The “Festival of Love” on London’s Southbank in 2014. Sometimes unattractive technologies – in this case concrete – can create great places.
As an IT Architect in the 1990s, I used Design Patterns as a tool to exchange knowledge with industry colleagues as we tried to solve what were then complex challenges – the execution of failure-proof transactions across distributed applications on the early World Wide Web, for example.
Much of the digital technology suffusing today’s world is engineered to those patterns – when we use a function of an app or website, we invoke a piece of software fitting the “Command” pattern. The Design Pattern was, of course, invented by Christopher Alexander, a town planner. The world of technology owes much of its design today to the tool he created.
Today, the influence of technology back into the professions of the built environment is increasing rapidly. We can use computer vision, the internet of things and machine learning to measure the physical world and the behaviour of people and organisations within it; to analyse them; and to design places and services for them to use.
But whilst “Smart Buildings” have been talked about and sometimes built since the 1980s, and “Smart Cities” since the late 1990s, they are largely one-off showcases and experiments rather than our mainstream approach to creating great places in a digital world.
Partly this is because the technology, built environment and investment professions lack a common, modern understanding of value creation. A leading economist recently described the mechanism by which urban economies grow due to the presence of public physical infrastructure that enables us to travel, meet and transact, generating incentives for further investment. That description completely overlooks the astonishing growth in physical transactions that are mediated online.
This “interface design” in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, prioritises pedestrian and bicycle traffic along a main road over cars joining from sideroads. Open Data and Open APIs are two equivalent technology policies that seek to promote individual adaptability of digital systems.
As a consequence, communities, property companies and local authorities are arguably not setting the digital agenda for the built environment – individual citizens and tenants are selecting their own technology from the market, for their own reasons. The controversies created by “gig economy” employment and the sub-letting of accommodation through peer-to-peer services illustrate that the results are not always consistent with our aspirations.
If we want to create great places which benefit from flourishing digital innovation and enterprise, our first challenge is to better articulate the potential benefits of digital services. For example, students living in University accommodation with good internal and external 4G coverage – enabled by sufficient broadband capacity – will find the streaming video and social media services they use to socialise, access content, and perform research more reliable. They will provide better feedback on their student experience, helping the University to attract more students and to increase fee income.
We next need a common process for applying our expertise. So in “Digital Masterplanning”, we complement traditional masterplanning, planning and design processes by specifying digital infrastructures, policies and services for buildings and places.
For a property developer or owner, that might involve defining a common set of digital services across a portfolio, along with open standards for interoperability so that they are not overwhelmed by a multitude of different systems. A local authority digital masterplan might require new infrastructure and property developments to provide open data and public wi-fi, so that the public realm is both physically and digitally adaptable. A digital masterplan for a new town of 10,000 residents in Scandinavia included digitally-enabled de-centralised renewable energy and low carbon mobility schemes, playful and informative environments, distributed places of work and learning, and data privacy and security.
Finally, we need to measure the value of digital infrastructure and services, and convert that value – which is often personal, social, environmental or economic – into the creation of a financial return for investors.
Digbeth in Birmingham, UK, is an example of an urban place that has attracted a variety of successful creative digital businesses, and that – despite its heritage of industrial decay – flourishes as a place.
For example, for companies that operate sites undergoing re-development or construction, we have explored the value of “digital wayfinding” tools that adapt as physical space is altered on a daily basis. Successful digital wayfinding can reduce time that is literally “lost” and reduce stress and frustration, contributing to productivity both directly and indirectly. In neighbourhood-scale regenerations, we can mediate a balance between the interests of local authorities to secure investment in public digital infrastructure, and the level of competition from private property and infrastructure investors seeking a reasonable rate of return.
In his 1964 book, “Notes on the Synthesis of Form”, Alexander explained that new multidisciplinary approaches were necessary because “new materials are developed all the time, social patterns alter quickly, they also change faster than before”. The amount of digital information in the world overtook the amount of information stored in traditional forms in the early 2000s, and is now doubling every 3 years. The creation of new digital materials and social patterns is still speeding up, and challenges professionals of all disciplines working in the built environment to cooperate to turn them to our advantage.
(This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 “TripWire” magazine by the Royal Town Planning Institute in the West Midlands, UK.
(The futuristic “Emerald City” in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz“. The “wizard” who controls the city is a fraud who uses theatrical technology to disguise his lack of real power.)
(I was recently asked to give evidence to the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development during the development of their report on Smart Cities and Infrastructure. This article is based on my presentation, which you can find here).
The idea of a “Smart City” (or town, or region, or community) is 20 years old now; but despite some high profile projects and a lot of attention, it has so far achieved relatively little.
In honesty, that debate is not really taking place. There are endless conferences and reports about Smart Cities, but very, very few of them tackle the issues of financing, investment and policy – they are more likely to describe the technology and engineering solutions behind schemes that appear to create new efficiencies and improvements in transport and energy systems, for example, but that in reality are unsustainable because they rely on one-off research and innovation grants.
Because Smart Cities are usually defined in these terms – by the role of technology in city systems rather than by the role of policy in shaping the outcomes of investment – the idea has not won widespread interest and support from the highest level of political leadership – the very people without whom the policy changes and investments that Smart Cities need will not be made.
(William Robinson Leigh’s 1908 painting “Visionary City” envisaged future cities constructed from mile-long buildings of hundreds of stories connected by gas-lit skyways for trams, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. A century later we’re starting to realise not only that developments in transport and power technology have eclipsed Leigh’s vision, but that we don’t want to live in cities constructed from buildings on this scale.)
The fact that the Smart Cities movement confuses itself with inconsistent and contradictory definitions exacerbates this lack of engagement, understanding and support. From the earliest days, it has been defined in terms of either smart infrastructure or smart citizens; but rarely both at the same time.
For example, in “City of Bits” in 1996, William Mitchell, Director of the Smart Cities Research Group at MIT’s Media Lab, predicted the widespread deployment of digital technology to transform city infrastructures:
“… as the infobahn takes over a widening range of functions, the roles of inhabited structures and transportation systems are shifting once again, fresh urban patterns are forming, and we have the opportunity to rethink received ideas of what buildings and cities are, how they can be made, and what they are really for.”
Whilst in their paper “E-Governance and Smart Communities: A Social Learning Challenge“, published in the Social Science Computer Review in 2001, Amanda Coe, Gilles Paquet and Jeffrey Roy described the 1997 emergence of the idea of “Smart Communities” in which citizens and communities are given a stronger voice in their own governance by the power of internet communication technologies:
“A smart community is defined as a geographical area ranging in size from a neighbourhood to a multi-county region within which citizens, organizations and governing institutions deploy and embrace NICT [“New Information and Communication Technologies”] to transform their region in significant and fundamental ways (Eger 1997). In an information age, smart communities are intended to promote job growth, economic development and improve quality of life within the community.”
Because few descriptions of a Smart City reflect both of those perspectives in harmony, many Smart City discussions quickly create arguments between opposing camps rather than constructive ideas: infrastructure versus people; top-down versus bottom-up; technology versus urban design; proprietary technology versus open source; public service improvements versus the enablement of open innovation – and so on.
I haven’t seen many political leaders or the people who vote for them be impressed by proposals whose advocates are arguing with each other.
The emperor has no wearable technology … why we’re not really investing in Smart Cities
The consequence of this lack of cohesion and focus is that very little real money is being invested in Smart Cities to create the outcomes that cities, towns, regions and whole countries have set out for themselves in thousands of Smart City visions and strategies. The vast majority of Smart City initiatives to date are pilot projects funded by research and innovation grants. There are very, very few sustainable, repeatable solutions yet.
There are three reasons for this; and they will have serious economic and social consequences if we don’t address them.
Firstly, the investment streams available to most of those who are trying to shape Smart Cities initiatives – engineers, technologists, academics, local authority officers and community activists – are largely limited to corporate research and development funds, national and international innovation programmes and charitable or socially-focussed grants. Those are important sources of funding, but they are only available at a scale sufficient to prove that good new ideas can work through individual, time-limited projects. They are not intended to fund the deployment of those ideas across cities everywhere, or to construct new infrastructure at city scale, and they are not remotely capable of doing so.
(United States GDP plotted against median household income from 1953 to present. Until about 1980, growth in the economy correlated to increases in household wealth. But from 1980 onwards as digital technology has transformed the economy, household income has remained flat despite continuing economic growth. From “The Second Machine Age“, by MIT economists Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, summarised in this article.)
Secondly and conversely, the massive investments that are being made in smart technology at a scale that is transforming our world are primarily commercial: they are investing in technology to develop new products and services that consumers want to buy. That’s guaranteed to create convenience for consumers and profit for companies; but it’s far from guaranteed to create resilient, socially mobile, vibrant and healthy cities. It’s just as likely to reduce our life expectancy and social engagement by making it easier to order high-fat, high-sugar takeaway food on our smartphones to be delivered to our couches by drones whilst we immerse ourselves in multiplayer virtual reality games.
Finally, the similarly massive investments continually made in property development and infrastructure in cities are, for the most part, not creating investments in digital technology in the public interest. Sometimes that’s because there’s no incentive to do so: development investors make their returns by selling the property they construct; they often have no interest in whether the tenants of that property start successful digital businesses, and they receive no income from any connectivity services those tenants might use. In other cases, policy actively inhibits more socially-minded developers from providing digital services. One developer of a £1billion regeneration project told me that European Union restrictions on state aid had prevented them making any investment in connectivity. They could only build buildings without connectivity – in an area with no mobile coverage – and attempt to attract people and businesses to move in, thereby creating demand for telecommunications companies to subsequently compete to fulfil.
We’ll only build Smart Cities when we shape the market for investing in technology for city services and infrastructure
In her seminal 1961 work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“, Jane Jacobs wrote that “Private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image.”
Cities, towns, regions and countries around the world have set out their self-images of a Smart future, but we have not adapted the financial, regulatory and economic machinery – the policies, the procurement practises, the development frameworks, the investment models – to incentivise the private sector to create them.
I do not mean to be critical of the private sector in this article. I have worked in the private sector for my entire career. It is the engine of our economy, and without its profits we would not create the jobs needed by a growing global population, or the means to pay the taxes that sustain our public services, or the surplus wealth that creates an ability to invest in our future.
But one of the fallacies of large parts of the Smart Cities movement, and of a significant part of the overall debate concerning the enormous growth in value of the technology economy, is the assumption that economic growth driven by private sector investments in technology to improve business performance will create broad social, economic and environmental benefits.
There is no guarantee that it will. Outside philanthropy, charitable donations and social business models, private sector investments are made in order to make a profit, period. In doing so, social, economic and environmental benefits may also be created, but they are side effects which, at best, result from the informed investment choices of conscientious business leaders. At worst, they are simply irrelevant to the imperative of the profit motive.
Some businesses have the scale, vision and stability to make more direct links in their strategies and decision-making to the dependency between their success as businesses and the health of the society in which they operate – Unilever is a notable and high profile example. And all businesses are run by real people whose consciences influence their business decisions (with unfortunate exceptions, of course).
But those examples do not in any way add up to the alignment of private sector investment objectives with the aspirations of city authorities or citizens for their future. And as MIT economists Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, amongst others, have shown, most current evidence indicates that the technology economy is exacerbating the inequality that exists in our society (see graph above). That is the opposite of the future aspirations expressed by many cities, communities and their governments.
This leads us to the political and economic imperative represented by the Smart Cities movement: to adapt the machinery of our economy to influence investments in technology so that they contribute to the social, economic and environmental outcomes that we want.
A leadership imperative to learn from the past
Those actions can only be taken by political leaders; and they must be taken because without them developments and investments in new technology and infrastructure will not create ubiquitously beneficial outcomes. Historically, there is plenty of evidence that investments in technology and infrastructure can create great harm if market forces alone are left to shape them.
(Areas of relative wealth and deprivation in Birmingham as measured by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation. Birmingham, like many of the UK’s Core Cities, has a ring of persistently deprived areas immediately outside the city centre, co-located with the highest concentration of transport infrastructure allowing traffic to flow in and out of the centre)
For example, in the decades after the Second World War, cities in developed countries rebuilt themselves using the technologies of the time – concrete and the internal combustion engine. Networks of urban highways were built into city centres in the interests of connecting city economies with national and international transport links to commerce.
Those infrastructures supported economic growth; but they did not provide access to the communities they passed through.
The 2015 Indices of Multiple Deprivation in the UK demonstrate that some of those communities were greatly harmed as a result. The indices identify neighbourhoods with combinations of low levels of employment and income; poor health; poor access to quality education and training; high levels of crime; poor quality living environments and shortages of quality housing and services. An analysis of these areas in the UK’s Core Cities (the eight economically largest cities outside London, plus Glasgow and Cardiff) show that many of them exist in rings surrounding relatively thriving city centres. Whilst clearly the full causes are complex, it is no surprise that those rings feature a concentration of transport infrastructure passing through them, but primarily serving the interests of those passing in and out of the centre. (And this is without taking into account the full health impacts of transport-related pollution, which we’re only just starting to appreciate).
Similar effects can be seen historically. In their report “Cities Outlook 1901“, Centre for Cities explored the previous century of urban development in the UK, examining why at various times some cities thrived and some did not. They concluded that the single most important influence on the success of cities was their ability to provide their citizens with the right skills and opportunities to find employment, as the skills required in the economy changed as technology evolved. (See the sample graph below). A recent short article in The Economist magazine similarly argued that history shows there is no inevitable mechanism that ensures that the benefits of economic growth driven by technology-enabled productivity improvements are broadly distributed. It cites huge investments made in the US education system in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to ensure that the general population was in a position to benefit from the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution as an example of the efforts that may need to be made.
Why smart cities are a political leadership challenge
So, to summarise the arguments I’ve made so far:
From global urbanisation and population growth to man-made climate change we are facing some of the most serious and acute challenges in our history, as well as the persistent challenge of inequality. But the most powerful tool that is shaping a transformation of our society and economy, digital technology, is, for the most part, not being used to address those challenges. The vast majority of investments in it are being made simply in the interests of profitable returns. Our political leaders are not shaping the markets in which those investment are made, or influencing public sector procurement practises, in order to create broader social, economic and environmental outcomes.
So what can we do about that?
We need to persuade political leaders to act – the leaders of cities; of local authorities more generally; and national politicians. I’m trying to do that using the arguments set out in this article, approaching “Smart Cities” not as a technology initiative but as a political and economic issue made urgent by imperative challenges to society.
I can imagine three arguments against that proposition, which I’d like to tackle first, before going on to talk about the actions that we need those leaders to take.
(Population changes in Blackburn, Burnley and Preston from 1901-2001. In the early part of the century, all three cities grew, supported by successful manufacturing economies. But in the latter half, only Preston continued to grow as it transitioned successfully to a service economy. If cities do not adapt to changes in the economy driven by technology, history shows that they fail. From “Cities Outlook 1901” by Centre for Cities)
The first argument is: why focus on cities? What about the rest of the world, and in particular the challenges of smaller towns, which are often overlooked; or rural regions, which are distinctive and deserve focus in their own right?
There are two replies to this argument. The first is that cities do represent the most sizeable challenge. Since 2010, more than half the world’s population has lived in urban areas, and that’s expected to rise to 70% by 2050. Cities drive the majority of the world’s economy, consume the majority of resources in the most concentrated way and create the majority of the pollution driving climate change. By focussing on cities we focus on most of our challenges at the same time, and in the places where they are most concentrated; and we focus on a unit of governance that is able to act decisively and with understanding of local context.
And that brings us to the second reply: most of the arguments I make in this article aren’t really about cities, they’re about the need for the leaders of local governments – cities, towns and regions – to take action. That applies to any local authority, not just to cities.
The second counter-argument is that my proposal is “top-down” and that instead we should focus on the “bottom-up” creativity that is the richest source of innovation and of practical solutions to problems that are rooted in local context.
My answer to this challenge is that I agree completely that it is bottom-up innovation that will create the majority of the answers to our challenges. But bottom-up innovation is already happening everywhere around us – it is what everyone does every day to create a better business, a better community, a better life. The problem with bottom-up innovation doesn’t lie in making it happen; it lies in enabling it to have a bigger impact. If bottom-up innovation on its own were the answer, then we wouldn’t have the staggering and increasing levels of inequality that we see today, and the economic growth created by the information revolution would be more broadly distributed.
Ultimately, it’s not the bottom-up innovators who need persuading to take action: they’re already acting. It’s the top-down leaders and policy-makers who are not doing what we need them to do: setting the policies that will influence investments in digital technology infrastructure to create better opportunities and support for citizen-led, community-led and business-led innovation. That’s why I’m focussing this article on those leaders and the actions we need them to take.
