Smart ideas for everyday cities

December 13, 2012 8 Comments

(Artist’s impression of the new Birmingham City University campus, currently under construction alongside Millennium Point and the new Eastside City Park. Image by Birmingham City University.)

The outcomes that matter to cities and to the people who live and work in them, such as wellbeing, job creation, economic growth, and social mobility, are complex, compound results of the behaviour of a combination of city systems such as education, public safety, transport and the economy.

Because those systems are operated by separate organisations – if they are even “operated” as systems at all – many “Smarter City” discussions are concerned with “breaking down silos” in order to integrate them.

As Fast Company’s 2010 survey of the “Top 20 Smartest Cities on the Planet“, illustrates, many of the earliest and highest profile examples of cities pursuing “Smart” agendas were governed by hierarchical, integrated systems of authority which helped them to address this challenge – often because they were new or expanding cities in rapidly growing economies.

Elsewhere, governance is more complex. Particularly in the UK, services such as utilities and transport are operated by private sector providers contracted to deliver performance and financial measures that cannot easily be changed. It is hard enough to agree common objectives across a city; it can be even harder to agree how to make investments to achieve them by transforming city systems that are subcontracted in this way.

But that is what cities must somehow do. And in recent weeks I have valued some open and frank discussions between city leaders, financiers and developers, policy makers, academics, architects, planners – and even some technologists – that have revealed some simple ideas that are common to those cities that have demonstrated how it can be done.

Start new partnerships

Most initiatives that contribute to city-wide outcomes require either co-ordinated action across city systems; or an investment in one system to achieve an outcome that is not a simple financial return within that system. For example, the ultimate objective of many changes to transportation systems is to improve economic growth and productivity, or to reduce environmental impact.

(The members of Birmingham’s Smart City Commission)

A programme of initiatives with these characteristics therefore involves the resources and interests of great many organisations within a city; and may lead to the creation of entirely new organisations. Special purpose vehicles such as  the “Eco-Island” Community Interest Company on the Isle of Wight and the Birmingham District Energy Company are two such examples.

New partnerships between these organisations are needed to agree city-wide objectives, and to co-ordinate their activities and investments to achieve them. Depending on local challenges,  opportunities, and relationships those partnerships might include:

  • Local Authorities and other public sector agencies co-operating to operate shared services;
  • Central government bodies involved in negotiations of policy, responsibility and financing such as “City Deals“;
  • Leaders from cities’ business, entrepreneurial and SME communities;
  • Local Universities who may have domain expertise in city systems; and who provide skills into the local economy;
  • Neighbourhood, faith and community associations;
  • Representatives of the third sector – charities, voluntary associations, social enterprises and co-operatives;
  • Industry sector and cultural organisations;
  • Service and technology providers who form partnerships with cities; for example, Amey have a 25-year PFI partnership with Birmingham; IBM operate joint research programmes with cities such as Dublin and Moscow; and Cisco have partnerships with cities such as Songdo in South Korea;
  • Financiers, for example local venture capitalists such as MidVen in the West Midlands, or banks and financial services companies with a strong local presence;
  • … and there are many other possibilities.

To attract the various forms of investment that are required to support a programme of “Smart” initiatives, these partnerships need to be decision-making entities, such as Manchester’s “New Economy” Commission, not discussion groups. They need to take investment decisions together in the interest of their shared objectives; and they need a mature understanding and agreement of how risk is shared and managed across those investments.

Such partnerships do not start by adopting the approach of any single member; they start with a genuine discussion to build understanding and consensus.

For example, public and private sector organisations both tend to assume that the other is better placed to accept risk. Private sector organisations make profits and invest them in new products and markets, so surely they can take on risk? Public sector organisations are funded to predictable levels through taxation, so surely they can take on risk?

In reality, the private sector has lost jobs, faced falling profits, and seen many businesses fail in recent years. Meanwhile, public sector is burdened with unprecedented budget cuts and in many cases significant deficits that are threatening their ability to deliver frontline services. Both are therefore risk averse.

A working partnership will only form if such issues are discussed openly so that an equitable consensus is achieved.

(A video describing the partnership between IBM and Dubuque, Iowa, which aims to develop a model for sustainable communities of less than 200,000 people)

Size matters; but not absolutely

Manchester’s New Economy Commission have taken a particular approach that is commensurate to the size of the Greater Manchester area and economy, coordinated by the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA). But their approach is not the only one.

Elsewhere, Southampton City Council are creating a “Virtual Local Authority”, together with other authorities around the country, as a vehicle to approach the bond market for a £100 million investment. They believe such a vehicle can create an investment opportunity of similar size to Birmingham’s “Energy Savers” scheme.

“Size” in these terms can mean geographic area; population; economic value or market potential. It is interpreted differently by international investment funds; or by local interests such as property and business owners. And it is balanced against complexity: one reason that some more modestly sized cities such as Sunderland and Peterborough have made so much early progress is their relative political and economic simplicity.

Vision, Transparency and Consistency

Whatever specific form a local partnership takes, it needs to demonstrate certain behaviours and characteristics in order that its initiatives and proposals are attractive to investors. They are straightforward in themselves;  but take time to establish amongst a new group of stakeholders:

  • A clear, agreed and consistent set of goals;
  • A mutual understanding of risk; how it is shared; and how it is managed;
  • An ability to express investment opportunities, including the risks associated with them, to potential investors;
  • A track record of taking transparent, consistent decisions to coordinate projects and investments against their objectives.

This is the model that in many cases will deliver Smarter City projects and programmes in everyday cities: a model of several organisations coordinating multiple investments, rather than individual organisations managing their own budgets.

(Philippe Petit’s remarkable tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974 at a height of 417 metres. Image from Carolina Pastrana)

Match risks to the right investors

There are many sources of funding for Smart City initiatives; each has different requirements and capabilities, and is attracted by specific risks and rewards. And with traditional markets such as property stagnant in developed economies, new opportunities for investment are being sought.

However, with a high degree of uncertainty in the prospects for future economic growth, it is harder than ever to assess the likely returns from investment opportunities. And when those opportunities are presented as new forms of partnership, special purpose vehicles or social enterprises, or by public sector authorities adopting revenue-generating models to compensate for dramatic cuts in their traditional funding, that assessment becomes even harder.

There is no simple answer to this challenge; but once again progress to resolving it will begin with conversations that build understanding. Ultimately, investors will be attracted to proposals with well defined and managed risks from organisations exhibiting good governance; and that can demonstrate a track record of making clear decisions to achieve their goals.

Of course, some Smart City projects are highly innovative, and may be too risky for investors accustomed to supporting infrastructure projects such as transportation and property development.  This is particularly the case for schemes that require a change in consumer behaviour – for example, switching from private car ownership to the use of “car clubs” or car-sharing schemes.

