The future of open urbanism

December 4, 2012 1 Comment

(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 “Open urbanism: why the information economy will lead to sustainable cities“).

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

The rapid evolution of sensors, analytics, and automation technologies and their application to city systems such as transport, energy, and utilities offer a glimpse of the future.

These systems will support city populations more efficiently and sustainably. In South Bend, Ind., for example, an analytic system helps to predict and prevent wastewater overflows, avoiding the need to invest in hundreds of millions of dollars for upgrades for the system’s physical capacity.

However, the real power of these intelligent infrastructures is in their ability to influence our choices.

Stockholm’s road-use charging system, for example, influences the behaviour of travelers considering driving into the city and has reduced congestion and improved environmental quality.

At the World Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” Symposium in Barcelona in October, I took part in a panel discussion on whether this approach of including “externalities” (such as social and environmental costs) in prices would encourage widespread adoption of sustainable behaviours. The panel concluded that, whilst pricing is a useful tool, it’s not the only one and not sufficient on its own.

(The remainder of this article, which explores the opportunity for technology to encourage sustainable choices, can be found on UBM’s Future Cities site, as “The Future of Open Urbanism“).

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Inspirational Simpli-City

November 22, 2012 4 Comments

(Recycling bins in Curitiba, Brazil photographed by Ana Elisa Ribeiro)

In the past few years, terms such as “Smart Cities” and “Future Cities” have emerged to capture the widespread sense that the current decade is one in which trends in technology, the economy, demographics and the environment are coinciding in an exciting and meaningful way.

Common patterns have emerged in the technology platforms that enable us to address these economic, social and environmental challenges. For example, the “Digital Cities Exchange” research programme at Imperial College, London; the “FI-WARE” project researching the core platform for the “future internet”; the “European Platform for Intelligent Cities (EPIC)“; and IBM’s own “Intelligent Operations Centre” all share a similar architecture.

I think of these platforms as 21st Century “civic infrastructures”. They will provide services that can be composed into new city systems and local marketplaces. Those services will include the management of personal data and identity; authentication; local currencies; micro-payments; and the ability to access data about city systems, amongst others.

But whilst some trends in technology are technically cohesive and can be defined by a particular architecture – as was the case for client/server computing, distributed computing, the initial emergence of the mobile internet, or Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) – other trends are more nebulous.

Five years ago, my role for IBM was to develop and evangelise the opportunities that social computing  and “Web 2.0” represented for our customers. Whilst various patterns emerged to express the ways in which technology at that time could provide new value to businesses, communities and individuals, no single technology or platform accompanied the trend. Rather, “Web 2.0” was the label for a period in time in which the internet and related technologies once again became a valuable source of innovation following the “dot.com crash”. Tim O’Reilly, widely credited with coining the term “Web 2.0”, acknowledged this interpretation in his “How to succeed in 2007” interview with CNN.

Cities are such complex systems of systems, and face such a multitude of challenges in a rich variety of contexts, that no single technology solution could possibly address them all. In fact an incredibly rich variety of technologies has already been used to create “Smart” systems in cities. But whilst I’m preparing an article that I hope to publish on this blog next week that lays out a framework for considering those technologies systematically, there’s a more fundamental observation that’s worth making:

Some of the technologies at the heart of urban innovations are incredibly simple.

(The conceptual architecture for the “European Platform for Intelligent Cities” research project)

15 years ago, I lived through the transformation of a city neighbourhood that illustrates this point. It involved community activism and crowdsourced information, enabled by an accessible technology – analogue photography.

As a University student in Birmingham, I lived in rented accommodation in the city’s Balsall Heath area. Balsall Heath has one of Birmingham’s largest Muslim communities, in addition to its substantial student population.

And, for the best part of half a century from the 1950s to the 1990s, it was Birmingham’s “red light” district, the centre of prostitution in the city.

At the time, Balsall Heath’s prostitution trade was so open that Cheddar Road – just across the street from the house that I lived in – was the only road in the UK with houses with “red light” front rooms.

Balsall Heath was clearly a district with substantial differences in culture – which were accommodated very peacefully, I should say. But in 1994, members of the Muslim community decided to change their neighbourhood. They put out old sofas and chairs on street corners, and sat on them each night, photographing anyone walking or driving around the area seeking prostitutes. Those simple steps tapped into the social motivations of those people and had a powerfully discouraging effect on them. Over the course of a year, prostitution was driven out of Balsall Heath for the first time in 50 years. It has never returned, and the district and its communities were strengthened as a result. The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has referred to the achievements of Balsall Heath’s community as an inspiration for his “Big Society” initiative.

I have just given a very simplified description of a complex set of events and issues; and in particular, I did not include the perspective of the working women who were perhaps the most vulnerable people involved. But this example of a simple technology (analogue photography) applied by a community to improve their district, with an understanding of the personal and social motivations that affect individual behaviour and choice, is an example that I have been regularly reminded of throughout my work in social media and Smarter Cities.

(Photo from Digital Balsall Heath of residents warning kerb-crawlers on Cheddar Road in the 1990s that they would be watched and recorded)

The city systems facing economic, demographic and environmental challenges today are immensely complex. They provide life-support for city populations – feeding, transporting, and educating them; providing healthcare; and supporting individuals, communities and businesses. As we continue to optimise their operation to support larger, more dense urban populations, maintaining their resilience is a significant challenge.

At the same time, though, the simplicity of Balsall Heath’s community action in the 1990s is inspirational; and there are many other examples.

Jaime Lerner started one of the earliest and most effective city recycling programmes in the world by harnessing the enthusiasm of children to influence the behaviour of their parents. In Mexico City a new “bartering market” allows residents to exchange recyclable waste material for food. In Kenya, SMS messages are used to optimise the distribution of malaria medication between local pharmacists; and in Australia, OzHarvest redistribute excess food from restaurants and hotels to charities supporting the vulnerable.

These innovations will not always be simply transferable from one city to another; but they could form the basis of a catalogue or toolkit of re-usable ideas, as was suggested by the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in their research on urban innovation in Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, echoing Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s “Collage City“.

As I wrote recently in the article “Zen and the art of messy urbanism“, many of the Smart systems of tomorrow will be surprising innovations that cut across and disrupt the industry sectors and classifications of city systems that we understand today; and in order to provide food, energy, water, transport and other services to city populations, they will need to be robustly engineered. But drawing inspiration from good, simple ideas with their roots in human behaviour rather than new technology is surely a good starting point from which to begin our journey towards discovering them.

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Should technology improve cities, or should cities improve technology?

October 23, 2012 5 Comments

(Photo of the Queens Arms in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter by Ian Edwards)

I was honoured this week to be invited to join the Academy of Urbanism, a society of professionals, academics and policy makers from a variety of backgrounds whose work is concerned in some way with cities. As a technology professional who has increasingly worked in an urban context over the past few years, I try to be as conscious of what I don’t know about cities as what I do; and I’m hoping that the Academy will offer me the opportunity to learn from its many expert members.

In fact, in a discussion today with an expert from the property development sector, I found myself reversing my usual direction of thinking concerning the relationship between technology and cities: when asked “how can technology contribute to improving property development” I replied that I was more interested in the question “how can property development improve technology?”.

I spend a lot of my time working both with City Councils and with the ecosystems of entrepreneurs and small businesses in cities; especially those businesses that create or use technology. Such businesses are – rightly, in my view – seen as the heart of a sustainable economy by many cities. They create innovate products and services in high value markets; they often operate in local networks of supply and demand that create self-reinforcing growth in the city economy; and they export products and services nationally and internationally.

Almost by definition these businesses create value in a way that is agile and closely linked to local market and cultural context; they are the antithesis of the sort of large-scale, process-driven, technology work that it is easy and cost-effective to describe in writing in order that its delivery can be commissioned from the lowest cost supplier internationally. These are amongst the reasons that the excellent Microsoft-sponsored “Developing the Future” report in 2007 cited this sector as key to growth in the UK economy.

It’s obvious that making office space and technology infrastructure such as broadband connectivity available to businesses of this sort is important; what’s less obvious is what else is required in order to create a successful, sustainable, growing cluster of such businesses with the capability to have a significant overall impact on a city economy.

