Plan to integrate seniors housing within smart city project
NEW YORK: Seniors housing will be woven into the fabric of a purpose build smart city project.
Plans are under way to create Australia’s first smart city from scratch, where traffic lights communicate with autonomous vehicles, smart roads collect rain water and aged care facilities transmit information about residents to hospitals.
Sydney developer Celestino, with research partner University Technology Sydney, will on Friday host representatives from about 30 local and international companies as part of an expressions of interest campaign to attract top infrastructure, transport and technology providers to develop their $5 billion Sydney Science Park greenfield project.
Work on the 280-hectare site three kilometres north of the planned western Sydney airport, which will house 100,000 residents upon completion, began in August 2018.
The first phase of the precinct will include 3400 homes, a 30,000-square-metre retail centre, 340,000sq m of commercial space and 100,000sq m for education.
Residents are expected to start moving in by mid-2021, with up to 30,000 expected to call the city home in the next decade.
Companies participating in the workshop include Bosch, Hyundai and Westfield, a leading provider of autonomous vehicles in Britain.
“It’s creating something very unique in Australia where we are building a new city from nothing,” Duncan Challen, general manager of business development for Sydney Science Park, said.
“The vision has always been around anchoring the city around education, research development and technology commercialisation and we want to transform urban development by thinking about infrastructure, data, liveability and telecommunications.
“You don’t get many opportunities in Australia or any first-world countries to build a city from a greenfield site.”
As well as pushing the envelope with autonomous vehicles, developer Celestino wants to be at the forefront of aged care and healthcare technology.
Drones that deliver antibiotics to people unable to leave their homes and room sensors that can monitor the movements of old or sick residents who can then be triaged by artificial intelligence and driven to hospital by automated vehicles are some of the technologies Celestino is planning to integrate into the development.
Professor Don Bone, from the faculty of engineering and information Technology at UTS, was hopeful industry experts would be attracted to the project because they could then test, implement and commercialise their technology on an untouched site.
“We have this brilliant site which is like the crown jewels – it’s going to be a valuable asset to attract partners.”
Professor Bone said autonomous vehicles, with sensors to communicate with traffic lights and to identify pedestrians, cyclists and animals, would initially be isolated from residents in the testing phase.
“But then they would be slowly integrated into the activities in the park and we would invite people to use the vehicles, not just to get from A to B but to deliver parcels or to use as a meeting space instead of an office.”