The third argument works similarly to the second argument, and it’s that we should be focussing on people, not on technology and policy.
Yes, of course we should be focussing on people: their creativity, the detail of their daily lives, and the outcomes that matter to them. But two central points to my argument are that digital technology is a new and revolutionary force reshaping our world, our society and our economy; and that the benefits of that revolution are not being equitably distributed. The main thing that’s not working for people right now is the impact of digital technology on society, and the main reason for that is the lack of action by political leaders. So that’s what we should concentrate on fixing.
Finally, I can summarise my response to all of those arguments in a simple statement: first we have to persuade political leaders to act, because many of them are not acting on these issues at the moment; and then we have to persuade them to act in the right way – to support bottom-up innovation through investment in open technology infrastructures and to put the interests of people at the heart of the policies that drive and shape that investment.
This might all sound rather negative so far; and in a sense that’s intentional because I want to be very clear in my message that I do not think we are doing enough.
But I have a positive message too: if we can persuade our political leaders to act, then it’s increasingly clear what we need them to do. Whilst the majority of “Smart City” initiatives are unsustainable pilot and innovation projects, that’s not true of them all.
In the UK, from Sunderland to London to Newcastle to Birmingham there are examples of initiatives that are supported by sustainable funding sources and investment streams; that are not dependent on research and development grants from national or international innovation funds or technology companies; and that essentially could be applied by any city or community.
1. Include Smart City criteria in the procurement of services by local authorities to encourage competitive innovation from private sector providers. Whilst local authority budgets are under pressure around the world, and have certainly suffered enormous cuts in the UK, local authorities nevertheless spend up to billions of pounds sterling annually on goods, services and staff time. The majority of procurements that direct that spending still procure traditional goods and services through traditional criteria and contracts. By contrast, Sunderland, a UK city, and Norfolk, a UK county, have shown that by emphasising city and regional aspirations in procurement scoring criteria it is possible to incentivise suppliers to invest in smart solutions that contribute to local objectives.
3. Commit to entrepreneurial programmes. There are many examples of new urban or public services being delivered by entrepreneurial organisations who develop new business and operating models enabled by technology – I’ve already cited Uber and Airbnb as examples that contribute to traveller convenience; Casserole Club, a service that uses social media to connect people who can’t provide their own food with neighbours who are happy to cook an extra portion of a meal for someone else, is an example that has more obviously social benefits. Many cities have local investment funds and support services for entrepreneurial businesses, and Sunderland’s Software Centre, Birmingham’s iCentrum development, Sheffield’s Smart Lab and London’s Cognicity accelerator are examples where those investments have been linked to local smart city objectives.
4. Enable and support Social Enterprise. The objectives of Smart Cities are analogous to the “triple bottom line” objectives of Social Enterprises – organisations whose finances are sustained by revenues from the products or services that they provide, but that commit themselves to social, environmental or economic outcomes, rather than to maximising their financial returns to shareholders. A vast number of Smart City initiatives are carried out by these organisations when they innovate using technology. Cities that find a way to systematically enable social enterprises to succeed could unlock a reservoir of beneficial innovation, as the Impact Hub network, a global community of collaborative workspaces, has shown.
How to lead a smart city: Commitment, Collaboration, Consistency and Community
Each of the approaches I’ve described is dependent on both political leadership from a local authority and collaboration with regional stakeholders – businesses, developers, Universities, community groups and so on.
So the first task for political leaders who wish to drive an effective Smart City programme is to facilitate the co-creation of regional consensus and an action plan (I’m not going to use the word “roadmap”. My experience of Smart Cities roadmaps is that they are, as the name implies, passive documents that don’t go anywhere).
I can sum up how to do that effectively using “four C’s”: Commitment, Collaboration, Consistency and Community:
Commitment: a successful approach to a Smart City or community needs the commitment, leadership and active engagement of the most senior local government leaders. Of course, elected Mayors, Council Leaders and Chief Executives are busy people with a multitude of responsibilities and they inevitably delegate; but this is a responsibility that cannot be delegated too far. The vast majority of local authorities that I have seen pursue this agenda with tangible results – through whichever approach, even those authorities who have been successful funding their initiatives through research and innovation grants – have appointed a dedicated Executive officer reporting directly to the Chief Executive and with a clear mandate to create, communicate and drive a collaborative smart strategy and programme.
Collaboration: a collaborative, empowered regional stakeholder forum is needed to convene local resources. Whilst a local authority is the only elected body with a mandate to set regional objectives, local authorities directly control only a fraction of regional resources, and do not directly set many local priorities. Most approaches to Smart Cities require coordinated activity by a variety of local organisations. That only comes about if those organisations decide to collaborate at the most senior level, mutually agree their objectives for doing so, and meet regularly to agree actions to achieve them. The local authority’s elected mandate usually makes it the most appropriate organisation to facilitate the formation and chair the proceedings of such fora; but it cannot direct them.
Consistency: in order to collaborate, regional stakeholders need to agree a clear, consistent, specific local vision for their future. Without that, they will lack a context in which to take decisions that reconcile their individual interests with shared regional objectives; and any bids for funding and investments they make, whether individually or jointly, will appear inconsistent and unconvincing.
Community: finally, the only people who really know what a smart city should look like are the citizens, taxpayers, voters, customers, business owners and employees who form its community; who will live and work in it; and who will ultimately pay for it through their taxes. It’s their bottom-up innovation that will give rise to the most meaningful and effective initiatives. Their voice – heard through events, consultation exercises, town hall meetings, social media and so on – should lead to the visions and policies to create an environment in which they can flourish.
(Birmingham’s newly opened city centre trams are an example of a reversal of 20th century trends that prioritised car traffic over the public transport systems that we have re-discovered to be so important to healthy cities)
Beyond “top-down” versus “bottom-up”: Translational Leadership and Smart Digital Urbanism
Having established that there’s a challenge worth facing, argued that we need political leaders to take action to address it, and explored what that action should be, I’d like finally to return to one of the arguments I explored along the way.
Action by political leaders is, almost by definition, “top-down”; and, whilst I stand by my argument that it’s the most important missing element of the majority of smart cities initiatives today, it’s vitally important that those top-down actions are taken in such a way as to encourage, enable and empower “bottom-up” innovation by the people, communities and businesses from which real cities are made.
It’s not only important that our leaders take the actions that I’ve argued for; it’s important that they act in the right way. Smart cities are not “business as usual”; and they are also not “behaviour as usual”.
The smart cities initiatives that I have been part of or had the privilege to observe, and that have delivered meaningful outcomes, have taken me on a personal journey. They have involved meeting with, listening to and working with people, organisations and communities that I would not have previously expected to be part of my working life, and that I was not previously familiar with in my personal life – from social enterprises to community groups to individual people with unusual ideas.
Writing in “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back”, Andrew Zolli observes that the leaders of initiatives that have created real, lasting and surprising change in communities around the world show a quality that he defines as “Translational Leadership“. Translational leaders have the ability to overcome the institutional and cultural barriers to engagement and collaboration between small-scale, informal innovators in communities and large-scale, formal institutions with resources. This is precisely the ability that any leaders involved in smart cities need in order to properly understand how the powerful “top-down” forces within their influence – policies, procurements and investments – can be adapted to empower and enable real people, real communities and real businesses.
Translational leaders understand that their role is not to direct change, but to create the conditions in which others can be successful.
We can learn how to create those conditions from the decades of experience that town planners and urban designers have acquired in creating “human-scale cities” that don’t repeat the mistakes that were made in constructing vast urban highways, tower blocks and housing projects from unforgiving concrete in the past century.
And there is good precedent to do so. It is not just that the experience of town planners and urban designers leads us unmistakably to design thinking that focusses on the needs of the millions of individual citizens whose daily experiences collectively create the behaviour of cities. That is surely the only approach that will succeed; and the designers of smart city technologies and infrastructures will fail unless they take it. But there is also a long-lasting and profound relationship between the design techniques of town planners and of software engineers. The basic architectures of the internet and mobile applications we use today were designed using those techniques in the last decade of the last millennium and the first decade of this one.
The architect Kelvin Campbell’s concept of “massive/small smart urbanism” can teach us how to join the effects of “top-down” investments and policy with the capacity for “bottom-up” innovation that exists in people, businesses and communities everywhere. In the information age, we create the capacity for “massive amounts of small-scale innovation” if digital infrastructures are accessible and adaptable through the provision of open data interfaces, and accessible from open source software on cloud computing platforms – the digital equivalent of accessible public space and human-scale, mixed-used urban environments.
Defining and re-defining the “Smart City” is a hoary old business – as I pointed out at the start of this article, we’ve been at it for 20 years now, and without much success.
But definitions are important: saying what you mean to do is an important first step in acting successfully, particularly in a collaborative, public context.
So I’ll end this article by offering another attempt to sum up a smart city – or community – in a way that emphasises what I know from experience are the important factors that will lead to successful actions and outcomes, rather than the endless rounds of debate that we can’t allow to continue any longer:
A Smart City or community is one which successfully harnesses the most powerful tool of our age – digital technology – to create opportunities for its citizens; to address the most severe acute challenges the human race has ever faced, arising from global urbanisation and population growth and man-made climate change; and to address the persistent challenge of social and economic inequality. The policies and investments needed to do this demand the highest level of political leadership at a local level where regional challenges and resources are best understood, and particularly in cities where they are most concentrated. Those policies and investments will only be successful if they are enabling, not directing; if they result from the actions of leaders who are listening and responding to the people and communities they serve; and if they shape an urban environment and digital economy in which individual citizens, businesses and communities have the skills, opportunities and resources to create their own success on their own terms.
That’s not a snappy definition; but I hope it’s a useful definition that’s inclusive of the major issues and clearly points out the actions that are required by city, political, community and business leaders … and why it’s vitally important that we finally start taking them.
(The 2nd Futurama exhibition at the 1964 New York World’s Fair displayed a vision for the future that in many ways reflected the concrete highways and highrises constructed at the time. We now recognise that the environments those structures created often failed to support healthy personal and community life. In 50 years’ time, how will we perceive today’s visions of Intelligent Transport Systems? Photo by James Vaughan)
Two weeks ago the Transport Systems Catapult published a “Traveller Needs and UK Capability Study”, which it called “the UK’s largest traveller experience study” – a survey of 10,000 people and their travelling needs and habits, complemented by interviews with 100 industry experts and companies. The survey identifies a variety of opportunities for UK innovators in academia and industry to exploit the predicted £56 billion market for intelligent mobility solutions in the UK by 2025, and £900 billion market worldwide. It is rightly optimistic that the UK can be a world leader in those markets.
This is a great example of the enormous value that the Catapult programme – inspired by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institutes – can play in transferring innovation and expertise out of University research and into the commercial economy, and in enabling the UK’s expert small businesses to reach opportunities in international markets.
But it’s also a great example of failing to connect the ideas of Intelligent Transport with their full impact on society.
I don’t think we should call any transport initiative “intelligent” unless it addresses both the full relationship between the physical mobility of people and goods with social mobility; and the significant social impact of transport infrastructure – which goes far beyond issues of congestion and pollution.
The new study not only fails to address these topics, it doesn’t mention them at all. In that light, such a significant report represents a failure to meet the Catapult’s own mission statement, which incorporates a focus on “wellbeing” – as quoted in the introduction to the report:
“We exist to drive UK global leadership in Intelligent Mobility, promoting sustained economic growth and wellbeing, through integrated, efficient and sustainable transport systems.” [My emphasis]
I’m surprised by this failing in the study as both the engineering consultancy Arup and the Future Cities Catapult – two organisations that have worked extensively to promote human-scale, walkable urban environments and human-centric technology – were involved in its production; as was at least one social scientist (although the experts consulted were otherwise predominantly from the engineering, transport and technology industries or associated research disciplines).
I note also that the list of reports reviewed for the study does not include a single work on urbanism. Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Jan Gehl’s “Cities for People“, Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City” and Charles Montgomery’s “The Happy City“, for example, all describe very well the way that transport infrastructures and traffic affect the communities in which most of the world’s population lives. That perspective is sorely lacking in this report.
Transport is a balance between life and death. Intelligent transport shouldn’t forget that.
These omissions matter greatly because they are not just lost areas of opportunity for the UK economy to develop solutions (although that’s certainly what they are). More importantly, transport systems that are designed without taking their full social impact into account have the most serious social consequences – they contribute directly to deprivation, economic stagnation, a lack of social mobility, poor health, premature deaths, injuries and fatalities.
As town planner Jeff Speck and urban consultant Charles Montgomery recently described at length in “Walkable City” and “The Happy City” respectively, the most vibrant, economically successful urban environments tend to be those where people are able to walk between their homes, places of work, shops, schools, local transport hubs and cultural amenities; and where they feel safe doing so.
But many people do not feel that it is safe to walk about the places in which they live, work and relax. Transport is not their only cause of concern; but it is certainly a significant one.
A recent working paper published by Transport for London found that the risk and severity of injury for different types of road users – pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, car passengers, bus passengers etc. – vary in complex and unexpected ways; and that in particular, the risks for each type of traveller vary very differently according to age, as our personal behaviours change, depending on the journeys we undertake, and according to the nature of the transport infrastructure we use.
These are not simple issues, they are deeply challenging. They are created by the tension between our need to travel in order to carry out social and economic interactions, and the physical nature of transport which takes up space and creates pollution and danger.
As a consequence, many of the most persistently deprived areas in cities are badly affected by large-scale transport infrastructure that has been primarily designed in the interests of the travellers who pass through them, and not in the interests of the people who live and work around them.
(Photo of Masshouse Circus, Birmingham, a concrete urban expressway that strangled the city centre before its redevelopment in 2003, by Birmingham City Council)
Birmingham’s Masshouse circus, for example, was constructed in the 1960s as part of the city’s inner ring-road, intended to improve connectivity to the national economy through the road network. However, the impact of the physical barrier that it created to pedestrian traffic can be seen by the stark difference in land value inside and outside the “concrete collar” that the ring-road created around the city centre. Inside the collar, land is valuable enough for tall office blocks to be constructed on it; whilst outside it is of such low value that it is used as a ground-level carpark. The reason for such a sharp change in value? People didn’t feel safe walking across or under the roundabout. The demolition of Masshouse Circus in 2002 enabled a revitalisation of the city centre that has continued for more than a decade.
Atlanta’s Buford Highway is a seven lane road which for two miles has no pavements, no junctions and no pedestrian crossings, passing through an area of houses, shops and businesses. It is an infrastructure fit only for vehicles, not for people. It allows no safe access along or across it for the communities it passes through – it is closed to them, unless they risk their lives.
In Sheffield, two primary schools were recently forced to close after measurements of pollution from diesel vehicles revealed levels 10-15 times higher than those considered the maximum safe limits, caused by traffic from the nearby M1 motorway. The vast majority of vehicles using the motorway comply to the appropriate emissions legislation depending on their age; and until specific emissions measurements were performed at the precise locations of the schools, the previous regional measurements of air quality had been within legal limits. This illustrates the failure of our transport policies to take into account the nature of the environments within which we live, and the detailed impact of transport on them. That’s why it’s now suspected that up to 60,000 people die prematurely every year in the UK due to the effects of diesel emissions, double previous estimates.
Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners recently published a survey of the 2015 Indices of Multiple Deprivation in the UK – the indices summarise many of the challenges that affect deprived communities such as low levels of employment and income; poor health; poor access to quality education and training; high levels of crime; poor quality living environments and shortages of quality housing and services.
Lichfield and Partners found that most of the UK’s Core Cities (the eight economically largest cities outside London, plus Glasgow and Cardiff) are characterised by a ring of persistently deprived areas surrounding their relatively thriving city centres. Whilst clearly the full causes are complex, it is no surprise that those rings feature a concentration of transport infrastructure passing through them, but primarily serving the interests of those passing in and out of the centre.
(Areas of relative wealth and deprivation in Birmingham as measured by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation. Birmingham, like many of the UK’s Core Cities, has a ring of persistently deprived areas immediately outside the city centre, co-located with the highest concentration of transport infrastructure allowing traffic to flow in and out of the centre)
These issues are not considered at all in the Transport Systems Catapult’s study. The word “walk” appears just three times in the document, all in a section describing the characteristics of only one type of traveller, the “dependent passenger” who does not own a car. Their walking habits are never examined, and walking as a transport choice is never mentioned or presented as an option in any of the sections of the report discussing challenges, opportunities, solutions or policy initiatives, beyond a passing mention that public transport users sometimes undertake the beginnings and ends of their journeys on foot. The word “pedestrian” does not appear at all. Cycling is mentioned only a handful of times; once in the same section on dependent passengers, and later on to note that “bike sharing [schemes have] not yet enjoyed high uptake in the UK”. The reason cited for this is that “it is likely that there are simply not enough use cases where using these types of services is convenient and cost-effective for travellers.”