Two aspects of that challenge that have been interesting me recently are: how do cities attract the young, skilled people who might start or work for such businesses? And: how can cities make themselves attractive places for those people to grow older, mature their business and professional skills, and start families?

Whilst I often write on this blog about my own work in the UK, I spoke at length with a colleague this week who is helping a fast-growing African city to contemplate these precise issues. In a single, global economy, they matter to cities everywhere.

By coincidence, the Urban Repairs Club visited the Jewellery Quarter in my home city of Birmingham this week. Their report of what they found is insightful and very relevant to this subject. I moved to Birmingham in 1990, just in time to annoy shoppers in the city’s old Bullring shopping centre by busking as a university student, before it was replaced by the new Bullring which revitalised the city’s retail centre. The Urban Repairs Club article well reflects both the changes for the better since that period; and the challenges that remain.

(Photo of machines from the industrial revolution in Birmingham’s Science Museum by Chris Moore)

Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution; it is where the powered mass-manufacture of designed items (such as badges, coins, and belt buckles) was first invented, in between the creation of one-off objects of art and the mass production of undecorated functional items.

It retains that industrial heritage today in a way that is entirely uncontrived and that has not been “restored” or recreated as a homage to history. It contains green spaces; some of Birmingham’s most interesting restaurants and evening venues; and affordable housing. In many ways it reminds me of the comments made by London-based technology entrepreneurs in the recent Demos “Tale of Tech City” report describing what attracts them to Shoreditch – and what will not necessarily attract them to use the facilities of the Olympic legacy sites.

At the risk of entering into a controversial debate in my home city, one of its challenges is that the attractions of the Jewellery Quarter are less than ideally connected to some key economic areas in Birmingham, such as the technology incubation campus at Birmingham Science Park Aston; or the hearts of the digital media and creative sectors around Fazeley Studios and the Custard Factory. The Urban Repairs Club report discusses some of the features of Birmingham’s urban landscape that cause this separation: it is possible to walk between all of these areas, for example; but it is not pleasant to do so, and it is not a walk I would undertake on a dark autumn or winter evening with my family. That reluctance might arise more from my perception of the area’s character than its reality; but it’s on the basis of perception that such decisions are taken.

A colleague in Birmingham commented that the deficiencies of urban environments such as those highlighted by the Urban Repairs Club are often impacts of decisions in property development and transport that are driven by financial and economic outcomes and that don’t adequately recognise the importance of social mobility, social cohesion and sustainability.

Those comments reminded me of a passage in Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, “Collapse“. In it, Diamond is concerned with the ways in which societies respond to environmental challenges that threaten their survival. As historic examples, he studies Easter Island and Norse Greenland, and in the present day he discusses the situations of Australia and the US State of Montana.

(Photo by Stefan of Himeji, Japan, showing the forest that covers much of Japan’s landmass enclosing – and enclosed by – the city)

In particular, his comments on Japan’s successful slowing of population growth and reversal of deforestation between the 17th and 19th Centuries struck me:

“… a suite of factors … caused both the elite and the masses in Japan to recognise their long-term stake in preserving their own forests, to a degree greater than for most other people.”

He goes on to say that those factors included the fact that the ruling Tokugawa shoguns:

“… having imposed peace and eliminated rival armies at home, correctly anticipated that they were at little risk of a revolt at home or an invasion from overseas. They expected their own Tokugawa family to remain in control of Japan, which in fact it did for 250 years.”

Unless I’m misreading the current political situation, 250 years of hereditary governance is not something that’s likely to happen in the UK; but there’s a hint of the modern-day expression of that stability of vested interest in the Urban Repair Club’s report. In it, they highlight that the property section of Birmingham’s newspaper, the Birmingham Post has the subtitle: “EdgbastonHarborneHerefordshireStaffordshireSolihullWarwickshireShropshireStourbridgeWorcestershire”; and that if these are the areas that Birmingham’s citizens are thought to aspire to live in, then it’s notable that only two of them (Edgbaston and Harborne) are in Birmingham; the others are mostly nearby market towns and the counties that surround them.

This is a typical consequence of the trend in the UK for those who are approaching middle-age, and becoming more experienced businesspeople and professionals, to leave cities as they also become parents; in the search for more space, better schools and a more peaceful lifestyle. Edward Glaesar referred to the same drive in “The Triumph of the City” and reflected that he himself had moved from a city centre to a suburb for precisely these reasons.

If we could counter that trend, we might help cities to address two challenges: the loss from the city-centre economy of some of their most important business talent (as highlighted in the Centre for Cities reports “Outlook for Cities 2012” and “Hidden potential: Supporting growth in Sunderland & other mid-sized cities“); and the development of longer-term relationships between people and place; particularly those people whose careers advance to the point that they are in the position to take the investment and property development decisions that shape our cities.

(Photo byC. Wess Daniels of Bournville, the urban village created by the long-standing relationship between the Cadbury family and the area of Birmingham in which their chocolate factory is located)

The Urban Repairs Club article suggests that some of the Corporations responsible for modern developments in Birmingham act in their own short-term financial interest, and not in the city’s interest. In contrast to this are the attitudes expressed recently by Sir Roger Carr, president of the Confederation of British Industry and chair of Centrica, the UK’s largest energy company; and Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. Recognising the reality that we live in a globalised world with a single capitalist economy, both Sir Roger and Professor Petriglieri are meditating on the opportunity for business to be a force for good; and on the importance of globally mobile leaders retaining a prolonged, local sense of place. I suspect that the truth is complex and consists of elements of all of these perspectives.

To return to Jared Diamond, in an analysis of the factors common to successful responses to environmental challenges, he comments:

“Leaders who don’t just react passively, who have the courage to anticipate crises or to act early, and who make strong insightful decisions of top-down management really can make a huge difference to their societies. So can similarly courageous, active citizens practicing bottom-up management.”

Achieving that balance will help cities such as Birmingham, and others across the world, to be successful in achieving many of their goals, including the creation of high-value, sustainable local economies – whether in the technology sector or elsewhere.

The relationships between sustainability and economy are many-faceted. Diamond comments that his analysis included examples in which:

“one society succeeded while one or more societies practising different economies in the same environment failed”

And that therefore:

“not only the environment, but also the proper choice of an economy to fit the environment, is important.”

Correspondingly, the right urban environment is needed to support the economy. Not just one in which the technology and transport infrastructure is available to support distribution, services and operations; but one that attracts people to live and work; and that provides both physical and social mobility for everyone. Those are challenges that in some ways technology can assist – through the provision of more complete, holistic information, for example – but they will not be solved by technology. They’ll be solved – I hope – by the combination of talent and disciplines represented in organisations such as the Academy of Urbanism; or that in some cases come together naturally in city communities to create enlightened “bottom-up” activism.

I’m hoping to learn much more about all of these possibilities as I get to know my fellow Academicians.

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Why Open City Data is the Brownfield Regeneration Challenge of the Information Age

October 18, 2012 9 Comments

(Graphic of New York’s ethnic diversity from Eric Fischer)

I often use this blog to explore ways in which technology can add value to city systems. In this article, I’m going to dig more deeply into my own professional expertise: the engineering of the platforms that make technology reliably available.

Many cities are considering how they can create a city-wide information platform. The potential benefits are considerable: Dublin’s “Dublinked” platform, for example, has stimulated the creation of new high-technology businesses, and is used by scientific researchers to examine ways in which the city’s systems can operate more efficiently and sustainably. And the announcements today by San Francisco that they are legislating to promote open data and have appointed a “Chief Data Officer” for the city are sure to add to the momentum.

But if cities such as Dublin, San Francisco and Chicago have found such platforms so useful, why aren’t there more of them already?

To answer that question, I’d like to start by setting an expectation:

City information platforms are not “new” systems; they are a brownfield regeneration challenge for technology.

Just as urban regenerations need to take account of the existing physical infrastructures such as buildings, transport and utility networks; when thinking about new city technology solutions we need to consider the information infrastructure that is already in place.

