Creating successful Smart Cities in 2014 will be an economic, financial and political challenge, not an engineering accomplishment

March 2, 2014 12 Comments

Why insurers, pension funds and politics will be more important to Smart Cities in 2014 than “Living Labs” or technology.

(The 2nd Futurama exhibition at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In 50 years’ time, how will we perceive today’s visions of Smart Cities? Photo by James Vaughan)

I hope that 2014 will be the year in which we see widespread and large-scale investments in future city technology infrastructures that enable sustainable, equitably distributed economic and social growth. The truth is that we are still in the very early stages of that process.

In 2012 I spoke with a Director at a financial consultancy who’d performed a survey of European Smart City initiatives. She confirmed something that I suspected at the time: that the great majority of Smart City initiatives up to that point in the mature markets of Europe and North America had been financed by research funding, rather than on a commercial basis.

Four trends characterised the subsequent development of Smart Cities throughout 2013. Firstly, emerging markets continued to invest in supporting the rapid urbanisation they are experiencing; and businesses, Universities and national governments in developed nations recognised the commercial opportunity for them to supply that market with “Smart” solutions.

Secondly, it remains the case that the path to growth for undeveloped nations is still extremely slow and complex; so whilst there is private sector and national government interest in investing in those nations – IBM’s new Research centre in Nairobi being an example – many “smart” initiatives are carried out at small scale by local innovators, the third sector or development agencies.

In Europe and North America, a third trend was the continuing announcement of investments by the European Union and national governments in the applied research and innovation agenda in cities – such as the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, for example.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the final trend was for cities in Europe and North America to start to make investments in the underlying technology platforms for Smart Cities from their own operational budgets, on the basis of their ability to deliver cost savings or improvements in outcomes. For example, some cities are replacing traditional parking management and enforcement services with “smart parking” schemes that are reducing congestion and pollution whilst paying for themselves through improved revenues. Others are investing their allocation of central government infrastructure funds in Smart solutions – such as Cambridge, Ontario’s use of the Canadian government’s Gas Tax Fund to invest in a sensor network and analytics infrastructure to manage the city’s physical assets intelligently.

This trend to create business cases for investment from normal operating budgets or infrastructure investment programmes is important not only because it shows that these cities are developing the business models to support investment in “Smart” solutions locally, where the finances associated with rapid economic growth and urbanisation are not present; but also because (at the risk of simplifying a challenging and complex issue) some of those business models might serve as a template for self-sustainable adoption in less developed nations.

(Downtown Cambridge, Ontario. Photo by Justin Scott Campbell)

Whilst the idea of a “Smart City” has been capturing the imagination for several years now, the reality is that many cities are still deciding what that idea might mean for them. For example, London’s “Smart London Board” published it’s Smart London plan in December, following Birmingham’s Smart City Commission report earlier in the year. And most cities who are considering such plans now or who have recently published them are still determining how to put the finance in place to carry them out.

Will “Living Labs” be the death of Smart Cities?

A concept that I see in many such plans that is intended to assist in securing finance, but that I think risks being a distraction from addressing it properly, is the “Living Lab”. 

Living labs emerged as a set of best practises for carrying out applied research into consumer or citizen services with a focus on collaborative, user-centred design and co-creation. Many cities are now seeking to win funding for their Smarter Cities initiatives by offering themselves as “Living Labs” in which consortia constructing proposals for applied research funding can carry out their activities.

The issue is not that Living Lab’s aren’t a good idea – on the contrary, they are undoubtably a very good set of prescriptions for carrying out such research and design successfully. The problem is that there are now so many cities intending to follow this approach that it no longer makes them stand out as particularly effective environments in which to perform research.

Research programmes will continue to fund the first deployments of new Smart City ideas and technology; but competition for those funds will be fierce. Cities, universities and companies that bid for them will invest many months – often more than a year – in developing their proposals; and in competitions, most entrants do not win.

The real need in cities is for the development and regeneration of infrastructure. There are certainly research topics concerning infrastructure that will attract funding from national and international government bodies; but those funds will not support the rollout of citywide infrastructure to every city in every country.

(Birmingham's new city-centre tram)

(Birmingham’s new city-centre tram is an infrastructure investment that will contribute to the same objectives as the city’s Smart City vision.)

The big questions for European and American cities in 2014 are then:

Will they continue to invest resources competing for applied research and innovation funding, limiting the speed at which the widespread deployment of new infrastructure will take place?

Or will they focus on developing independently viable business cases for investment in the infrastructure to support their
Smarter City visions?

There’s a real need for clarity about these issues. Whilst the enormous level of innovation funding being made into smart buildings, smart transport and smart cities by the EU Horizon 2020 programme and national equivalents such as the UK’s Technology Strategy Board will stimulate the field and fund important demonstration projects that deliver real value, these bodies will not pay for all of our cities to become Smarter.

The same is true for the research investments made by commercial organisations including technology companies such as IBM. Commercial research investments fund the first attempts to apply technology to solve problems or achieve objectives in new ways; those that succeed are subsequently deployed elsewhere on a commercial basis.

The risk is that in seeking investment from research programmes, we become distracted from addressing the real challenge: how to make the case for private sector investment in new technology infrastructures based on the economic and social improvements they will enable; or on the direct financial returns that they will generate. In the UK, for example, a specialist body in Government, Infrastructure UK, coordinates private sector funding for public infrastructure. And if we can persuade property developers of the value of “Smart” technologies, then cities could benefit from the enormous investments made in property every year that currently don’t result in the deployment of technology – the British Property Federation, for example, estimate that £14 billion is invested in the development of new space in the UK each year.

(This pedestrian roundabout in Lujiazui, China, constructed over a busy road junction, is a large-scale city infrastructure that balances the need to support traffic flows through the city with the importance that Jane Jacobs first described of allowing people to walk freely about the areas where they live and work. Photo by ChrisUK)

This is an opportunity we should treat with urgency. Whilst public sector finances are under immense pressure, the vast wealth held in private investment funds is seeking new opportunities following the poor returns that many traditional forms of investment have yielded over the last few years. There is a lot of work to do between the stakeholders in cities, government and finance before these investment sources can be exploited by Smart Cities – not least in agreeing reasonable expectations for how the risks and returns will be measured and shared. But I personally believe that until we do so, we will not be able to properly finance the development of our next generation of cities.

As Jane Jacobs wrote in her seminal 1961 work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“:

“Private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image. The financial machinery has been adjusted to create anti-city images because, and only because, we as a society thought this would be good for us. If and when we think that lively, diversified city, capable of continual, close-grained improvement and change, is desirable, then we will adjust the financial machinery to get that.”

Overcoming these challenges won’t be easy, and doing so will require each of the various stakeholder organisations facing them to take bold steps this year.

Local Government

Whilst their finances throughout the developed world have been under severe pressure for a long time now, local government bodies are still responsible for procuring a significant volume of goods and services. Smart Cities will only become a reality when local authority visions for the future are reflected in procurement practises and scoring criteria for contracts issued today. It’s only very recently that procurements for contracts to build, update and manage physical infrastructures such as roads and pavements have been based on outcomes such as minimising congestion or increasing the overall quality of performance throughout the lifetime of the asset within the contract value, rather than on securing the maximum volume of concrete (or number of traffic wardens).

Outcomes-based procurements are challenging to be sure, both for the purchaser and the provider; especially so when they are for such new solutions. But service and infrastructure providers will only be motivated to propose and deliver innovative, smart solutions when they’re rewarded for doing so.

Local authorities can also exploit indirect mechanisms such as planning and development frameworks. I worked last year with one authority which asked how its planning framework should evolve in order to promote the development of a “Smart City”, and published a set of 23 “Design principles for a Smarter City” as a result. They require that investments in property also deliver technology infrastructures such as wi-fi, broadband, open-data, and multi-channel self-service access.

(An analysis based on GPS data from mobile phones of end-to-end journeys undertaken by users of Abidjan’s bus services. By comparing existing bus routes to end-to-end journey requirements, the analysis identified four new bus routes and led to changes in many others. As a result, 22 routes now show increased ridership, and city-wide journey times have decreased by 10%. The techniques and technologies behind the project build on those developed for projects in Dubuque, Istanbul and Dublin.)

Private Sector

The technology companies associated with Smart Cities have sometimes been criticised for focussing too much on the technology that can be applied to city infrastructures, and not enough on the improvements to people’s work and lives that technology can enable, or on the business cases for investing in it.

To make the business case clearer, my colleague the economist Mary Keeling has been working for IBM’s Institute for Business Value to more clearly analyse and express the benefits of Smart approaches – in water management and transportation, for example. And I’ll be contributing along with representatives from many of the other companies that provide technology and infrastructure for Smart Cities to the TSB’s Future Cities Catapult’s finance initiative.

But we also need to respect the principles of Living Labs and the experience of urban designers – not least the writing of Jane Jacobs – which reflect that our starting point for thinking about Smart Cities should be the everyday lives and experiences of individual citizens in their family lives; at work; and moving through cities. In one sense, this is business as usual in the technology industry – “user-centered design“, “use cases” and “user stories” have been at the heart of software development since the 1980s. So one of our challenges is simply to communicate that approach more clearly within our descriptions of Smart Cities. This is a topic I’ve written about in many articles on this blog that you can find described in “7 Steps to a Smarter City“; and that I tried to address in IBM’s new Smarter Cities video.

The other challenge is for technology companies to become more familiar and expert in the disciplines associated with good quality urban design – town planning, architecture, social science and the psychology of human behaviour, for example. This is one of the reasons why IBM started the “Smarter Cities Challenge” programme through which we have donated our technology expertise to 100 cities worldwide to help them address the opportunities and challenges they face; and in so doing become more familiar with their very varied cultures, economies, issues and capabilities. It’s also why I joined the Academy of Urbanism, along with representatives of several other technology companies.

We also need to embrace the “Smart Urbanism” thinking exemplified by Kelvin Campbell. Kelvin’s “Massive / Small” approach is intended to design large-scale urban infrastructures that encourage and support “massive” amounts of “small-scale” innovation. I think that’s an extremely powerful idea that we should embrace in Smarter Cities; and that translates directly to the practise of providing open-standard, public interfaces to city technology infrastructures – open data feeds and APIs (“Application Programming Interfaces”), for example – that not only reduce the risk that city systems become “locked-in” to any proprietary provider; but that also open up the power of large scale technology systems and “big data” sources so that local businesses, innovators and communities are able to adapt public infrastructures to their own needs. I think of these interfaces as creating an “innovation boundary” between a city’s infrastructure and its stakeholders.

(George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol, one of the few cities in the UK with an elected Mayor with significant authority and responsibility. His salary is paid in the city’s local currency, the Bristol Pound, rather than in the national currency. His red trousers are famous. Photo by PaulNUK)

Central Government

In most countries in the developed world – i.e. those which are not being driven by rapid urbanisation today because they urbanised during the Industrial Revolution – the majority of Smart City initiatives that have momentum are driven by Mayors convening city stakeholders and institutions to co-create, finance and deliver those initiatives. Correspondingly, in countries without strong mayoral systems – such as the UK – progress can be slower. Worryingly, Centre for Cities’ recent Outlook 2014 report pointed out that only 17% of funding for UK cities comes from locally administered taxation, as opposed to the OECD average of 55%.

To risk stating the obvious, every city is different, and different in very many important ways, from its geographical situation to its linkage to national and international transport infrastructure; from its economic and business capabilities to the skills and wealth of its population; from its social challenges and degree of social mobility to its culture and heritage. Successful Smart City initiatives are specific, not generic; and the greater degree of autonomy that cities are allowed in setting strategy and securing financing, the greater their capability to pursue those initiatives. Programmes such as “City Deals” and the recent reforms resulting from Lord Heseltine’s “No Stone Unturned” report are examples of progress towards greater autonomy for the UK’s cities, but they are not enough.

Central government will always have a significant role in funding the infrastructures that cities rely on, of course; whether that’s national infrastructures that connect cities (such as the planned “HS2” high-speed train network in the UK, or Australia’s national deployment of broadband internet connectivity), or specific infrastructures within cities, such as Birmingham’s new city-centre tram. And so just as local governments should consider how they can use procurement practises and planning frameworks to encourage investments in property and infrastructure that deliver “Smart” solutions, so central government should consider how the funding programmes that it administers can contribute to cities’ “Smart” objectives.

Financial Services

If the challenge is to unlock investment in new assets and outcomes, then we should turn to banks, insurers and investors to help us shape the new financial vehicles that we will require to do so. In Canada, for example, a collaboration between Canadian insurers and cities has developed a set of tools to create a common understanding of the financial risk created by the effects of climate change on the resilience of city infrastructures. These tools are the first step towards creating investment and insurance models for city infrastructures that will be exposed to new levels of risk; that will need to exhibit new levels of resilience; and that in turn may require Smart solutions to achieve them.