If that is the case, why not investigate ways to extend the applicability of such schemes to broader use cases?
If only the sharing economy were a walking and cycling economy
The role of the Transport Systems Catapult is to promote the UK transport and transport technology industry, and this perhaps explains why so much of the study is focussed on public and private forms of powered transport and infrastructure. But there are many ways for businesses to profit by providing innovative technology and services that support walking and cycling.
What about way-finding services and street furniture that benefit pedestrians, for example, as the Future Cities Catapult recently explored? What about the cycling industry – including companies providing cargo-carrying bicycles as an alternative to small vans and trucks? What about the wearable technology industry to promote exercise measurement and pedestrian navigation along the safest, least polluted routes?
And what about the UK’s world-class community of urban designers, town planners and landscape architects, some of whom are using increasingly sophisticated technologies to complement their professional skills in designing places and communities in which living, working and travelling co-exist in harmony? What about our world class University expertise researching visions for sustainable, liveable cities with less intrusive transport systems?
An even more powerful source of innovations to achieve a better balance between transportation and liveability could be the use of “sharing economy” business models to promote social and economic systems that emphasise local, human-powered travel.
Wikipedia describes the sharing economy as “economic and social systems that enable shared access to goods, services, data and talent“. Usually, these systems employ consumer technologies such as SmartPhones and social media to create online peer-to-peer trading networks that disrupt or replace traditional supply chains and customer channels – eBay is an obvious example for trading second hand goods, Airbnb connects travellers with people willing to rent out a spare room, and Uber connects passengers and drivers.
These business models can be enormously successful. Since its formation 8 years ago, Airbnb has acquired access to over 800,000 rooms to let in more than 190 countries; in 2014 the estimated value of this company which employed only 300 people at the time was $13 billion. Uber has demonstrated similarly astonishing growth.
By creating dramatic shifts in how transactions take place in the industries in which they operate, sharing economy businesses can create similarly dramatic shifts in transport patterns. For example, hotels in major cities frequently operate shuttle buses to transfer guests from nearby airports – a shared form of transport. Airbnb offer no such equivalent transfers to their independent accommodation. This is a general consequence of replacing large-scale, centrally managed systems of supply with thousands of independent transactions. At present there is very little research to understand these impacts, and certainly no policy to address them.
But what if incentives could be created to encourage the formation of sharing economy systems that promoted local transactions that can take place with less need for powered transport?
For example, Borroclub provides a service that matches someone who needs a tool with a neighbour who owns one that they could borrow. Casserole Club connects people who are unable to cook for themselves with a neighbours who are happy to cook and extra portion and share it. The West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplaceidentifies opportunities for groups of local businesses to collaborate to win new contracts. Such “hyperlocal” schemes are not a new idea, and there are endless possibilities for them to reveal local opportunities to interact; but they struggle to compete for attention and investment against businesses purely focussed on maximising profits and investor returns.
Surely, a study that includes the Future Cities Catapult, Digital Catapult and Transport Systems Catapult amongst its contributors could have explored possibilies for encouraging and scaling hyperlocal sharing economy business models, alongside all those self-driving cars and multi-modal transport planners that industry seems to be quite willing to invest in on its own?
The study does mention some “sharing economy” businesses, including Uber; but it makes no mention of the controversy created because their profit-seeking focus takes no account of their social, economic and environmental impact.
It also mentions the role of online commerce in providing retail options that avoid the need to travel in person – and cites these as an option for reducing the overall demand for travel. But it fails to adequately explore the impact of the consequent requirements for delivery transport – other than to note the potential for detrimental impact on, let’s wait for it, not local communities but: local traffic!
“Enabling lifestyles is about more than just enabling and improving physical travel. 31% (19bn) of journeys made today would rather not have been made if alternative means were available (e.g. online shopping)” (page 15)
“Local authorities and road operators need to be aware that increased goods delivery can potentially have a negative impact on local traffic flows.” (page 24)
Why promote transactions that we carry out in isolation online rather than transactions that we carry out socially by walking, and that could contribute towards the revitalisation of local communities and town centres? Why mention “enabling lifestyles” without exploring the health benefits of walking, cycling and socialising?
(A poster from the International Sustainability Institute’s Commuter Toolkit, depicting the space 200 travellers occupy on Seattle’s 2nd Avenue when using different forms of transport, and intended to persuade travellers to adopt those forms that use less public space)
Self-driving cars as a consumer product represent selfish interests, not societal interests
The sharing economy is not the only example of a technology trend whose social and economic impact cannot be assumed to be positive. The same challenge applies very much to perhaps the most widely publicised transport innovation today, and one that features prominently in the new study: the self-driving car.
On Friday I attended a meeting of the UK’s Intelligent Transport Systems interest group, ITS-UK. Andy Graham of White Willow Consulting gave a report of the recent Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress in Bordeaux. The Expo organisers had provided a small fleet of self-driving cars to transfer delegates between hotels and conference venues.
Andy noted that the cars drove very much like humans did – and that they kept at least as large, if not a larger, gap between themselves and the car in front. On speaking to the various car manufacturers at the show, he learned that their market testing had revealed that car buyers would only be attracted to self-driving cars if they drove in this familiar way.
Andy pointed out that this could significantly negate one of the promoted advantages of self-driving cars: reducing congestion and increasing transport flow volumes by enabling cars to be driven in close convoys with each other. This focus on consumer motivations rather than the holistic impact of travel choices is repeated in the Transport Systems Catapults’ study’s consideration of self-driving cars.
Cars don’t only harm people, communities and the environment if they are diesel or petrol powered and emit pollution, or if they are involved in collisions: they do so simply because they are big and take up space.
Space – space that is safe for people to inhabit – is vital to city and community life. We use it to walk; to sit and relax; to exercise; for our children to play in; to meet each other. Self-driving cars and electric cars take up no less space than the cars we have driven for decades. Cars that are shared take up slightly less space per journey – but are nowhere near as efficient as walking, cycling or public transport in this regard. Car clubs might reduce the need for vehicles to be parked in cities, but they still take up as much space on the road.
The Transport Systems Catapult’s study does explore many means to encourage the use of shared or public transport rather than private cars; but it does so primarily in the interests of reducing congestion and pollution. The relationship between public space, wellbeing and transport is not explored; and neither is the – at best – neutral societal impact of self-driving cars, if their evolution is left to today’s market forces.
The Catapult’s report does highlight the potential need for city-wide and national policies to govern future transport systems consisting of connected and autonomous vehicles; but once again the emphasis is on optimising traffic flows and the traveller experience, not on optimising the outcomes for everyone affected by transport infrastructure and traffic.
The Transport Systems Catapult’s report doesn’t mention most of the issues I’ve explored in this article, and those that it does touch on are quickly passed over. In 60 pages it only mentions walking and cycling a handful of times; it never analyses the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, and beyond a passing mention of employers’ “cycle to work” schemes and the incorporation of bicycle hire schemes in multi-modal ticketing solutions, these modes of transport are never presented as solutions to our transport and social challenges.
This is a failure that matters. The Transport Systems Catapult is only one voice in the Intelligent Transport Systems community, and many of us would do well to broaden our understanding of the context and consequences of our work. For my part when I worked with IBM’s Intelligent Transport Systeams team several years ago I was similarly disengaged with these issues, and focussed on the narrower economic and technological aspects of the domain. It was only later in my career as I sought to properly understand the wider complexities of Smart Cities that I began to appreciate them.
But the Catapult Centre benefits from substantial public funding, is a high profile influencer across the transport sector, and is perceived to have the authority of a relatively independent voice between the public and private sectors. By not taking into account these issues, its recommendations and initiatives run the risk of creating great harm in cities in the UK, and anywhere else our transport industry exports its ideas to.
Both the “Smart Cities” and “Intelligent Transport” communities often talk in terms of breaking down silos in industry, in city systems and in thinking. But in reality we are not doing so. Too many Smart City discussions separate out “energy”, “mobility” and ”wellbeing” as separate topics. Too few invite town planners, urban designers or social scientists to participate. And this is an example of an “Intelligent Transport” discussion that makes the same mistakes.
(Pedestrian’s attempting to cross Atlanta’s notorious Buford Highway; a 7-lane road with no pavements and 2 miles between junctions and crossings. Photo by PBS)
In the wonderful “Walkable City“, Jeff Speck describe’s the epidemiologist Richard Jackson’s stark realisation of the life-and-death significance of good urban design related to transport infrastructure. Jackson was driving along the notorious two mile stretch of Atlanta’s seven lane Buford highway with no pavements or junctions:
“There, by the side of the road, in the ninety-five degree afternoon, he saw a woman in her seventies, struggling under the burden of two shopping bags. He tried to relate her plight to his own work as an epidemiologist. “If that poor woman had collapsed from heat stroke, we docs would have written the cause of death as heat stroke and not lack of trees and public transportation, poor urban form, and heat-island effects. If she had been killed by a truck going by the cause of death would have been “motor vehicle trauma”, and not lack of sidewalks and transit, poor urban planning and failed political leadership.”
We will only harness technology, transport and infrastructure to create better communities and better cities if we seek out and respect those cross-disciplinary insights that take seriously the needs of everyone in our society who is affected by them; not just the needs of those who are its primary users.
That is the life and death impact of the transport strategies that we’ve had in the past; the transport strategies we publish today must do better.
Postscript 3rd November
The Transport Systems Catapult replied very positively on Twitter today to my rather forthright criticisms of their report. They said “Great piece Rick. The study is a first step in an ongoing discussion and we welcome further input/ideas feeding in as we go on.”
I’d like to think I’d respond in a similarly gracious way to anyone’s criticism of my own work!
What my article doesn’t say is that the Catapult’s report is impressively detailed and insightful in its coverage of those topics that it does include. I would absolutely welcome their expertise and resources being applied to a broader consideration of the topic of future transport, and look forward to seeing it.
(Cities either balance or create tension between human interaction and transport; how will self-driving cars change that equation? With thanks and apologies to Tim Stonor for images and inspiration)
Will we remember to design cities for people and life, enriched by interactions and supported by transport? Or will we put the driverless car and the app that hires it before the passenger?
I’m worried that the current level of interest in self-driving cars as a Smart City initiative is a distraction from the transport and technology issues that really matter in cities.
It’s a great example of a technology that is attracting significant public, private and academic investment because many people will pay for the resulting product in return for the undoubted benefits to their personal safety and convenience.
But will cities full of cars driving themselves be better places to live, work and play than cities full of cars driven by people?
Cities create value when people in them transact with each other: that often requires meeting in person and/or exchanging goods – both of which require transport. From the medieval era to the modern age cities have in part been defined by the tension between our desire to interact and the negative effects created by the size, noise, pollution and danger of the transport that we use to do so – whether that transport is horses and wagons or cars and vans.
A number of town planners and urban designers argue that we’ve got that balance wrong over the past half century with the result that many urban environments are dominated by road traffic and infrastructure to the extent that they inhibit the human interactions that are at the heart of the social and economic life of cities.
What will be the effect of autonomous vehicles on that inherent tension – will they help us to achieve a better balance, or make it harder to do so?
(Traffic clogging the streets of Rome. Photo by AntyDiluvian)
Autonomous vehicles are driven in a different way than the cars that we drive today, and that creates certain advantages: freeing people from the task of driving in order to work or relax; and allowing a higher volume of traffic to flow in safety than currently possible, particularly on national highway networks. And they will almost certainly very soon become better at avoiding accidents with people, vehicles and their surroundings than human drivers.
But they are no smaller than traditional vehicles, so they will take up just as much space. And they will only produce less noise and pollution if they are electric vehicles (which in turn merely create pollution elsewhere in the power system) or are powered by hydrogen – a technology that is still a long way from large-scale adoption.
And whilst computer-driven cars may be safer than cars driven by people, they will not make pedestrians and cyclists feel any safer: people are more likely to feel safe in proximity with slow moving cars with whose drivers they can make eye contact, not automated vehicles travelling at speed. The extent to which we feel safe (which we are aware of) is often a more important influence on our social and economic activity than the extent to which we are actually safe (which we may well not be accurately aware of).
The tension between the creation of social and economic value in cities through interactions between people, and the transport required to support those interactions, is also at the heart of the world’s sustainability challenge. At the “Urban Age: Governing Urban Futures” conference in New Delhi, November 2014, Ricky Burdett, Director of the London School of Economics’ Cities Program, described the graph below that shows the relationship between social and economic development, as measured by the UN Human Welfare Index, plotted left-to-right; and ecological footprint per person, which is shown vertically, and which by and large grows significantly as social and economic progress is made. (You can watch Burdett’s presentation, along with those by other speakers at the conference, here).
The dotted line at the bottom of the graph shows when the ecological footprint of each person passes beyond that which our world can support for the entire population. Residents of cities in the US are using five times this limit already, and countries such as China and Brazil, whose cities are growing at a phenomenal rate, are just starting to breach that line of sustainability.
Tackling this challenge does not necessarily involve making economic, social or personal sacrifices, though it certainly involves making changes. In recent decades, a number of politicians such as Enrique Penalosa, ex-Mayor of Bogota, international influencers such as Joan Clos, Exective Director of UN-Habitat (as reported informally by Tim Stonor from Dr. Clos’s remarks at the “Urban Planning for City Leaders” conference at the Crystal, London in 2012), and town planners such as Jeff Speck and Charles Montgomery have explored the social and economic benefits of cities that combine low-carbon lifestyles and economic growth by promoting medium-density, mixed-use urban centres that stimulate economies with a high proportion of local transactions within a walkable and cyclable distance.
Of course no single idea is appropriate to every situation, but overall I’m personally convinced that this is the only sensible general conception of cities for the future that will lead to a happy, healthy, fair and sustainable world.
There are many ways that technology can contribute to the development of this sort of urban economy, to complement the work of urban designers and town planners in the physical environment. For example, a combination of car clubs, bicycle hire schemes and multi-modal transport information services is already contributing to a changing culture in younger generations of urban citizens who are less interested in owning cars than previous generations.
(Top: Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, where cyclists and pedestrians on one of the districts main thoroughfares are given priority over cars waiting to turn onto the road. Bottom: Buford Highway, Atlanta, a 2 kilometre stretch of 7-line highway passing through a residential and retail area with no pavements or pedestrian crossings)
And this is a good example that it is not set in stone that cities must inevitably grow towards the high ecological footprints of US cities as their economies develop.
The physicist Geoffrey West’s work is often cited as proof that cities will grow larger, and that their economies will speed up as they do so, increasing their demand for resources and production of waste and pollution. But West’s work is “empirical”, not “deterministic”: it is simply based on measurements and observations of how cities behave today; it is not a prediction for how cities will behave in the future.
It is up to us to discover new services and infrastructures to support urban populations and their desire for ever more intense interactions in a less profligate way. Already today, cities diverge from West’s predictions according to the degree to which they have done so. The worst examples of American sprawl such as Houston, Texas have enormous ecological footprints compared to the standard of living and level of economy activity they support; more forward-thinking cities such as Portland, Vancouver, Copenhagen and Freiberg are far more efficient (and Charles Montgomery has argued that they are home to happier, healthier citizens as a consequence).
However, the role that digital technologies will play in shaping the economic and social transactions of future cities and that ecological footprint is far from certain.
On the one hand modern, technologies make it easier for us to communicate and share information wherever we are without needing to travel; but on the other hand those interactions create new opportunities to meet in person and to exchange goods and services; and so they create new requirements for transport. As technologies such as 3D printing, open-source manufacturing and small-scale energy generation make it possible to carry out traditionally industrial activities at much smaller scales, an increasing number of existing bulk movement patterns are being replaced by thousands of smaller, peer-to-peer interactions created by transactions in online marketplaces. We can already see the effects of this trend in the vast growth of traffic delivering goods that are purchased or exchanged online.
I first wrote about this “sharing economy“, defined by Wikipedia as “economic and social systems that enable shared access to goods, services, data and talent”, two years ago. It has the potential to promote a sustainable economy through matching supply and demand in ways that weren’t previously possible. For example, e-Bay CEO John Donahoe has described the environmental benefits created by the online second-hand marketplace extending the life of over $100 billion of goods since it began, representing a significant reduction in the impact of manufacturing and disposing of goods. But on the other hand those benefits are offset by the carbon footprint of the need to transport goods between the buyers and sellers who use them; and by the social and economic impact of that traffic on city communities.