A typical city authority has many hundreds of IT systems and applications that store and manage data about their city and region. Private sector organisations who operate services such as buses, trains and power, or who simply own and operate buildings, have similarly large and complex portfolios of applications and data.

So in every city there are thousands – probably tens of thousands – of applications and data sources containing relevant information. (The Dublinked platform was launched in October 2011 with over 3,000 data sets covering the environment, planning, water and transport, for example). Only a very small fraction of those systems will have been designed with the purpose of making information available to and usable by city stakeholders; and they certainly will not have been designed to do so in a joined-up, consistent way.

(A map of the IT systems of a typical organisation, and the interconnections between then)

The picture to the left is a reproduction of a map of the IT systems of a real organisation, and the connections between them. Each block in the diagram represents a major business application that manages data; each line represents a connection between two or more such systems. Some of these individual systems will have involved hundreds of person-years of development over decades of time. Engineering the connections between them will also have involved significant effort and expense.

Whilst most organisations improve the management of their systems over time and sometimes achieve significant simplifications, by and large this picture is typical of the vast majority of organisations today, including those that support the operation of cities.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore some of the specific challenges for city data and open data that result from this complexity.

My intention is not to argue against bringing city information together and making it available to communities, businesses and researchers. As I’ve frequently argued on this blog, I believe that doing so is a fundamental enabler to transforming the way that cities work to meet the very real social, economic and environmental challenges facing us. But unless we take a realistic, informed approach and undertake the required engineering diligence, we will not be successful in that endeavour.

1. Which data is useful?

Amongst those thousands of data sets that contain information about cities, on which should we concentrate the effort required to make them widely available and usable?

That’s a very hard question to answer. We are seeking innovative change in city systems, which by definition is unpredictable.

One answer is to look at what’s worked elsewhere. For example, wherever information about transport has been made open, applications have sprung up to make that information available to travellers and other transport users in useful ways. In fact most information that describes the urban environment is likely to quickly prove useful; including maps, land use characterisation, planning applications, and the locations of shops, parks, public toilets and other facilities .

The other datasets that will prove useful are less predictable; but there’s a very simple way to discover them: ask. Ask local entrepreneurs what information they need to start new businesses. Ask existing businesses what information about the city would help them be more successful. Ask citizens and communities.

This is the approach we have followed in Sunderland, and more recently in Birmingham through the Smart City Commission and the recent “Smart Hack” weekend. The Dublinked information partnership in Dublin also engages in consultation with city communities and stakeholders to prioritise the datasets that are made available through the platform. The Knight Foundation’s “Information Needs of Communities” report is an excellent explanation of the importance of taking this approach.

2. What data is available?

How do we know what information is contained in those hundreds or thousands of data sets? Many individual organisations find it difficult to “know what they know”; across an entire city the challenge is much harder.

Arguably, that challenge is greatest for local authorities: whilst every organisation is different, as a rule of thumb private sector companies tend to need tens to low hundreds of business systems to manage their customers, suppliers, products, services and operations. Local authorities, obliged by law to deliver hundreds or even thousands of individual services, usually operate systems numbering in the high hundreds or low thousands. The process of discovering, cataloguing and characterising information systems is time-consuming and hence potentially expensive.

The key to resolving the dilemma is an open catalogue which allows this information to be crowdsourced. Anyone who knows of or discovers a data source that is available, or that could be made available, and whose existence and contents are not sensitive, can document it. Correspondingly, anyone who has a need for data that they cannot find or use can document that too. Over time, a picture of the information that describes a city, including what data is available and what is not, will build up. It will not be a complete picture – certainly not initially; but this is a practically achievable way to create useful information.

3. What is the data about?

The content of most data stores is organised by a “key” – a code that indicates the subject of each element of data. That “key” might be a person, a location or an organisation. Unfortunately, all of those things are very difficult to identify correctly and in a way that will be universally understood.

For example, do the following pieces of information refer to the same people, places and organisations?

“Mr. John Jones, Davis and Smith Delicatessen, Harbourne, Birmingham”
“J A Jones, Davies and Smythe, Harborne, B17”
“The Manager, David and Smith Caterers, Birmingham B17”
“Mr. John A and Mrs Jane Elizabeth Jones, 14 Woodhill Crescent, Northfield, Birmingham”

This information is typical of what might be stored in a set of IT systems managing such city information as business rates, citizen information, and supplier details. As human beings we can guess that a Mr. John A Jones lives in Northfield with his wife Mrs. Jane Elizabeth Jones; and that he is the manager of a delicatessen called “Davis and Smith” in Harborne which offers catering services. But to derive that information we have had to interpret several different ways of writing the names of people and businesses; tolerate mistakes in spelling; and tolerate different semantic interpretations of the same entity (is “Davis and Smith” a “Delicatessen” or a “Caterer”? The answer depends on who is asking the question).

(Two views of Exhibition Road in London, which can be freely used by pedestrians, for driving and for parking; the top photograph is by Dave Patten. How should this area be classified? As a road, a car park, a bus-stop, a pavement, a park – or something else? My colleague Gary looks confused by the question in the bottom photograph!)

All of these challenges occur throughout the information stored in IT systems. Some technologies – such as “single view” – exist that are very good at matching the different formats of names, locations and other common pieces of information. In other cases, information that is stored in “codes” – such as “LHR” for “London Heathrow” and “BHX” for “Birmingham International Airport” can be decoded using a glossary or reference data.

Translating semantic meanings is more difficult. For example, is the A45 from Birmingham to Coventry a road that is useful for travelling between the two cities? Or a barrier that makes it difficult to walk from homes on one side of the road to shops on the other? In time semantic models of cities will develop to systematically reconcile such questions, but until they do, human intelligence and interpretation will be required.

4. Sometimes you don’t want to know what the data is about

Sometimes, as soon as you know what something is about, you need to forget that you know. I led a project last year that applied analytic technology to derive new insights from healthcare data. Such data is most useful when information from a variety of sources that relate to the same patient is aggregated together; to do that, the sort of matching I’ve just described is needed. But patient data is sensitive, of course; and in such scenarios patients’ identities should not be apparent to those using the data.

Techniques such as anonymisation and aggregation can be applied to address this requirement; but they need to be applied carefully in order to retain the value of data whilst ensuring that identities and other sensitive information are not inadvertently exposed.

For example, the following information contains an anonymised name and very little address information; but should still be enough for you to determine the identity of the subject:

Subject: 00764
Name: XY67 HHJK6UB
Address: SW1A
Profession: Leader of a political party

(Please submit your answers to me at @dr_rick on Twitter!)

This is a contrived example, but the risk is very real. I live on a road with about 100 houses. I know of one profession to which only two people who live on the road belong. One is a man and one is a woman. It would be very easy for me to identify them based on data which is “anonymised” naively. These issues become very, very serious when you consider that within the datasets we are considering there will be information that can reveal the home address of people who are now living separately from previously abusive partners, for example.

5. Data can be difficult to use

(How the OECD identified the “Top 250 ICT companies” in 2006)

There are many, many reasons why data can be difficult to use. Data contained within a table within a formatted report document is not much use to a programmer. A description of the location of a disabled toilet in a shop can only be used by someone who understands the language it is written in. Even clearly presented numerical values may be associated with complex caveats and conditions or expressed in quantities specific to particular domains of expertise.

For example, the following quote from a 2006 report on the global technology industry is only partly explained by the text box shown in the image on the left:

“In 2005, the top 250 ICT firms had total revenues of USD 3 000 billion”.

(Source: “Information Technology Outlook 2006“, OECD)

Technology can address some of these issues: it can extract information from written reports; transform information between formats; create structured information from written text; and even, to a degree, perform automatic translation between languages. But doing all of that requires effort; and in some cases human expertise will always be required.

In order for city information platforms to be truly useful to city communities, then some thought also needs to be given for how those communities will be offered support to understand and use that information.

6. Can I trust the data?

Several British banks have recently been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for falsely reporting the interest rates at which they are able to borrow money. This information, the “London InterBank Offered Rate” (LIBOR) is an example of open data. The Banks who have been fined were found to have under-reported the interest rate at which they were able to borrow – this made them appear more creditworthy than they actually were.