(Luciana Berger, Shadow Minister for Energy and Climate Change pictured talking to Northfield, Birmingham resident Abraham Weekes and James McKay, Birmingham City Council’s Cabinet Member for a Green, Safe and Smart city. Abraham lives in the house pictured, which has been fitted with exterior house covering, solar panels and energy efficient windows through the Birmingham Energy Savers scheme. Photo by Birmingham City Council)

More internationally, the “Little Rock Accord” between the Madrid Club of former national Presidents and Prime Ministers and the P80 group of pension funds agreed to create a task force to increase the degree to which pension and sovereign wealth funds invest in the deployment of technology to address climate change issues, shortages in resources such as energy, water and food, and sustainable, resilient growth. And more locally, I’m proud to note that my home city of Birmingham is a pioneer in this area through the Birmingham Energy Savers project, financed through a mixture of prudential borrowing and private sector investment.

It has taken us too long to get to this point, but I’m encouraged that several initiatives are now convening discussions between the traditionally understood stakeholders in Smart Cities – local authorities, technology companies, universities and built-environment companies – and the financial sector. For example, in addition to the Future Cities Catapult’s financing programme, on March 13th, I’ll be speaking at an event organised by the Lord Mayor of the City of London to encourage the City’s financial institutions and UK city authorities to undertake a similar collaboration to develop new financing models for future city infrastructures.

Are Smarter Cities a “middle out” economic intervention?

In his 2011 Presidential Campaign speech Barack Obama promised an economic strategy based on “middle-out” economics – the philosophy that equitable, sustainable growth is driven by the spending power of middle class consumers, as an alternative to “trickle-down” economics – the philosophy that growth is best created when very rich “wealth-creators” are free to become as successful as possible.

As this analysis in “The Atlantic” shows, job creation does depend on the investments of the wealthiest; but also on the spending power of the masses; and on a lot of very hard work making sure that a reasonable portion of the profits created by both of those activities are used to invest in making skills, education and opportunity available to all. The Economist magazine made the same point in a recent article by reminding us of the enormous investments made into public institutions in the past in order to distribute the benefits of the Industrial Revolution to society at large rather than concentrate them on behalf of business owners and the professional classes; though with only partial success.

(The discussion group at the #SmartHack event in Birmingham)

(The discussion group at the #SmartHack event in Birmingham, described in “Tea, trust and hacking – how Birmingham is getting Smarter“, photographed by Sebastian Lenton)

 Those ideas are reflected in what it takes to craft an investment in a technology-enabled Smart City initiative that successfully creates social and economic improvements in a city.

Whilst a huge number of effective “Smart” ideas will be created “bottom-up” by innovators and social entrepreneurs intimately familiar with specific local communities and context, those ideas will not succeed as well or rapidly as we need them to without significant investment in new infrastructures – such as wi-fi, broadband and realtime open data – that are deployed everywhere, not just in the most economically active areas of cities that reward commercial investment most quickly. Accessibility to these infrastructures creates the “innovation boundary” between city institutions and infrastructures, and local innovators and communities.

This is not an abstract concept; it is an idea that some cities are making very real today. For example, the “Dublinked” information-sharing partnership between Dublin County Council, three surrounding County Councils and the National University of Ireland now makes available 3,000 city datasets as “open data” – including a realtime feed showing the location of buses in the city. That’s a resource that local innovators can use to create their own new applications and services. Similarly, in Birmingham the “West Midlands Open Data Forum” has emerged as a community in which city local businesses and innovators can negotiate access to data held by city institutions and service providers.

(David Willets, MP, Minister for Universities and Science, launches the UK Government’s Smart Cities Forum)

At launch of the UK Government’s “Smart Cities Forum” last year, I remarked that we were not inviting key stakeholders to the Smarter Cities debate – specifically, banks, investors, insurers and entrepreneurs. Some of the initiatives I’ve described in this article are starting to address that omission; and to recognise that the most significant challenges are to do with finance, politics, social issues and economics, not engineering and technology.

And those are challenges that all of us should focus on. No-one is going to pay for our cities to become Smarter, more successful, more sustainable and fairer: we will have to figure out how to pay for  those things ourselves.

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Three mistakes we’re still making about Smart Cities

October 10, 2013 7 Comments

(David Willets, MP, Minister for Universities and Science, launches the UK Government’s Smart Cities Forum)

(I was asked this week to contribute my view of the present state of the Smart Cities movement to the UK Government’s launch of it’s Smart Cities forum, which will report to the Government’s Information Economy Council. This article is based on my remarks at the event).

One measure of how successfully we have built today’s cities using the technologies that shaped them over the last century – concrete, steel and the internal combustion engine – is the variation of life expectancy within them. In the UK, people born in the poorest areas of our large cities can expect to live lives that are two decades shorter than those born in the wealthiest areas.

We need to do much better than that as we apply the next generation of technology that will shape our lives – digital technology.

The market for Smart Cities, which many define as the application of digital technology to city systems, is growing. Entrepreneurial businesses such as Droplet and Shutl are delivering new city services, enabled by technology. City Councils, service providers and transport authorities are investing in Smart infrastructures, such as Bradford’s City Park, whose fountains and lights react to the movements of people through it. Our cities are becoming instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, creating new opportunities to improve the performance and efficiency of city systems.

But we are still making three mistakes that limit the scale at which truly innovative Smart City projects are being deployed.

1. We don’t use the right mix of skills to define Smart City initiatives

Over the last year, I’ve seen a much better understanding develop between some of the creative professions in the Smart Cities domain: technologists, design thinkers, social innovators, entrepreneurs and urban designers. Bristol’s “Hello Lamppost” is a good example of a project that uses technology to encourage playful interaction with an urban environment, thereby bringing the life to city streets that the urbanist Jane Jacobs‘ taught us is so fundamental to healthy city communities.

Internationally, cities have a great opportunity to learn from each others’ successes: smart, collective, sustainable urbanism in Scandinavia, as exemplified by Copenhagen’s Nordhavnen district; intelligent city planning and management in Asia and increasingly in the United States, where cities such as Chicago have also championed the open data movement; and the phenomenal level of small-scale, non-institutional innovation in communities in UK cities.

But this debate does not extend to some important institutions that are also beginning to explore how they can contribute towards the social and environmental wellbeing of cities and communities. Banks and investors, for example, who have the funds to support large-scale initiatives, or the skills to access them; or supermarkets and other retailers who operate across cities, nations and continents; but whose operational and economic footprint in cities is significant, and whose supply chains support or contribute to billions of lives.

It’s important to engage with these institutions in defining Smart City initiatives which not only cut across traditional silos of responsibility and budgets in cities, but also cut across the traditional asset classes and revenue streams that investors understand. A Smart City initiative that is crafted without their involvement will be difficult for them to understand, and they will be unlikely to support it. Instead, we need to craft Smart initiatives with them.

(The masterplan for Copenhagen’s regeneration of Nordhavnen, which was co-created with local residents and communities. Photo by Thomas Angermann)

2. We ask researchers to answer the wrong challenges

University research is a great source of new technologies for creating Smart solutions. But our challenge is rarely the availability of new technology – we have plenty of that already.

The real challenge is that we are not nearly exploiting the full potential of the technology already available to us; and that’s because in many cases we do not have a quantified evidence base for the financial, social, economic and environmental benefits of applying technology in city systems. Without that evidence, it’s hard to create a business case to justify investment.

This is the really valuable contribution that research could make to the Smart Cities market today: quantify the benefits of applying technology in city systems and communities; identify the factors that determine the degree to which those benefits can be realised in specific cities and communities; align the benefits to the financial and operating models of the public and private institutions that operate city services and assets; and provide the detailed data from which clear businesses cases with quantified risks and returns can be constructed.

3. We don’t listen to the quiet voices that matter

It’s my experience that the most powerful innovations that make a difference to real lives and communities occur when “little things” and “big things” work well together.

Challenges such as transport congestion, social mobility, responsible energy usage or small business growth are often extremely specific to local contexts. Successful change in those contexts is usually created when the people, community groups and businesses involved create, or co-create, initiatives to improve them.

But often, the resources available locally to those communities are very limited. How can the larger resources of institutional organisations be made available to them?

In “Resilience: why things bounce back“, Andrew Zolli describes many examples of initiatives that have successfully created meaningful change; and characterises the unusual qualities of the “translational leaders” that drive them – people who can engage with both small-scale, informal innovation in communities and large-scale, formal institutions with resources.

It’s my hope that we can enable more widespread changes not by relying only on such rare individuals, but by changing the way that we think about the design of city infrastructures. Rather than designing the services that they deliver, we should design what Service Scientists call the “affordances” they offer. An affordance is a capability of an infrastructure that can be adapted to the needs of an individual.

An example might be a smart grid power infrastructure that provides an open API allowing access to data from the grid. Developers, working together with community groups, could create schemes specific to each community which use that information to encourage more responsible energy usage. My colleagues in IBM Research explored this approach in partnership with the Sustainable Dubuque partnership resulting in a scheme that improved water and energy conservation in the city.

We can also apply this approach to the way that food is supplied to cities. The growing and distribution of food will always be primarily a large-scale, industrial operation: with 7 billion people living on a planet with limited resources, and with more than half of them living in dense cities, there is no realistic alternative. An important challenge for the food production and distribution industry, and for the technology industry, is to find ways to make those systems more efficient and sustainable.

But we can also act locally to change the way that food is processed, prepared and consumed; and in doing so create social capital and economic opportunity in some of the places that need it most. A good example is “Casserole Club“, which uses social media as the basis of a peer-to-peer model which connects people who are unable to cook for themselves with people who are willing to cook for, and visit, others.

These two movements to improve our food systems in innovative ways currently act separately; what new value could we create by bringing them together?

We’re very poor at communicating effectively between such large-scale and small-scale activities. Their cultures are different; they use different languages, and those involved spend their working lives in systems focussed on very different objectives.

There’s a very simple solution. We need to listen more than we talk.

We all have strong opinions and great ideas. And we’re all very capable of quickly identifying the aspects of someone else’s idea that mean it won’t work. For all of those reasons, we tend to talk more than we listen. That’s a mistake; it prevents us from being open to new ideas, and focussing our attention on how we can help them to succeed.

New conversations

By coincidence, I was asked earlier this year to arrange the agenda for the annual meeting of IBM’s UK chapter of our global Academy of Technology. The Academy represents around 500 of IBM’s technology leaders worldwide; and the UK chapter brings 70 or so of our highest achieving technologists together every year to share insights and experience about the technology trends that are most important to our industry, and to our customers.

(Daden's visualisation of the new Library of Birmingham, created before construction started and used to familiarise staff with the new building they would be working in. Taken from Daden's brochure describing the work more fully).

(Daden’s visualisation of the new Library of Birmingham, created before construction started and used to familiarise staff with the new building they would be working in. Taken from Daden’s brochure describing the work more fully).

This year, I’m bringing them to Innovation Birmingham for two days next week to explore how technology is changing Britain’s second city. We’ll be hearing about Birmingham City Council’s Smart City Strategy and Digital Birmingham‘s plans for digital infrastructure; and from research initiatives such as the University of Birmingham’s Liveable Cities programme; Aston University’s European Bio-Energy Research Institute; and Birmingham City University’s European Platform for Intelligent Cities.

But we’ll also be hearing from local SMEs and entrepreneurs creating innovations in city systems using technology, such as Droplet‘s smartphone payment system; 3D visualisation and analytics experts Daden, who created a simulation of Birmingham’s new Library; and Maverick Television whose innovations in using technology to create social value include the programmes Embarrassing Bodies and How to Look Good Naked. And we’ll hear from a number of social innovators, such as Localise West Midlands, a not-for-profit think-tank which promotes localisation for social, environmental and economic benefit, and Hub Launchpad, a business-accelerator for social enterprise who are building their presence in the city. You can follow our discussions next week on twitter through the hashtag #IBM_TCG.

This is just one of the ways I’m trying to make new connections and start new conversations between stakeholders in cities and professionals with the expertise to help them achieve their goals. I’m also arranging to meet some of the banks, retailers and supply-chain operators who seem to be most focussed on social and environmental sustainability, in order to explore how those objectives might align with the interests of the cities in which they operate. The British Standards Institute is undertaking a similar project to explore the financing of Smart Cities as part of their Smart Cities programme. I’m also looking at the examples set by cities such as Almere whose collaborative approach to urban design, augmented by their use of analytics and technology, is inspirational.

