-private partnerships), with the private sector providing the technologies and know-how, and the government acting as a facilitator in setting policies, standards and regulations.
• Both private and public sectors will need to work together to develop a collaborative ecosystem that includes associations, unions and academics in order to cultivate the “bottom-up” component – active citizen participation and a future-ready workforce.

Building Economically Viable and Sustainable Cities with 3DEXPERIENCity

Stéphane LECOMTE, Dassault Systèmes’ Urban Areas Industry Solution Experience Director, and and Eric Matonnier, Dassault Systèmes’ EXALEAD Asia Senior Technical Sales Manager

• Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform is a data science engine for 3D virtual modelling and simulation for operational excellence; its mission is to collect and collate both structured and unstructured data from everywhere into actionable digitized visual models.
• These digitized visual models are utilized to develop the 3DEXPERIENCity, a dynamic 3D virtual model of a real-world city in real-time, which helps to optimize urban plans and support sustainable city development through virtual and real world synchronisation.
• By modeling and simulating the city with real-time data, 3DEXPERIENCity looks to recreate ‘what if’ scenarios of various urban plans to adapt, mitigate and promote economic, social, and environmental change.
• 3DEXPERIENCity takes an evolutive approach to city planning, where the 3D city referential reflecting all its systems and connections are shared with citizens, businesses and city planners for collaborative co-creation of new value-added urban plans.
• The “Virtual Singapore” project, which utilizes the 3DEXPERIENCity, is one such collaborative and co-creating process which enables key stakeholders from all segments of the economy to play a role in developing an economically viable and sustainable city.