Such deliberate manipulation is just one of the many reasons we may have to doubt information. Who creates information? How qualified are they to provide accurate information? Who assesses that qualification and tests the accuracy of the information?

For example, every sensor which measures physical information incorporates some element of uncertainty and error. Location information derived from Smartphones is usually accurate to within a few meters when derived from GPS data; but only a few hundred meters when derived by triangulation between mobile transmission masts. That level of inaccuracy is tolerable if you want to know which city you are in; but not if you need to know where the nearest cashpoint is. (Taken to its extreme, this argument has its roots in “Noise Theory“, the behaviour of stochastic processes and ultimately Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics. Sometimes it’s useful to be a Physicist!).

Information also goes out of date very quickly. If roadworks are started at a busy intersection, how does that affect the route-calculation services that many of us depend on to identify the quickest way to get from one place to another? When such roadworks make bus stops inaccessible so that temporary stops are erected in their place, how is that information captured? In fact, this information is often not captured; and as a result, many city transport authorities do not know where all of their bus stops are currently located.

I have barely touched in this section on an enormously rich and complex subject. Suffice to say that determining the “trustability” of information in the broadest sense is an immense challenge.

7. Data is easy to lose

(A computer information failure in Las Vegas photographed by Dave Herholz)

Whenever you find that an office, hotel room, hospital appointment or seat on a train that you’ve reserved is double-booked you’ve experienced lost data. Someone made a reservation for you in a computer system; that data was lost; and so the same reservation was made available to someone else.

Some of the world’s most sophisticated and well-managed information systems lose data on occasion. That’s why we’re all familiar with it happening to us.

If cities are to offer information platforms that local people, communities and businesses come to depend on, then we need to accept that providing reliable information comes at a cost. This is one of the many reasons that I have argued in the past that “open data” is not the same thing as “free data”. If we want to build a profitable business model that relies on the availability of data, then we should expect to pay for the reliable supply of that data.

A Brownfield Regeneration for the Information Age

So if this is all so hard, should we simply give up?

Of course not; I don’t think so, anyway. In this article, I have described some very significant challenges that affect our ability to make city information openly available to those who may be able to use it. But we do not need to overcome all of those challenges at once.

Just as the physical regeneration of a city can be carried out as an evolution in dialogue and partnership with communities, as happened in Vancouver as part of the “Carbon Talks” programme, so can “information regeneration”. Engaging in such a dialogue yields insight into the innovations that are possible now; who will create them; what information and data they need to do so; and what social, environmental and financial value will be created as a result.

That last part is crucial. The financial value that results from such “Smarter City” innovations might not be our primary objective in this context – we are more likely to be concerned with economic, social and environmental outcomes; but it is precisely what is needed to support the financial investment required to overcome the challenges I have discussed in this article.

On a final note, it is obviously the case that I am employed by a company, IBM, which provides products and services that address those challenges. I hope that you have noticed that I have not mentioned a single one of those products or services by name in this article, nor provided any links to them. And whilst IBM are involved in some of the cities that I have mentioned, we are not involved in all of them.

I have written this article as a stakeholder in our cities – I live in one – and as an engineer; not as a salesman. I am absolutely convinced that making city information more widely available and usable is crucial to addressing what Professor Geoffrey West described as “the greatest challenges that the planet has faced since humans became social“. As a professional engineer of information systems I believe that we must be fully cognisant of the work involved in doing so properly; and as a practical optimist, I believe that it is possible to do so in affordable, manageable steps that create real value and the opportunity to change our cities for the better. I hope that I have managed to persuade you to agree.

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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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Tea, trust, and hacking – how Birmingham is getting Smarter

October 3, 2012 14 Comments

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

As I described in my last article on this blog, the second meeting of Birmingham’s Smart City Commission last week addressed the question: “what will make Birmingham a Smart City, not just a place where a few “smart things” happen?

A large part of our discussion was concerned with the way a city-level Smart initiative can engage in and enable the communities and individuals who are already creating innovations in the city.

Nick Booth of Podnosh told the Commission about his work running social media surgeries in Birmingham. Nick helps these conversations to take place across the city’s communities; their purpose is to share an understanding of the power that social media can offer to communities to share resources more effectively and create social value. Nick and the volunteers he works with were recently honoured by the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, with a “Big Society Award” in recognition of their work.

Social media is not the answer to all the challenges of Smarter Cities; but it still has tremendous unrealised potential to contribute to them. I’ve written many times on this blog about the fundamental changes that internet and social media technologies have caused in industries such as publishing, music and video over the last decade; but there are still many communities who are not yet making full use of them.

The physicist and biologist Geoffrey West’s work has shown that the nature of human social behaviour creates a feedback loop that will lead to ongoing growth in the size and density of city populations; and this in turn will create ongoing increases in the consumption of resources. As I remarked recently, there’s a growing consensus that we cannot continue to consume resources at the rate that this growth suggests. The solution, according to Professor West, is to create changes in the way that social and urban systems work. He is not prescriptive about what those changes should be; but in my view we have already seen enough examples of the use of social media to create sustainable systems to suggest that it could be at least part of the solution. Examples include Carbon Voyage‘s system for sharing taxis;  the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets in sustainable food production operated by Big Barn and Sustaination; and the Freecycle recycling network.

(Photo of a Social Media Surgery held in Birmingham by Nick Booth. The surgeries have now spread across the UK and to five other countries).

The social media surgeries that Nick runs in Birmingham are helping communities to create similar innovations for themselves. What makes them work is the personal philosophy that’s applied by those who engage in them: a willingness to “turn up and have something to offer” in an informal conversation.

In answer to the question “what could make Birmingham a Smart City?”, Nick went so far as to reply “having more conversations over cups of tea”.

Nick’s comment reminded me of one of the quotations from Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai that appears in Jim Jarmusch’s film “Ghost Dog“:

Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige’s wall there was this one: Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Master Ittei wrote: Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

The point is that behaving “lightly” and taking the trouble to go to meet people in the environments where they are comfortable are profoundly important components of the approach that makes social media surgeries work. They create trust, and invite contribution and co-creation. And they encourage those who receive help at one surgery in turn to offer help at another.

Several of us came together in Birmingham last weekend for another conversation to create value in the city: the “Smart Hack” organised by Gavin Broughton at Birmingham Science Park Aston – an example of the increasingly common “hackathons” in which developers contribute their time and expertise to create new “apps” for the cities where they live. I was really pleased that IBM helped to fund the facilities and catering for the event.

(As a brief aside: the word “hacking” can mean many things; but when it is used by computer programmers in this context, it means using technology in a clever and innovative way to solve a problem. It is a very positive activity. Some programmers would even describe the astonishing technology innovations that made it possible to land on the moon in 1969 as “hacks”, and would consider doing so to be a demonstration of their deep respect and admiration for the scientists and engineers involved).

Following a series of introductory provocations about Open Data and Smarter Cities technologies, about thirty of us discussed the challenges and opportunities facing Birmingham that such approaches could apply to. Within a short time, an idea had been proposed which seemed viable – could an “app” be created to connect charities that distribute food to catering services who might have leftover food to spare?

(The discussion group at #SmartHack in Birmingham photographed by Sebastian Lenton)

The importance of addressing wastage and efficiency in urban food systems is something that I’ve written about before on this blog. The idea the Smart Hack team created was carefully formulated as a way to reduce food wastage that would be compliant with food safety and hygiene legislation. A smaller team of 10 or so coders subsequently spent Saturday and Sunday building an app based on the idea, fuelled by beer and pizza – and by their own willingness to contribute to their city.

In Birmingham’s Smart City Commission we discussed how conversations such as social media surgeries and the “Smart Hack” lead to innovation; and asked whether they represent a “soft infrastructure” for Smarter Cities in which it is just as worthwhile to invest as the “hard infrastructure” with which we are perhaps more familiar – open data portals, network infrastructure and so on. I certainly think they do. I’ve spent today at the “Smart Infrastructure” summit organised by IBM and the Start Initiative having a similar discussion focussed on challenges, opportunities and communities in Glasgow, and the same thinking seemed to apply there.