This will not be a quick or easy process; but it will involve exciting conversations between people with passion and expertise. Providing we remember to listen as much as we talk, it’s the right place to start.

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A design pattern for a Smarter City: Local Currencies and Alternative Trading Systems

September 30, 2013 10 Comments

(Photo of the Brixton Pound by Charlie Waterhouse)

(In “Do we need a Pattern Language for Smarter Cities” I suggested that “design patterns“, a tool for capturing re-usable experience invented by the town-planner Christopher Alexander, might offer a useful way to organise our knowledge of successful approaches to “Smarter Cities”. I’m now writing a set of design patterns to describe ideas that I’ve seen work more than once. The collection is described and indexed in “Design Patterns for Smarter Cities” which can be found from the link in the navigation bar of this blog).  

Design Pattern: Local Currencies and Alternative Trading Systems

Summary of the pattern:

There are many definitions of a “smart city”, but they all incorporate the concept of innovations, enabled by technology, that change the relationships between the creation of financial and social value and the consumption of resources.

Money is our universal system for quantifying the exchange of value; but most of the systems which measure value using money do not incorporate social or environmental factors – externalities as they are known by economists. Consequently a variety of alternative systems of trading and exchange have emerged amongst online communities and in local ecosystems that are exploring new ways to create sustainable regional economic and social improvement.

Some of these schemes use paper or electronic currencies that are issued and accepted within a particular place or region; and that have the effect of influencing people and businesses to spend the money that they earn locally, promoting regional economic synergies. Last year, Bristol became the 5th UK town or city to operate its own currency using this model, and “Droplet” operate a local smartphone payment scheme in Birmingham and London.

Other schemes are based on the bartering of goods, money, time and services, such as time banking. And some schemes combine both elements – In Switzerland, a complementary currency, the Wir , has contributed to economic stability over the last century by allowing some debt repayments to be bartered locally when they cannot be repaid in universal currency.

As these schemes develop – and in particular as they adopt technologies such as smartphones and offer open APIs to allow developers to incorporate their capabilities in new services – they are increasingly being used as an infrastructure for Smarter City projects in domains such as transport, food supply and energy.

(The SMS for Life project uses the cheap and widely used SMS infrastructure to create a dynamic, collaborative supply chain for medicines between pharmacies in Africa. Photo by Novartis AG)

Such schemes exploit the potential for the combination of information technology and local currencies to calculate rates of exchange that compare the social, environmental and economic cost of goods and services to their immediate, contextual value to the participants in the transaction. The academic field of service science has evolved to study the ways in which such possibilities lead to business and service invocation.

This trend is particularly strong in some African nations where a lack of physical and transport infrastructure has led to a surge in business innovation supported by mobile payments schemes. For example, the Kilimo Salama scheme in Kenya provides affordable insurance to subsistence farmers by using remote weather monitoring to trigger payouts via mobile phones, rather than undertaking expensive site visits to assess claims.

City systems, communities and infrastructures affected:

(This description is based on the elements of Smarter City ecosystems presented in ”The new Architecture of Smart Cities“).

  • Goals: Wealth, health, opportunity, choice, sustainability
  • People: Any
  • Ecosystem: All
  • Soft infrastructures: Leadership and governance, networks and community organisations
  • City systems: Transport systems, health, culture, economy, retail, leisure; and potentially others
  • Hard infrastructures: Information and communication technology

Commercial operating models, alternatives and variations:

Four main types of commercial model exist, each constituting a variation of this pattern:

  • Local currencies operated as social enterprises within specific towns or cities, pursing local economic objectives, often issuing paper currencies. Examples include the Bristol, Brixton, Lewes, Stroud, and Totnes pounds. These schemes link to national and universal currency by offering defined processes and rates of exchange. Often the financial backing is provided by a credit union or other mutual financial organisation.
  • Smartphone payment schemes operated by private enterprises, usually entrepreneurial technology companies. These companies may not have local economic objectives as a primary focus, but will usually deploy their services and build businesses with a network of merchants in a specific city in order to create the critical mass necessary to persuade consumers to adopt the service. These schemes link to traditional payment systems either through direct integration to banking services, or though the billing systems offered by mobile network operators.
  • Recycling and bartering networks such as Freecycle which operate very informally and are locally focused as they involve people physically meeting to exchange goods or services. Such networks are often governed at least as much by codes of behaviour as they are by being legally constituted as formal bodies.
  • Local loyalty schemes operated by city councils or by businesses on behalf of local communities, and that encourage local businesses to collectively reward customers for using their products and services. Examples include the “Backing Birmingham” b-card; the not-for-profit “tag” scheme that operates in Durham, Manchester and Stockport; and Local Loyalty Powys.

In addition, it is likely that formal banking institutions and payments intermediaries will enter this market in some form. Many financial institutions started as or are now social enterprises, or express community objectives in their charters; credit unions, for example, or Hancock Bank, whose charter as a community bank led them to take powerful actions to assist the citizens of New Orleans to recover from hurricane Katrina in 2005 .

These institutions are increasingly exploring the role they can take in supporting Smarter Cities, both directly  or through supporting innovation facilities like the Future Cities programme at the Level39 incubator in London’s financial district.

Soft infrastructures, hard infrastructures and assets required:

Local currencies and trading schemes are formed where an entrepreneurial organisation – whether a private business or a social enterprise – works together with a community organisation – either an institution such as a city council, or a community such as a local business network. Trust and collaboration between the entrepreneur, institution and community are vital to success. In particular, city institutions can support the scheme by allowing employees to chose to be paid through it in whole or in part – Lambeth Council offers employees the choice to be paid in part in Brixton pounds; and Bristol’s mayor takes his entire salary in Bristol Pounds.

A Payments or billing service, or mechanisms to print local currency and govern its exchange for national currency are also required in order to integrate the local scheme with the traditional economy. The governance of these arrangements is crucial to convincing individuals and businesses to trust this new independent form of currency.

Schemes achieve the highest level of adoption where they are supported by strong local economic and business communities, such as Business Improvement Districts or campaigns such as Coffee Birmingham.

(The QR code that enabled Will Grant of Droplet to buy me a coffee at Birmingham Science Park Aston using Droplet’s local smartphone payment solution; and the receipt that documents the transaction)

Driving forces:

The factors that lead to the emergence of local currencies and alternative trading systems include:

  • The desire from local government, within local communities and amongst local businesses and entrepreneurs to support local economic and social growth.
  • Disillusion with traditional financial systems following the 2008 crash, recent banking scandals, and the reluctance of some banks to lend to small business; along with an awareness that alternative models are increasingly viable for some purposes.
  • The increasing availability of low-cost payment systems to support transactions in online marketplaces that exchange local resources, such as local food initiatives, community energy schemes, shared transport systems and timebanks.

Benefits:

Benefits of local currencies and alternative trading systems include:

  • The potential to link the formal economy with informal transactions, some of which are crucial to creating value in communities with the fewest resources.
  • The ability to include local externalities in the rate of exchange associated with transactions.
  • Reinforcement of local economic synergies.
  • The creation of brand value for towns and cities with flourishing local currencies.

Alternatives and variations:

Alternatives and variations of this pattern are described under “Commercial operating models, alternatives and variations” above.

Implications and risks:

Local currencies are not universally admired. Some merchants complain that it is inconvenient to accept payment in a currency with restrictions on spending, or that requires conversion to national currency; and some commentators have questioned whether they achieve anything that couldn’t be achieved through simpler means. Newspaper and BBC journalists have explored these issues in reports describing the Lewes Pound.

Local currency schemes must also offer some mechanism to protect the value of currency held by users of the scheme. This might be achieved if the currency is operated by a mutual financial organisation such as a credit union; or by depositing matching funds in national currency in a traditional bank account. Where printed notes are issued, steps must be taken to prevent them being easily reproduced fraudulently.

Finally, in order to succeed, local currencies need to achieve a critical mass of users and of accepting merchants. Lambeth Council accept payments of business rates in Brixton pounds, and allow employees to take part of their salaries in the currency. Both actions support growth in use of the currency. The presence of strong community groups amongst local businesses can also boost such schemes.

(George Ferguson, Bristol’s Mayor, whose salary is paid in Bristol Pounds . His red trousers are famous . Photo by PaulNUK)

Examples and stories:

The story of Hancock Bank’s actions to assist the citizens of New Orleans to recover from hurricane Katrina in 2005 is told in this video, and shares many of the values that local currencies are based on.

Hancock Bank’s actions were the result of senior management basing their decisions on the company’s purpose, expressed in its charter, to support the communities of the city. This is in contrast to the behaviour of Bob Diamond, who resigned as CEO of Barclays Bank following the Libor rate-manipulation scandal, who under questioning by parliamentary committee could not remember what the Bank’s founding principles, written by community-minded Quakers, stated.

Rose Goslinga tells the story of forming the Kilimo Salama micro-insurance scheme here.

Sources of information:

In addition to the sources already linked to in this pattern, Brett Scott’s “Heretic’s guide to global finance” explores a number of ways to adapt the traditional financial system to achieve social and environmental objectives.

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A design pattern for a Smarter City: City-Centre Enterprise Incubation

April 3, 2013 6 Comments

(The Custard Factory in Birmingham, at the heart of the city’s creative media sector in the central district of Digbeth)

(In “Do we need a Pattern Language for Smarter Cities” I suggested that “design patterns“, a tool for capturing re-usable experience invented by the town-planner Christopher Alexander, might offer a useful way to organise our knowledge of successful approaches to “Smarter Cities”. I’m now writing a set of design patterns to describe ideas that I’ve seen work more than once. The collection is described and indexed in “Design Patterns for Smarter Cities” which can be found from the link in the navigation bar of this blog).  

Design Pattern: City-Centre Enterprise Incubation

Summary of the pattern:

This pattern describes the provision of mixed facilities to incubate technology, creative and social enterprises in an urban environment.

The intention is to foster growth across the high-value sectors of a city economy in a way that maximises the potential for cross-sectoral interaction and innovation. Locating incubation facilities in a city centre rather than on an out-of-town campus encourages such cross-fertilisation between existing and new businesses. The city environment – its transport systems, retailers, businesses, residents and visitors – can also serve as a “living lab” in which to test new products and services.

Such incubation facilities are often operated through hybrid public/private models so that they are financially sustainable, but act so as to promote the success of enterprises which contribute to the host city’s strategic objectives – for example, promoting growth in key sectors of the economy or creating jobs or skills in specific areas or communities.

City systems, communities and infrastructures affected:

(This description is based on the elements of Smarter City ecosystems presented in ”The new Architecture of Smart Cities“).

  • Goals: Any.
  • People: Primarily innovators. Citizens, employees and visitors play a secondary role as the potential consumers of new services created through innovation.
  • Ecosystem: All.
  • Soft infrastructures: Innovation forums; networks and community organisations.
  • City systems: Any.
  • Hard infrastructures: Information and communications technology, spaces and buildings.

Commercial operating model:

City-centre incubation facilities are often operated by “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPVs) jointly owned by city institutions such as local authorities; universities; and organisations providing incubation services to businesses and social enterprises. Alternatively, some are established through collaborative business models such as Co-Operatives, Social Enterprises or Community Interest Companies. This enables them to offer the revenue-generating services that enable financial self-sufficiency; but also to focus on incubating those enterprises that contribute most significantly to the city’s overall strategic objectives, rather than simply generated the highest revenue income.

Some investment is often made in shared technology or services for use by tenant enterprises: for example, access to Cloud computing resources; collaboration tools; video conferencing services; 3D-printing or 3D-cutting facilities. Such services may be procured through the creation of partnerships with technology vendors or service providers who are seeking to build their own ecosystem of entrepreneurial business partners.

Long-term financial sustainability is dependent on the generation of commercial revenues from services offered to successfully operating businesses and social enterprises.

Soft infrastructures, hard infrastructures and assets required:

(The collaborative working space of Hub Westminster which is constantly refactored to support new uses, exploiting furniture and spatial technology laser-cut from digital designs)

(The collaborative working space of Hub Westminster which is constantly refactored to support new uses, exploiting furniture and spatial technology laser-cut from digital designs)

An active incubation programme depends on a complex ecosystem of relationships and capabilities, including: the generation of new entrepreneurial talent through the education system; the attraction of external entrepreneurs and businesses to re-locate; access to market insight and development capability, mentoring and finance; the provision of business support and growth services such as office space, computing capability, legal and financial advice; and access to business partners and market opportunities.