There are many sharing economy business models that promote sustainable, walkable, locally-reinforcing city economies: Casserole Club, who use social media to introduce people who can’t cook for themselves to people who are prepared to volunteer to cook for others; the West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace, which uses analytics technology to help it’s 10,000 member businesses work together in local partnerships to win more than £4billion in new contracts each year, and Freecyle and other free recycling networks which tend to promote relatively local re-use of goods and services because the attraction of free, used goods diminishes with the increasing expense of the travel required to collect them.
(Packages from Amazon delivered to Google’s San Francisco office. Photo by moppet65535)
The vast majority of systematic incentives act to encourage such people to design businesses that maximise profit. That is why many social enterprises are small-scale, and why many successful “sharing economy” businesses such as Airbnb and Uber have very little to do with sharing value and resources, but are better understood as a new type of profit-seeking transaction broker. It is only personal, ethical attitudes to society that persuade any of us to turn our efforts and talents to more balanced models.
This is a good example of a big choice that we are taking in millions of small decisions: the personal choices of entrepreneurs, social innovators and business leaders in the businesses they start, design and operate; and our personal choices as consumers, employees and citizens in the products we buy, the businesses we work for and the politicians we vote for.
For individuals, those choices are influenced by the degree to which we understand that our own long term interests, the long term interests of the businesses we run or work for, and the long term interests of society are ultimately the same – we are all people living on a single planet together – and that that long-term alignment is more important than the absolute maximisation of short-term financial gain.
But as a whole, the markets that invest in businesses and enable them to operate and grow are driven by relatively short-term financial performance unless they are influenced by external forces.
In this context, self-driving cars – like any other technology – are strictly neutral and amoral. They are a technology that does have benefits, but those benefits are relatively weakly linked to the outcomes that most cities have set out as their objectives. If we want autonomous vehicles, “sharing economy” business models or the Internet of Things to deliver vibrant, fair, healthy and happy cities then more of our attention should be on the policy initiatives, planning and procurement frameworks, business licensing and taxation regimes that could shape the market to achieve those outcomes. The Centre for Data Innovation, British Standards Institute, and Future Cities Catapult have all published work on this subject and are carrying out initiatives to extend it.
(Photograph by Martin Deutsche of plans to redevelop Queen Elizabeth Park, site of the 2012 London Olympics. The London Legacy Development’s intention, in support of the Smart London Plan, is “for the Park to become one of the world’s leading digital environments, providing a unique opportunity to showcase how digital technology enhances urban living. The aim is to use the Park as a testing ground for the use of new digital technology in transport systems and energy services.”)
Cities create the most value in the most sustainable way when they encourage transactions between people that can take place over a walkable or cyclable distance. New technologies and new technology-enabled business models have great potential to encourage both of those outcomes, but only if we use the tools available to us to shape the market to make them financially advantageous to private sector enterprise. We should be paying more attention to those tools, and less attention to technology.
(The sound artists FA-TECH improvising in Shoreditch, London. Shoreditch’s combination of urban character, cheap rents and proximity to London’s business, financial centres and culture led to the emergence of a thriving technology startup community – although that community’s success is now driving rents up, challenging some of the characteristics that enabled it.)
(I first learned of the architect Kelvin Campbell‘s concept of “massive/small” just over two years ago – the idea that certain characteristics of policy and the physical environment in cities could encourage “massive amounts of small-scale innovation” to occur. Kelvin recently launched a collaborative campaign to capture ideas, tools and tactics for massive/small “Smart Urbanism“. This is my first contribution to that campaign.)
Over the past 5 years, enormous interest has developed in the potential for digital technologies to contribute to the construction and development of cities, and to the operation of the services and infrastructures that support them. These ideas are often referred to as “Smart Cities” or “Future Cities”.
Indeed, as the price of digital technologies such as smartphones, sensors, analytics, open source software and cloud platforms reduces rapidly, market dynamics will drive their aggressive adoption to make construction, infrastructure and city services more efficient, and hence make their providers more competitive.
But those market dynamics do not guarantee that we will get everything we want for the future of our cities: efficiency and resilience are not the same as health, happiness and opportunity for every citizen.
Is it realistic to ask ourselves whether we can achieve those objectives? Yes, it has to be.
Many of us believe in that possibility, and spend a lot of our efforts finding ways to achieve it. And over the same timeframe that interest in “smart” and “future” cities has emerged, a belief has developed around the world that the governance institutions of cities – local authorities and elected mayors, rather than the governments of nations – are the most likely political entities to implement the policies that lead to a sustainable, resilient future with more equitably distributed economic growth.
Consequently many Mayors and City Councils are considering or implementing legislation and policy frameworks that change the economic and financial context in which construction, infrastructure and city services are deployed and operated. The British Standards Institute recently published guidance on this topic as part of its overall Smart Cities Standards programme.
But whilst in principle these trends and ideas are incredibly exciting in their potential to create better cities, communities, places and lives in the future, in practise many debates about applying them falter on a destructive and misleading argument between “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches – the same chasm that Smart Urbanism seeks to bridge in the physical world.
Policies and programmes driven by central government organisations or implemented by technology and infrastructure corporations that drive digital technology into large-scale infrastructures and public services are often criticised as crude, “top-down” initiatives that prioritise resilience and efficiency at the expense of the concerns and values of ordinary people, businesses and communities. However, the organic, “bottom-up” innovation that critics of these initatives champion as the better, alternative approach is ineffective at creating equality.
(“Lives on the Line” by James Cheshire at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, showing the variation in life expectancy and correlation to child poverty in London. From Cheshire, J. 2012. Lives on the Line: Mapping Life Expectancy Along the London Tube Network. Environment and Planning A. 44 (7). Doi: 10.1068/a45341)
“Bottom-up innovation” is what every person, community and business does every day: using our innate creativity to find ways to use the resources and opportunities available to us to make a better life.
But the degree to which we fail to distribute those resources and opportunities equally is illustrated by the stark variation in life expectancy between the richest and poorest areas of cities in the UK: often this variation is as much as 20 years within a single city.
The tools to achieve this are relatively cheap, and the right policy environment could make it fairly straightforward to augment the business case for efficient, resilient “smart city” infrastructures to ensure that they are deployed. They are the digital equivalents of the physical concepts of Smart Urbanism – the use of open grid structures for spatial layouts, and the provision of basic infrastructure components such as street layouts and party walls in areas expected to attract high growth in informal housing. Some will be delivered as a natural consequence of market forces driving technology adoption; but others will only become economically viable when local or national government policies shape the market by requiring them:
Broadband, wi-if and 3G / 4G connectivity should be broadly available so that everyone can participate in the digital economy.
The data from city services should be made available as Open Data and published through “Application Programming Interfaces” (APIs) so that everybody knows how they work; and can adapt them to their own individual needs.
The data and APIs should be made available in the form of Open Standards so that everybody can understand them; and so that the systems that we rely on can work together.
The data and APIs should be available to developers working on Cloud Computing platforms with Open Source software so that anyone with a great idea for a new service to offer to people or businesses can get started for free.
The technology systems that support the services and infrastructures we rely on should be based on Open Architectures, so that we have freedom to chose which technologies we use, and to change our minds.
Governments, institutions, businesses and communities should participate in an open dialogue about the places we live and work in, informed by open data, enabled by social media and smartphones, and enlightened by empathy.
Local regulatory regimes should encourage the development of “sharing-economy” online business models that use local community networks and bartering mechanisms to prefer local transactions – retaining value in the local economy, and increasing the percentage of transactions that take place through walking and cycling rather than requiring motorised transport.
(Casserole Club, a social enterprise developed by FutureGov uses social media to connect people who have difficulty cooking for themselves with others who are happy to cook an extra portion for a neighbour; a great example of a locally-focused “sharing economy” business model which creates financially sustainable social value.)
These principles would encourage good “digital placemaking“: they would help to align the investments that will be made in improving cities using technology with the needs and motivations of the public sector, the private sector, communities and businesses. They would create “Smart Digital Urbanism”: the conditions and environment in which vibrant, fair digital cities grow from the successful innovations of their citizens, communities and businesses in the information economy.
In my new role at Amey, a vast organisation in the UK that delivers public services and operates and supports public infrastructure, I’m leading a set of innovative projects with our customers and technology partners to explore these ideas and to understand how we can collaboratively create economic, social and environmental value for ourselves; for our customers; and for the people, communities and businesses who live in the areas our services support.
It’s a terrifically exciting role; and I’ll soon be hiring a small team of passionate, creative people to help me identify, shape and deliver those projects. I’ll post an update here with details of the skills, experience and characteristics I’m looking for. I hope some of you will find them attractive and get in touch.
(An infographic depicting realtime data describing Dublin – the waiting time at road junctions; the location of buses; the number of free parking spaces and bicycles available to hire; and sentiments expressed about the city through social media)
(I was honoured to be asked to speak at TEDxBrum in my home city of Birmingham this weekend. The theme of the event was “DIY” – “the method of building, modifying or repairing something without the aid of experts or professionals”. In other words, how Birmingham’s people, communities and businesses can make their home a better place. This is a rough transcript of my talk).
What might I, a middle-aged, white man paid by a multi-national corporation to be an expert in cities and technology, have to say to Europe’s youngest city, and one of its most ethnically and nationally diverse, about how it should re-create itself “without the aid of experts or professionals”?
Perhaps I could try to claim that I can offer the perspective of one of the world’s earliest “digital natives”. In 1980, at the age of ten, my father bought me one of the world’s first personal computers, a Tandy TRS 80, and taught me how to programme it using “machine code“.
But about two years ago, whilst walking through London to give a talk at a networking event, I was reminded of just how much the world has changed since my childhood.
I found myself walking along Wardour St. in Soho, just off Oxford St., and past a small alley called St. Anne’s Court which brought back tremendous memories for me. In the 1980s I spent all of the money I earned washing pots in a local restaurant in Winchester to travel by train to London every weekend and visit a small shop in a basement in St. Anne’s Court.
I’ve told this story in conference speeches a few times now, perhaps to a total audience of a couple of thousand people. Only once has someone been able to answer the question:
“What was the significance of St. Anne’s Court to the music scene in the UK in the 1980s?”
Here’s the answer:
Shades Records, the shop in the basement, was the only place in the UK that sold the most extreme (and inventive) forms of “thrash metal” and “death metal“, which at the time were emerging from the ashes of punk and the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” in the late 1970s.
The process by which bands like VOIVOD, Coroner and Celtic Frost – who at the time were three 17-year-olds who practised in an old military bunker outside Zurich – managed to connect – without the internet – to the very few people around the world like me who were willing to pay money for their music feels like ancient history now. It was a world of hand-printed “fanzines”, and demo tapes painstakingly copied one at a time, ordered by mail from classified adverts in magazines like Kerrang!
Our world has been utterly transformed in the relatively short time between then and now by the phenomenal ease with which we can exchange information through the internet and social media.
The real digital natives, though, are not even those people who grew up with the internet and social media as part of their everyday world (though those people are surely about to change the world as they enter employment).
They are the very young children like my 6-year-old son, who taught himself at the age of two to use an iPad to access the information that interested him (admittedly, in the form of Thomas the Tank Engine stories on YouTube) before anyone else taught him to read or write, and who can now use programming tools like MIT’s Scratch to control computers vastly more powerful than the one I used as a child.
Their expectations of the world, and of cities like Birmingham, will be like no-one who has ever lived before.
And their ability to use technology will be matched by the phenomenal variety of data available to them to manipulate. As everything from our cars to our boilers to our fridges to our clothing is integrated with connected, digital technology, the “Internet of Things“, in which everything is connected to the internet, is emerging. As a consequence our world, and our cities, are full of data.
(The programme I helped my 6-year old son write using MIT’s “Scratch” language to cause a cartoon cat to draw a picture of a house)
My friend the architect Tim Stonor calls the images that we are now able to create, such as the one at the start of this article, “data porn”. The image shows data about Dublin from the Dublinked information sharing partnership: the waiting time at road junctions; the location of buses; the number of free parking spaces and bicycles available to hire; and sentiments expressed about the city through social media.
Tim’s point is that we should concentrate not on creating pretty visualisations; but on the difference we can make to cities by using this data. Through Open Data portals, social media applications, and in many other ways, it unlocks secrets about cities and communities:
Who are the 17 year-olds creating today’s most weird and experimental music? (Probably by collaborating digitally from three different bedroom studios on three different continents)
Where is the healthiest walking route to school?
Is there a local company nearby selling wonderful, oven-ready curries made from local recipes and fresh ingredients?
If I set off for work now, will a traffic jam develop to block my way before I get there?
From Dublin to Montpellier to Madrid and around the world my colleagues are helping cities to build 21st-Century infrastructures that harness this data. As technology advances, every road, electricity substation, University building, and supermarket supply chain will exploit it. The business case is easy: we can use data to find ways to operate city services, supply chains and infrastructure more efficiently, and in a way that’s less wasteful of resources and more resilient in the face of a changing climate.
Top-down thinking is not enough
But to what extent will this enormous investment in technology help the people who live and work in cities, and those who visit them, to benefit from the Information Economy that digital technology and data is creating?
This is a vital question. The ability of digital technology to optimise and automate tasks that were once carried out by people is removing jobs that we have relied on for decades. In order for our society to be based upon a fair and productive economy, we all need to be able to benefit from the new opportunities to work and be successful that are being created by digital technology.
(Photo of Masshouse Circus, Birmingham, a concrete urban expressway that strangled the city centre before its redevelopment in 2003, by Birmingham City Council)
Too often in the last century, we got this wrong. We used the technologies of the age – concrete, lifts, industrial machinery and cars – to build infrastructures and industries that supported our mass needs for housing, transport, employment and goods; but that literally cut through and isolated the communities that create urban life.
If we make the same mistake by thinking only about digital technology in terms of its ability to create efficiencies, then as citizens, as communities, as small businesses we won’t fully benefit from it.
In contrast, one of the authors of Birmingham’s Big City Plan, the architect Kelvin Campbell, created the concept of “massive / small“. He asked: what are the characteristics of public policy and city infrastructure that create open, adaptable cities for everyone and that thereby give rise to “massive” amounts of “small-scale” innovation?
There are examples we can learn from. Almere in Holland use analytics technology to plan and predict the future development of the city; but they also engage in dialogue with their citizens about the future the city wants. Montpellier in France use digital data to measure the performance of public services; but they also engage online with their citizens in a dialogue about those services and the outcomes they are trying to achieve. The Dutch Water Authority are implementing technology to monitor, automate and optimise an infrastructure on which many cities depend; but making much of the data openly available to communities, businesses, researchers and innovators to explore.
The data from city services should be made available as Open Data and through published “Application Programming Interfaces” (APIs) so that everybody knows how they work; and can adapt them to their own individual needs.
The data and APIs should be made available in the form of Open Standards so that everybody can understand it; and so that the systems that we rely on can work together.
The data and APIs should be available to developers working on Cloud Computing platforms with Open Source software so that anyone with a great idea for a new service to offer to people or businesses can get started for free.
The technology systems that support the services and infrastructures we rely on should be based on Open Architectures, so that we have freedom to chose which technologies we use, and to change our minds.
Governments, institutions, businesses and communities should participate in an open dialogue, informed by data and enlightened by empathy, about the places we live and work in.
If local authorities and national government create planning policies, procurement practises and legislation that require that public infrastructure, property development and city services provide this openness and accessibility, then the money spent on city infrastructure and services will create cities that are open and adaptable to everyone in a digital age.
Bottom-up innovation is not enough, either
(Coders at work at the Birmingham “Smart Hack”, photographed by Sebastian Lenton)
Not everyone has access to the technology and skills to use this data, of course. But some of the people who do will create the services that others need.
I took part in my first “hackathon” in Birmingham two years ago. A group of people spent a weekend together in 2012 asking themselves: in what way should Birmingham be better? And what can we do about it? Over two days, they wrote an app, “Second Helping”, that connected information about leftover food in the professional kitchens of restaurants and catering services, to soup kitchens that give food to people who don’t have enough.
Second Helping was a great idea; but how do you turn a great idea and an app into a change in the way that food is used in a city?
Hackathons and “civic apps” are great examples of the “bottom-up” creativity that all of us use to create value – innovating with the resources around us to make a better life, run a better business, or live in a stronger community. But “bottom-up” on it’s own isn’t enough.