These sorts of project may be more suited to technology or service providers who might invest in pilot schemes in order to develop or prove new offerings which, if successful, can generate follow-on sales elsewhere. The “First of a Kind” programme in IBM’s Research division is one example or a formal programme that is operated for this purpose.

Similarly, Venture Capital will make investments in new businesses with higher risk profiles – demanding, of course, a commensurately higher level of return. And government backed innovation funds such as the European Union FP7 programme or the UK’s Technology Strategy Board are also available.

All of these organisations, of course, are looking to invest in projects which are initially small scale; but that will eventual develop into a widespread market opportunity. They will therefore be drawn to projects that take place in a stable, supported context from which that opportunity can be developed – in other words, the same level of partnership working, governance, transparency and consistency.

(A successful urban intervention: the “Container City” incubation hub for social enterprises operated by Sustainable Enterprise Strategies (SES) in Sunderland. SES support hundreds of new businesses and social enterprises in Sunderland every year, with a combined turnover of around £25m, and employing thousands of people from the city’s most challenged communities. 82% of the people they help to start a business or a social enterprise were previously unemployed, and after 2 years nearly three quarters are still in business.)

Exploit success to build momentum

Most cities need to stimulate economic growth, and to revitalise economically and socially deprived neighbourhoods.

It may be more effective to achieve those goals through a series of related steps, than through a single initiative, however:

1. Invest to reinforce growth that is already taking place – it may be more straightforward in the first place to use mechanisms such as tax increment financing or private investment to accelerate growth that is already taking place; such as last week’s announcement by David Cameron of additional government and corporate investment in London’s “Tech City” cluster.

2. Retain the financial benefits resulting from growth – Manchester’s New Economy Commission is able to retain the benefits of the growth the stimulate in the form of increased tax returns, in order to reinvest in subsequent initiatives. Their early successes built confidence amongst investors in the viability of their ongoing programme.

3. Recycle funds to stimulate new growth – having built an initial level of confidence, returns from early projects can be reinvested in areas with more significant challenges; where new infrastructures such as broadband connectivity or support services are required to attract new business activity.

Everywhere is different

Whilst the ideas I’ve described in this article do seem to be emerging as common characteristics of successful Smarter City programmes; we are still at a relatively early stage.

In particular, not enough examples exist for us to reliably separate generally viable elements of these approaches from those aspects that are strongly tied to specific local contexts.

Every city of course is different; and in this context has different access to transport systems, and to national and international supply chains and markets; has different demographics and social character; and different economic capacity. Even within a country, the governance of cities and regions varies – in the UK, for example, the relationships between Central, County, District, City and Borough Councils are subtly different everywhere. So each city still needs to find its own path.

But the first step is simple. There is nothing stopping cities from having the conversations that will get them started. And those that have done so are proving that it works.

I’d like to thank the delegates and attendees at many workshops and meetings I’ve attended in recent weeks; the discussions I’ve been lucky enough to participate in as a result have contributed significantly to the views expressed in this article. They include:

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The six steps to a Smarter City; and the philosophical imperative for taking them (updated)

November 13, 2012 3 Comments

(Photo of digital lights in “The Place” in Beijing by Trey Ratcliff)

(This article originally appeared in September 2012 as “Five steps to a Smarter City: and the philosophical imperative for taking them“. Because it contains an overall framework for approaching Smart City transformations, I’ll keep it updated to reflect the latest content on this blog, and ongoing developments in the industry. It can also be accessed through the page link “Six steps to a Smarter City” in the navigation bar above). 

As I remarked last week, in the past months some interesting announcements have been made concerning emerging frameworks and protocols for Smarter Cities – such as the “City Protocol” collaboration which will be formally launched at the Smart City Expo this week in Barcelona.

There are now a wide variety of established and emerging repositories of experience and practise relevant to Smart Cities in such domains as sustainability, technology, community engagement and economic development. Some are open collaborations; some are research programmes; and some are published position papers from consultancies and service providers. It therefore seems an opportune time to update the article “Five steps to a Smarter City” I wrote in September, to include a sixth step: “Structure your approach to a Smart City by drawing on the available resources of expertise“:

  1. Define what a “Smarter City” means to you
  2. Convene a stakeholder group to create a specific Smarter City vision
  3. Structure your approach to a Smart City by drawing on the available resources of expertise
  4. Populate a roadmap that can deliver the vision
  5. Put the financing in place
  6. Thinking beyond the future: how to make “Smarter” a self-sustaining process … and a philosophical imperative for doing so

1. Define what a “Smarter City” means to you

Many urbanists and cities have grappled with how to define what a “Smart City”, a “Smarter City” or a “Future City” might be. It’s important for cities to agree to use an appropriate definition because it sets the scope and focus for what will be a complex collective journey of transformation.

In his article “The Top 10 Smart Cities On The Planet“, Boyd Cohen of Fast Company defined a Smart City as follows:

“Smart cities use information and communication technologies (ICT) to be more intelligent and efficient in the use of resources, resulting in cost and energy savings, improved service delivery and quality of life, and reduced environmental footprint–all supporting innovation and the low-carbon economy.”

This definition shares a useful distinction that was made to me by the Technology Strategy Board‘s Head of Sustainability, Richard Miller: a “Smart City” is one that transforms itself into a “Future City” by using technology. In IBM we use the phrase “Smarter City” to describe a city that is making progress on that path.

As is frequently quoted, more than half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas; and in the UK where I live, that’s true of more than 90% of us. So its not surprising that so many people have strong views on what Smart, Smarter and Future Cities should be.

Personally I think that a useful and holistic definition of a “Future City” needs to include the following concepts:

  • A Future City is in a position to make a success of the present: for example, it is economically active in high-value industry sectors and able to provide the workforce and infrastructure that companies in those sectors need.
  • A Future City is on course for a successful future: with an education system that provides the skills that will be needed by future industries as technology evolves.
  • A Future City creates sustainable, equitably distributed growth: where education and employment opportunities are widely available to all citizens and communities, and with a focus on delivering social and environmental outcomes as well as economic growth.
  • A Future City operates as efficiently & intelligently as possible: so that resources such as energy, transportation systems and water are used optimally, providing a low-cost, low-carbon basis for economic and social growth, and an attractive, healthy environment in which to live and work.
  • A Future City enables citizens, communities, entrepreneurs & businesses to do their best; because making infrastructures Smarter is an engineering challenge; but making cities Smarter is a societal challenge; and those best placed to understand how societies can change are those who can innovate within them.