Unless they are of significant size and diversity, cities and regions will be most successful if they focus their business development capacity on the stimulation of growth in specific sectors that maximise the value of their existing regional economic, social, geographic and infrastructural capability.

Such focus may lead to some supporting capabilities, including technology, being common to many businesses in a locality. For example, 3D printing is an increasingly useful tool for prototyping manufactured objects; but the cost of highly capable 3D printers may be beyond the capability of individual small businesses to afford. Similarly a Cloud Computing platform dedicated to supporting small, entrepreneurial businesses may enable the cost of some technology capabilities to be shared by a regional cluster.

Driving forces:

An economy of sustainable, profitable businesses is at the heart of the long term vitality of cities and the regions surrounding them. As economic growth in emerging markets combines with increasingly rapid advances in science and technology, maintaining such an economy requires constant innovation by businesses; and it is in the interests of cities to stimulate and support such innovation.

Michael Porter’s analysis of economic clusters shows that this innovation is created when businesses adopt new technology; or when they adopt existing technologies from outside their current market sector. Whereas many science parks have been based on or near to University campuses to enable access to new technology, an increasing number of more broadly focussed incubation facilities are based in city centres in order to facilitate cross-sectorial interaction and innovation. Some of these can additionally exploit their proximity to city-centre Universities.

City centre locations also provide the opportunity to create businesses with unique capabilities or value. New technologies that emerge from University-based science are often the result of a global research agenda; but innovations that are created through cross-sectorial interaction in a city economy are shaped by the specific characteristics of that economy, and of the city’s geography and demographics. They may thereby create unique products and services that it is harder to replicate elsewhere, providing a competitive advantage in the global economy.

Benefits:

  • Enable local organic economic growth and job creation through small and entrepreneurial businesses.
  • Enable local businesses to exchange ideas across sectors to maintain the value of existing products and services; and to create new ones.
  • Provide access to leading edge technology and market insight to local economic clusters through the attraction of technology and service providers seeking partnerships with clusters of entrepreneurial businesses.
  • Coordinate regional investment and incubation capacity in support of business growth in areas of strategic local importance.
  • Create an offer that is attractive to talented people and businesses to locate in a place.

(Technology entrepreneurs in Birmingham Science Park Aston exploring how their skills can contribute to innovative services in the city, photographed by Sebastian Lenton)

Implications and risks:

  • There are very many factors that affect the success of initiatives intended to provide business incubation and stimulate economic growth, including the availability of affordable housing, the attractiveness of the urban environment and the availability of skills. Some of those factors are difficult to influence, and some take considerable time and investment to affect.
  • It is difficult to “pre-let” incubation capacity, so initial investments are usually speculative.
  • Rental revenues for incubation space provide relatively short term financial returns, but job creation, economic growth and other intended outcomes are long-term.
  • Genuinely constructive partnerships rely on effective engagement between city institutions, businesses and communities that can take time to achieve.

Alternatives and variations:

Collaborative working spaces exist in many cities to offer small businesses, entrepreneurs and mobile workers convenient, attractive, flexible and vibrant places to work. Whilst they are not always explicitly intended to incubate new businesses, or businesses in specific sectors, they clearly represent an incubation capacity; and most also invest in shared resources such as office space and digital connectivity.

Cutting edge examples also use technologies such as 3D-cutting to constantly re-fashion furniture and interior structures to adapt the shared space to changing requirements to support presentations, workshops, prototyping, conferences and events. Many collaborative working spaces attractive creative and media rather than technology businesses; but these sectors now overlap to such a significant extent that the distinction between them is increasingly slight.

Examples and stories:

Examples of collaborative working spaces include:

Sources of information:

Some of the articles on this blog refer to this topic and provide further links to information sources:

Filed under Design Patterns Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Refactoring, nucleation and incubation: three tools for digital urban adaptability

March 27, 2013 5 Comments

(This year's Ecobuild conference, which showcases technologies for sustainable cities)

(This year’s Ecobuild conference in London, which showcases technologies for sustainable cities)

When I am at my most productive as a computer programmer, I don’t write code; I sculpt virtual objects from it.

Any computer system exists to fulfill a purpose in the real world. To do so it recreates in code those aspects of the world that are relevant to its purpose. What transformed the creation of that model from the laborious, procedural task of writing instructions into the seamless creative flow that I liken to sculpting was Martin Fowler‘s conception of “refactoring”.

In Martin’s words:

“Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a ‘refactoring’) does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it’s less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.”

– (quoted from the Refactoring homepage).

Refactoring is at the heart of what we now know as the “Agile Development” of software. Agile approaches embrace the fact that when we start to create a new system, we don’t know exactly what the final result should be. Traditional approaches to software development attempted to address that challenge through the lengthy analysis of stakeholder requirements. In contrast, agile approaches address it by quickly presenting a first working solution to stakeholders for feedback, and asking them what should be changed. The final solution is co-created by developers and stakeholders through many iterations of that process.

Refactoring codified the tools and techniques for performing the adaptations to computer systems required by that evolutionary process whilst preserving their operability. With practise, a good programmer internalises those tools so that they are used almost unconsciously – just as any good artisan or artist creates their work through the expert application of technique.

We need similar tools and techniques to support the evolution of our cities in the 21st Century.

Those cities will exist in a world that is ever more changeable, and ever less certain. Geoffrey West’s analysis of city systems, for example, showed that as the cities of the world grow, the rate of social, technological and economic change within them will increase. At the same time, climate change is causing not just an increase in temperature, but an increase in the variability of temperature, and of other environmental conditions. That variability reduces the stability of supply of grain and other natural resources that underpin the systems that support life. In order to provide social stability in this context, cities need to be adaptable and resilient in the face of change and uncertainty.

But it is already the case that the urban, economic and social systems of cities can’t keep up with the rate of change we are experiencing today.

(Image by TurkleTom)

Take the ability of education to support the economy. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt criticised the British Education system recently for producing insufficient computer programming skills to meet the needs of businesses.

But our current need for those skills is based on the computing technologies that are broadly adopted by business today. By and large those technologies are at least five years behind the leading edge; consider that whilst the first generation Apple iPad was launched in 2010, most businesses do not yet routinely provide their employees with a touchscreen tablet for use as a business tool.

As the rate of change in science and technology increases, the skills required by business will also change more rapidly. Consequently, it will become even more challenging to design and operate an education system that prepares children for productive careers in an economy that evolves for at least a decade after their education begins.

We won’t design those education systems successfully by considering our current requirements for skills; or by attempting to predict the skills that will be required ten years from now. If we make such predictions, they will be wrong. Instead we need to equip the education system with refactoring tools that allow it to continually adapt to the changing needs of the present.

The same challenges apply to the strategic planning of physical infrastructure in cities. As cities pursue “Smarter City” strategies, and as their economies evolve to exploit new technologies, what are the impacts on power requirements? On the need to provide connectivity to residential, retail and business space? On the physical space required by retail and business as online commerce and mobile working continue to grow? And on the movement of people and goods as information marketplaces change the physical supply chains of industries?

The only thing we can be sure of is the need for flexibility: the city of the future will need to be more responsive and adaptable to change than the cities that we know today.

(The collaborative working space of Hub Westminster which is constantly refactored to support new uses, exploiting furniture and spatial technology laser-cut from digital designs)

(The collaborative working space of Hub Westminster which is constantly refactored to support new uses, exploiting furniture and spatial technology laser-cut from digital designs)

Techniques to provide flexibility in the physical environment are already emerging. Kelvin Campbell’s theory of Smart Urbanism encourages the use of a spatial grid, party walls and building shells as a substrate upon which the fine detail of a city can grow.

A high quality, detailed physical environment can first be constructed on such a substrate according to customisable “design patterns” such as town houses and mews studios; and then refactored through interventions such as the reconfiguration of internal walls; the conversion of lofts to living or working space; or straightforward extensions to the physical size of buildings. Recently developed technologies such as 3D printing and 3D cutting provide additional opportunities for the physical refactoring of buildings and cities that would have been unimaginable relatively recently.

In materials science, sophisticated materials such as semi-conductors and super-conductors grow when large numbers of individual atomic particles are attracted to appropriately designed substrates; and when those particles form clusters together which eventually grow and combine into continuous materials. The process by which those initial clusters form is nucleation.

By analogy, if we can design urban substrates which encourage the nucleation of small-scale, productive, sustainable social and economic activity; and the subsequent agglomeration of that activity into larger-scale systems; then we will have created an environment in which smarter 21st century cities can grow.

We need to evolve similar concepts to support the development of information infrastructures for smarter cities. Broadband, wi-fi and mobile communications provide the equivalent substrate to the grid-based spatial framework of a city; but what are the equivalents of the party wall, building shell, design pattern and nucleation?

“Open data“, for example, is clearly an important component of a Smarter City information infrastructure; but we do not yet fully understand how to exploit it sustainably. Doing so will likely involve structures such as city information partnerships; sustainable commercial models; standards for the interchange of data; models of the meaning of data; and planning and procurement policies that embed the openness and interoperability of data into the development process.

Finally, the same challenges appear in economic development.

Michael Porter’s theory of economic clusters states that in order to protect profit margins from commoditisation over time, businesses need to constantly adopt new capabilities into their products and services. As science and technology develop more rapidly, cities and regions will need to drive that process of innovation more intensively in order to remain competitive in the global economy.

(The Old Street roundabout, around which London's "Tech City" cluster of technology companies has evolved)

(The Old Street roundabout, around which London’s “Tech City” cluster of technology companies has evolved)

This thinking is behind the technology innovation and business incubation partnership programme I’m putting together for IBM with Sunderland Software City, following our recent agreement to provide support for their new urban technology incubation campus at Tavistock Place.

Sunderland Software City- like Bristols’ Watershed media incubation centre and Birmingham’s Science Park Aston and Custard Factory – are exploring a form of urban technology incubation that is very different from that enabled by the more common out-of-town, campus-based science parks. They are not only concerned with supporting  new businesses that exploit the latest developments in science and technology; but with doing so in a way that creates synergies between local businesses, and that contributes to the  economic and industrial strategy of the cities where they are located.

Refactoring, nucleation and incubation are concepts drawn independently from domains as diverse as software engineering, the physical sciences and economics. There is no guarantee that they are mutually compatible; or even relevant to urban systems in any more direct way than by loose analogy.

But they share important characteristics that are also observed in successful urbanism and the research of resilient systems. For example: a preference for emergent growth rather than planned development;  and the need to enable widespread changes that are adaptable to highly specific local contexts.

So whilst I can’t be sure that these concepts are universally applicable, I am convinced that their potential value is so great that we are compelled to explore them.

Filed under Urbanism Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The need for sympathetic digital urbanism

March 20, 2013 3 Comments

(Photo of me wearing the Emotiv headset, which measures the magnetic waves created by brain activity.)

(Photo of me wearing the Emotiv headset, which measures the magnetic waves caused by brain activity.)

(I’m a guest blogger on UBM’s Future Cities community; this article was published there last week. It builds on themes I first explored here in the article “Little/big; producer/consumer; and the story of the Smarter City“)..

Technology is changing how we understand cities, and how we will understand ourselves in the context of urban environments. We’re only at the beginning of this complex revolution.

Consider that scientists from Berkeley have used a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner to reconstruct images perceived by a test subject’s brain activity while the subject watched a video. A less sensitive mind-reading technology is already available as a headset from Emotiv. (My colleagues have used Emotiv to help a paralysed person communicate by sending directional instructions from his thoughts to a computer.)

Developments in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and advanced manufacturing show similarly remarkable interactions between information systems and the physical and biological world: solar panels that can mend themselves; living biological tissues that can be printed.

These technologies, combined with our ability to process and draw insight from digital information, could offer real possibilities to engineer more efficient and sustainable city systems, such as transportation, energy, water, and food. But using them to address the demographic, financial, and environmental challenges of cities will raise questions about our relationship with the natural world, what it means to live in an ethical society, and what defines us as human.

(The remainder of this article, which explores ways in which we might answer those questions, can be found on UBM’s Future Cities site, as “Make Way for Sensitive Cities“).

Filed under Science & Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Do we need a Pattern Language for Smarter Cities?

February 15, 2013 21 Comments

(Photo of the Athens Olympic Sports Complex from Space by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

The UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills held a workshop recently to determine how to create guidance for cities considering their approach to Smarter Cities.

A robust part of the debate centred on the challenge of providing “delivery guidance” for cities embarking on Smarter Cities initiatives: whilst there are many visions for smart and future cities; and many examples of projects that have been carried out; there is little prescriptive guidance to assist cities in defining and delivering their own strategy (although I’ve provided my own humble contribution in “Six steps to a smarter city” on this blog; an article which organises a broad set of resources into an admittedly very high level framework).