If you’re born in the wrong place, you’re likely to die 10 years younger than someone else born in a different part of the same city. This shocking situation arises from many, complex issues; but one conclusion that it is easy to draw is that the opportunity to innovate successfully is not the same for everyone.
So how do we increase everybody’s chances of success? We need to create the policies, institutions, culture and behaviours that join up the top-down thinking that tends to control the allocation of resources and investment, especially for infrastructure, with the needs of bottom-up innovators everywhere.
Translational co-operation
(The Harborne Food School, which will open in the New Year to offer training and events in local and sustainable food)
But the institutions of the past, such as the schools which to a large degree educated the population for repetitive careers in labour-intensive factories, won’t work for us today. Our world is more complicated and requires a greater degree of localised creativity to be successful. We need institutions that are able to engage with and understand individuals; and that make their resources openly available so that each of us can use them in the way that makes most sense to us. Some public services are starting to respond to this challenge, through the “Open Public Services” agenda; and the provision of Open Data and APIs by public services and infrastructure are part of the response too.
But as Andrew Zolli describes in “Resilience: why things bounce back“, there are both institutional and cultural barriers to engagement and collaboration between city institutions and localised innovation. Zolli describes the change-makers who overcome those barriers as “translational leaders” – people with the ability to engage with both small-scale, informal innovation in communities and large-scale, formal institutions with resources.
We’re trying to apply that “translational” thinking in Birmingham through the Smart City Alliance, a collaboration between 20 city institutions, businesses and innovators. The idea is to enable conversations about challenges and opportunities in the city, between people, communities, innovators and the organisations who have resources, from the City Council and public institutions to businesses, entrepreneurs and social enterprises. We try to put people and organisations with challenges or good ideas in touch with other people or organisations with the ability to help them.
This is how we join the “top-down” resources, policies and programmes of city institutions and big companies with the “bottom-up” innovation that creates value in local situations. A lot of the time it’s about listening to people we wouldn’t normally meet.
Partly as a consequence, we’ve continued to explore the ideas about local food that were first raised at the hackathon. Two years later, the Harborne Food School is close to opening as a social enterprise in a redeveloped building on Harborne High Street that had fallen out of use.
The innovations and changes caused by the internet over the last two decades have accelerated as it has made information easier and easier to access and exchange through the advent of technologies such as broadband, mobile devices and social media. But the usefulness of all of those technologies is limited by the tools required to control them – keyboards, mice and touchscreens.
Telepathy is now technology, and this is just one example of the way that the boundary between our minds, bodies and digital information will disappear over the next decade. As a consequence, our cities and lives will change in ways we’ve never imagined, and some of those changes will happen surprisingly quickly.
I can’t predict what Birmingham will or should be like in the future. As a citizen, I’ll be one of the million or so people who decide that future through our choices and actions. But I can say that the technologies available to us today are the most incredible DIY tools for creating that future that we’ve ever had access to. And relatively quickly technologies like bio-technology, 3D printing and brain/computer interfaces will put even more power in our hands.
As a parent, I get engaged in my son’s exploration of these technologies and help him be digitally aware, creative and responsible. Whenever I can, I help schools, Universities, small businesses or community initiatives to use them, because I might be helping one of IBM’s best future employees or business partners; or just because they’re exciting and worth helping. And as an employee, I try to help my company take decisions that are good for our long term business because they are good for the society that the business operates in.
We can take for granted that all of us, whatever we do, will encounter more and more incredible technologies as time passes. By remembering these very simple things, and remembering them in the hundreds of choices I make every day, I hope that I’ll be using them to play my part in building a better Birmingham, and better cities and communities everywhere.
(Shades Records in St. Anne’s Court in the 1980s. You can read about the role it played in the development of the UK’s music culture – and in the lives of its customers – in this article from Thrash Hits; or this one from Every Record Tells a Story. And if you really want to find out what it was all about, try watching Celtic Frost or VOIVOD in the 1980s!)
Why data is uncertain, cities are not programmable, and the world is not “algorithmic”.
Many people are not convinced that the Smart Cities movement will result in the use of technology to make places, communities and businesses in cities better. Outside their consumer enjoyment of smartphones, social media and online entertainment – to the degree that they have access to them – they don’t believe that technology or the companies that sell it will improve their lives.
Most recently, the idea that traditional processes of government should be replaced by “algorithmic regulation” – the comparison of the outcomes of public systems to desired objectives through the measurement of data, and the automatic adjustment of those systems by algorithms in order to achieve them – has been proposed by Tim O’Reilly and other prominent technologists.
These approaches work in many mechanical and engineering systems – the autopilots that fly planes or the anti-lock braking systems that we rely on to stop our cars. But should we extend them into human realms – how we educate our children or how we rehabilitate convicted criminals?
It’s clearly important to ask whether it would be desirable for our society to adopt such approaches. That is a complex debate, but my personal view is that in most cases the incredible technologies available to us today – and which I write about frequently on this blog – should not be used to take automatic decisions about such issues. They are usually more valuable when they are used to improve the information and insight available to human decision-makers – whether they are politicians, public workers or individual citizens – who are then in a better position to exercise good judgement.
More fundamentally, though, I want to challenge whether “algorithmic regulation” or any other highly deterministic approach to human issues is even possible. Quite simply, it is not.
It is true that our ability to collect, analyse and interpret data about the world has advanced to an astonishing degree in recent years. However, that ability is far from perfect, and strongly established scientific and philosophical principles tell us that it is impossible to definitively measure human outcomes from underlying data in physical or computing systems; and that it is impossible to create algorithmic rules that exactly predict them.
Sometimes automated systems succeed despite these limitations – anti-lock braking technology has become nearly ubiquitous because it is more effective than most human drivers at slowing down cars in a controlled way. But in other cases they create such great uncertainties that we must build in safeguards to account for the very real possibility that insights drawn from data are wrong. I do this every time I leave my home with a small umbrella packed in my bag despite the fact that weather forecasts created using enormous amounts of computing power predict a sunny day.
(No matter how sophisticated computer models of cities become, there are fundamental reasons why they will always be simplifications of reality. It is only by understanding those constraints that we can understand which insights from computer models are valuable, and which may be misleading. Image of Sim City by haljackey)
We can only understand where an “algorithmic” approach can be trusted; where it needs safeguards; and where it is wholly inadequate by understanding these limitations. Some of them are practical, and limited only by the sensitivity of today’s sensors and the power of today’s computers. But others are fundamental laws of physics and limitations of logical systems.
A blog published by the highly influential magazine Wired recently made similar overstatements: “The Universe is Programmable” argues that we should extend the concept of an “Application Programming Interface (API)” – a facility usually offered by technology systems to allow external computer programmes to control or interact with them – to every aspect of the world, including our own biology.
To compare complex, unpredictable, emergent biological and social systems to the very logical, deterministic world of computer software is at best a dramatic oversimplification. The systems that comprise the human body range from the armies of symbiotic microbes that help us digest food in our stomachs to the consequences of using corn syrup to sweeten food to the cultural pressure associated with “size 0” celebrities. Many of those systems can’t be well modelled in their own right, let alone deterministically related to each other; let alone formally represented in an accurate, detailed way by technology systems (or even in mathematics).
We should regret and avoid the hubris that leads to the distrust of technology by overstating its capability and failing to recognise its challenges and limitations. That distrust is a barrier that prevents us from achieving the very real benefits that data and technology can bring, and that have been convincingly demonstrated in the past.
For example, an enormous contribution to our knowledge of how to treat and prevent disease was made by John Snow who used data to analyse outbreaks of cholera in London in the 19th century. Snow used a map to correlate cases of cholera to the location of communal water pipes, leading to the insight that water-borne germs were responsible for spreading the disease. We wash our hands to prevent diseases spreading through germs in part because of what we would now call the “geospatial data analysis” performed by John Snow.
Many of the insights that we seek from analytic and smart city systems are human in nature, not physical or mathematical – for example identifying when and where to apply social care interventions in order to reduce the occurrence of emotional domestic abuse. Such questions are complex and uncertain: what is “emotional domestic abuse?” Is it abuse inflicted by a live-in boyfriend, or by an estranged husband who lives separately but makes threatening telephone calls? Does it consist of physical violence or bullying? And what is “bullying”?
We attempt to create structured, quantitative data about complex human and social issues by using approximations and categorisations; by tolerating ranges and uncertainties in numeric measurements; by making subjective judgements; and by looking for patterns and clusters across different categories of data. Whilst these techniques can be very powerful, just how difficult it is to be sure what these conventions and interpretations should be is illustrated by the controversies that regularly arise around “who knew what, when?” whenever there is a high profile failure in social care or any other public service.
These challenges are not limited to “high level” social, economic and biological systems. In fact, they extend throughout the worlds of physics and chemistry into the basic nature of matter and the universe. They fundamentally limit the degree to which we can measure the world, and our ability to draw insight from that information.
By being aware of these limitations we are able to design systems and practises to use data and technology effectively. We know more about the weather through modelling it using scientific and mathematical algorithms in computers than we would without those techniques; but we don’t expect those forecasts to be entirely accurate. Similarly, supermarkets can use data about past purchases to make sufficiently accurate predictions about future spending patterns to boost their profits, without needing to predict exactly what each individual customer will buy.
We underestimate the limitations and flaws of these approaches at our peril. Whilst Tim O’Reilly cites several automated financial systems as good examples of “algorithmic regulation”, the financial crash of 2008 showed the terrible consequences of the thoroughly inadequate risk management systems used by the world’s financial institutions compared to the complexity of the system that they sought to profit from. The few institutions that realised that market conditions had changed and that their models for risk management were no longer valid relied instead on the expertise of their staff, and avoided the worst affects. Others continued to rely on models that had started to produce increasingly misleading guidance, leading to the recession that we are only now emerging from six years later, and that has damaged countless lives around the world.
Every day in their work, scientists, engineers and statisticians draw conclusions from data and analytics, but they temper those conclusions with an awareness of their limitations and any uncertainties inherent in them. By taking and communicating such a balanced and informed approach to applying similar techniques in cities, we will create more trust in these technologies than by overstating their capabilities.
What follows is a description of some of the scientific, philosophical and practical issues that lead inevitability to uncertainty in data, and to limitations in our ability to draw conclusions from it:
But I’ll finish with an explanation of why we can still draw great value from data and analytics if we are aware of those issues and take them properly into account.
1. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the fundamental impossibility of knowing everything about anything
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a cornerstone of Quantum Mechanics, which, along with General Relativity, is one of the two most fundamental theories scientists use to understand our world. It defines a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of properties of the basic particles which make up the world – such as protons, neutrons and electrons – can be known at the same time. For instance, the more accurately we measure the position of such particles, the more uncertain their speed and direction of movement become.
In order to measure something, we have to interact with it. In everyday life, we do this by using our eyes to measure lightwaves that are created by lightbulbs or the sun and that then reflect off objects in the world around us.
But when we shine light on an object, what we are actually doing is showering it with billions of photons, and observing the way that they scatter. When the object is quite large – a car, a person, or a football – the photons are so small in comparison that they bounce off without affecting it. But when the object is very small – such as an atom – the photons colliding with it are large enough to knock it out of its original position. In other words, measuring the current position of an object involves a collision which causes it to move in a random way.
This analogy isn’t exact; but it conveys the general idea. (For a full explanation, see the figure and link above). Most of the time, we don’t notice the effects of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle because it applies at extremely small scales. But it is perhaps the most fundamental law that asserts that “perfect knowledge” is simply impossible; and it illustrates a wider point that any form of measurement or observation in general affects what is measured or observed. Sometimes the effects are negligible, but often they are not – if we observe workers in a time and motion study, for example, we need to be careful to understand the effect our presence and observations have on their behaviour.
2. Accuracy, precision, noise, uncertainty and error: why measurements are never fully reliable
Outside the world of Quantum Mechanics, there are more practical issues that limit the accuracy of all measurements and data.
(A measurement of the electrical properties of a superconducting device from my PhD thesis. Theoretically, the behaviour should appear as a smooth, wavy line; but the experimental measurement is affected by noise and interference that cause the signal to become “fuzzy”. In this case, the effects of noise and interference – the degree to which the signal appears “fuzzy” – are relatively small compared to the strength of the signal, and the device is usable)
We live in a “warm” world – roughly 300 degrees Celsius above what scientists call “absolute zero“, the coldest temperature possible. What we experience as warmth is in fact movement: the atoms from which we and our world are made “jiggle about” – they move randomly. When we touch a hot object and feel pain it is because this movement is too violent to bear – it’s like being pricked by billions of tiny pins.
This random movement creates “noise” in every physical system, like the static we hear in analogue radio stations or on poor quality telephone connections.
We also live in a busy world, and this activity leads to other sources of noise. All electronic equipment creates electrical and magnetic fields that spread beyond the equipment itself, and in turn affect other equipment – we can hear this as a buzzing noise when we leave smartphones near radios.
Generally speaking, all measurements are affected by random noise created by heat, vibrations or electrical interference; are limited by the precision and accuracy of the measuring devices we use; and are affected by inconsistencies and errors that arise because it is always impossible to completely separate the measurement we want to make from all other environmental factors.
Scientists, engineers and statisticians are familiar with these challenges, and use techniques developed over the course of more than a century to determine and describe the degree to which they can trust and rely on the measurements they make. They do not claim “perfect knowledge” of anything; on the contrary, they are diligent in describing the unavoidable uncertainty that is inherent in their work.
3. The limitations of measuring the natural world using digital systems
One of the techniques we’ve adopted over the last half century to overcome the effects of noise and to make information easier to process is to convert “analogue” information about the real world (information that varies smoothly) into digital information – i.e. information that is expressed as sequences of zeros and ones in computer systems.
(When analogue signals are amplified, so is the noise that they contain. Digital signals are interpreted using thresholds: above an upper threshold, the signal means “1”, whilst below a lower threshold, the signal means “0”. A long string of “0”s and “1”s can be used to encode the same information as contained in analogue waves. By making the difference between the thresholds large compared to the level of signal noise, digital signals can be recreated to remove noise. Further explanation and image by Science Aid)
This process involves a trade-off between the accuracy with which analogue information is measured and described, and the length of the string of digits required to do so – and hence the amount of computer storage and processing power needed.
This trade-off can be clearly seen in the difference in quality between an internet video viewed on a smartphone over a 3G connection and one viewed on a high definition television using a cable network. Neither video will be affected by the static noise that affects weak analogue television signals, but the limited bandwidth of a 3G connection dramatically limits the clarity and resolution of the image transmitted.
The Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem defines this trade-off and the limit to the quality that can be achieved in storing and processing digital information created from analogue sources. It determines the quality of digital data that we are able to create about any real-world system – from weather patterns to the location of moving objects to the fidelity of sound and video recordings. As computers and communications networks continue to grow more powerful, the quality of digital information will improve, but it will never be a perfect representation of the real world.
Three limits to our ability to analyse data and draw insights from it
1. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the inconsistency of algorithms
Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem sets a limit on what can be achieved by any “closed logical system”. Examples of “closed logical systems” include computer programming languages, any system for creating algorithms – and mathematics itself.
We use “closed logical systems” whenever we create insights and conclusions by combining and extrapolating from basic data and facts. This is how all reporting, calculating, business intelligence, “analytics” and “big data” technologies work.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem proves that any closed logical system can be used to create conclusions that it is not possible to show are true or false using the same system. In other words, whilst computer systems can produce extremely useful information, we cannot rely on them to prove that that information is completely accurate and valid. We have to do that ourselves.
Gödel’s theorem doesn’t stop computer algorithms that have been verified by humans using the scientific method from working; but it does mean that we can’t rely on computers to both generate algorithms and guarantee their validity.
2. The behaviour of many real-world systems can’t be reduced analytically to simple rules
Many systems in the real-world are complex: they cannot be described by simple rules that predict their behaviour based on measurements of their initial conditions.
A simple example is the “three body problem“. Imagine a sun, a planet and a moon all orbiting each other. The movement of these three objects is governed by the force of gravity, which can be described by relatively simple mathematical equations. However, even with just three objects involved, it is not possible to use these equations to directly predict their long-term behaviour – whether they will continue to orbit each other indefinitely, or will eventually collide with each other, or spin off into the distance.
(A computer simulation by Hawk Express of a Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, in which reactions between liquid chemicals create oscillating patterns of colour. The simulation is carried out using “cellular automata” a technique based on a grid of squares which can take different colours. In each “turn” of the simulation, like a turn in a board game, the colour of each square is changed using simple rules based on the colours of adjacent squares. Such simulations have been used to reproduce a variety of real-world phenomena)
As Stephen Wolfram argued in his controversial book “A New Kind of Science” in 2002, we need to take a different approach to understanding such complex systems. Rather than using mathematics and logic to analyse them, we need to simulate them, often using computers to create models of the elements from which complex systems are composed, and the interactions between them. By running simulations based on a large number of starting points and comparing the results to real-world observations, insights into the behaviour of the real-world system can be derived. This is how weather forecasts are created, for example.