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

This approach of engagement through conversation also offers cities a chance to deliver new “hard” infrastructures for Smarter Cities that are better suited to the needs of communities, innovators, citizens and businesses: by becoming a “listening” city, and by understanding and then removing some of the barriers that make it hard for small organisations to create successful innovations. That might mean investing in broadband or wireless internet coverage in areas that don’t have it; making public sector procurement processes more open to small businesses; or simply helping communities to win funding to build better places in which to come together to communicate and create ideas, such as the new “Container City” incubation facility for social enterprises in Sunderland.

The European Union recognised the importance of supporting social innovation this way in a recent report, “Empowering people, driving change – social innovation in the European Union“, and the European Commission’s president José Manuel Barroso will launch a social innovation competition on 1 October, the “Europe Social Innovation Prize“. The Guardian newspaper in the UK wrote an interesting article about these annoucements, and offering several other examples of the power of community-based social innovation.

If we are really going to make our cities “Smarter” and more successful, then we must allow all of the individuals and communities in cities to participate in that process. The way to start doing that is through conversations that build trust and create the environment for inclusive innovation. Tea, trust and hacking. It’s what will make Birmingham – and every other city – Smarter.

(This article and the events it describes are the result of the activities of many people, several of whom appear in the photographs I’ve used by Sebastian Lenton: Nick Booth of Podnosh; Gavin Broughton; David Roberts of DropletPay; James Cattell who following his great work on Open Data for Digital Birmingham has recently joined the Government Digital Service; Andy Mabbett; Oojal Jhutti of iWazat – who first suggested the idea for the food “app” at the “Smart Hack” event; and Andy Cowin of Sanfire who has forgotten more about creating innovation through conversations than I’ll ever know. I also owe a deep debt of thanks to Tom Baker and his colleagues at Sunderland City Council for introducing me to some of the amazing social innovators in Sunderland at the start of our work on Sunderland’s “City Cloud” – they have been an inspiration to me ever since).

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Four avatars of the metropolis: technologies that will change our cities

August 20, 2012 6 Comments

(Photo of Chicago by Trey Ratcliff)

Many cities I work with are encouraging clusters of innovative, high-value, technology-based businesses to grow at the heart of their economies. They are looking to their Universities and technology partners to assist those clusters in identifying the emerging sciences and technologies that will disrupt existing industries and provide opportunities to break into new markets.

In advising customers and partners on this subject, I’ve found myself drawn to four themes. Each has the potential to cause significant disruptions, and to create opportunities that innovative businesses can exploit. Each one will also cause enormouse changes in our lives, and in the cities where most of us live and work.

The intelligent web

(Diagram of internet tags associated with “Trafalgar” and their connections relevant to the perception of London by visitors to the city by unclesond)

My colleague and friend Dr Phil Tetlow characterises the world wide web as the biggest socio-technical information-computing space that has ever been created; and he is not alone (I’ve paraphrased his words slightly, but I hope he’ll agree I’ve kept the spirit of them intact).

The sheer size and interconnected complexity of the web is remarkable. At the peak of “web 2.0” in 2007 more new information was created in one year than in the preceding 5000 years. More important, though, are the number and speed of  transactions that are processed through the web as people and automated systems use it to exchange information, and to buy and sell products and services.

Larger-scale emergent phenomena are already resulting from this mass of interactions. They include universal patterns in the networks of links that form between webpages; and the fact that the informal collective activity of “tagging” links on social bookmarking sites tends to result in relatively stable vocabularies that describe the content of the pages that are linked to.

New such phenomena of increasing complexity and significance will emerge as the ability of computers to understand and process information in the forms in which it is used by humans grows; and as that ability is integrated into real-world systems. For example, the IBM “Watson” computer that competed successfully against the human champions of the television quiz show “Jeopardy” is now being used to help healthcare professionals identify candidate diagnoses based on massive volumes of research literature that they don’t have the time to read. Some investment funds now use automated engines to make investment decisions by analysing sentiments expressed on Twitter; and many people believe that self-driving cars will become the norm in the future following the award of a driving license to a Google computer by the State of Nevada.

As these astonishing advances become entwined with the growth in the volume and richness of information on the web, the effects will be profound and unpredictable. The new academic discipline of “Web Science” attempts to understand the emergent phenomena that might arise from a human-computer information processing system of such unprecedented scale. Many believe that our own intelligence emerges from complex information flows within the brain; some researchers in web science are considering the possibility that intelligence in some form might emerge from the web, or from systems like it.

That may seem a leap too far; and for now, it probably is. But as cities such as Birmingham, Sunderland and Dublin pursue the “open data” agenda and make progress towards the ideal of an “urban observatory“, the quantity, scope and richness of the data available on the web concerning city systems will increase many-fold. At the same time, the ability of intelligent agents such as Apple’s “Siri” smartphone technology, and social recommendation (or “decision support”) engines such as FourSquare will evolve too. Indeed, the domain of Smarter Cities is in large part concerned with the application of intelligent analytic software to data from city systems. Between the web of information and analytic technologies that are available now, and the possibilities for emergent artificial intelligence in the future, there lies a rich seam of opportunity for innovative individuals, businesses and communities to exploit the intelligent analysis of city data.

Things that make themselves

(Photo of a structure created by a superparamagnetic fluid containing magnetic nanoparticles in suspension, by Steve Jurvetson)

Can you imagine downloading designs for chocolate, training shoes and toys and then making them in your own home, whenever you like? What if you could do that for prosthetic limbs or even weapons?

3D printing makes all of this possible today. While 3D printers are still complex and expensive, they are rapidly becoming cheaper and easier to use. In time, more and more of us will own and use them. My one-time colleague Ian Hughes has long been an advocate; and Staffordshire University make their 3D printer available to businesses for prototyping and exploratory use.

Their spread will have profound consequences. Gun laws currently control weapons which are relatively large and need to be kept somewhere; and which leave a unique signature on each bullet they fire. But if guns can be “printed” from downloadable designs whenever they are required  – and thrown away afterwards because they are so easy to replace – then forensics will rarely in future have the opportunity to match a bullet to a gun that has been fired before. Enforcement of gun ownership will require the restriction of access to digital descriptions of gun designs. The existing widespread piracy of music and films shows how hard it will be to do that.

3D printers, combined with technologies such as social media, smart materials, nano- and bio-technology and mass customisation, will create dramatic changes in the way that physical products are designed and manufactured – or even grown. For example CocoWorks, a collaboration involving Warwick University, uses a combination of social media and 3D printing to allow groups of friends to collectively design confectionery that they can then “print out” and eat.

These changes will have significant implications for city economies. The reduction in wage differentials between developed and emerging economies already means that in some cases it is more profitable to manufacture locally in rapid response to market demand than to manufacture globally at lowest cost. In the near-future technology advances will accelerate a convergence between the advanced manufacturing, design, communication and information technology industries that means that city economic strategies cannot afford to focus on any of them separately. Instead, they should look for new value at the evolving intersections between them.

Of mice, men and cyborgs

(Professor Kevin Warwick, who in 2002 embedded a silicon chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his nervous system. Photo by M1K3Y)

If the previous theme represents the convergence of the information world and products and materials in the physical world; then we should also consider convergence between the information world and living beings.

The “mouse” that defined computer usage from the 1980s through to the 2000s was the first widely successful innovation in human/computer interaction for decades; more recently, the touchscreen has once again made computing devices accessible or acceptable to new communities. I have seen many people who would never choose to use a laptop become inseparable from their iPads; and two-year-old children understand them instinctively. The world will change as these people interact with information in new ways.

More exciting human-computer interfaces are already here – Apple’s intelligent agent for smartphones, “Siri”; Birmingham City University’s MotivPro motion-capture and vibration suit; the Emotiv headset that measures thoughts and can interpret them; and Google’s augmented reality glasses.