In setting out a transformative smarter city vision and then taking the steps to achieve it, a great deal of change is involved. Large, formal organisations tend to approach change with prescriptive , process-driven techniques – for all that the objective of change might be defined disruptively by individual insight and leadership or through the application of techniques such as “design thinking“; the execution of the changes required to achieve that objective is usually driven by a controlled process with well defined roles, scope, milestones, risks and performance indicators.

My own employer, IBM, is a vast organisation with over 400,000 employees; a similar number of people to the population of a city of modest size. It was the subject of one of the most famous transformations in corporate history when Lou Gerstner saved it from near-failure in the 1990s. The transformation was achieved by brilliant personal leadership; trial and error; and a variety of techniques and ideas from different sources – there was no “off-the-shelf” process to follow at this scale of organisational change.

But transforming a city is not the same thing as changing an organisation, however big. A city is a complex system of systems, and we have comparatively little knowledge about how to drive change in such an environment. Arguably,we should not even think about “driving change” in city ecosystems, but rather consider how to influence the speed and direction of the changes that will emerge from them anyway.

Some very different approaches to process-driven change have emerged from thinking in policy, economics, planning and architecture: the Collective Research Initiatives Trust‘s study of Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“; Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s “Collage City“; Manu Fernandez’s “Human Scale Cities” project; the “Massive / Small” concept and associated “Urban Operating System” from Kelvin Campbell and Urban Initiatives; and CHORA’s Taiwan Strait Atlas, for example have all suggested an approach that involves a “toolkit” of ideas for individuals and organisations to apply in their local context.

(In this light, it’s interesting to observe that in order to steer the ongoing growth of IBM following the transformation led by Lou Gerstner, his successor as CEO, Sam Palmisano, took the organic approach of seeking to inspire a consistent evolution of business behaviour across all 400,000 individual IBMers by co-creating and adopting a common and explicit set of “values”).

(Stories of Mumbai: an exploration of Mumbai’s history of urban development, and its prospects for the future, using storytelling and puppetshows, by the BMW Guggenheim Lab)

In “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back“, Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, give a fascinating description of the incredible impact such approaches can achieve through the example of the response to the earthquake near Port-au-Prince in Haiti on January 10, 2010 that was led by Patrick Meier, the Ushahidi information crowd-sourcing platform and the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts. Meier catalysed an incredible multi-national response to the earthquake that included the resources of organisations such as Thomson Reuters, Digicel (the largest mobile phone company in Haiti), and MedicMobile; and just as importantly hundreds of individuals literally spread across the world, with nothing more in common than a desire to do what they could to contribute:

“I told people, ‘We’re going to let this be emergent,’” Meier explained. “There are so many things that need to happen every single hour and so many things that need to keep evolving in such a short amount of time. I have to just let it flourish and deal with what happens when it starts getting inefficient.” The open nature of the platform – both the code that powers Ushahidi and the collaborative nature of the mapping – meant that people could easily be recruited to perform discrete, useful tasks with a minimum of formal authority.”

(Patrick Meier, quoted in “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back“, p179, by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy)

In my own work, I’ve tried to follow a similar course, inspired first by the Knight Foundation’s report on the Information Needs of Communities. The Knight Foundation counsel a process of engagement and understanding between institutions and communities, in order to identify the specific information and resources that can be most usefully made available by city institutions to individual citizens, businesses and social organisations. As I described in “The Amazing Heart of a Smarter City: the Innovation Boundary“, the resulting portfolio provides a toolkit customised to the needs of a city, and that can be used to shape a collective case for investment in the development of that city.

The idea of a toolkit recognises both that no one approach, philosophy or framework is applicable to every city, or to every context within a single city; and that an idea that works in one place might work in many others.

For example, in the UK, the regions around the cities of Birmingham and Manchester are of similar size in terms of population and economic activity; but they are very different in the structure of their political administrations and economies. The approach that one of these cities adopts as its Smarter City strategy will not necessarily transfer to the other.

In contrast, however, specific ideas concerning economic development and the attraction of talented young people that I’ve found useful in Sunderland in the UK have been inspired by past experience in Wuxi, China and New York State; and in turn have informed initiatives in Spain, Singapore and Nairobi; in other words they have transcended contexts of vastly different size, culture and economics.

A tool that emerged from town planning in the 1970s and that was then adopted across the information technology industry in the 1980s and 1990s might just provide the approach we need to harness this information. And it’s perhaps not surprising that a tool with such provenance should become relevant at at time when the architects of information technology systems, buildings and cities are finding that they are working within a common context.

That tool is the “Design Pattern”.

A Pattern Language for Smarter Cities

(A pattern language for social software features, image by Amber Case)

The town planner Christopher Alexander invented “design patterns” in the 1970s. He addressed the challenge that many problems in planning were (and are) too large and complex for one person to consider them in their entirety at one time; and that it is hence necessary to break them down into sub-problems.

The difficulty is that it is not at all straightforward to break a problem into sub-problems that can be solved effectively in isolation from each other.

Consider city transport systems: in many cases, road management, bus operations and the rail network are the responsibility of different organisations. It “makes sense” to break up transport systems in this way because each is different; and so different organisations are better at running them effectively.

But from the perspective of the users of transport systems, it doesn’t make sense to do this. Bus and rail timetables don’t work together; cars, buses, freight vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians have conflicting requirements of road space; and the overall system does not behave as though it is designed to serve travellers consistently.

In “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” in 1969, Alexander described a mathematical technique that could be used to manage the complexity of large problems and to break them down into sub-problems in a way that accommodated interdependencies between them. As a result, those sub-problems could be solved separately from each other, then integrated to form an overall solution.

This process of decomposition, solution and integration is fundamental to process-driven approaches to the design and delivery of complex solutions. It is not possible, for example, to assign responsibilities to individuals and teams without going through it. Many projects that fail do so because the  problem that they are addressing is not decomposed effectively so that individual teams find that they have overlapping areas of responsibility and therefore experience duplication and conflict.

However, in developing his technique for decomposing problems, Alexander concluded that it was overly complex, rigid and impractical; and he recommended that it should never be used. Instead, he suggested that it was more useful to focus not on how we deal with problems; but on how we re-use successful solutions.

By identifying and characterising the components of solutions that have been proven to work, we enable them to be reused elsewhere. Christopher Alexander’s particular insight was to recognise that to do so successfully, it is vitally important to precisely describe the context in which a solution is applicable. He called the resulting description of reusable solutions a “design pattern”; and a collection of such descriptions, a “pattern language“.

Design patterns and pattern languages offer a useful combination of formal and informal approaches. They are formal in that each pattern is described in a consistent way, using a structured framework of characteristics. And they are informal in that the description isn’t constrained to that framework of characteristics; and because design patterns do not assert that they should be used: they are simply there to be used by anyone who chooses to do so.

Christopher Alexander’s patterns for town planning and architecture can be found in his books, or online at the “Pattern Language” community; in information technology, Martin Fowler’s “Enterprise Application Architecture Patterns” provide a similar example.

To my knowledge, no-one is yet curating a similar set of Smarter Cities patterns; I believe that there would be great value in doing so; and that in order to do so skills and expertise across domains such as planning, architecture, technology, social science and many others would be required.

In the final part of this article, I’d like to suggest some examples of Smarter City initiatives and ideas that I think can be usefully described as patterns; and to give one example of such a description. Please do share your views on whether this approach is useful by commenting on this blog, or through one of the Linked-In discussion groups where I’ve posted links to this article.

Design Patterns for Smarter Cities

Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve seen applied successfully in more than one place, either as part of a Smarter City strategy, or simply as valuable initiatives in their own right. It is certainly not an exhaustive list – a quick survey of Linked-In discussion Groups such as “Smart Cities and City 2.0“, “Smarter Cities” and “Smart Urbanism” will reveal many other examples that could be described in this way.

  • Information Partnerships – collaborations between city institutions, communities, service providers and research institutions to share and exploit city data in a socially and financially sustainable system. (I’ve provided a more detailed description of this example below).
  • Incubation Clouds – the use of Cloud Computing platforms and hybrid public/private commercial models to enable co-operative investment in technology capabilities that can lower the barriers to successful innovations in city services. Examples: Sunderland’s “City Cloud” and the Wuxi iPark.
  • Community Energy Initiatives – the formation of local energy companies to exploit “smart grid” technology, local energy generation (such as solar panels, wind power, wave power, geo-thermal power and bio-energy) and collaborative energy consumption to reduce carbon emissions and reliance on external energy sources. Examples: Eco-island and Birmingham Energy Savers.
  • Social Enterprises – a collective term for models of business that audit themselves against social and environmental outcomes, as well as financial sustainability and returns. Examples: co-operatives, credit unions and organisations using “triple-bottom-line” accounting.

(The components of a Smart City architecture I described in “The new architecture of Smart Cities“)

In order to describe these concepts more completely as re-usable patterns; and in a way that allows them to be compared, selected in comparison to each other, or used together; it is important that they are described consistently, and in a way that accurately identifies the context in which they are applicable.

To do so requires that we describe the same aspects of each pattern; and that we describe each aspect using a common language. For example:

  • The city systems, communities and infrastructures affected; using a framework such as the “The new architecture of Smart Cities” that I described last year, shown in the diagram above.
  • The commercial operating model that makes the pattern financially sustainable.
  • The driving forces that make the pattern applicable, such as traffic congestion; persistent localised economic inactivity; the availability of local energy sources; or the need to reduce public sector spending.
  • The benefits of using the pattern; including financial, social, environmental and long-term economic benefits.
  • The implications and risks of implementing the pattern – such as the risk that consumers will not chose to change their behaviour to adopt more sustainable modes of transport; or the increasing long-term costs of healthcare implied by initiatives that raise life-expectancy by creating a healthier environment.
  • The alternatives and variations that describe how the pattern can be adapted to particular local contexts.
  • Examples of where the pattern has been applied; what was involved in making it work; and the outcomes that were achieved as a result.
  • Sources of information that provide further explanation, examples of use and guidance for implementation.

I’ll finish this article by given an example of a Smarter City pattern described in that way – the “City Information Partnership”.

(Coders at work exploiting city information at the Birmingham “Smart Hack”, photographed by Sebastian Lenton)

An Example Pattern: City Information Partnership

(Note: the following description is not intended to be written in the fluent style that I usually hope to achieve in my blog articles; instead, it is meant to illustrate the value in bringing together a set of concisely expressed ideas in a structured format).

Summary of the pattern: a collaboration between city institutions, communities, service providers and research institutions to share and exploit city data in a socially and financially sustainable system.

City systems, communities and infrastructures affected:

(This description is based on the elements of Smarter City ecosystems presented in “The new Architecture of Smart Cities“).

  • Goals: Any.
  • People: Citizens; innovators.
  • Ecosystem: All.
  • Soft infrastructures: Innovation forums; networks and community organisations.
  • City systems: Any.
  • Hard infrastructures: Information and communications technology.

Commercial operating model:

City information partnerships are often incorporated as “Special Purpose Vehicles” (SPVs) jointly owned by city institutions such as local authorities; universities; other public sector organisations such as schools, healthcare providers and emergency services; services providers such as transportation authorities and utilities; asset owners and operators such as property developers and facility managers; local employers; and private sector providers such as technology companies.

A shared initial investment in technology infrastructure is often required; and in order to address legal issues such as intellectual property rights and liability agreements.

Long-term financial sustainability is dependent on the generation of commercial revenues by licensing the use of data by commercial operations. In cases where such initiatives have been supported only by public sector or research funding, that funding has eventually been reduced or terminated leading to the stagnation or cessation of the initiative.

Soft infrastructures, hard infrastructures and assets required:

Information partnerships only succeed where they are a component of a co-creative dialogue between individuals and organisations in city institutions such as entrepreneurs, community associations, local authorities and social enterprises.

Institutional support is required to provide the models of legal liability and intellectual property ownership that create a trusted and transparent context for collaborative innovation.

Technologies such as Cloud Computing platforms; information management; security; analytics, reporting; visualisation; and data catalogues are required to manage city information and make it available and useful to end users.

Information partnerships require the participation of organisations which between them own and are prepared to make available a sufficiently broad and rich collection of datasets.

Driving forces:

Information is transforming the world’s economy; it provides new insight to support business model creation and operation; makes new products and services possible; and creates new markets.

At the same time global and local demographic trends mean that the cost-base and resource usage of city systems must change.

Information partnerships expose city information to public, private, social and academic research and innovation to discover, create and operate new models for city services; with the potential for resale elsewhere; leading in turn to economic and social growth.