But as we all know, weather forecasts are not always accurate. Simulations are approximations to real-world systems, and their accuracy is restricted by the degree to which digital data can be used to represent a non-digital world. For this reason, conclusions and predictions drawn from simulations are usually “average” or “probable” outcomes for the system as a whole, not precise predictions of the behaviour of the system or any individual element of it. This is why weather forecasts are often wrong; and why they predict likely levels of rain and windspeed rather than the shape and movement of individual clouds.
(A simple and famous example of a computer programme that never stops running because it calls itself. The output continually varies by printing out characters based on random number generation. Image by Prosthetic Knowledge)
3. Some problems can’t be solved by computing machines
If I consider a simple question such as “how many letters are in the word ‘calculation’?”, I can easily convince myself that a computer programme could be written to answer the question; and that it would find the answer within a relatively short amount of time. But some problems are much harder to solve, or can’t even be solved at all.
For example, a “Wang Tile” (see image below) is a square tile formed from four triangles of different colours. Imagine that you have bought a set of tiles of various colour combinations in order to tile a wall in a kitchen or bathroom. Given the set of tiles that you have bought, is it possible to tile your wall so that triangles of the same colour line up to each other, forming a pattern of “Wang Tile” squares?
In 1966 Robert Berger proved that no algorithm exists that can answer that question. There is no way to solve the problem – or to determine how long it will take to solve the problem – without actually solving it. You just have to try to tile the room and find out the hard way.
One of the most famous examples of this type of problem is the “halting problem” in computer science. Some computer programmes finish executing their commands relatively quickly. Others can run indefinitely if they contain a “loop” instruction that never ends. For others which contain complex sequences of loops and calls from one section of code to another, it may be very hard to tell whether the programme finishes quickly, or takes a long time to complete, or never finishes its execution at all.
(A set of Wang Tiles, and a pattern of coloured squares created by tiling them. Given any random set of tiles of different colour combinations, there is no set of rules that can be relied on to determine whether a valid pattern of coloured squares can be created from them. Sometimes, you have to find out by trial and error. Images from Wikipedia)
Five reasons why the human world is messy, unpredictable, and can’t be perfectly described using data and logic
1. Our actions create disorder
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a good candidate for the most fundamental law of science. It states that as time progresses, the universe becomes more disorganised. It guarantees that ultimately – in billions of years – the Universe will die as all of the energy and activity within it dissipates.
For example, if I spend a day building a shed, then to create that order and value from raw materials, I consume structured food and turn it into sewage. Or if I use an electric forklift to stack a pile of boxes, I use electricity that has been created by burning structured coal into smog and ash.
So it is literally impossible to create a “perfect world”. Whenever we act to make a part of the world more ordered, we create disorder elsewhere. And ultimately – thankfully, long after you and I are dead – disorder is all that will be left.
2. The failure of Logical Atomism: why the human world can’t be perfectly described using data and logic
In the 20th Century two of the most famous and accomplished philosophers in history, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, invented “Logical Atomism“, a theory that the entire world could be described by using “atomic facts” – independent and irreducible pieces of knowledge – combined with logic.
But despite 40 years of work, these two supremely intelligent people could not get their theory to work: “Logical Atomism” failed. It is not possible to describe our world in that way.
One cause of the failure was the insurmountable difficulty of identifying truly independent, irreducible atomic facts. “The box is red” and “the circle is blue”, for example, aren’t independent or irreducible facts for many reasons. “Red” and “blue” are two conventions of human language used to describe the perceptions created when electro-magnetic waves of different frequencies arrive at our retinas. In other words, they depend on and relate to each other through a number of sophisticated systems.
Despite centuries of scientific and philosophical effort, we do not have a complete understanding of how to describe our world at its most basic level. As physicists have explored the world at smaller and smaller scales, Quantum Mechanics has emerged as the most fundamental theory for describing it – it is the closest we have come to finding the “irreducible facts” that Russell and Wittgenstein were looking for. But whilst the mathematical equations of Quantum Mechanics predict the outcomes of experiments very well, after nearly a century, physicists still don’t really agree about what those equations mean. And as we have already seen, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle prevents us from ever having perfect knowledge of the world at this level.
Perhaps the most important failure of logical atomism, though, was that it proved impossible to use logical rules to turn “facts” at one level of abstraction – for example, “blood cells carry oxygen”, “nerves conduct electricity”, “muscle fibres contract” – into facts at another level of abstraction – such as “physical assault is a crime”. The human world and the things that we care about can’t be described using logical combinations of “atomic facts”. For example, how would you define the set of all possible uses of a screwdriver, from prising the lids off paint tins to causing a short-circuit by jamming it into a switchboard?
Our world is messy, subjective and opportunistic. It defies universal categorisation and logical analysis.
(A Pescheria in Bari, Puglia, where a fish-market price information service makes it easier for local fisherman to identify the best buyers and prices for their daily catch. Photo by Vito Palmi)
3. The importance and inaccessibility of “local knowledge”
Because the tool we use for calculating and agreeing value when we exchange goods and services is money, economics is the discipline that is often used to understand the large-scale behaviour of society. We often quantify the “growth” of society using economic measures, for example.
But this approach is notorious for overlooking social and environmental characteristics such as health, happiness and sustainability. Alternatives exist, such as the Social Progress Index, or the measurement framework adopted by the United Nations 2014 Human Development Report on world poverty; but they are still high level and abstract.
Such approaches struggle to explain localised variations, and in particular cannot predict the behaviours or outcomes of individual people with any accuracy. This “local knowledge problem” is caused by the fact that a great deal of the information that determines individual actions is personal and local, and not measurable at a distance – the experienced eye of the fruit buyer assessing not just the quality of the fruit but the quality of the farm and farmers that produce it, as a measure of the likely consistency of supply; the emotional attachments that cause us to favour one brand over another; or the degree of community ties between local businesses that influence their propensity to trade with each other.
“Sharing economy” business models that use social media and reputation systems to enable suppliers and consumers of goods and services to find each other and transact online are opening up this local knowledge to some degree. Local food networks, freecycling networks, and land-sharing schemes all use this technology to the benefit of local communities whilst potentially making information about detailed transactions more widely available. And to some degree, the human knowledge that influences how transactions take place can be encoded in “expert systems” which allow computer systems to codify the quantitative and heuristic rules by which people take decisions.
But these technologies are only used in a subset of the interactions that take place between people and businesses across the world, and it is unlikely that they’ll become ubiquitous in the foreseeable future (or that we would want them to become so). Will we ever reach the point where prospective house-buyers delegate decisions about where to live to computer programmes operating in online marketplaces rather than by visiting places and imagining themselves living there? Will we somehow automate the process of testing the freshness of fish by observing the clarity of their eyes and the freshness of their smell before buying them to cook and eat?
In many cases, while technology may play a role introducing potential buyers and sellers of goods and services to each other, it will not replace – or predict – the human behaviours involved in the transaction itself.
(Medway Youth Trust use predictive and textual analytics to draw insight into their work helping vulnerable children. They use technology to inform expert case workers, not to take decisions on their behalf.)
4. “Wicked problems” cannot be described using data and logic
Despite all of the challenges associated with problems in mathematics and the physical sciences, it is nevertheless relatively straightforward to frame and then attempt to solve problems in those domains; and to determine whether the resulting solutions are valid.
As the failure of Logical Atomism showed, though, problems in the human domain are much more difficult to describe in any systematic, complete and precise way – a challenge known as the “frame problem” in artificial intelligence. This is particularly true of “wicked problems” – challenges such as social mobility or vulnerable families that are multi-faceted, and consist of a variety of interdependent issues.
Take job creation, for example. Is that best accomplished through creating employment in taxpayer-funded public sector organisations? Or by allowing private-sector wealth to grow, creating employment through “trickle-down” effects? Or by maximising overall consumer spending power as suggested by “middle-out” economics? All of these ideas are described not using the language of mathematics or other formal logical systems, but using natural human language which is subjective and inconsistent in use.
The failure of Logical Atomism to fully represent such concepts in formal logical systems through which truth and falsehood can be determined with certainty emphasises what we all understand intuitively: there is no single “right” answer to many human problems, and no single “right” action in many human situations.
(An electricity bill containing information provided by OPower comparing one household’s energy usage to their neighbours. Image from Grist)
5. Behavioural economics and the caprice of human behaviour
“Behavioural economics” attempts to predict the way that humans behave when taking choices that have a measurable impact on them – for example, whether to put the washing machine on at 5pm when electricity is expensive, or at 11pm when it is cheap.
But predicting human behaviour is notoriously unreliable.
These are impressive achievements; but they are not always repeatable. A recycling scheme in the UK that adopted a similar approach found instead that it lowered recycling rates across the community: households who learned that they were putting more effort into recycling than their neighbours asked themselves “if my neighbours aren’t contributing to this initiative, then why should I?”
Low carbon engineering technologies like electric vehicles have clearly defined environmental benefits and clearly defined costs. But most Smart Cities solutions are less straightforward. They are complex socio-technical systems whose outcomes are emergent. Our ability to predict their performance and impact will certainly improve as more are deployed and analysed, and as University researchers, politicians, journalists and the public assess them. But we will never predict individual actions using these techniques, only the average statistical behaviour of groups of people. This can be seen from OPower’s own comparison of their predicted energy savings against those actually achieved – the predictions are good, but the actual behaviour of OPower’s customers shows a high degree of apparently random variation. Those variations are the result of the subjective, unpredictable and sometimes irrational behaviour of real people.
We can take insight from Behavioural Economics and other techniques for analysing human behaviour in order to create appropriate strategies, policies and environments that encourage the right outcomes in cities; but none of them can be relied on to give definitive solutions to any individual person or situation. They can inform decision-making, but are always associated with some degree of uncertainty. In some cases, the uncertainty will be so small as to be negligible, and the predictions can be treated as deterministic rules for achieving the desired outcome. But in many cases, the uncertainty will be so great that predictions can only be treated as general indications of what might happen; whilst individual actions and outcomes will vary greatly.
(Of course it is impossible to predict individual criminal actions as portrayed in the film “Minority Report”. But is is very possible to analyse past patterns of criminal activity, compare them to related data such as weather and social events, and predict the likelihood of crimes of certain types occurring in certain areas. Cities such as Memphis and Chicago have used these insights to achieve significant reductions in crime)
Learning to value insight without certainty
Mathematics and digital technology are incredibly powerful; but they will never perfectly and completely describe and predict our world in human terms. In many cases, our focus for using them should not be on automation: it should be on the enablement of human judgement through better availability and communication of information. And in particular, we should concentrate on communicating accurately the meaning of information in the context of its limitations and uncertainties.
There are exceptions where we automate systems because of a combination of a low-level of uncertainty in data and a large advantage in acting autonomously on it. For example, anti-lock braking systems save lives by using automated technology to take thousands of decisions more quickly than most humans would realise that even a single decision needed to be made; and do so based on data with an extremely low degree of uncertainty.
But the most exciting opportunity for us all is to learn to become sophisticated users of information that is uncertain. The results of textual analysis of sentiment towards products and brands expressed in social media are far from certain; but they are still of great value. Similar technology can extract insights from medical research papers, case notes in social care systems, maintenance logs of machinery and many other sources. Those insights will rarely be certain; but properly assessed by people with good judgement they can still be immensely valuable.
This is a much better way to understand the value of technology than ideas like “perfect knowledge” and “algorithmic regulation”. And it is much more likely that people will trust the benefits that we claim new technologies can bring if we are open about their limitations. People won’t use technologies that they don’t trust; and they won’t invest their money in them or vote for politicians who say they’ll spend their taxes on it.
Thankyou to Richard Brown and Adrian McEwen for discussions on Twitter that helped me to prepare this article. A more in-depth discussion of some of the scientific and philosophical issues I’ve described, and an exploration of the nature of human intelligence and its non-deterministic characteristics, can be found in the excellent paper “Answering Descartes: Beyond Turing” by Stuart Kauffman published by MIT press.
(A US Department of Agriculture inspector examines a shipment of imported frozen meat in New Orleans in 2013. Photo by Anson Eaglin)
One of the biggest challenges associated with the rapid urbanisation of the world’s population is working out how to feed billions of extra citizens. I’m spending an increasing amount of my time understanding how technology can help us to do that.
It’s well known that the populations of many of the world’s developing nations – and some of those that are still under-developed – are rapidly migrating from rural areas to cities. In China, for example, hundreds of millions of people are moving from the countryside to cities, leaving behind a lifestyle based on extended family living and agriculture for employment in business and a more modern lifestyle.
The definitions of “urban areas” used in many countries undergoing urbanisation include a criterion that less than 50% of employment and economic activity is based on agriculture (the appendices to the 2007 revision of the UN World Urbanisation Prospects summarise such criteria from around the world). Cities import their food.
In the developed countries of the Western world, this criterion is missing from most definitions of cities, which focus instead on the size and density of population. In the West, the transformation of economic activity away from agriculture took place during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th Centuries.
Urbanisation and the industrialisation of food
The food that is now supplied to Western cities is produced through a heavily industrialised process. But whilst the food supply chain had to scale dramatically to feed the rapidly growing cities of the Industrial Revolution, the processes it used, particularly in growing food and creating meals from it, did not industrialise – i.e. reduce their dependence on human labour – until much later.
As described by Population Matters, industrialisation took place after the Second World War when the countries involved took measures to improve their food security after struggling to feed themselves during the War whilst international shipping routes were disrupted. Ironically, this has now resulted in a supply chain that’s even more internationalised than before as the companies that operate it have adopted globalisation as a business strategy over the last two decades.
This industrial model has led to dramatic increases in the quantity of food produced and distributed around the world, as the industry group the Global Harvest Initiative describes. But whether it is the only way, or the best way, to provide food to cities at the scale required over the next few decades is the subject of much debate and disagreement.
(Irrigation enables agriculture in the arid environment of Al Jawf, Libya. Photo by Future Atlas)
One of the critical voices is Philip Lymbery, the Chief Executive of Compassion in World Farming, who argues passionately in “Farmageddon” that the industrial model of food production and distribution is extremely inefficient and risks long-term damage to the planet.
Lymbery questions whether the industrial system is sustainable financially – it depends on vast subsidy programmes in Europe and the United States; and he questions its social benefits – industrial farms are highly automated and operate in formalised international supply chains, so they do not always provide significant food or employment in the communities in which they are based.
He is also critical of the industrial system’s environmental impact. In order to optimise food production globally for financial efficiency and scale, single-use industrial farms have replaced the mixed-use, rotational agricultural systems that replenish nutrients in soil and that support insect species that are crucial to the pollination of plants. They also create vast quantities of animal waste that causes pollution because in the single-use industrial system there are no local fields in need of manure to fertilise crops.
And the challenges associated with feeding the growing populations of the worlds’ cities are not only to do with long-term sustainability. They are also a significant cause of ill-health and social unrest today.
But increasing the amount of food available to feed people doesn’t necessarily mean growing more food, either by further intensifying existing industrial approaches or by adopting new techniques such as vertical farming or hydroponics. In fact, a more recent report issued by the United Nations and partner agencies cautioned that it was unlikely that the necessary increase in available food would be achieved through yield increases alone. Instead, it recommended reducing food loss, waste, and “excessive demand” for animal products.
I think that technology has some exciting roles to play in how we respond to those challenges.
Smarter food in the field: data for free, predicting the future and open source beekeeping
New technologies give us a great opportunity to monitor, measure and assess the agricultural process and the environment in which it takes place.
The SenSprout sensor can measure and transmit the moisture content of soil; it is made simply by printing an electronic circuit design onto paper using commercially-available ink containing silver nano-particles; and it powers itself using ambient radio waves. We can use sensors like SenSprout to understand and respond to the natural environment, using technology to augment the traditional knowledge of farmers.
These possibilities are not limited to industrial agriculture or to developed countries. For example, the Kilimo Salama scheme adds resilience to the traditional practises of subsistence farmers by using remote weather monitoring and mobile phone payment schemes to provide affordable insurance for their crops.
Smarter food in the marketplace: local food, the sharing economy and soil to fork traceability
The emergence of the internet as a platform for enabling sales, marketing and logistics over the last decade has enabled small and micro-businesses to reach markets across the world that were previously accessible only to much larger organisations with international sales and distribution networks. The proliferation of local food and urban farming initiatives shows that this transformation is changing the food industry too, where online marketplaces such as Big Barn and FoodTrade make it easier for consumers to buy locally produced food, and for producers to sell it.