Even these innovations have been surpassed by yet more intimate connections between ourselves and the information world. Professor Kevin Warwick at Reading University has pioneered the embedding of technology into the human body (his own body, to be precise) since 2002; and in the effort to create ever-smaller pilotless drone aircraft, control technology has been implanted into insects. There are immense ethical and legal challenges associated with these developments, of course. But it is certain that boundaries will crumble between the information that is processed on a silicon substrate; information that is processed by DNA; and the actions taken by living people and animals.

Historically, growth in Internet coverage and bandwidth and the progress of digitisation technology led to the disintermediation of value chains in industries such as retail, publishing and music. As evolving human/computer interfaces make it possible to digitise new aspects of experience and expression, we will see a continuing impact on the media, communication and information industries. But we will also see unexpected impacts on industries that we have assumed so far to be relatively immune to such disruptions: surgery, construction, waste management, landscape gardening and arbitration are a few that spring to mind as possibilities. (Google futurist Thomas Frey speculated along similar lines in his excellent article “55 Jobs of the Future“).

Early examples are already here, such as Paul Jenning’s work at Warwick University on the engineering of the emotional responses of drivers to the cars they are driving. Looking ahead, there is enormous scope amidst this convergence for the academic, entrepreneurial and technology partners within city ecosystems to collaborate to create valuable new ideas and businesses.

Bartering 2.0

(Photo of the Brixton Pound by Matt Brown)

Civilisation has grown through the specialisation of trades and the diversification of economies. Urbanisation is defined in part by these concepts. They are made possible by the use of money, which provides an abstract quantification of the value of diverse goods and services.

However, we are increasingly questioning whether this quantification is complete and accurate, particularly in accounting for the impact of goods and services on the environments and societies in which they are made and delivered.

Historically, money replaced bartering,  a negotiation of the comparative value of goods and services within an immediate personal context, as the means of quantifying transactions. The abstraction inherent in money dilutes some of the values central to the bartering process. The growing availability of alternatives to traditional bartering and money is making us more conscious of those shortcomings and trade-offs.

Social media, which enables us to make new connections and perform new transactions, combined with new technology-based local currencies and trading systems, offer the opportunity to extend our personalised concepts of value in space and time when negotiating exchanges; and to encourage transactions that improve communities and their environments.

It is by no means clear what effect these grass-roots innovations will have on the vast system of global finance; nor on the social and environmental impact of our activities. But examples are appearing everywhere; from the local, “values-led” banks making an impact in America; to the widespread phenomenon of social enterprise; to the Brixton and Bristol local currencies; and to Droplet, who are aiming to make Birmingham the first city with a mobile currency.

These local currency mechanisms have the ability to support marketplaces trading goods and services such as food, energy, transport, expertise and many of the other commodities vital to the functioning of city economies; and those marketplaces can be designed to promote local social and environmental priorities. They have an ability that we are only just beginning to explore to augment and accelerate existing innovations such as the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets in sustainable food production operated by Big Barn and Sustaination; or what are so far simply community self-help networks such as Growing Birmingham.

As Smarter City infrastructures expose increasingly powerful and important capabilities to such enterprises – including the “civic hacking” movement – there is great potential for their innovations to contribute in significant ways to the sustainable growth and evolution of cities.

Some things never change

Despite these incredible changes, some things will stay the same. We will still travel to meet in person. We like to interact face-to-face where body language is clear and naturally understood, and where it’s pleasant to share food and drink. And the world will not be wholly equal. Humans are competitive, and human ingenuity will create things that are worth competing for. We will do so, sometimes fairly, sometimes not.

It’s also the case that predictions are usually wrong and futurologists are usually mistaken; so you have good cause to disregard everything you’ve just read.

But whether or not I have the details right, these trends are real, significant, and closer to the mainstream than we might expect. Somewhere in a city near you, entrepreneurs are starting new businesses based on them. Who knows which ones will succeed, and how?

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The amazing heart of a Smarter City: the innovation boundary

August 13, 2012 23 Comments

(Photo of a mouse by pure9)

Innovation has always been exciting, interesting and valuable; but recently it’s become essential.

The “mouse” that defined computer usage from the 1980s through to the 2000s was an amazing invention in its time. It was the first widely successful innovation in human/computer interaction since the typewriter keyboard and video display which came decades before it; and it made computers accessible to new communities of people for the first time.

But whilst the mouse, like the touchscreen more recently popularised by the iPhone and iPad, was a great innovation that increased the usability and productivity of personal computers, it wasn’t really necessary for a greater and pressing purpose. Its benefits came later as we explored its capabilities.

We now have a greater purpose that demands innovation: the need to make our cities and communities more sustainable, vibrant and equal in the face of the severe economic, environmental and demographic pressures that we face; and that are well described in the Royal Society’s “People and the Planet” report.

We have already seen those pressures create threats to food and energy security; and in recent months I’ve spoken to city leaders who are increasingly concerned with the difference in life expectancy between the most affluent and most deprived areas of their cities – it can be 10 years or more. There are much worse inequalities on a global scale, of course. But this is a striking local difference in the basic opportunity of people to live.

Barnett Council in North London famously predicted recently that within 20 years, unless significant changes in public services are made, they will be unable to afford to provide any services except social care. There will be no money left to collect waste, run parks and leisure facilities, clean streets or operate any of the other services that support and maintain cities and communities. I have spoken informally to other Councils who have come to similar conclusions.

All the evidence, including the scientific analysis of the behaviour and sustainability of city systems by the Physicist Geoffrey West, points to the need to create innovations that change the way that cities work.

But where will this innovation come from?

I think innovation of this sort takes place at an “innovation boundary”: the boundary between capability and need.

When a potentially transformative infrastructure such as a Smarter City technology platform is designed and deployed well, then the services it provides precisely embody that boundary.

This idea is fundamental to the concept of Smarter Cities, where we are concerned with the capability of technology to transform cities. Technology vendors – including, but not limited to, my employer IBM – are sometimes expected to use the Smarter City movement as a channel through which to sell generic technology platforms. As vendors, we do deliver technology platforms for cities, and they are part of the capability required to transform them. But they are not the only part – far from it. And they must not be generic.

(A smartphone alert sent to a commuter in a San Francisco pilot project by IBM Research and Caltrans that provides personalised daily predictions of commuting journey times – and suggestions for alternative routes.)

As I hope regular readers of this blog will know, I often explore the role of people and communities in transforming how cities work. A city is the combined effect of the behaviour of all of the people in it – whether they are buying food in a supermarket, traveling to work, relaxing in a park, planning an urban development or teaching in a school. No infrastructure – whether it is a road, a building, a broadband network or an intelligent energy grid – will have a transformative effect on a city unless it engages with individuals in a way that results in a change of behaviour. Work by my colleagues in IBM on transportation in California (pictured, left) and on water and energy usage in Dubuque, Iowa provide examples of what can be achieved when technology solutions are designed in the context of individual and community behaviour.

The innovations that discover how technology can change behaviour are sometimes very localised. They can be specific to the nature, challenges and opportunities of local communities; and are often therefore created by individuals, entrepreneurs, businesses and social enterprises within them. The “civic hacking” and “open data” movements are great examples of this sort of creativity.

But this is not the only sort of innovation that is required to enable Smarter City transformations. The infrastructures that support cities literally provide life-support to hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals. They must be highly resilient, performant and secure – particularly as they become increasingly optimised to support larger and larger city populations sustainably.

The invention, design, deployment and operation of Smarter City infrastructures require the resources of large organisations such as technology vendors, infrastructure providers, local governments and Universities who are able to make significant investments in them.

The secret to successfully transforming cities lies at the boundary between local innovations and properly engineered platforms. “Smarter City” transformations are effective when new and resilient information infrastructures are designed and deployed to meet the specific needs of city communities. One size does not fit all.

A technology infrastructure is no different in this regard to a physical infrastructure such as a new urban highway. In each case, there are some requirements that are obvious and generic – getting traffic in and out of a city centre more efficiently; or  making superfast broadband connectivity universally accessible. But other crucially important requirements are more complex, subtle and varied. How can a new road be integrated into the existing environment of a city so that local communities benefit from it, and so that it does not divide them? What access points, support and funding assistance are needed so that communities can use superfast broadband networks; and what services and information can be delivered to them using those networks that will make a difference?