(A visualisation created by Daniel X O Neil of data from Chicago’s open data portal showing the activities of paid political lobbyists and their customers in the city)

Benefits:

Community hacktivism can usually be engaged by information partnerships to create useful community “apps” such as local transport information and accessibility advice.

The creation of new information-based businesses creates local employment opportunities, and economic export potential.

Information partnerships can provide information resources for technology education in schools, colleges and universities.

New city services developed as a result of the information partnership may provide lower-carbon alternatives to existing city systems such as transportation.

Implications and risks:

If participating organisations such as local authorities include the requirement to contribute data to the information partnership in procurement criteria, then tendering organisations will include any associated costs in their proposals.

For information partnerships to be sustainable, the operating entity needs to be able to accrue and reinvest profits from licenses to exploit data commercially.

The financial returns and economic growth created by information partnerships can take time to develop.

Genuinely constructive partnerships rely on effective engagement between city institutions, businesses and communities.

Existing contracts between local authorities and service providers are unlikely to require that data is contributed to the partnership; and the costs associated with making the data associated with those services available will need to be negotiated.

Alternatives and variations:

Some organisations have provided single-party open data platforms. These can be effective – for example, the APIs offered by e-Bay and Amazon; but individual organisations within cities will rarely have a critical mass of valuable data; or the resources required to operate effective and sustained programmes of engagement with the local community.

Many advocates of open data argue that such data should be freely available. However, the majority of platforms that have made data available freely have struggled to make data available in a form that is usable; to expand the data available; to offer data at a reliable level of service; or to sustain their operations over time. Making good quality data available reliably requires effort, and that effort needs to be paid for.

Examples:

Sources of information:

The UK Open Data Institute is championing open data in the UK – http://www.theodi.org/

O’Reilly Media have published many informative articles on their “Radar” website – http://search.oreilly.com/?q=open+data&x=0&y=0&tmpl=radar

The report “Information Marketplaces: The new economics of cities” published by Arup, The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of Nottingham – http://www.arup.com/Publications/Information_Marketplaces_the_new_economics_of_cities.aspx

Finally, I have written a series of articles on this blog that explore the benefits and challenges associated with the collaborative exploitation of city information:

What next?

It has been an interesting exercise for me to write this article. Many of the ideas and examples that I have included will not be new to regular readers of this blog. But in describing the idea of an “Information Partnership” as a formal design pattern I have brought them together in a particularly focussed and organised manner. There are many, many more ideas and examples of initiatives within the Smarter Cities domain that could be described in this way; and I personally believe that it would be valuable to do so.

But my opinion on that subject is less valuable than yours. I would really appreciate your thoughts on whether the “Smarter City Design Patterns” I’ve suggested and explored in this article would be a valuable contribution to our collective knowledge.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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Better stories for Smarter Cities: three trends in urbanism that will reshape our world

January 30, 2013 5 Comments

(Stories of Mumbai: an exploration of Mumbai’s history of urban development, and its prospects for the future, using storytelling and puppetshows, by the BMW Guggenheim Lab)

Towards the end of last year, it became clearer how cities could take practical steps to position themselves to transform to meet the increasing economic, environmental and social challenges facing them; and to seek investment to support those transformations, as I described in “Smart Ideas for Everyday Cities“.

Equally important as those practical approaches to organisation, though, are the conceptual tools that will shape those transformations. Across fields as diverse as psychology, town planning, mathematics, construction, service-design and technology, some striking common themes have emerged that are shaping those tools.

Those themes imply that we will need to take radically different approaches to city systems driven by the astonishing, exciting and sometimes disturbing changes that we’re likely to see taking place increasingly rapidly in our world over the next decade.

To adopt the terminology of Irene Ng, a Researcher in new economic models and service science at the University of Warwick, these changes will create both “needs-led” and “capability-led” drivers to do things differently.

“Needs-led” changes will be driven by the massive growth taking place in the global middle class as economies across the world modernise. The impacts will be varied and widespread, including increasing business competition in a single, integrated economy; increasing competition for resources such as food, water and energy; and increasing fragility in the systems that supply those resources to a population that is ever more concentrated in cities. We are already seeing these effects in our everyday lives: many of us are paying more for our food as a proportion of our income than a few years ago.

At a recent lecture on behalf of the International Federation for Housing and Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning, Sir Peter Hall, Professor of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School of Planning, spoke of the importance of making the growth of cities sustainable through the careful design of the transport systems that support them. In the industrial revolution, as Edward Glaeser described in Triumph of the City, cities grew up around lifts powered by steam engines; Sir Peter described how more recently they have grown outwards into suburbs populated with middle-class car-owners who habitually drive to work, schools, shops, gyms and parks.

This lifestyle simply cannot be sustained – in the developed world or in emerging economies – across such an explosively growing number of people who have the immediate wealth to afford it, but who are not paying the full price of the resources it consumes. According to the exhibition in Siemens’ “Crystal” building, where Sir Peter’s lecture was held, today’s middle class is consuming resources at one-and-a-half times the rate the world creates them; unless something changes, the rate of growth of that lifestyle will hurl us towards a global catastrophe.

So, as the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) observed in their study of the ongoing evolution of Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, the structure of movement and the economy will have to change.

(Siemens’ Crystal building in London, a show case for sustainable technology in cities, photographed by Martin Deutsch)

Meanwhile, the evolution of technology is creating incredible new opportunities for “capability-led” change.

In the last two decades, we have seen the world revolutionised by information and communication technologies such as the internet and SmartPhones; but this is only the very start of a transformation that is still gathering pace. Whilst so far these technologies have created an explosion in the availability of information, recent advances in touch-screen technology and speech recognition are just starting to demonstrate that the boundary between the information world and physical, biological and neural systems is starting to disappear.

For example, a paralysed woman recently controlled a robotic arm by thought; and prosthetic limbs, a working gun and living biological structures such as muscle fibre and skin are just some of the things that can be 3D printed on demand from raw materials and digital designs.

What changes to our urban systems will these developments – and the ones that follow them – lead to?

Following the decline of industries such as manufacturing, resource-mining and ship-building,  many post-industrial cities in the developed world are rebuilding their economies around sectors with growth potential, such as environmental technology and creative media. They are also working with the education system to provide their citizens with access to the skills those sectors require.

Supplying the skills that today’s economy needs can be a challenge. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt lambasted the British Education system last year for producing insufficient computer programming skills; and a cross-industry report, “Engineering the Future“, laid out the need for increased focus on environmental, manufacturing, technology and engineering skills to support future economic growth in the UK. As the rate of change in science and technology increases, the skills required in a consequently changing economy will also change more rapidly; providing those skills will be an even bigger challenge.

Or will it? How much of a leap forward is required from the technologies I’ve just described, to imagining that by 2030, people will respond to the need for changing skills in the market by downloading expertise Matrix-style to exploit new employment opportunities?

Most predictions of the future turn out to be wrong, and I’m sure that this one will be, in part or in whole. But as an indication of the magnitude of changes we can expect across technology, business, society and our own physical and mental behaviour I expect it will be representative.

Our challenge is to understand how these needs-led and capability-led transformations can collectively create a world that is sustainable; and that is sympathetic to us as human beings and communities. That challenge will be most acute where both needs and capabilities are most concentrated – in cities. And across economics, architecture, technology and human behaviour, three trends in urban thinking have emerged – or, at least, become more prominent – in recent years that provide guiding principles for how we might meet that challenge.

The attraction of opposites, part 1: producer and consumer

20120605-005134.jpg

(Photograph of 3D printers by Rob Boudon)

In the Web 2.0 era (roughly 2003-2009), the middle classes of the developed world became connected by “always-on” broadband connections, turning these hundreds of millions of information-consumers into information-producers. That is why in 2007 (and every year since) more new information was created than in all of the previous 5 millenia. Industries such as publishing, music and telecommunications have been utterly transformed as a result.

The disappearance of the boundary between  information, physical and biological systems, and the explosive growth in the population with access to the technologies responsible for that disappearance, will transform every economic and social structure we can imagine through the same producer / consumer revolution.

We can already produce as well as consume transport resources by participating in car-sharing schemes; and energy by exploiting domestic solar power and bio-energy. The falling cost and increasing sophistication of 3D printers are just starting to make it feasible to manufacture some products in the home, particularly in specialist areas such as railway modelling; and platforms such as the Amazon Turk and Slivers of Time can quickly connect producers and consumers in the service industries.

Business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketplaces such as Big Barn and Sustaination provide the same service in local food systems. And the transport industry is evolving to serve these new markets: for instance, Shutl provide a marketplace for home delivery services through a community of independent couriers; and a handful of cities are deploying or planning recycling systems in which individual items of waste are distributed to processing centres through pneumatically powered underground transport networks.

Of course, from the earliest development of farming in human culture, we have all been both producers and consumers in a diversified economy. What’s new is the opportunity for technology to dramatically improve the flexibility, timeliness and efficiency of the value-chains that connect those two roles. Car-sharing not only reduces the amount of fuel used by our journeys; it could reduce the resources consumed by manufacturing vehicles that spend the majority of their lives stationary on drives or in car parks. Markets that more efficiently connect food production, processing and consumption could reduce the thousands of miles that food currently travels between farm and fork, often crossing its own path several times; they could create employment opportunities in small-scale food processing; not to mention reducing the vast quantity of food that is produced but not eaten, and goes to waste.

Irene Ng explores these themes wonderfully in her new book, “Value and Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy“; they offer us exciting opportunities for economic and social growth, and an evolution towards a more sustainable urban future – if we can harness them in that way.

The attraction of opposites, part 2: little and big

Some infrastructures can be “blunt” instruments: from roads and railway lines which connect their destinations but which cut apart the communities they pass through; to open data platforms which provide vast quantities of data “as-is” but little in the way of information and services customised to the needs of local individuals and communities.

Architects such as Jan Gehl have argued that the design process for cities should concentrate on the life between buildings, rather than on the structure of buildings; and that cities should be constructed at a “human-scale” – medium-sized buildings, not tower-blocks and sky-scrapers; and streets that are walkable and cycle-able, not dominated by cars. In transport, elevated cycleways and pedestrian roundabouts have appeared in Europe and Asia. These structures prevent road traffic infrastructures form impeding the fluid movement of cycling and walking – transport modes which allow people to stop and interact in a city more easily and often than driving.

At a meeting held in London last year to establish the UK’s chapter to the City Protocol Society, Keith Coleman of Capgemini offered a different view by comparing the growth in size of cities to the structure of the world’s largest biological organisms. In particular, Keith contrasted the need to provide infrastructure – such as the Pando forest in Utah, a single, long-lived and vastly extensive root system supporting millions of individual trees that live, grow and die independently – with the need to provide capabilities – such as those encoded in the genes of the Neptune sea grass, which is not a single organism, but rather a genetically identical colony which collectively covers 5% of the Mediterranean sea floor.

The Collective Research Initiatives Trust‘s study of Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s “Collage City“, Manu Fernandez’s “Human Scale Cities” project and CHORA’s Taiwan Strait Atlas project have all suggested an approach to urban systems that is more like the Neptune sea grass than the Pando forest: the provision of a “toolkit” for individuals and organisations to apply in their local context

My own work, initially in Sunderland, was similarly informed by the Knight Foundation’s report on the Information Needs of Communities, to which I was introduced by Conn Crawford of Sunderland City Council. It counsels for a process of engagement and understanding between city institutions and communities, in order that the resources of large organisations can be focused on providing the information and services that can be most effectively used by individual citizens, businesses and social organisations.

(The Bristol Pound, a local currency intended to encourage and reinforce local trading synergies.)

Kelvin Campbell of Urban Initiatives has perhaps taken this thinking furthest in the urban context in his concept of “Massive Small” and the “urban operating system”. Similar thinking appears throughout research on resilience in systems such as cities, coral reefs, terrorist networks and financial systems, as described by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy in “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back“. And it is reflected in the work that many researchers and professionals across fields as diverse as city planning, economics and technology are doing to understand how institutional city systems can engage effectively with “informal” activity in the economy.

In IBM we have adapted our approach too. To take one example, a few years ago we launched our “Global Entrepreneur” programme, through which we engage directly with small, startup businesses using technology to develop what we call “Smarter Planet” and “Smarter Cities” solutions. These businesses are innovating in specific markets that they understand much better than we do; using operating models that IBM does not have. In turn, IBM’s resources can help them build more resilient solutions more quickly and cost-effectively, and reach a wider set of potential customers across the world.