This is not to say that vast industrial supply-chains will disappear overnight to be replaced by local food networks: they clearly won’t. But just as large-scale film and video production has adapted to co-exist and compete with millions of small-scale, “long-tail” video producers, so too the food industry will adjust. The need for co-existence and competition with new entrants should lead to improvements in efficiency and impact – the supermarket Tesco’s “Buying Club” shows how one large food retailer is already using these ideas to provide benefits that include environmental efficiences to its smaller suppliers.
(A Pescheria in Bari, Puglia photographed by Vito Palmi)
One challenge is that food – unlike music and video – is a fundamentally physical commodity: exchanging it between producers and consumers requires transport and logistics. The adoption by the food industry of “sharing economy” approaches – business models that use social media and analytics to create peer-to-peer transactions, and that replace bulk movement patterns by thousands of smaller interactions between individuals – will be dependent on our ability to create innovative distribution systems to support them. Zaycon Foods operate one such system, using online technology to allow consumers to collectively negotiate prices for food that they then collect from farmers at regular local events.
Rather than replacing existing markets and supply chains, one role that technology is already playing is to give food producers better insight into their behaviour. M-farm links farmers in Kenya to potential buyers for their produce, and provides them with real-time information about prices; and the University of Bari in Puglia, Italy operates a similar fish-market pricing information service that makes it easier for local fisherman to identify the best buyers and prices for their daily catch.
This advice from the Mayo Clinic in the United States gives one example of the link between the provenance of food and its health qualities, explaining that beef from cows fed on grass can have lower levels of fat and higher levels of beneficial “omega-3 fatty acids” than what they call “conventional beef” – beef from cows fed on grain delivered in lorries. (They appear to have forgotten the “convention” established by several millennia of evolution and thousands of years of animal husbandry that cows eat grass).
(Baltic Apple Pie – a recipe created by IBM’s Watson computer)
All of this information contributes to describing both the taste and health characteristics of food; and when it’s available, we’ll have the opportunity to make more informed choices about what we put on our tables.
Smarter food in the kitchen: cooking, blogging and cognitive computing
But whilst eating less meat and more fish and vegetables is a simple idea, putting it into practise is a complex cultural challenge.
A recent report found that “a third of UK adults struggle to afford healthy food“. But the underlying cause is not economic: it is a lack of familiarity with the cooking and food preparation techniques that turn cheap ingredients into healthy, tasty food; and a cultural preference for red meat and packaged meals. The Sustainable Food School that is under development in Birmingham is one example of an initiative intending to address those challenges through education and awareness.
Engagement through traditional and social media also has an influence. The celebrity chefs that have campaigned for a shift in our diets towards more sustainably sourced fish and the schoolgirl who provoked a national debate concerning the standard and health of school meals simply by blogging about the meals that were offered to her each day at school, are two recent examples in the UK; as is the food blogger Jack Monroe who demonstrated how she could feed herself and her two-year-old son healthy, interesting food on a budget of £10 a week.
My colleagues in IBM Research have explored turning IBM’s Watson cognitive computing technology to this challenge. In an exercise similar to the “invention test” common to television cookery competitions, they have challenged Watson to create recipes from a restricted set of ingredients (such as might be left in the fridge and cupboards at the end of the week) and which meet particular criteria for health and taste.
(An example of local food processing: my own homemade chorizo.)
Food, technology, passion
The future of food is a complex and contentious issue – the controversy between the productivity benefits of industrial agriculture and its environmental and social impact being just one example. I have touched on but not engaged in those debates in this article – my expertise is in technology, not in agriculture, and I’ve attempted to link to a variety of sources from all sides of the debate.
Some of the ideas for providing food to the world’s growing population in the future are no less challenging, whether those ideas are cultural or technological. The United Nations suggested last year, for example, that more of us should join the 2 billion people who include insects in their diet. Insects are a nutritious and environmentally efficient source of food, but those of us who have grown up in cultures that do not consider them as food are – for the most part – not at all ready to contemplate eating them. Artificial meat, grown in laboratories, is another increasingly feasible source of protein in our diets. It challenges our assumption that food is natural, but has some very reasonable arguments in its favour.
It’s a trite observation, but food culture is constantly changing. My 5-year-old son routinely demands foods such as humus and guacamole that are unremarkable now but that were far from commonplace when I was a child. Ultimately, our food systems and diets will have to adapt and change again or we’ll run out of food, land and water.
There are no simple answers, but we are all increasingly informed and well-intentioned. And as technology continues to evolve it will provide us with incredible new tools. Those are great ingredients for an “invention test” for us all to find a sustainable, healthy and tasty way to feed future cities.
(William Robinson Leigh’s 1908 painting “Visionary City” envisaged future cities constructed from mile-long buildings of hundreds of storeys connected by gas-lit skyways for trams, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. A century later we’re starting to realise not only that developments in transport and power technology have eclipsed Leigh’s vision, but that we don’t want to live in cities constructed from buildings on this scale.)
But “bottom up” is not enough; in order to succeed at scale, grass-roots innovation and localism need support from a new environment of policy, finance, infrastructure and technology.
I took part in a panel discussion last week with Leo Johnson, co-author of “Turnaround Challenge: Business and the City of the Future” (and, coincidentally, the brother of London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson). Leo argued in an impassioned speech that we should avoid overly deterministic “top-down” approaches to developing sustainable cities, and should instead encourage “bottom-up” innovation. His points echoed some of the criticisms levelled at parts of the Smart Cities movement by writers such as Adam Greenfield and Richard Sennett.
But these are arguments against a proposition that I simply don’t think anyone is advocating today.
In all of my contacts across the world, in technology, government and urban design, I don’t know anyone who thinks it would be “smart” for cities to be run wholly by technological systems; who believes that digital data can provide “perfect knowledge” about city systems; or who thinks that cities built and run entirely by deterministic plans driven from the top down would be healthy, vibrant places to live (or indeed are possible at all).
Smart cities are not about putting machines in control, and they are not about imposing an idealistic, corporate way of life. They are simply about harnessing the ever-advancing capabilities of technology in our efforts to create a more sustainable, equitable, resilient world in the cities in which more and more of us are living.
The ultimate purpose of cities is to enable the people who live and work in them to lead safe and rewarding lives with their families. The raw material from which the life of cities is built is therefore small-scale – it is the activity of individual people in their personal and family life or going about their work. Consequently, there is an enormous focus in smart cities and smart urbanism on “bottom-up” thinking : how can we enable private businesses, community innovators and citizen-led initiatives to be successful, and to create sustainable wealth and social value? If the opportunities to do that are widely available, then cities as a whole will be more successful, and, when economic or climate events affect their circumstances, they will be more adaptable and resilient.
But let’s be frank: that’s an awfully big “if”.
There’s nothing new about “bottom-up” creativity – that’s simply what people do as they get on with life, using whatever resources are available to them to craft a living, support their families and build successful businesses. But the truth is that we are not very good at all at creating environments in which everybody has an equal chance of succeeding in those efforts.
For bottom-up creativity to be broadly successful, citizens, communities and businesses must be able to adapt the city infrastructures that provide food, water, energy, transport and resources to serve their specific needs and opportunities. Those infrastructures are vast – they support 3 billion urban lives worldwide today, and will need to scale to support 3 billion more by 2050. Communities and neighbourhoods with persistently low levels of economic activity and social mobility – those most in need of innovative answers to their challenges – are often those who have the least access to those infrastructures, and whose issues can include poor schools, disconnection from transport networks, exclusion from mainstream financial systems, fuel poverty and so on. Those problems will not solve themselves: we will only adapt city infrastructures and institutions to serve these communities better through significant effort from the businesses and governments that control and govern them.
(When planning policy and other regulations allow, urban farms can adapt the physical infrastructure of cities to create new sources of food. A similar combination of policy innovation and grass-roots creativity could enable similarly creative uses of digital infrastructure and information in cities. Photo by ToadLickr)
From the governance of cities, to the policies that affect investment, to the oversight, administration and operation of city infrastructures – these processes work top-down; and in order for us to rely on “bottom-up” creativity improving cities for all of their citizens, we must adapt and improve them to better support that creativity.
Technology plays three roles in this context. Firstly, smartphones, tablets, 3D printers and social media are examples of new consumer and citizen tools that we could barely imagine as recently as a decade ago. They make immense power available to bottom-up, small-scale activity and local innovations, and have resulted in the emergence of significant economic trends such as the “sharing economy” of business models based on peer-to-peer transactions.
Thirdly, technology can help to open up the operations and infrastructures of big institutions and companies to local innovation – from the provision of “open data” and API interfaces that allow these systems to be adapted to new uses; to the use of technology to measure and trace the social and environmental impact of goods and services in order to inform consumer choice so that it can become a lever to improve the impact of the vast supply chains that supply cities. Unilever and Tesco are just two examples of businesses pursuing this business strategy.
Smart cities is not a prescriptive, top-down, corporate movement. The perception that it was arose because a handful of early and highly visible examples such as Masdar and Songdo were new, large-scale developments financed by strong economic growth in emerging markets; or because some of the rapid urbanisation taking place today is in countries with strongly hierarchical governance. These examples also gave emphasis to the importance of efficiently and intelligently operating large-scale city infrastructures – without which we’ll never sustainably and resiliently support the 6 billion city inhabitants predicted by the United Nations’ World Urbanisation Prospects report by 2050.
(Delegates at Gov Camp 2013 at IBM’s Southbank office, London. Gov Camp is an annual conference which brings together anyone interested in creating new uses of digital technology in public services. Photo by W N Bishop)
But we must give equal recognition to the vast amount of bottom-up creativity that took place throughout this period; that continues today; and which has exploited technology in strikingly innovative ways.
The “open data” movement has become a force for transparency in government and for addressing social and environmental issues. “Civic hacking” communities have sprung up around the world, using this data to create novel new public services. Many of my colleagues have contributed to that movement, either representing IBM, or simply as personal contributions to the cities in which they live – as have the employees of many other businesses. And community initiatives everywhere now routinely exploit technologies such as social media and crowdfunding; or co-create schemes to apply commercial technologies for their own purposes. For example, in the village of Chale on the Isle of Wight, a community with significant levels of fuel poverty worked together to use smart energy meters to reduce their energy bills by up to 50%.
There are two serious challenges in how we apply these ideas more broadly that demand debate:
The Economist magazine reminded us of the importance of those questions in a recent article describing the enormous investments made in public institutions in the past in order to distribute the benefits of the Industrial Revolution to society at large rather than concentrate them on behalf of business owners and the professional classes.
We have only partially been successful in those efforts. As one measure, it’s common for life expectancy to vary by around 20 years between the poorest and richest parts of the same city in the UK. Scandinavian cities do not show that disparity – their culture and system of taxation, benefits and collective insurance create a more equal opportunity to live. In the UK, the US and other societies that emphasise greater retention of private wealth and the distribution of opportunity through flexible market economies, how can we better approach Scandinavia’s level of equality?
These questions are much more important than perpetuating an adversarial debate between “top down” and “bottom up” thinking. No-one wants top-down, technology driven cities. They’d be dumb, not smart. And no-one believes that digital data can provide “perfect knowledge” – we all understand that perfect knowledge is neither possible nor desirable.
Digital data and technology do much more realistic and exciting things. They allow us to uncover the hidden opportunity to transact locally with people and businesses in our community. They reveal patterns in the messy complexity of social, economic, physical and environmental systems that help us to look ahead to likely outcomes, take proactive measures and do more with less. And they make it possible for us to connect to people around the world who we’ve never met but with whom we share an interest or can create a new opportunity.
A smart city creates an environment in which technology, infrastructure, policies and culture make people safe, and provide the resources and opportunities they need – including better access to technology and information – to create safer and more rewarding lives.
That’s not top-down or bottom-up. It’s common sense. Let’s stop arguing and start applying it.
(Birmingham’s Social Media Cafe, where individuals from every part of the city share their experience using social media to promote their businesses and community initiatives. Photograph by Meshed Media)
The Smart Cities movement is sometimes criticised for appearing to focus mainly on the application of technology to large-scale city infrastructures such as smart energy grids and intelligent transportation.
But to focus too much on this aspect of Smart Cities and to overlook the social needs of cities and communities risks forgetting what the full purpose of cities is: to enable a huge number of individual citizens to live not just safe, but rewarding lives with their families.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs identifies our most basic requirements to be food, water, shelter and security. The purpose of many city infrastructures is to answer those needs, either directly (buildings, utility infrastructures and food supply chains) or indirectly (the transport systems that support us and the businesses that we work for).
Important as those needs are, though – particularly to the billions of people in the world for whom they are not reliably met – life would be dull and unrewarding if they were all that we aspired to.
Maslow’s hierarchy next relates the importance of family, friends and “self-actualisation” (which can crudely be described as the process of achieving things that we care about). These are the more elusive qualities that it’s harder to design cities to provide. But unless cities provide them, they will not be successful. At best they will be dull, unrewarding places to live and work, and will see their populations fall as those can migrate elsewhere. At worst, they will create poverty, poor health and ultimately short, unrewarding lives.
A Smart City should not only be efficient, resilient and sustainable; it should improve all of these qualities of life for its citizens.
Another Birmingham initiative, the Northfield Ecocentre, crowdfunded £10,000 to support their “Urban Harvest” project. The funds helped the Ecocentre pick unwanted fruit from trees in domestic gardens in Birmingham and distribute it between volunteers, children’s centres, food bank customers and organisations promoting healthy eating; and to make some of it into jams, pickles and chutneys to raise money so that in future years the initiative can become self-sustaining.
In the village of Chale on the Isle of Wight, a community not served by the national gas power network and with significant levels of fuel poverty, my colleague Andy Stanford-Clark has helped an initiative not only to deploy smart meters to measure the energy use of each household; but to co-design with residents how they will use that technology, so that the whole community feels a sense of ownership and inclusion in the initiative. The project has resulted in a significant drop in rent arrears as residents use the technology to reduce their utility bills, in some cases by up to 50 percent. Less obviously, the sense of shared purpose has extended to the creation of a communal allotment area in the village and a successful compaign to halve bus fares in the area.
None of these initiatives are purely to do with technology. But they all use technologies that simply were not available and accessible as recently as a few years ago to achieve outcomes that are important to cities and communities. By understanding how the potential of technology was apparent to the stakeholders in such initiatives, why it was affordable and accessible to them, and how they acquired the skills to exploit it, we can learn how to design Smart Cities in a way that encourages widespread grass-roots, localised innovation.
(Top: Birmingham’s Masshouse Circus roundabout, part of the inner-city ringroad that famously impeded the city’s growth until it was demolished. Photo by Birmingham City Council. Bottom: Pedestrian roundabout in Lujiazui, China, constructed over a busy road junction, is a large-scale city infrastructure that balances the need to support traffic flows through the city with the importance that Jane Jacobs first described of allowing people to walk freely about the areas where they live and work. Photo by ChrisUK)
A tale of two roundabouts
History tells us that we should not assume that it will be straightforward to design Smart Cities to achieve that objective, however.
The photograph on the right shows two city transport infrastructures that are visually similar, but that couldn’t be more different in their influence on the success of the cities that they are part of.
The picture at the top shows Masshouse Circus in Birmingham in 2001 shortly before it was demolished. It was constructed in the 1960s as part of the city’s inner ring-road, intended to improve connectivity to the national economy through the road network. However, the impact of the physical barrier that it created to pedestrian traffic can be seen by the stark difference in land value inside and outside the “concrete collar” of the ring-road. Inside the collar, land is valuable enough for tall office blocks to be constructed on it; whilst outside it is of such low value that it is used as a ground-level carpark.
In contrast, the pedestrian roundabout in Lujiazui, China pictured at the bottom, constructed over a busy road junction, balances the need to support traffic flows through the city with the need for people to walk freely about the areas in which they live and work. As can be seen from the people walking all around it, it preserves the human vitality of an area that many busy roads flow through.
We should take insight from these experiences when considering the design of Smart City infrastructures. Unless those infrastructures are designed to be accessible to and usable by citizens, communities and local businesses, they will be as damaging as poorly constructed buildings and poorly designed transport networks. If that sounds extreme, then consider the dangers of cyber-stalking, or the implications of the gun-parts confiscated from a suspected 3D printing gun factory in Manchester last year that had been created on general purpose machinery from digital designs shared through the internet. Digital technology has life and death implications in the real world.