If we understand those requirements, we can design infrastructures that properly support the innovation boundary. Doing so demands that we address three challenges:

Firstly, we must identify the specific information and technology services that can be provided to individuals, communities, entrepreneurs, businesses and social enterprises to help them succeed and grow. I’ve referred many times to the Knight Foundation’s excellent work in this area; it has inspired my own work with entrepreneurs and social enterprises in Sunderland and elsewhere.

(Meeting with social entrepreneurs in Sunderland to understand how new technology can help them)

Secondly, we need to understand and then supply the heavily engineered capabilities that are beyond the means of local communities to deliver for themselves; but that which enable them to create innovations with real significance.

At the 3rd EU Summit on Future Internet, Juanjo Hierro, Chief Architect for the FI-WARE “future internet platform” project, addressed this topic and identified the specific challenges that local innovators need help to overcome, and that could by provided by city information infrastructures. His challenges included: real-time access to information from physical city infrastructures; tools for analysing “big data“; and access to technologies to ensure privacy and trust. As we continue to engage with communities of innovators in cities, we will discover other requirements of this sort.

Finally, the boundary needs to be defined by standards. Many cities will deploy many information infrastructures, and many different vendors will be involved in supplying them. In order that successful local innovations can spread and interact with each other, Smarter City infrastructures should support Open Standards and interoperability with Open Source technologies.

It will take work to achieve that, of course. It is very easy to underestimate the complexity of the standards required to achieve interoperability. For example, in order to make it possible to safely change something as simple as a lightbulb, standards for voltage, power, physical dimensions, brightness, socket shape and fastening type, fragility and heat output are required. Some standards for Smarter City infrastructures are already in place – for example, Web services and the Common Alerting Protocol – but many others will need to be invented and encouraged to spread. Fortunately, the process is already underway. As an example, IBM recently donated MQTT, a protocol for connecting information between small devices such as sensors and actuators in Smarter City systems to the Open Source community.

(The first “Local Gov Camp” unconference in 2009, attended by community innovators with an interest in transforming local services, held in Fazeley Studios in Birmingham. Photo by s_p_a_c_e_m_a_n)

In the meantime, the innovation boundary is an amazing place to work. It puts me in contact with the leading edge of technology development – with IBM Research, and with new products such as the Intelligent Operations Centre for Smarter Cities. And it offers me the chance to collaborate with the academic institutions and thought-leaders who are defining the innovation boundary through initiatives such as “disruptive business platforms” (see this work from Imperial college, or these thoughts from my colleague Pete Cripps).

But more importantly, my work puts me in touch with innovators who are creating exciting and inspiring new ways for cities to work; often in the communities that need the most help, such as Margaret Elliott in Sunderland; Mark Heskett-Saddington of Sustainable Enterprise Strategies; and the team at Droplet in Birmingham.

I count myself terrifically honoured and lucky to have the privilege of working with them.

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From Christmas lights to bio-energy: how technology will change our sense of place

August 2, 2012 13 Comments

(Photo of Vancouver from the waterfront in Kitsilano by James Wheeler)

Why do we care about cities?

Why are private sector companies, public sector authorities and organisations such as the European Union making such enormous investments in “Smarter Cities“, “Sustainable Cities” and “Future Cities”?

Usually we would say it’s because of a combination of social, environmental and economic challenges facing us all. But there’s a powerful personal force at work too: where we live matters to us.

The choices that the 7 billion of us who share the planet make that are affected by our relationship with the places where we live have an incredible impact, especially when they are concentrated in cities. For example, the combined carbon impact of those who commute into cities to work each day because they choose to live in the less densely populated areas outside them is immense.

If we’re going to succeed in facing the significant challenges facing us, we need to exploit the powerful connections between people and places to motivate us to choose and behave differently.

The super-rich own houses around the world and have the means to travel between them as they choose or as their business demands it; and some professionals or tradespeople choose or accept a life that involves constant travel in the interests of work and employment. But on the whole, these are the exceptions.

Humans are physical not virtual. Whilst we move or travel from time to time out of choice or necessity, most people work and live day-by-day within a place. Some people and communities face challenges of social and transport mobility, and simply have no choice about where they live. Others may have some choice of location, but are limited by means to investing in living in one place. To a greater or lesser degree we all want to make the most of that investment, and don’t want to relocate too often or travel too far or frequently away from home in order to work.

The value we perceive in our connections to places is determined by their physicality, economics and communities. Many cities and regions exploit this by publicising the attractive qualities of the environment that they can offer – to individuals looking for homes, or to businesses looking for locations to operate from. Whilst the qualities of natural geography are certainly an important contributor to the quality of those environments, many of the other factors are to do with the people within them.

The choices and actions of people can have unusual effects on their environment; for example, the residents of Broadwater Road in Southampton choose collectively to mount striking lighting displays on their houses every Christmas. Or local regulations can constrain the choices of residents to achieve sometimes impressive results, such as in the beautiful urban village of Bourneville in Birmingham.

(Photo of the beautifully maintained frontage of houses in Bournville, Birmingham, by C. Wess Daniels)

Place and economy have many and complex influences on each other. The “Silicon Roundabout” cluster of entrepreneurial technology businesses in London exists where it does because of a combination of proximity to London’s financial services sector – and its venture capitalisists – and the availability of cheap flats, pubs and food outlets. These latter make it an affordable, attractive place to live for the young people with technology skills that start-up companies need to hire.

In other cases, the influences are less constructive. London’s economy has succeeded through businesses that rely on higly educated, skilled people; who in turn are recompensed with some of the highest wages in the country. Accordingly, house prices are extremely high. This it turn makes it difficult or impossible for many people in careers with more modest salaries to afford housing – for example, teachers. If there’s one thing that educated, successful people can be pretty much guaranteed to care about, it’s providing a high quality education for their children. But their success and affluence makes it hard for teachers to live nearby and provide it.

Modern communication technologies provide new opportunities for communities to form and interact in ways that give them more insight into and control over the impact of their interactions. Somewhere between the inventions of the telegraph and virtual worlds, we passed a tipping point: the earliest technologies were simply means to pass messages between people who already knew each other; the ones we have now – especially social media – enable people to identify, contact and transact with complete strangers based on some common interest.

Some simple examples of these technologies allowing communities to behave in more sustainable ways are the recycling network Freecyle, the LandShare initiative that provides access to untended land to people who want to grow food but don’t have gardens, and Carbon Voyage, one of many platforms that promote the sharing of cars, taxis and other forms of transport.

These technologies gives us the opportunity to build new marketplaces and currencies which can be used to encourage transactions that create social, environmental and economic value for communities. For example, organisations such as Big Barn and Sustaination are building new business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketplaces to encourage more sustainable food production and consumption.

(Photo of a 3D printer at work by Media Lab Prado)

What’s even more interesting is to look ahead to emerging technologies that could make it possible for such community markets to create some very surprising disruptions in the way city systems and some industries work. Smart materials and 3D printers, combined with the reduction in cost differentials between emerging and mature markets, are bringing some striking changes to manufacturing; meaning that in some cases it is more important to be able to manufacture customised items locally in immediate response to individual demand than it is to globally source the lowest cost manufacturer of commodity items.

New innovations in user interfaces are also making it easier to connect people to digital information and services. Whilst significant challenges remain in making such services truly accessible to all, it’s already striking to see tablet computers and e-readers being widely used by people who would never choose to buy or use a laptop. And once you’ve seen how naturally very young toddlers interact with tablet computers in particular, you realise how significantly the world will change in future years.

(Photo of me wearing the Emotiv headset)

Technology has already advanced even further; Emotiv‘s headset, which measures brain activity, has already been used by my colleagues to drive a London Taxi around an airfield by using the headset to monitor their thoughts; and Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University has pioneered the use of computing technology embedded in our bodies as a means of interacting with information systems in our environment. As such technologies mature and spread they’ll have impacts that are impossible to predict.