A civic infrastructure that combines economics and technology and that, whilst it has a long history,  is starting to evolve rapidly, is the local currency. Last year Bristol became the fifth place in the UK to launch its own currency; whilst in Switzerland an alternative currency, the Wir, is thought to have contributed to the stability of the Swiss economy for the last century by providing an alternative, more flexible basis for debt, by allowing repayments to made in kind through bartering, as well as in currency.

Such systems can promote local economic synergy, and enable the benefits of capital fluidity to be adapted to the needs of local contexts. And from innovations in mobile banking in Africa to Birmingham’s DropletPay SmartPhone payment system, they are rapidly exploiting new technologies. They are a clear example of a service that city and economic institutions can support; and that can be harnessed and used by individuals and organisations anywhere in a city ecosystem for the purposes that are most important and valuable to them.

IMG-20121104-00606

(The Co-operative Society building at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings)

Co-operative Governance

It’s increasingly obvious that on their own, traditional businesses and public and civic institutions won’t deliver the transformations that our cities, and our planet, need. The restructuring of our economy, cities and society to address the environmental and demographic challenges we face requires that social, environmental and long term economic goals drive our decisions, rather than short term financial returns alone.

Alternatives have been called for and proposed. In her speech ahead of the Rio +20 Summit, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said that one of the challenges for achieving a sustainable, equitably distributed return to growth following the recent economic challenges was that “externalities” such as social and environmental impacts are not currently included in the prices of goods and services.

I participated last year in a panel discussion at the World Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” conference which asked whether including those costs would incent consumers to chose to purchase sustainably provided goods and services. We examined several ways to create positive and negative incentives through pricing; but also examples of simply “removing the barriers” to making such choices. Our conclusion was that a combination of approaches was needed, including new ideas from game theory and technology, such as “open data”; and that evidence exists from a variety of examples to prove that consumer behaviour can and does adapt in response to well designed systems.

In “Co-op Capitalism“, Noreena Hertz proposed an alternative approach to enterprise based on social principles, where the objectives of collective endeavours are to return broad value to all of their stakeholders rather than to pay dividends to financial investors. This approach has a vital role in enabling communities across the entirety of city ecosystems to harness and benefit from technology in a sustainable way, and is exemplified by innovations such as MyDex in personal information management, Carbon Voyage in transport, and Eco-Island in energy.

New forms of cooperation have also emerged from resilience research, such as “constellations” and “articulations”. All of these approaches have important roles to play in specific city systems, community initiatives and new businesses, where they successfully create synergies between the financial, social and economic capabilities and needs of the participants involved.

But none of them directly address the need for cities to create a sustainable, cohesive drive towards a sustainable, equitable, successful future.

(Photo by Greg Marshall of the rocks known as “The Needles” just off the coast of the Isle of Wight; illustrating the potential for the island to exploit wave and tidal energy sources through the Eco-Island initiative)

In “Smart Ideas for Everyday Cities“, I described an approach that seems to be emerging from the cities that have made the most progress so far. It involves bringing together stakeholders across city systems – representatives of communities; city institutions; owners and operators of city systems and assets such as buildings, transportation and utilities; Universities and schools; and so on – into a group that can not only agree a vision and priorities for the city’s future; but that is empowered to take collective decisions accordingly.

The initiatives agreed by such a group will require individual “special purpose vehicles” (SPVs) to be created according to the specific set of stakeholder interests involved in each case – such as public/private partnerships to build infrastructure or Community Interest Companies and Energy Service Companies to operate local energy schemes. (There are some negative connotations associated with SPVs, which have been used in some cases by private organisations seeking to hide their debt or ownership; but in the Smarter Cities context they are frequently associated with more positive purposes).

Most importantly, though: where a series of such schemes and commercial ventures are initiated by a stable collaboration within a city, investors will see a reliable decision-making process and a mature understanding of shared risk and its management; making each individual initiative more likely to attract investment.

In his analysis of societal responses to critical environmental threats, Jared Diamond noted in his 2005 book “Collapse” that successful responses often emerge when choices are taken by leaders with long-term vested interests, working closely with their communities. In a modern economy, the interests of stakeholders are driven by many timescales – electoral cycles, business cycles, the presence of commuters, travellers and the transient and long-term residents of the city, for example. Bringing those stakeholders together can create a forum that transcends individual timescales, creating stability and the opportunity for a long-term outlook.

A challenge for 2013: better stories for Smarter Cities

Some cities are seizing the agenda for change that I have described in this article; and the very many of us across countries, professions and disciplines who are exploring that agenda are passionate about helping them to do so successfully.

In their report “Cities Outlook 1901“, Centre for Cities explored the previous century of urban development in the UK, examining why at various times some cities thrived and some did not. They concluded that actions taken by cities in areas such as planning, policy, skills development and economic strategy could have significant effects on their economic and social prosperity relative to others.

The need for cities to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future using the old, new and evolving tools at their disposal is urgent. In the 20th Century, some cities suffered a gradual decline as they failed to respond successfully to the changes of their age. In the 21st Century those changes will be so striking, and take place so quickly, that failing to meet them could result in a decline that is catastrophic.

But there is a real impediment to our ability to apply these ideas in cities today: a lack of common understanding.

(Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch, Birmingham’s three fathers of the Industrial Revolution, photographed by Neil Howard)

As the industrial and information revolutions have led our world to develop at a faster and faster pace, human knowledge has not just grown dramatically; it has fragmented to an extraordinary extent.

Consequently, across disciplines such as architecture, economics, social science, psychology, technology and all the many other fields important to the behaviour of cities, a vast and confusing array of language and terminology is used – a Tower of Babel, no less. The leaders of many city institutions and businesses are understandably not familiar with what they can easily perceive as jargon; and new ideas that appear to be presented in jargon are unlikely to be trusted.

To address the challenge, those of us who believe in these new approaches to city systems need to tell better stories about them; stories about individuals and their lives in the places where they live and work; how they will be more healthy, better equiped to support themselves, and able to move around freely in a pleasant urban environment.

Professor Miles Tight at the University of Birmingham and his colleagues in the “Visions 2030” project have applied this idea to the description of future scenarios for transportation in cities. They have created a series of visually appealing animated depictions of everyday scenes in city streets and places that could be the result of the various forces affecting the development of transport over the next 20 years. Malcolm Allan, a colleague in the Academy of Urbanism, helps cities to tell “stories about place” as a tool for envisaging their future development in a way that people can understand and identify with. And my colleagues in IBM Research have been exploring more generally how storytelling can enable the exchange of knowledge in situations where collaborative creativity is required across multiple domains of specialisation.

If we can bring our knowledge of emerging technologies and new approaches to urbanism into conversations about specific places in the form of stories, we will build trust and understanding in those places, as well as envisioning their possible futures. And that will give us a real chance of achieving the visions we create. This is what I’ll be concentrating on doing in 2013; and it looks like being an exciting year.

(It’s been much longer than usual since I last wrote an article for this blog; following an extended break over Christmas and the New Year, I’ve had a very busy start to 2013. I hope to resume my usual frequency of writing for the rest of the year.

And finally, an apology: in my remarks on the panel discussion following Sir Peter Hall’s lecture at the Crystal, I gave a very brief summary of some of the ideas described in this article. In particular, I used the term “Massive / Small” without attributing it to Kelvin Campbell and Urban Initiatives. My apologies to Kelvin, whose work and influence on my thinking I hope I have now acknowledged properly).

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No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter

November 30, 2012 5 Comments

(The Bristol Pound, a local currency intended to encourage and reinforce local trading synergies.)

It’s been a busy week for cities in the UK; and we should draw important insights from its events.

On Monday, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB); Department of Business, Innovation and Skills; and the British Standards Institution were the sponsors of a meeting in London to establish a UK “Future Cities Network”. One of their objectives was to build a consensus from the UK to contribute to the City Protocol initiative launched at the Smart City Expo in Barcelona this month.

Wednesday and Thursday saw the society of IT managers in local government (SOCITM) hold its annual conference in Birmingham. This community includes the technology leaders of the UK’s city authorities; many of them are driving the transformation to shared public services in their regions; and exploring the opportunities this transformation provides to improve service quality and outcomes, as well as reducing costs.

Finally, it’s been a week of mixed news for Future Cities: the Technology Strategy Board shortlisted 4 UK cities as the finalists in their competition to host a £25 million “Future Cities Demonstrator” project.

This is clearly fantastic news for the cities concerned – London, Glasgow, Peterborough and Bristol – and they should be congratulated for their achievement. But it also means that 22 other cities who submitted proposals to the TSB have learned over the past two days that they will not benefit from this investment.

Whilst the TSB’s competition – and their progress in setting up the related “Future Cities Catapult Centre” – have been great catalysts to encourage cities in the UK to shape their thinking about the future, the decisions this week throw the real challenge they face into sharp focus:

No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter.

The TSB investment of £25 million is astonishingly generous; but it will nevertheless be only a small contribution to the city that receives it; and the role of innovation stimulus organisations such as the TSB and the European Union’s FP7 programme is only to fund the first, exploratory initiatives; not to support their widespread adoption by cities everywhere.

The UK government’s “City Deals” are a great innovation that will give cities more autonomy over taxation and spending. But in reality they will not provide significant sums of new money; especially when compared to the scale of the financial challenge city authorities face. As the Local Government Association commented in their report “Funding outlook for councils from 2010/11 to 2019/20“:

“… councils will not be able to deliver the existing service offer by the end of this decade. Fundamental change is needed to one or both of … the way local services are funded and organised [or the] statutory and citizen expectations of what councils will provide.”

(A station on London’s Underground railway under construction in 1861, from the Science and Society Picture Library)

Some of these changes will be achieved through public sector transformation. The London Borough of Newham, for example, were recognised at the SOCITM Awards Dinner this week for their achievements in reducing costs and improving service quality through implementation of a successful transformation to online channels for many services.

This is a remarkable achievement for an authority serving one of London’s least affluent boroughs, demanding careful and innovative thinking about the provision of digital services to communities and citizens who may not have access to broadband connectivity or traditional computers. Newham have concentrated on the delivery of services through mobile telephones – which are much more widely owned than PCs and laptops – and  in contexts where a friend or family member assists the ultimate service user.

But local authority transformations of this sort won’t create intelligent transport solutions; or trigger a transformation to renewable energy sources; or improve the resilience of food supply to city populations.

In the UK, many of those services are supported by physical infrastructures that were first constructed in the Victorian era, more than a century ago. Through pride and vision – and the determination to out-do each other – the industrialists, engineers and philanthropists who created those infrastructures dramatically over-engineered them. We are now using them to support many times the population that existed when they were designed and built.

As competition for resources such as food, energy and water intensifies, driven by both a growing global population and by rapid improvements in living standards in emerging economies, these infrastructures will increasingly struggle to support us at the cost, and with the level of resilience, that we have become accustomed to. And whilst they are now often owned and operated by private sector organisations, or by public-private partnerships, the private sector is in no better position to address the challenges faced by cities than the public sector.

In the recent recession and the current slow recovery from it, many companies have failed, lost business, and reduced their workforce. And as the Guardian reported this week, whilst many business leaders take sustainability seriously and attempt to build it into their business models, the financial markets do not recognise those objectives in share prices; and do not offer investment vehicles that support them.

So if government and the financial markets can’t or won’t pay cities to become smarter, how are we going to re-engineer city infrastructures to be more intelligent and sustainable?

In my view, the key is to look at four ways in which money is already spent; and to harness that spending power to achieve the outcomes that cities need.

1. Encourage Venture Capital Investment

(Photo of the “Container City” incubation hub for social enterprises operated by Sustainable Enterprise Strategies in Sunderland)

The current economic climate has not stopped investors and venture capitalists from investing in exciting new businesses. Some of the businesses they are investing in are using technology to offer innovative services in cities. For example, Shutl and Carbon Voyage both use recently emerged technologies to match capacity and demand across networks of transport suppliers.

The systems that these businesses operate have the potential to catalyse local economic trading opportunities – and in so doing, safeguard or create jobs; to lower the carbon footprint of travel and distribution within cities; and to offer new and valuable services to city residents, workers and visitors.

Several cities, including Dublin and Sunderland, are engaged in an ongoing conversation with their local community of technology, business and social entrepreneurs to encourage and support them in developing new, sustainable business models of this sort that promote the social, environmental and economic objectives of the city.

These investments are not on the scale of the tens or hundreds of millions of pounds that would be required to completely overhaul city infrastructures; but they are complemented by the revenues the businesses earn. In this way, consumer, retail and business spending can be harnessed to contribute to the evolution of Smarter Cities.

2. Build Markets, not Infrastructure

Transport is an example of a city system that is not usually considered a marketplace; that’s one of the reasons why the entrepreneurial businesses that I mentioned in the previous section, which effectively create new markets for transport capacity, are so innovative.