If those objectives provide – an admittedly very generic – view of what a “Future City” is, then a “Smarter City” is one that uses technology to accomplish them.

Creating a more specific vision is a task for each city to undertake for itself, taking into account its unique character, strengths and challenges. This process usually entails a collaborative act of creativity by city stakeholders.

(The members of Birmingham’s Smart City Commission)

2. Convene a stakeholder group to create a specific Smarter City vision

For a city to agree a shared “Smarter City” vision involves bringing an unusual set of stakeholders together in a single forum: political leaders, community leaders, major employers, transport and utility providers, entrepreneurs and SMEs, universities and faith groups, for example. The task for these stakeholders is to agree a vision that is compelling, inclusive; and specific enough to drive the creation of a roadmap of individual projects and initiatives to move the city forward.

This is a process that I’m proud to be taking part in in Birmingham through the City’s Smart City Commission. I discussed how such processes can work, and some of the challenges and activities involved, back in July in an article entitled “How Smarter Cities Get Started“.

3. Structure your approach to a Smart City by drawing on the available resources of expertise

Any holistic approach to a Smarter City needs to recognise the immensely complex context that a city represents: a rich “system of systems” comprising the physical environment, economy, transport and utility systems, communities, education and many other services, systems and human activities.

In “The new architecture of Smart Cities” I laid out a framework  for thinking about that context; in particular highlighting the need to focus on the “soft infrastructure” of conversations, trust, relationships and engagement between people, communities, enterprises and institutions that is fundamental to establishing a consensual view of the future of a city.

In that article  I also asserted that whilst in Smarter Cities we are often concerned with the application of technology to city systems, the context in which we do so – i.e. our understanding of the city as a whole – is the same context as that in which other urban professionals operate: architects, town planners and policy-makers, for example. An implication is that when looking for expertise to inform an approach to “Smarter Cities”, we should look broadly across the field of urbanism, and not restrict ourselves to that material which pertains specifically to the application of technology to cities.

So whilst  “City Protocol” seems to be the strongest emerging initiative to determine frameworks and standards for approaching Smarter Cities – and certainly should be considered by any city starting on that path – there are other resources that can be drawn on.

UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency for human settlements, recently published its “State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013” report. UNHABITAT promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities, and their reports and statistics on urbanisation are frequently cited as authoritative. Their 2012/2013 report includes extensive consultation with cities around the world, and proposes a number of new mechanisms intended to assist decision-makers. It focuses extensively on South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East; but also considers a number of European and North American examples.

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

The World Bank’s Urban Development page contains a number of reports covering many aspects of urbanisation relevant to Smarter Cities, such as “Transforming Cities with Transit”, “Urban Risk Assessments: Towards a Common Approach” and a forthcoming report in December to promote “sustainable urban development through cross-sector integration by focusing on the careful coordination of transit and land development”. At the Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” symposium in Barcelona in October, they also announced that they would be publishing a book of the same title containing a set of viewpoints on similar themes.

The Academy of Urbanism, a UK-based not-for-profit association of several hundred urbanists including policy-makers, architects, planners and academics, publishes the “Friebrug Charter for Sustainable Urbanism” in collaboration with the city of Frieburg, Germany. Frieburg won the Academy’s European City of the Year award in 2010 but its history of recognition as a sustainable city goes back further. The charter contains a number of useful principles and ideas for achieving consensual sustainability that can be applied to Smarter Cities.

A number of current research programmes are seeking to define more technical standards for achieving the interoperability between city systems that underpins many Smarter City ideas. Imperial College in the UK have established the Digital City Exchange initiative; Imperial have a depth of expertise across urban systems such as transport and energy, and are working with a number of academic and industry partners.

The European Union Platform for Intelligent Cities (EPIC) project is similarly researching  architectures and standards for Smart Cities technology infrastructure – my colleagues in IBM and at Birmingham City Universityare amongst the participants. Finally, the “FI-WARE” project, also funded by the European Union, is researching architectures and standards for a “future internet platform”: one of its focusses is the integration of city systems, and particularly how cities can provide technology infrastructures on which SMEs and entrepreneurs can base innovative new city services.

With the UK Technology Strategy Board continuing to invest through it’s “Future Cities” programme (link requires registration) and the EU announcing new investments in Smart Cities recently, research activity in this area will surely grow.

Consultancies, technology and service providers also offer useful views. IBM’s own perspectives and case studies can be found at http://www.ibm.com/smartercities/; Arup have published a number of viewpoints, including “Information Marketplaces: the new economics of cities“; and McKinsey’s recent report “Government designed for new times: a global conversation” contains a number of sections dedicated to technology and Smarter Cities.

Finally, the large number of “Smart Cities” and “Future Cities” communities on the web are good sources of emerging new knowledge, such as UBM’s “Future Cities” site; the Sustainable Cities Collective; and Linked-In discussion Groups such as “Smart Cities and City 2.0“, “Smarter Cities” and “Smart Urbanism“.

4. Populate a roadmap that can deliver the vision

In order to fulfill a vision for a Smarter City, a roadmap of specific projects and initiatives is needed, including both early “quick wins” and longer term strategic programmes.

Those projects and initiatives take many forms; and it can be worthwhile to concentrate initial effort on those that are simplest to execute because they are within the remit of a single organisation; or because they build on cross-organisational initiatives within cities that are already underway.

In my August article “Five roads to a Smarter City” I gave some ideas of what those initiatives might be, and the factors affecting their viability and timing, including:

  1. Top-down, strategic transformations across city systems;
  2. Optimisation of individual infrastructures such as energy, water and transportation;
  3. Applying “Smarter” approaches to “micro-city” environments such as industrial parks, transport hubs, university campuses or leisure complexes;
  4. Exploiting the technology platforms emerging from the cost-driven transformation to shared services in public sector;
  5. Supporting the “Open Data” movement.

A roadmap consisting of several such individual activities within the context of a set of cross-city goals, and co-ordinated by a forum of cross-city stakeholders, can form a powerful programme for making cities Smarter.

5. Put the financing in place

A crucial factor in assessing the viability of those activities, and then executing them, is putting in place the required financing. There are many ways in which that can be done, and I described several of them in two articles in September:

In “Ten ways to pay for a Smarter City (part one)“:

And in “Ten ways to pay for a Smarter City (part two):

I’m a technologist, not a financier or economist; so those articles are not intended to be exhaustive or definitive. But they do suggest a number of practical options that can be explored.

(Meeting with social entrepreneurs in Sunderland who create local innovations in the city)

6. Thinking beyond the future: how to make “Smarter” a self-sustaining process

Once a city has become “Smart”, is that the end of the story?