For a start, we cannot take for granted that city residents have the basic ability to access the internet and digital technology. Some 18% of adults in the UK have never been online; and children today without access to the internet at home and in school are at an enormous disadvantage. As digital technology becomes even more pervasive and important, the impact of this digital divide – within and between people, cities and nations – will become more severe. This is why so many people care passionately about the principle of “Net Neutrality” – that the shared infrastructure of the internet provides the same service to all of its users; and does not offer preferential access to those individuals or corporations able to pay for it.
(Photograph of Aesop’s fable “The Lion and the Mouse” by Liz West)
Little and big
Cities are enormous places in which what matters most is that millions of individually small matters have good outcomes. They work well when their large scale systems support the fine detail of life for every one of their very many citizens: when “big things” and “little things” work well together.
A modest European or US city might have 200,000 to 500,000 inhabitants; a large one might have between one and ten million. The United Nations World Urbanisation Prospects 2011 revision recorded 23 cities with more than 10 million population in 2011 (only six of them in the developed world); and predicted that there would be nearly 40 by 2025 (only eight of them in the developed world – as we define it today). Overall, between now and 2050 the world’s urban population will double from 3 billion to 6 billion.
A good example of the challenges that this enormous level of urbanisation is already creating is the supply of food. One hectare of highly fertile, intensively farmed land can feed 10 people. Birmingham, my home city, has an area of 60,000 hectares of relatively infertile land, most of which is not available for farming at all; and a population of around 1 million. Those numbers don’t add up to food self-sufficiency; and Birmingham is a very low-density city – between one-half and one-tenth as dense as the growing megacities of Asia and South America. Feeding the 7 to 10 billion people who will inhabit the planet between now and 2050, and the 3 to 6 billion of them that will live in dense cities, is certainly a challenge on an industrial scale.
In contrast, Casserole Club, the Northfield Eco-Centre, the Chale Project and many other initiatives around the world have demonstrated the social, health and environmental benefits of producing and distributing food locally. Understanding how to combine the need to supply food at city-scale with the benefits of producing it locally and socially could make a huge difference to the quality of urban lives.
In his enjoyable and insightful book “Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia“, Anthony Townsend describes a grass-roots effort by civic activists to provide New York with free wi-fi connectivity. I have to admire the vision and motivation of those involved, but – rightly or wrongly; and as Anthony describes – wi-fi has ultimately evolved to be dominated by commercial organisations.
But more importantly, neither small-scale nor large-scale solutions alone will meet all of our needs. Many areas in cities – usually those that are the least wealthy – haven’t yet been provided with wi-fi or broadband connectivity by either.
(A well designed urban interface between people and infrastructure. Cars in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen wishing to join a main road must give way to cyclists and pedestrians passing along it)
And I am optimistic that we can find it more often. Whilst Anthony is rightly critical of approaches to designing and building city systems that are led by technology, or that overlook the down-to-earth and sometimes downright “messy” needs of people and communities for favour of unrealistic technocratic and corporate utopias; the reality of the people I know that are employed by large corporations on Smart City projects is that they are acutely aware of the limitations as well as the value of technology, and are passionately committed to the human value of their work. That passion is often reflected in their volunteered commitment to “civic hacking“, open data initiatives, the teaching of technology in schools and other activities that help the communities in which they live to benefit from technology.
But rather than relying on individual passion and integrity, how do we encourage and ensure that large-scale investments in city infrastructures and technology enable small-scale innovation, rather than stifle it?
Smart urbanism and massive/small innovation
I’ve taken enormous inspiration in recent years from the architect Kelvin Campbell whose “Massive / Small” concept and theory of “Smart Urbanism” are based on the belief that successful cities emerge from physical environments that encourage “massive” amounts of “small”-scale innovation – the “lively, diversified city, capable of continual, close- grained improvement and change” that Jane Jacobs described in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“.
We’ll have to apply similar principles in order for large-scale city technology infrastructures to support localised innovation and value-creation. But what are the practical steps that we can take to put those principles into practise?
Step 1: Make institutions accessible
There’s a very basic behaviour that most of us are quite bad at – listening. In particular, if the institutions of Smart Cities are to successfully create the environment in which massive amounts of small-scale innovation can emerge, then they must listen to and understand what local activists, communities, social innovators and entrepreneurs want and need.
Many large organisations – whether they are local authorities or private sector companies – are poor at listening to smaller organisations. Their decision-makers are very busy; and communications, engagement and purchasing occur through formally defined processes with legal, financial and confidentiality clauses that can be difficult for small or informal organisations to comply with. The more that we address these barriers, the more that our cities will stimulate and support small-scale innovation. One way to do so is through innovations in procurement; another is through the creation of effective engagements programmes, such as the Birmingham Community Healthcare Trust’s “Healthy Villages” project which is listening to communities expressing their need for support for health and wellbeing. This is why IBM started our “Smarter Cities Challenge” which has engaged hundreds of IBM’s Executives and technology experts in addressing the opportunities and challenges of city communites; and in so doing immersed them in very varied urban cultures, economies, and issues.
But listening is also a personal and cultural attitude. For example, in contrast to the current enthusiasm for cities to make as much data as possible available as “open data”, the Knight Foundation counsel a process of engagement and understanding between institutions and communities, in order to identify the specific information and resources that can be most usefully made available by city institutions to individual citizens, businesses and social organisations.
(Delegates at Gov Camp 2013 at IBM’s Southbank office, London. Gov Camp is an annual conference which brings together anyone interested in the use of digital technology in public services. Photo by W N Bishop)
More widely, it is often talented, individual leaders who overcome the barriers to engagement and collaboration between city institutions and localised innovation. In “Resilience: why things bounce back“, Andrew Zolli describes many examples of initiatives that have successfully created meaningful change. A common feature is the presence of an individual who shows what Zolli calls”translational leadership“: the ability to engage with both small-scale, informal innovation in communities and large-scale, formal institutions with resources.
Step 2: Make infrastructure and technology accessible
Some businesses and social initiatives are seeking to address this shortfall. CommunityUK, for example, are developing sustainable business models for providing affordable, accessible connectivity, and assistance using it, and are behind the Castle Vale project in Birmingham. And some local authorities, such as Sunderland and Birmingham, have attempted to provide complete coverage for their citizens – although just how hard it is to achieve that whilst avoiding anti-competition issues is illustrated by Birmingham’s subsequent legal challenges.
We should also tap into the enormous sums spent on the physical regeneration of cities and development of property in them. As I first described in June last year, while cities everywhere are seeking funds for Smarter City initiatives, and often relying on central government or research grants to do so, billions of Pounds, Euros, and Dollars are being spent on relatively conventional property development and infrastructure projects that don’t contribute to cities’ technology infrastructures or “Smart” objectives.
Local authorities could use planning regulations to steer some of that investment into providing Smart infrastructure, basic connectivity, and access to information from city infrastructures to citizens, communities and businesses. Last year, I developed a set of “Smart City Design Principles” on behalf a city Council considering such an approach, including:
Principle 4: New or renovated buildings should be built to contain sufficient space for current and anticipated future needs for technology infrastructure such as broadband cables; and of materials and structures that do not impede wireless networks. Spaces for the support of fixed cabling and other infrastructures should be easily accessible in order to facilitate future changes in use.
Principle 6: Any development should ensure wired and wireless connectivity is available throughout it, to the highest standards of current bandwidth, and with the capacity to expand to any foreseeable growth in that standard.
Small-scale, local innovations will always take place, and many of them will be successful; but they are more likely to have significant, lasting, widespread impact when they are supported by city institutions with resources.
That support might vary from introducing local technology entrepreneurs to mentors and investors through the networks of contacts of city leaders and their business partners; through to practical assistance for social enterprises, helping them to put in place very basic but costly administration processes to support their operations.
City institutions can also help local innovations to thrive simply by becoming their customers. If Councils, Universities and major local employers buy services from innovative local providers – whether they be local food initiatives such as the Northfield Ecocentre or high-tech innovations such as Birmingham’s Droplet smartphone payment service – then they provide direct support to the success of those businesses.
It becomes more obvious why stakeholders in a city might become involved in collaborative innovation when they have the opportunity to co-create a clear set of shared priorities. Those priorities can be compared to the objectives of innovative proposals seeking support, whether from social initiatives or businesses; used as the basis of procurement criteria for goods, services and infrastructure; set as the objectives for civic hacking and other grass-roots creative events; or even used as the criteria for funding programmes for new city services, such as the “Future Streets Incubator” that will shortly be launched in London as a result of the Mayor of London’s Roads Task Force.
In this context, businesses are not just suppliers of products and services, but also local institutions with significant supply chains, carbon and economic footprints, purchasing power and a huge number of local employees. There are many ways such organisations can play a role in supporting the development of an open, Smarter, more sustainable city.
The following “Smart City Design Principles” promote collaborative innovation in cities by encouraging support from development and regeneration initiatives:
Principle 12: Consultations on plans for new developments should fully exploit the capabilities of social media, virtual worlds and other technologies to ensure that communities affected by them are given the widest, most immersive opportunity possible to contribute to their design.
Principle 13: Management companies, local authorities and developers should have a genuinely engaging presence in social media so that they are approachable informally.
Principle 14: Local authorities should support awareness and enablement programmes for social media and related technologies, particularly “grass roots” initiatives within local communities.
Step 4: Promote open systems
A common principle between the open data movement; civic hacking; localism; the open government movement; and those who support “bottom-up” innovations in Smart Cities is that public systems and infrastructure – in cities and elsewhere – should be “open”. That might mean open and transparent in their operation; accessible to all; or providing open data and API interfaces to their technology systems so that citizens, communities and businesses can adapt them to their own needs. Even better, it might mean all of those things.
The “Dublinked” information sharing partnership, in which Dublin City Council, three surrounding County Councils and service providers to the city share information and make it available to their communities as “open data”, is a good example of the benefits that openness can bring. Dublinked now makes 3,000 datasets available to local authority analysts; to researchers from IBM Research and the National University of Ireland; and to businesses, entrepreneurs and citizens. The partnership is identifying new ways for the city’s public services and transport, energy and water systems to work; and enabling the formation of new, information-based businesses with the potential to export the solutions they develop in Dublin to cities internationally. It is putting the power of technology and of city information not only at the disposal of the city authority and its agencies, but also into the hands of communities and innovators.
In a digital future, the more that city infrastructures and services provide open data interfaces and APIs, the more that citizens, communities and businesses will be able to adapt the city to their own needs. This is the modern equivalent of the grid system that Jane Jacobs promoted as the most adaptable urban form. A grid structure is the basis of Edinburgh’s “New Town”, often regarded as a masterpiece of urban planning that has proved adaptable and successful through the economic and social changes of the past 250 years, and is also the starting point for Kelvin Campbell’s work.
But open data interfaces and APIs will only be widely exploitable if they conform to common standards. In order to make it possible to do something as simple as changing a lightbulb, we rely on open standards for the levels of voltage and power from our electricity supply; the physical dimensions of the socket and bulb and the characteristics of their fastenings; specifications of the bulb’s light and heat output; and the tolerance of the bulb and the fitting for the levels of moisture found in bathrooms and kitchens. Cities are much more complicated than lightbulbs; and many more standards will be required on order for us to connect to and re-configure their systems easily and reliably.
Open standards are also an important tool in avoiding city systems becoming “locked-in” to any particular supplier. By specifying common characteristics that all systems are required to demonstrate, it becomes more straightforward to exchange one supplier’s implementation for another.
Principle 7: Any new development should demonstrate that all reasonable steps have been taken to ensure that information from its technology systems can be made openly available without additional expenditure. Whether or not information is actually available will be dependent on commercial and legal agreement, but it should not be additionally subject to unreasonable expenditure. And where there is no compelling commercial or legal reason to keep data closed, it should actually be made open.
Principle 8: The information systems of any new development should conform to the best available current standards for interoperability between IT systems in general; and for interoperability in the built environment, physical infrastructures and Smarter Cities specifically.
Finally, design skills will be crucial both to creating interfaces to city infrastructures that are truly useful and that encourage innovation; and in creating innovations that exploit them that in turn are useful to citizens.
But the creativity that imagines new ways to use these capabilities in business and in community initiatives will also be crucial. The new academic discipline of “Service Science” describes how designers can use technology to create new value in local contexts; and treats services such as open data and APIs as “affordances” – capabilities of infrastructure that can be adapted to the needs of an individual. In the creative industries, “design thinkers” apply their imagination and skills to similar subjects.
The Dublinked information sharing partnership is already putting some of these ideas into practise. It provides assistance to innovators in using, analysing and visualising data; and now makes available realtime data showing the location and movements of buses in the city. The partnership is based on specific governance processes that protect data privacy and manage the risk associated with sharing data.
Principle 9: New developments should demonstrate that they have considered the commercial viability of providing the digital civic infrastructure services recommended by credible research sources.
Step 6: Establish governance of the information economy
But can we speak in confidence of an information economy when the basis of establishing the ownership and value of its fundamental resource – digital information – is not properly established?
The privacy, security and ownership of information, especially personal information, are perhaps the greatest challenges of the digital age. But that is also a reflection of their importance to all aspects of our lives. Jane Jacobs’ description of urban systems in terms of human and community behaviour was based on those concepts, and is still regarded as the basis of our understanding of cities. New technologies for creating and using information are developing so rapidly that it is not only laws specifically concerning them that are failing to keep up with progress; laws concerning the other aspects of city systems that technology is transforming are failing to adapt quickly enough too.
A start might be to adapt city planning regulations to reflect and enforce the importance of the personal information that will be increasingly accessed, created and manipulated by city systems:
Principle 21: Any information system in a city development should provide a clear policy for the use of personal information. Any use of that information should be with the consent of the individual.
One of the major drivers for the current level of interest in Smarter Cities and technology is the need for us to adapt to a more sustainable way of living in the face of rising global populations and finite resources. At large scale, the resources of the world are common; and at local scale, the resources of cities are common too.
For four decades, it has been widely assumed that those with access to common resources will exploit them for short term gain at the expense of long term sustainability – this is the “tragedy of the commons” first described by the economist Garrett Hardin. But in 2009, Elinor Ostrum won the Nobel Prize for economics by demonstrating that the “tragedy” could be avoided, and that a community could manage and use shared resources in a way that was sustainable in the long-term.
Ostrum’s conceptual framework for managing common resources successfully is a set of criteria for designing “institutions” that consist of people, processes, resources and behaviours. These need not necessarily be formal political or commercial institutions, they can also be social structures. It is interesting to note that some of those criteria – for example, the need for mechanisms of conflict resolution that are local, public, and accessible to all the members of a community – are reflected in the development over the last decade of effective business models for carrying out peer-to-peer exchanges using social media, supported by technologies such as reputation systems.
Of course, there are many people and communities who have championed and practised the common ownership of resources regardless of the supposed “tragedy” – not least those involved in the Transition movement founded by Rob Hopkins, and which has developed a rich understanding of how to successfully change communities for the better using good ideas; or the translational leaders described by Andrew Zolli. But Elinor Ostrum’s ideas are particularly interesting because they could help us to link the design, engineering and governance of Smarter Cities to the achievement of sustainable economic and social objectives based on the behaviour of citizens, communities and businesses.
Combined with an understanding of the stories of people who have improved their lives and communities using technology, I hope that the work of Kelvin Campbell, Rob Hopkins, Andrew Zolli, Elinor Ostrum and many others can inspire technologists, urban designers, architects and city leaders to develop future cities that fully exploit modern technology to be efficient, resilient and sustainable; but that are also the best places to live and work that we can imagine, or that we would hope for for our children.
Cities created by people like that really would be Smart.
I’m the Director of Smart Places for Jacobs, the global engineering company. Previously, I was the UK, Middle East and Africa leader of the Digital Cities and Property business for Arup, Director of Technology for Amey, one of the UK’s largest engineering and infrastructure services companies and part of the international Ferrovial Group, and before that IBM UK’s Executive Architect for Smarter Cities.
You can connect to me on Twitter as @dr_rick; or contact me through Linked-In where I’ll respond to connection requests from people I know, or that are accompanied by a message that starts a meaningful discussion.
The opinions on this site are my own.
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![(The sound artists FA-TECH [http://fa-tech.tumblr.com/] improvising in Shoreditch, London. Shoreditch's combination of urban character, cheap rents and proximity to London's business, financial centres and culture led to the emergence of a thriving technology startup community - although that community's success is now driving rents up, challenging some of the characteristics that enabled it.)](https://rickrobinson.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/6172318975_bcc84af6b2_o.jpg)
The Urban Technologist 