But some city systems  already operate as marketplaces; such as energy in the UK, where consumers are free to switch between providers relatively easily. The fact that city infrastructures are already market-like to a degree is combining with trends in engineering to create exciting new developments.

As both international and national policies to encourage sustainable energy generation and use take effect; and as some fossil fuels become scarcer or more expensive, new power generation capacity is increasingly based on renewable energy sources such as wind, hydro-electric, tidal, geo-thermal and biological sources.

A challenge associated with some of those energy sources is that their generating capacity is small compared to their cost and physical impact. Wind farms, for example, take up vastly more space than gas- and coal-powered energy generation facilities, and produce only a fraction of their output.

(Photo by Greg Marshall of the rocks known as “The Needles” just off the coast of the Isle of Wight; illustrating the potential for the island to exploit wave and tidal energy sources)

However, for other power sources, a reduction in scale could be an advantage. The European Bioenergy Research Institute (EBRI) at Aston University in Birmingham, for example, exploit technologies that can recover energy from sewage and food waste. Those technologies can already be implemented on a small-enough scale that the city of Birmingham is setting up a local power distribution company to exploit a bio-energy power generation plant that EBRI will operate at Aston University. And the New Optimists, a community of scientists and industry leaders in Birmingham are considering on Birmingham’s behalf the possibility that such generation technology could eventually operate in city neighbourhoods and communities, or even within individual residences.

For all of these reasons, there is considerable interest at present in the formation of new, localised marketplaces in power generation and consumption. Ecoisland, a community initiative on the Isle of Wight, is perhaps at the forefront of this movement. Their objective is to make the Isle of Wight self-sufficient in energy; because their approach to meeting that objective is to form a new market, they are winning considerable investment from the financial markets due to the profit-making potential of that market.

3. Procure Infrastructure Smartly

City Authorities and property developers spend substantial sums of money on city infrastructures and related services. But the requirements and scoring systems of those procurements are often very traditional, and create no incentive for the providers of infrastructure services to offer innovative solutions.

Some flagship projects – such as Stockholm’s congestion-charging scheme and the smart metering programme in Dubuque, for example – have shown the tremendous potential of “Smarter” solutions. But their effectiveness is to some degree specific to their local context; relatively high levels of taxation are acceptable in Scandinavian society, for example, in return for high quality public service outcomes. Such levels of taxation are not so acceptable elsewhere.

There is tremendous scope for more creative and innovative approaches to procurement of city services to encourage service providers to offer “Smarter” solutions; Birmingham Science City’s Jackie Homan describred some of those possibilities very eloquently recently. The more urgently city authorities adopt those approaches, the sooner they are likely to benefit from the innovation that their infrastructure partners have the potential to provide.

(The Olympic flame at Vancouver’s Winter Olympics photographed by Evan Leeson)

4. Work With Ethical Investors

Finally, notwithstanding the challenges described in the Guardian article that I linked to above, some financial institutions do offer support for “Smart” and sustainable initiatives.

Vancouver’s “Change Everything” online community, for example, was an early pioneer in exploiting the power of social media to support social and environmental initiatives; it was created by Vancouver’s Credit Union, Vancity, a financial institution with social objectives.

Similarly, Sustainable Enterprise Strategies, who provide crucial support and incubation services to businesses and social enterprises in the most challenged communities in Sunderland, are supported by the UK’s Co-Operative Bank; and IBM and Citi-Group have collaborated to create a financing solution for city’s to invest in Streetline’s “Smart Parking” solution, which has reduced both traffic congestion and environmental pollution in cities such as San Francisco.

These are just some of the ways in which financial institutions have already been engaged to support Smarter Cities initiatives. They can surely be persuaded to do so more extensively by proposals that may have social or environmental objectives, but that are also well-formed from a financial perspective.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed”

All of the initiatives that I’ve described in this article are are already under way. As the science fiction author William Gibson memorably said – in what is now the last century – “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed”.

We should not wait for new, large-scale sources of Smarter City funding to appear before we start to transform our cities – we cannot afford to; and it’s simply not going to happen. What we must do is look at the progress that is already being made by cities, entrepreneurs and communities across the world, and follow their example.

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Open urbanism: why the information economy will lead to sustainable cities

October 11, 2012 16 Comments

(Delegates browsing the exhibition space in Fira Barcelona at the World Bank’s Urban Research and Knowledge Symposium “Rethinking Cities”)

On Monday this week I attended the World Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” Symposium in Barcelona.  I was asked to give presentations to the Symposium on the contributions technology could make to two challenges: improving social and physical mobility in cities; and the encouragement of change to more sustainable behaviours by including “externalities” (such as social and environmental costs) in the prices of goods and services.

(In her speech ahead of the Rio +20 Summit, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said that one of the challenges for achieving a sustainable, equitably distributed return to growth following the recent economic challenges was that these externalities are not currently included in prices).

These two topics are clearly linked. The lack of access that some city communities have to economic and personal opportunity is in part a social consequence of the way that systems such as education, transport and  planning operate.

As human beings, however altruistic we are capable of being, each day we take tens or hundreds of decisions which, in the moment, are consciously or subconsciously based on selfish motivations. We drive cars to work because it’s quicker and more pleasant than using public transport; or because it’s quicker, easier and safer than cycling, for example. The accumulation of all of these decisions by all of us defines the behaviour of the cities we inhabit.

In principle we might all be better off – proximity allowing – if we cycled or walked to our places of work, or to school with our children. It would be safer because there would be less traffic; both the exercise and the reduction in pollution would improve our health; and we would probably talk to our neighbours more in the process. One of the reasons we don’t currently choose cycling or walking for these journeys is that we are too busy working to afford the time involved in doing so. Crudely speaking, we are in competition with each other to earn enough money to survive comfortably and to afford the lifestyles we aspire to.

(The Copenhagen Wheel bike photographed by Sujil Shah. The wheel stores energy under braking and uses it to power an electric motor when required and shares information with a smartphone app.)

“Game Theory” – the mathematical analysis of human decision-making in groups – has something interesting to say on this subject. To oversimplify a complex and subtle field, Game Theory predicts that if we suspect each other of behaving selfishly, then we will behave selfishly too; but that when we observe others behaving in the common interest, then we are likely to behave in the same way.

So if we all knew that all of us were going to spend a little less time at work in order to walk with our children to school and then cycle to work, then we could do so, safe in the knowledge that individually we wouldn’t lose out, couldn’t we?

Obviously, that’s a ridiculous suggestion.

Except … in his plenary talk at the World Bank Symposium, Harvard Professor of Economics Edward Glaeser – author of “Triumph of the City” – at one point commented that part of the shift towards a more sustainable global economy might be for those of us who live in developed economies to forgo some monetary wealth in favour of living in more attractive cities.

So just maybe the suggestion wasn’t completely crazy, after all.

In Monday’s discussions at the Symposium we explored how sustainable choices could be made available in a way that appeals to the motivations of individuals and communities. We examined several ways to create positive and negative incentives through pricing; but also examples of simply “removing the barriers” to making such choices.

For example, if information was made available on demand to make it easier to plan a complete door-to-door journey using sustainable forms of transport such as cycling, buses, trains and shared car journeys, would people make less individual journeys in private cars?

Services are already emerging to provide this information, such as Moovel (a commercial offering) and Open Trip Planner (a free service using crowdsourced data). They are just two examples of the ways in which the availability of information is making our cities more open and transparent. At the moment, both services are too new for us to make an assessment of their impact; but it will be fascinating to observe their progress.

(The Portland, Oregon implementation of Open Trip Planner)

The lesson of Game Theory is that this transparency – which I think of as “Open Urbanism” in this context – is what is required to enable and encourage all of us to make the sustainable choices that in their collective impact could make a real difference to the way that cities work.

I’d like to explore four aspects of Open Urbanism a little further to support that idea: Open Thinking; Open Data; Open Systems and Open Markets.

Open Thinking

The simplest expression of Open Urbanism is through engagement and education. In the afternoon plenary debate at the Rethinking Cities symposium, the inspirational Jaime Lerner spoke of a city recycling programme that has been operating successfully for many years; and that involves citizens taking the time to separate recyclable waste in return for no direct individual benefit whatsoever. So how were they persuaded to spend their time in this way?

It simply began by teaching children why sorting and recycling waste was important, and how to do it. Those children taught and persuaded their parents to adopt the behaviour; and in time they taught their own children. In this way, recycling became a cultural habit. Jaime later referred to the general concept of “urban acupuncture” – finding a handful of people who have the ability to change, and understanding what it takes to encourage them to change – a bit like planting a tiny needle in exactly the right place in the city.

Open Data

The information available about cities, businesses, current events and every other aspect of life is increasing dramatically; through the Open Data movement; through crowdsourced information; through the spread of news and opinion via social media; and through the myriad new communication forms that are appearing and spreading every day. The availability of this information, and the awareness that it creates amongst us all of how our cities and our world behave, creates a powerful force for change.

For example, a UK schoolgirl recently provoked a national debate concerning the standard of school meals simply by blogging about the meals that were offered to her each day at school, and in particular commenting on their health implications.  And my colleagues in IBM along with our partners Royal Haskoning and Green Ventures have helped the city of Peterborough to understand, combine, visualise and draw insight from information concerning the environment, the economy, transport and social challenges in order to better inform planning and decision making.

Open Systems

The next stage is to develop models from this data that can simulate and predict how the many systems within cities interact; and the outcomes that result from those interactions. IBM’s recent “Smarter Cities Challenge” in my home city of Birmingham studied detailed maps of the systems in the city and their inputs and outputs, and helped Birmingham City Council understand how to developed those maps into a tool to predict the outcomes of proposed policy changes. In the city of Portland, Oregon – as shown in the video below – a similar interactive tool has already been produced.

(A video describing the “systems dynamics” project carried out by IBM in Portland, Oregon to model the interactions between city systems)

As data is made available from city systems in realtime, these models can be used not just to explore potential changes in policy; but to predict the dynamic behaviour of cities and create intelligent, pro-active – and even pre-emptive – responses. We can collect and access data now from an astonishing variety of sources: there are 30 billion RFID tags embedded into our world, across entire ecosystems of activity; we have 1 billion mobile phones with cameras able to capture and share images and events; and everything from  domestic appliances to vehicles to buildings is increasingly able to monitor its location, condition and performance and communicate that information to the outside world.

These sources can tell us which parking spaces are occupied, and which are free, for example. Streetline are using this information in San Francisco to create a market for parking spaces that reduces traffic congestion in the city. In South Bend, Indiana, an analytic system helps to predict and prevent wastewater overflows by more intelligently managing the city’s water infrastructure based on realtime information from sensors monitoring it. The city estimates that they have avoided the need to invest in hundreds of millions of dollars of upgrades to the physical capacity of the infrastructure as a result.

If such information is made openly available to innovators in city economies and communites, surprising new systems can be created. At a recent “hackathon” in Birmingham, an “app” was created that connects catering services with excess food to food distribution charities who can use it.

(The QR code that enabled Will Grant of Droplet to buy me a coffee at Birmingham Science Park Aston using Droplet’s local smartphone payment solution; and the receipt that documents the transaction)

That same information can create an appeal to our sense of community and place. The city of Dubuque in Iowa provides citizens and businesses with smart meters that measure and analyse their water use. They can detect when domestic appliances are used on inefficient settings, or when there is a leak in the water supply.

A pilot project in Dubuque found that people were twice as likely to act on this information when they were not only provided with insight into their own water usage; but also provided with a  score that ranked their water conversation performance compared to that of their neighbours.

Open Markets

To return to the initial subject of this article, interesting new technology-enabled systems such as local currencies are emerging that could embed information from open city systems into the pricing systems of new markets within cities – and thereby quantify the cost of “externalities” in those markets. For instance, the Brixton and Bristol Pounds are local currencies intended to reinforce local economic synergies; and in Birmingham Droplet are now making their first payments through their local SmartPhone Payment system which similarly operates between local merchants.

We are on the cusp of incredibly exciting possibilities. Local currencies and trading systems could enable marketplaces in locally-generated power; or in localised manufacturing using technologies such as 3D printing. They could exploit distribution systems such as the one that Amazon make available to their marketplace traders; and underground waste and recycling systems that take waste and recyclables direct from the home to the appropriate recycling and disposal centres.

I can only image the city systems that might result if these capabilities and sources of information were made openly available to innovators within city communities. They could create solutions that are Smarter than we can imagine. Personally I’m convinced that this “Open Urbanism” is an essential part of the journey towards the sustainable city of the future.

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