I don’t think so. The really Smart city is one that has put in place soft and hard infrastructures that can be used in a continuous process of reinvention and creativity.

In the same way that a well designed urban highway should connect rather than divide the city communities it passes through, the new technology platforms put in place to support Smarter City initiatives should be made open to communities and entrepreneurs to constantly innovate in their own local context. I described that process along with some examples of it in “The amazing heart of a Smarter City: the innovation boundary“.

When it works well, the result is the ongoing creation of new products, services or even marketplaces that enable city residents and visitors to make choices every day that reinforce local values and synergies. I described some of the ways in which technology could enable those markets to be designed to encourage transactions that support local outcomes in “From Christmas lights to bio-energy: how technology will change our sense of place“. And the money-flows within those markets can be used as the basis of financing their infrastructure, as I discussed in “Digital Platforms for Smarter City Market-Making“.

(Artist’s impression of a vertical urban farm shared by Curbed SF)

A philosophical imperative

It’s worth at this point reminding ourselves why we’re compelled to make cities Smarter. I’ve often referred to the pressing economic and environmental pressures we’re all aware of as the reasons to act; but they are really only the acute symptoms of an underlying demographic trend and its effect on the behaviour of complex systems within cities.

The world’s population is expected to grow towards 10 billion in 2070; and most of that growth will be within cities. The physicist and biologist Geoffrey West’s work on cities as complex systems showed that larger, denser cities are more successful in creating wealth. That creation of wealth attracts more residents, causing further growth – and further consumption of resources. At some point it’s inevitable that this self-reinforcing growth triggers a crisis.

If this sounds alarmist, consider the level of civic unrest associated with the Eurozone crisis in Greece and Spain; or that in the 2000 strike by the drivers who deliver fuel to petrol stations in the UK, some city supermarkets came within hours of running out of food completely. Or simply look to the frightening global effects of recent grain shortages caused by drought in the US.

Concern over this combination of the cost of resources and uncertainty in their supply has lead to sustainability becoming a critical economic and social issue, not just a long-term environmental one. And it demands changes in the way that cities behave.

As an example of just how far-reaching this thinking has become, consider the supply of food to urban areas. Whilst definitions vary, urban areas are usually defined as continuously built-up areas with a population of at least a few thousand people, living at a density of at least a few hundred people per square kilometer. Actual population densities in large cities are much higher than this, typically a few tens of thousands per square kilometer in developed economies, and sometimes over one hundred thousand per square kilometer in the largest megacities in emerging economies.

In contrast, one square kilometer of intensively farmed land with fertile soil in a good climate can feed approximately 1000 people according to Kate Cooper of the New Optimists forum, which is considering scenarios for Birmingham’s food future in 2050. Those numbers tell us that, then unless some radical new method of growing food appears, cities will never feed themselves, and will continue to rely on importing food from ever larger areas of farmland to support their rising populations.

(Photo by TEDxBrainport of Dr Mark Post explaining how meat can be grown artificially)

As I’ve noted before, such radical new methods are already appearing: artificial meat has been grown in laboratories; and the idea of creating “vertical farms” in skyscrapers is being seriously explored.

But these are surely scientific and engineering challenges; so why do I refer to a philosophical imperative?

I’ve previously referred to artificial meat and vertical farming as examples of “extreme urbanism“. They certainly push the boundaries of our ability to manipulate the natural world. And that’s where the philosophical challenge lies.

Do we regard ourselves as creatures of nature, or as creatures who manipulate nature? To what extent do we want to change the character of the world from which we emerged? As the population of our planet and our cities continues to rise, we will have to confront these questions, and decide how to answer them.

Geoffrey West’s work clearly predicts what will happen if we continue our current course; and I think it is likely that scientists and engineers will rise to the challenge of supporting even larger, denser cities than those we currently have. But personally I don’t think the result will be a world that I will find attractive to live in.

Organisations such as Population Matters campaign carefully and reasonably for an alternative path; an agenda of education, access to opportunity and individual restraint in the size of our families as a means to slow the growth of global population, so that more orthodox solutions can be affective – such as increasing the efficiency of food distribution, reducing food wastage (including our personal food wastage) and changing dietary habits – for instance, to eat less meat.

I don’t claim to know the answer to these challenges, but I’m thankful that they are the subject of urgent research by serious thinkers. The challenge for cities is to understand and incorporate this thinking into their own strategies in ways that are realistic and practical, in order that their Smarter City programmes represent the first steps on the path to a sustainable future.

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The new architecture of Smart Cities

September 26, 2012 36 Comments

(Photo of the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing by Trey Ratcliff)

I’ve been preparing this week for the next stage of work on Birmingham’s Smart City Commission; our task on the Commission is to develop a strategic vision for Birmingham as a Smart City and a roadmap for achieving it.

In doing so I’ve been considering an interesting and important question:

What makes a city a “Smart City” as opposed to a city where some “smart things” happen?

Three obvious criteria for answering that question stand out:

1. Smart Cities are led from the top – they have a strong and visionary leader championing the Smart agenda across the city. The Mayors of Rio and Barcelona are famously showing such leadership; and in the UK, so too are, amongst others, Dave Smith, CEO of Sunderland City Council, and Sir Albert Bore, Birmingham’s elected Council Leader, and a founder of the Eurocities movement.

2. Smart Cities have a stakeholder forum – they have drawn together a community of city stakeholders across the city. Those stakeholders have not only created a compelling vision for a Smart City; they have committed to taking an ongoing role coordinating a programme to deliver it. This is the challenge we have been given in Birmingham’s Smart City Commission; and I’ve previously written about how such a responsibility could be carried out.

3. Smart Cities invest in technology infrastructure – they are deploying the required information and communication technology (ICT) platforms across the city; and doing so in such a way as to support the integration of information and activity across city systems. (There are, of course, many other infrastructures that are important to the future of cities; but in “Smart Cities” we are particularly concerned with the role of technology, as I argued in a recent article on this blog).

It’s also important, though, to consider what is different about the structure and organisation of city systems in a Smart City. How does a city such as Birmingham decide which technology infrastructures are required? Which organisations will make use of them, and how? How can they be designed and delivered so that they effectively serve individuals, communities and businesses in the city? What other structures and processes are required to achieve this progress in a Smart City?

Designing Smart Cities

In order to design the infrastructures and systems of Smart Cities well, we need to design them in context – that is, with an understanding of the environment in which they will exist, and the other elements of that environment with which they will interact.

The figure below – “Components of a Smart City Architecture” – is one way of describing the context for Smart City systems and infrastructures. It contains six layers which I’ll discuss further below: “Goals”; “People”; “Ecosystem”; “Soft Infrastructures”; “City Systems” and “Hard Infrastructures”.