The New Optimists, a community of scientists and industry experts came together in Birmingham recently to explore the opportunities that new technologies offer for highly distributed energy production systems in communities. Domestic solar panels are an obvious means to do this; but geo-thermal energy, wind and tidal energy are other candidates. Southampton is already producing its own geo-thermal energy, for example, and Eco-Island are attempting to harness several such approaches to make the Isle of Wight not just self-sufficient in terms of energy, but a net exporter. The European Bio-Energy Research Institution (EBRI) at Aston University in Birmingham is developing new, more efficient means of producing energy from biological waste material such as discarded food. A prototype power-plant is already providing energy to 800 households in Shropshire. The New Optimists discussion looked ahead to the possibility that such technologies could be scaled-down even further for use in individual homes.

The systems exploiting these technologies in communities are winning investment because they are market-based: they create money-flows and revenue streams against which investments can be justified. Whilst their focus is local, it is not isolated: complete self-sufficiency will probably never be achieved, and is usually not the goal. Rather, it’s to maximise the benefits of local trading whilst making the impact of import and export more transparent so that more informed choices can be made.

Such place-based trading networks could connect the choices we make every day more directly with their impact on the places in which we live and work; exploiting our consciousness of the investments we’ve made in those places to persuade us to choose differently to protect and improve them. And if they’re linked sufficiently to the industrial national and international supply chains that provide what can’t be sourced locally, they could take into account the wider social and environmental impact of imported goods and services too. Of course, that will only be achieved if those systems are made more transparent, but the pressure to do that already exists. And the more we have the means to exploit transparency, the more effective that pressure will be.

We want to make our cities and lives more sustainable because we’re conscious of the environmental, social and economic challenges facing our planet; we’re most likely to do so through choices that have positive impacts we can see on the places where we live. Technology will continue to provide new mechanisms that can make such choices available to us; but its down to us as individuals and communities to harness and use them.

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How Smarter Cities Get Started

July 26, 2012 17 Comments

(Photo of The Cube in Birmingham by Elliott Brown)

I was delighted recently to be invited to join Birmingham’s new “Smart City Commission”. The Commission is meeting for the first time today, and leading up to it I gave some thought to what the common ideas are that are emerging from cities that are making progress with their “Smarter” transformations.

Many of the environmental, social and economic forces behind the transition to Smarter Cities are common everywhere; however, the capabilities that enable cities to act in response to them are usually very specific to individual cities. They depend on factors such as geographic location, the structure and performance of the local economy, the character of local communities, and the approach of leaders and stakeholders across the city.

The relationships between those stakeholders and communities are crucial. Cities may aspire to encourage economic growth amongst small, high-technology businesses; or to stimulate innovation in service delivery by social enterprises; or to switch to more sustainable patterns of travel and energy usage. To act successfully to achieve any of these aims, long and complex chains of connections between individuals need to work effectively, from city leaders, through their organisations, to community and business associations such as small business forums, neighbourhood communities, and faith groups, to individual companies, their employees and citizens across the city.

So how does it happen that this complex web of city systems can make cohesive progress towards such challenging objectives?

I’m not going to claim to have a complete answer, but I do think we can observe patterns in the behaviour of the cities who have made the most progress.

Does the city have a plan?

Cities already have plans, of course. In fact, often they have lots of plans – for the economy, for housing, for public service transformation, for marketing and for many other aspects of urban systems.

What is really required in a Smarter City context, though, is a single plan that captures the vision and means for transformation; and that is collectively defined and owned by stakeholders across the city; not by any single organisation acting alone. It needs to be consistent with existing plans within individual domains of the city; and in time needs to influence those plans to develop and change.

(Photo of Mount St. Helens from Portland, Oregon, by Keith Skelton)

Evidence supporting the importance of formulating such cross-city plans is growing. IBM’s work with the City of Portland is illustrating the deep and sometimes unexpected connections between city systems.  Elsewhere, Tim Stonor is a great advocate of the relationships between the physical organisation of cities and their social and economic character. IBM’s system, Tim’s work and that of the physicist and biologist Geoffrey West are all capable of making quantified predictions about the impacts of links within and between city systems.

A Smarter City plan needs to set out a vision that is clear and succinct, often expressed in a single sentence capturing the future that the city aspires to. That vision is usually supported by a handful of statements that summarise its impact on key aspects of the city – such as wealth creation, inclusivity and sustainability. Together these statements are something that everyone involved in the city can understand, agree to and promote. Sunderland’s “Economic Masterplan” is an example of a cross-city vision that is constructed in this way.

To make the vision deliverable, a set of quantified objectives against which progress can be measured are vital. In IBM as we work with cities to establish these measures, we’re learning that social, financial, environmental, strategic and brand values are all important and related. They could include improvements in education attainment; creation of jobs; increase in the GDP contribution by small businesses in specific sectors; reduction in carbon impact in specific systems or across the city as a whole; improvements in measures of health and well-being; and may include some qualitative as well as quantifiable criteria. It is against such objectives that specific programmes and initiatives can be designed in order to make real progress towards the city’s vision.

In this way a roadmap of activity aligned with a city’s transformation objectives can be laid out. It’s important that this roadmap includes a mixture of long and short-term projects across city domains; and in particular that it includes some “quick wins” – in attempting to work in new partnerships to achieve new objectives, nothing builds confidence and trust like early success.

Does the city have an effective stakeholder forum?

Once stakeholders from a city ecosystem have come together to define a vision and a plan to achieve it, it’s vital that they maintain a regular and empowered decision-making forum to drive progress. The delivery of a Smarter City plan relies on many separate investments and activities being undertaken by many independent individuals and organisations, justified on an ongoing basis against their various short-term financial obligations. Keeping such a complex programme on track to achieve cohesive city-level outcomes is an enormous challenge.

Such forums are often chaired by the city’s local authority; and they often involve representatives from local universities who act as trusted advisors on topics such as urban systems, sustainability and technology. They can include representatives from local employers, faith and community groups, institutions such as sports and retail centres, and trusted partners in domains such as technology, transport, city planning, architecture and energy. The broader the forum, the more completely the city is represented; but these are “coalitions of the willing”, and each city begins with its own unique mix.

In fact, a formative event or workshop that brings such city stakeholders together for the first time, is often the catalyst for the development of a Smarter City plan in the first place.

Is the city community acting together?

(Photo of the crowd at Moseley Folk Festival, Birmingham, by Pete Ashton)

It’s impossible to understate the importance of individual people in making cities Smarter. The functioning of a city is the combined effect of the behaviour of all of the people within it; and Smarter City systems will not change anything unless they engage with and meet the needs of those individuals.

The Knight Foundation’s excellent work on the “Information Needs of Communities“, for example, highlights the importance of engaging deeply with communities to understand the information needs of the individuals within them, rather than providing generic information platforms for cities as a whole. Where such information platforms do succeed, it is because their delivery and operations are focussed on specific areas identified as priorities in consultation with communities.

Community and faith groups are tremendously important in this process, as they can bridge between institutions such as Councils and employers and individuals in all the communities of a city, including those that face the most significant challenges. Every city has communities that struggle to access information, services and opportunities; and communities that are less engaged in the decision-making and consultation processes that lead to such things as Smarter City plans.

In Sunderland, the City Council has placed computer access points in around 40 “e-village halls” (see short articles on the Council’s website here and here). These are often facilities owned and run by community associations, and provide a trusted environment in which members of local communities can help each other access digital information and services. The city has a strong tradition of social enterprises  working in these communities; Sustainable Enterprise Strategies offer advice, facilities and support to such organisations from their new “Container City” facility.

These networks of people, organisations and infrastructure are vital assets that support Sunderland’s transformation objectives, particularly as the city delivers its new Cloud computing platform. They are a good example of the way a city can bring individuals, communities, organisations and technology together in support of common aims.

It’s a tremendous honour for me to have been asked to join Birmingham’s Smart City Commission . I’ve lived more than half my life in the city; it’s where I finished my education and started my career and family. So the chance to contribute to its future thinking is a personal privilege as well as a professional one. The commission has drawn together an incredible collection of expertise from across the city and beyond; I hope we can rise to the challenge of keeping Birmingham on course to play as prominent a role in the Information Revolution into the future as it played in the Industrial Revolution of the past.

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