(I’m very aware that this diagram is not a particularly good visual representation of a Smart City, by the way. It doesn’t emphasise the centricity of people, for example, and it is not aesthetically pleasing. I’m simply using it as a conceptual map at this stage. I welcome any suggestions for re-casting and improving it!)

(Components of a Smart City architecture)

Goals, People and Ecosystem

Every Smart City initiative is based on a set of goals; often they focus on sustainability, inclusivity and the creation of social and economic growth. Boyd Cohen, who writes frequently on the subject of Smart Cities for Fast Company, published an excellent article surveying and analysing the goals that cities have expressed in their Smart initiatives and providing a model for considering them.

Ultimately, such goals will only be achieved through a Smart City strategy if that strategy results in changes to city systems and infrastructures that make a difference to individuals within the city – whether they are residents, workers or visitors. The art of user-centric, or citizen-centric, service design is a rich subject in its own right, and I don’t intend to address it directly here. However, I am very much concerned with the wider context within which that design takes place, and in particular the role that communities play.

I do not believe that a Smart City strategy that concerns itself only with citizens, city systems and hard infrastructures will result in citizen-centric design; it is only be co-creating soft infrastructures with city communities that such an approach can be systematically encouraged across a city.

In “How Smarter Cities Get Started” I wrote some time ago about the importance of engaging city communities in identifying the goals of Smart City initiatives and setting out the strategy to achieve them. I’ve also written previously about the importance of designing Smart City infrastructures so that they enable innovation within city communities.

Communities are living, breathing manifestations of city life, of course, not structures to be engineered. They are vital elements of the city’s ecosystem: they provide support; they are expressions of social life; they represent shared interests and capabilities; and they can play a role communicating between city institutions and individual citizens. They include families and social networks; neighbourhood, cultural and faith groups; charities and the voluntary sector; public sector organisations such as Schools and Universities, in addition to local government; and private sector organisations such as service providers, retailers and employers.

The challenge for the architects and designers of Smart Cities is to create infrastructures and services that can become part of the fabric and life of this ecosystem of communities and people. To do so effectively is to engage in a process of co-creative dialogue with them.

Soft Infrastructures

In the process of understanding how communities and individuals might interact with and experience a Smart City, elements of “soft infrastructure” are created – in the first place, conversations and trust. If the process of conversations is continued and takes place broadly, then that process and the city’s communities can become part of a Smart City’s soft infrastructure.

A variety of soft infrastructures play a vital role in the Smart City agenda, from the stakeholder forum that creates and carries out a Smart City strategy; to the “hackdays” and competitions that make Open Data initiatives successful; to neighbourhood planning dialogues such as that conducted in Vancouver as part of the “Carbon Talks” programme. They also include the organisations and interest groups who support city communities – such as Sustainable Enterprise Strategies in Sunderland who provide support to small businesses and social enterprises in the city’s most deprived communities or the Social Media Cafe in Birmingham which brings together citizens from all walks of life who are interested in creating community value online.

Some soft infrastructural elements are more formal. For example, governance processes for measuring both overall progress and the performance of individual city systems against Smart City objectives; frameworks for procurement criteria that encourage and enable individual buying decisions across the city to contribute towards Smart City goals; and standards and principles for integration and interoperability across city systems. All of these are elements of a Smart City architecture that any Smart City strategy should seek to put in place.

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

City systems

Whilst individual city systems are not my focus in this article, they are clearly significant elements of the Smart City context. In a previous article I discussed how the optimisation of such systems as energy, water and transportation can contribute significantly to Smarter City objectives.

More importantly, these systems literally provide life support for cities – they feed, transport, educate and provide healthcare for citizens as well as supporting communities and businesses. So we must treat them with real respect.

A key element of any design process is taking into account those factors that act as constraints on the designer. Existing city systems are a rich source of constraints for Smart City design: their physical infrastructures may be decades old and expensive or impossible to extend; and their operation is often contracted to service providers and subject to strict performance criteria. These constraints – unless they can be changed – play a major role in shaping a Smart City strategy.

Hard Infrastructures

The field of Smart Cities originated in the possibilities that new technology platforms offer to transform city systems. Those platforms include networks such as 4G and broadband; communication tools such as telephony, social media and video conferencing; computational resources such as Cloud Computing; information repositories to support Open Data or Urban Observatories; and analytic and modelling tools that can provide deep insight into the behaviour of city systems.

These technology platforms are not exempt from the principles I’ve described in this article: to be effective, they need to be designed in context. By engaging with city ecosystems and the organizations, communities and individuals in them to properly understand their needs, challenges and opportunities, technology platforms can be designed to support them.

I’ve made an analogy before between technology platforms and urban highways. It’s much harder to design an urban highway in a way that supports and enables the communities it passes through, than it is to simply design one that allows traffic to get from one place to another – and that in overlooking those communities, runs the risk of physically cutting them apart.

Technology platforms rarely have such directly adverse effects – though when badly mis-applied, they can do. However, it is certainly possible to design them poorly, so that they do not deliver value, or are simply left unused. These outcomes are most likely when the design process is insular; by contrast, the process of co-creating the design of a Smart City technology infrastructure with the communities of a city can even result in the creation of a portfolio of technology-enabled city services with the potential to generate revenue. Those future revenues in return support the case for making an investment in the platform in the first place.

And some common patterns are emerging in the technology capabilities that can provide value in city communities. I’ve referred to these before as the “innovation boundary” of a city. They include the basic connectivity that provides access to information systems; digital marketplace platforms that can support new business models; and local currencies that reinforce regional economic synergies.

These technology capabilities operate within the physical context of a city: its buildings, spaces, and the networks that support transport and utilities. The Demos report on the “Tech City” cluster of technology start-up businesses in London offers an interesting commentary on the needs of a community of entrepreneurs – needs that span those domains. They include: access to technology, the ability to attract venture capital investment, office space from which to run their businesses; and proximity to the food, retail, accommodation and entertainment facilities that make the area attractive to the talented professionals they need to hire.

In a recent conversation, Tim Stonor, Managing Director of Space Syntax, offered this commentary on a presentation given by UN Habitat Director General Joan Clos at the “Urban Planning for City Leaders” conference last week:

“The place to start is with the street network. Without this you can’t lay pipes, or run trams. It’s the foundations of urbanism and, without foundations, you’re building on sand. Yes, we can have subways that cut across/beneath the street network, and data packets that travel through the airwaves over the tops of buildings, but if these aren’t serving human interactions in effectively laid out street networks, then they are to little avail.”

Tim’s point on human interactions, I think, brings us nicely back full circle to thinking again about people and the relationships between them. Tim’s further comments on the presentation can be found on Storify.

A New Architecture?

At some point in the process of writing this article, I realised I had strayed onto provocative ground – this, perhaps, is why it’s taken me longer than usual to write.

As you can see, my job title contains the word “architect”. Strictly, I’m an Information Technology Architect, or “IT Architect” – I’ve spent my career “architecting” IT solutions such as e-commerce sites, mobile web apps, analytics systems and so on. Most recently I’ve been working in that capacity with Sunderland on their City Cloud.

I’m very aware that a strong view exists amongst Architects who create buildings and plan cities that IT professionals shouldn’t be describing ourselves in this way. Indeed, some (although I’d say a minority) of my colleagues agree, and call themselves designers or engineers instead.

Personally, I feel comfortable referring to my work as “architecture”. Many “IT solutions” – or more broadly, “IT-enabled business solutions” – are complex socio-technical systems. They are complex in an engineering sense, often extremely so; but they incorporate financial, social, operational, psychological and artistic components too; and they are designed in the context of the human, social, business, political and physical environments in which they will be used.

(Entrance to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, New York, photographed by Lambert Wolterbeek Muller)

So when we are designing a technology solution in a Smart City context – or indeed in any physical context – we are concerned with physical space; with transport networks; with city systems; and with human interactions. All of these are related to the more obvious concerns of information technology such as user interfaces, software applications, data stores, network infrastructure, data centres, laptops and workstations, wi-fi routers and mobile connectivity.

It seems to me that whilst the responsibilities and skills of “IT Architects” and Architects are not the same, they are applied within the same context, and cannot be separated from each other in that context. So in Smart Cities we should not treat “architecture” and “IT architecture” as separable activities.

In “Notes on the Synthesis of Form”, a work which laid the groundwork for his invention of the “design patterns” now widely adopted by IT professionals, the town planner Christopher Alexander remarked of architecture:

At the same time that problems increase in quantity, complexity and difficulty, they also change faster than before. New materials are developed all the time, social patterns alter quickly, the culture itself is changing faster than it has ever changed before.”

– Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Harvard University Press, 1964

What else are the technologies incorporated in Smart City solutions but these “new materials” from which Architects can construct cities and buildings?

At the very least, it is inarguably the case that technologies such as the internet, social media and smartphones are intimately related to the significant changes taking place today in our culture and social patterns.

I’ve blogged many times about the emerging technologies that are making ever more sophisticated and intimate connections between the IT world and the physical world – in particular, in the article “Four avatars of the metropolis: technologies that will change our cities“. The new proximity of those two worlds is what has led to the “Smart Cities” movement; in a way it’s simply another example of the disruptions of industries such as publishing and music that we’ve seen caused by the internet. And if these two worlds are merging, then perhaps our professions need at least to work more closely together.

Already we’re seeing evidence of the need to do so: many city leaders and urbanists I’ve spoken to have described the problems caused by the separation of economic and spatial strategies in cities; or of the need for a better evidence-base for planning and decision making – such as the one that IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge team in Birmingham are helping the City Council to create. In response, we are starting to see technology experts taking part in some city and regional master-planning exercises.

Over the last few years this convergence of technology concerns with the many disciplines within urbanism has given me the opportunity to work with individuals from professions I would never previously have interacted with. It has been an honour and a pleasure to do so.

In a similar vein, I have quite deliberately posted links to this article in communities with wide and varied membership, and that I hope will include people who will disagree with me – perhaps strongly – and be kind enough to share their thoughts.

I’d like to thank the following people for their contributions in various discussions that have shaped this article:

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Ten ways to pay for a Smarter City (part two)

September 4, 2012 9 Comments

(Photo of the Brixton Pound by Charlie Waterhouse)

As I wrote recently, cities across the world are pursuing Smarter City strategies for common reasons including demographics, economics and the environment; but they start in very different social, financial and organisational positions. So there is a need to consider a variety of mechanisms when looking for the financial means to support those strategies.

Last week I discussed five ways in which cities can finance Smarter initiatives; they included tried-and-tested sources such as research grants, and more exploratory ideas such as sponsorship. In this post I’ll consider five more.

6. Approach ethical investment funds, values-led banks and national lotteries

Whilst the current state of the global economy has focused attention on the monetary aspects of our financial systems, in the context of Smarter Cities it is important to note that amongst the great variety of investment instruments are some which have social and environmental objectives.

I was honoured last week to attend the official opening of Sunderland’s new business support facility for social enterprises, Container City, operated by Sustainable Enterprise Strategies (SES). The centre, fabricated from 37 re-conditioned and adapted shipping containers, provides a new basis from which SES can support the hundreds of social enterprises and traditional businesses that they help to start and operate each year; and who provide services and employment in some of the city’s most disadvantaged areas.

Several of these organisations use emerging technologies in innovative ways to promote social outcomes in the city – such as Play Fitness whose “Race Fitness” product uses gamification to encourage children from deprived communities to engage in fitness and wellbeing; or See Detail who provide employment opportunities in software testing for people on the Autistic spectrum. I’ve argued before that this sort of innovation in communities can be a powerful force for making cities Smarter.

SES are supported by a variety of means, including financial institutions with mutual status, and funding programmes aimed specifically at encouraging social enterprise. The UK’s National Lottery provides one such programme, the “Big Lottery Fund“, which aims to support community groups and projects that improve health, education and the environment.

These sort of schemes operate in many countries, in addition to the ethical investment funds available in international markets. Community Interest Companies are another example of the new forms of organisation that are emerging to take advantage of them. Credit Unions and other forms of mutually owned or locally focussed financial institutions exist across the world; and the Global Alliance for Banking on Values recently issued a report stating that what it calls “sustainable banks” are outperforming their mainstream counterparts.

Such organisations will often demand a financial return in addition to social and environmental outcomes; but well-formed investment proposals for Smarter initiatives should be capable of meeting those objectives.

7. Make procurement Smarter

(Photo of a smart parking meter in San Francisco by Jun Seita)

Cities already spend hundreds of millions to billions of Pounds, Euros and Dollars each year operating city systems; and buying products, materials and services to support them. The scoring criteria in those procurements can be a powerful tool to create smarter cities.

Systems such as utilities, transport and maintenance of the environment are often contracted out to the private sector. If procurement criteria for those contracts are specified using traditional measures for the provision and cost of capability, then suppliers will likely offer traditional solutions and services. However, if procurements specify requirements for outcomes and innovation in line with a Smarter City strategy, then suppliers may offer more creative approaches.

Cities could specifically procure Smarter systems such as smart meters for water and power; or they could specify outcome-based procurement criteria such as lowering congestion or carbon impact in traffic systems; or they could formulate more open criteria to incent innovation and creativity. Jackie Homan of Birmingham Science City recently wrote a great article describing how some of those ideas are being explored in Birmingham and Europe.

8. Use legitimate state aid

A significant component of many Smarter City strategies is to stimulate economic and social growth in the less economically active areas of cities. Such initiatives often run into a “chicken-and-egg” or “bootstrapping” problem: new businesses need infrastructures such as broadband connectivity to start and succeed; but until an area has significant business demand, network providers won’t invest in deploying them.

Birmingham and Sunderland have both addressed this problem recently, winning exemptions from or avoiding conflict with European Union “State Aid” legislation to secure city-wide broadband deployments.

It’s important to make sure that such infrastructures are accessible. In the same way that a new city highway can divide the communities it passes through rather than linking them, it is important that new technology infrastructures are designed in consultation with local businesses and communities in order to provide capabilities they really need, through commercial models that they can afford to use.

Tax increment financing, which allows government bodies to use projected future increases in tax and business rates returns to justify investment in redevelopment, infrastructure, and other community-improvement projects, is another mechanism that can be used in this way. In the UK, the national government is undertaking an important extension of this thinking by agreeing a set of individual “City Deals” with cities such as Leeds and Birmingham, giving them new autonomous powers over local taxation and investment.

(Developers at City Camp Brighton explore ways in which collaboration and web technologies can contribute to the city’s future. Photo by Richard Stubbs)

9. Encourage Open Data and Hacktivism

Communities can bring great passion and resources to bear in finding new ways for their cities to work. In the domain of technology, this is exemplified in the phenomenon of “Hacktivism” in which volunteers lend their time and expertise to create new urban applications.

As I’ve discussed before, when this willingness to contribute is combined with the movement to Open Data and the transformation underway to regional shared services in public sector, powerful forces can be unleashed.

Code for America have championed this agenda in the United States, and this year Code4Europe was launched to promote a similar level of engagement in Europe.

There are limits to what can be achieved for free. But in my view great potential exists, particularly if City authorities can work in partnership with these movements to provide secure, scalable, open technology infrastructures that they can exploit.

However unfamiliar the produce, markets still need physical, infromation and governance infrastructure

10. Create new markets

For a long time I’ve considered that we should conceive of the platforms that support Smarter Cities not just as technology infrastructures, but as marketplaces – i.e. systems of transactions that take place on those new infrastructures. Marketplaces create money-flows; and marketplace operators can extract revenues from those flows which in return create the case for investing in the marketplace infrastructure in the first place. Further; by opening up the marketplace infrastructure to innovative local service providers, unforeseen new Smarter systems can be created.

There are many examples of new markets that use technologies such as social media and analytics to identify parties between which new transactions can be performed; and that then provide the infrastructure and governance to carry out those transactions. Craig’s List and E-Bay are well-known general marketplaces; whilst Freecycle specialises in the free distribution of unwanted items for re-use in communities. Zopa and Prosper apply these ideas to peer-to-peer lending and investment.

Similar markets with specific relevance to city systems are emerging. Streetline offer a Smarter Parking solution which could be viewed as a marketplace in parking spaces; and Carbon Voyage‘s system for sharing taxis can be seen as a marketplace for journeys. I’ve explored other examples of local, marketplace-based business models in food and energy in previous articles on this blog; and discussed some of the local currency and trading systems emerging to support them.

What these examples have in common is that they are independent businesses or social enterprises who are winning backing from investors because they have the potential to generate revenue. As I argued in the case of Open Data and Hacktivism above, if cities can find ways to support such innovative businesses, they’ll find another community that is able to help them achieve a Smarter City transformation.

The buck doesn’t stop here

The ideas for funding Smarter Cities that I’ve discussed over the last two weeks are certainly not exhaustive; and as a technologist rather than an economist or financier I certainly don’t consider them definitive.

But hopefully I’ve provided enough examples in support of them to demonstrate that they are realistic approaches with the potential to be re-used. I certainly expect to see them all play a role in financing the transition to the cities of the future.

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Ten ways to pay for a Smarter City (part one)

August 29, 2012 21 Comments

Birmingham’s striking new Library, which will open in 2013, is one example of the regeneration projects currently underway in cities despite the challenging economic climate.

I’ve been meeting frequently of late with academic, public sector and private sector partners in city systems to explore the ways in which Smarter City initiatives are funded. Whilst many such programmes are underway, it is still the case that individual cities starting on this path find that it can take considerable time to identify and secure funds.

The ultimate stakeholder in Smarter City initiatives is often a local authority – they alone have the responsibility to ensure the functioning and success of a city as a whole. But whilst some reports show that private sector sentiment is finally improving following the 2008 crash, public sector – and in particular, local government – is still in the grasp of an unprecedented squeeze in funding. So where can city authorities look for the – sometimes substantial – funds needed to support Smarter City initiatives?

Up to now, a great many Smarter City initiatives have been funded at least in part by research grants. By their nature, these will only fund the first projects to explore Smarter City concepts – they will not scale to support the mass adoption of proven ideas. So we need to consider how they are used alongside other sources of funding.

In this post I’ll describe the first five of ten ways that Smarter City initiatives can be funded, including but not limited to research grants. None of them are silver bullets; but they all represent realistic ways to start paying for cities to become Smarter. I’ll describe another five in a follow-up post next week.

The UK Technology Strategy Board’s “Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network” (who took this photo) brings innovators in cities together to create new ideas.

1. Apply for research grants to support new Smarter City ideas

Whilst research funding will not pay for widespread adoption of proven Smarter City ideas, it will still support the search for new ideas. And we have certainly not exhausted the supply of ideas – far from it. In the UK, the Technology Strategy Board’s award of thirty £50,000 grants to perform “Future City” feasibility studies has kick-started a frenzy of activity. Just one of the thirty cities awarded these grants will be chosen to receive £24 million to support a demonstrator project; but many of the others will use the results of their feasibility studies to seek independent funds to move ahead.

The European Union recently launched an Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities that is expected to provide €365 million to support projects demonstrating innovative urban technology systems; and many funding programmes that are not labelled “Smart” or “City” are nevertheless relevant to Smarter Cities – such as the Technology Strategy Board’s “Innovating in the Cloud” funding competition or the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s “Research in the Wild” programme.

From social science to sustainability to healthcare to transport and buildings, many research agendas are relevant to creating the cities of the future; and new, well-formed ideas can always seek support from the relevant funding organisations. In this context, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing ever-closer links being forged between cities and the Universities that are located in them.

2. Exploit the information-sharing potential of shared service platforms

City and regional authority finances are under unprecedented pressure from the acute financial situation and expected demographic changes. In the developed world, we are getting older, and more people who have retired from work need the support of less people who are still working and paying taxes; and in emerging economies, urban populations are growing at a staggering rate.

In order to save money whilst maintaining vital services, local governments are increasingly sharing the delivery of support services such as finance, HR and IT; saving money – and reducing staff – in those functions in order to preserve the delivery of frontline services such as education and social care. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these changes; in the UK, for example, it is expected that nearly 900,000 public sector workers – 3% of the entire national workforce – will lose their jobs over the next five years as a result. Whilst specific characteristics vary from place to place, similar trends are visible across the world.

One outcome of these changes is that shared IT platforms are increasingly in place in cities and regions to support shared services. Those platforms now host co-located, multi-agency data. Cities such as Plymouth, Dublin and Sunderland are starting to explore the benefits that might be realised from that data. In Sunderland, the CEO and CIO have both spoken extensively about the opportunities they see to transform the city and services within it using their City Cloud platform. The East Riding of Yorkshire has been sharing services between agencies for some time, and has reported their achievements in addressing Child Poverty through improving cross-agency information sharing as a result.

These examples all show that whilst the current acceleration of shared services in cities and regions has its origins in adversity, it nevertheless offers the potential to support some positive outcomes too.

3. Find and support hidden local innovations

(Photograph by Meshed Media of Birmingham’s Social Media Cafe, where individuals from every part of the city who have connected online meet face-to-face to discuss their shared interest in social media.)

City populations are not passive observers to the Smarter City phenomenon. They may be crowd-sourcing mapping information for OpenStreetMap; running or participating in hacking events such as the forthcoming Government Open Hackday in Birmingham; or they may be creating new social enterprises or regional technology startups, such as the many city currencies and trading schemes that are appearing. Simply running social media surgeries as Podnosh do in Birmingham, can have a powerful effect on local communities by helping them exploit social technology to uncover hidden synergies and connections.

Individual officers in many councils work very positively with these community innovators. But substantial formal relationships can be impeded by the complexity of public sector procurement regimes which are simply too expensive and time-consuming for very small organizations to engage with. By simplifying procurement practices – or even by being transparent about the level of purchase below which competitive procurement does not apply – the level of engagement between city authorities and these communities could be increased. Bridging organisations can also play a positive role here, such as Sustainable Enterprise Strategies (SES) in Sunderland. SES provide support to the local social enterprise community and act as a link between that community and the City Council.

Local entrepreneurs and innovators often have limited resources. On their own, they are unlikely to implement such Smarter City infrastructures as energy grids or real-time transport information systems, for example. But collectively, their ideas could contribute significantly to the business case for a local authority to invest in such infrastructures. By engaging with this community extensively, a portfolio of potential innovations and outcomes can be created to demonstrate the value of such investments. By drawing on the collective creative energies of the city in this way, that portfolio is likely to contain many more ideas than could be obtained from central agencies alone.

4. Explore the cost-saving potential of Smarter technologies

At the heart of Smarter Cities is the idea that information integration and analytic technologies allow better, more forward looking decisions to be taken within cities; with the potential both to improve outcomes and to reduce costs. Whereas the desired outcomes may be citywide and social or environmental in nature rather than directly financial, many case studies show that short-term cost reductions can also be achieved within a single investing organisation. These cost reductions, of course, can then be the basis of an investment case – as they were for Sunderland’s City Cloud.

The London Borough of Brent in the UK, for example, realised significant cost savings by reducing error and fraud using such technologies, as did Alameda County in the US, who also identified new revenue opportunities (see this case study and this video).

As I dicussed in an earlier blog post exploring this topic, if these technologies are deployed on the shared IT platforms described above, then once in place they can be re-used for other purposes. This might lower the cost of deploying subsequent solutions elsewhere in city systems, such as traffic prediction for commuters in order to reduce the congestion that lowers economic productivity and job creation in cities; or predictive analytics to enable preventative approaches to social care, as demonstrated by Medway Youth Trust.

5. Could Smarter Cities be sponsored?

The Miami Dolphin’s Sun Life Stadium photographed by Bob Brown

In recent times we have become used to the idea that sports stadiums take their names from sponsors who fund the teams that own them, such as Arsenal Football Club’s Emirates Stadium. Such facilities are cities in microcosm in many respects, operating their own power, transport, safety and other systems analogous to those found in cities. Some, such as the Miami Dolphin’s Sun Life Stadium are already transforming those systems to become Smarter Stadiums.

Other facilities such as ports, airports, industrial plants, shopping malls and University campuses can be considered “micro-cities” in a similar way; and as I have commented before some of these are large enough that transforming their systems can make a significant contribution to transforming the cities in which they are based.

Could the concept of sponsorship be extended beyond sports stadiums? It has certainly been applied to entertainment facilities such as the O² Arena; and many airports have changed their names for marketing and branding purposes. 

I don’t expect we’ll see a city renamed by a corporate sponsor anytime soon, and novels such as Max Barry’s “Jennifer Government” and Rupert Thomson’s “Soft” have cautioned against such ideas. As past controversies around privatisation and commercialisation in areas of education and the justice system suggest, there are certainly city systems for which this idea could be challenging or simply inappropriate. But with cities increasingly conscious of the value of their brands in attracting investment and business, and with local employers conscious of the need for cities to seem attractive to the skilled people they need to employ, the possibilities for sponsorship to support some form of investment in appropriate Smarter City systems or facilities – especially those that are already private sector components of the city ecosystem – could be worth considering.

Funding the Smarter City roadmap

It’s very unlikely that any of the ideas I’ve discussed here will fund an entire Smarter City transformation, of course. But they are all realistic possibilities to fund elements of such a transformation. The challenge for cities is for their stakeholders to come together and agree how they will collectively exploit all of these ideas – and more – in funding the elements of a programme that they agree to undertake together.

Next week I’ll continue this discussion by exploring five more ways for cities to fund and support Smarter initiatives.

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The amazing heart of a Smarter City: the innovation boundary

August 13, 2012 23 Comments

(Photo of a mouse by pure9)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But where will this innovation come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Five roads to a Smarter City

August 7, 2012 19 Comments

(Photo of Daikoku junction by Ykanazawa1999

Recently, I discussed the ways in which cities are formulating  “Smarter City” visions and the programmes to deliver them. Such cross-city approaches are clearly what’s required in order to have a transformative effect across an entire city.

However, whilst some cities have undergone dramatic changes in this way – or have been built as “Smarter” cities in the first place as in the case of the famous Masdar project in Abu Dhabi – most cities are making progress one step at a time.

Four patterns have emerged in how they are doing so. Each pattern is potentially replicable by other cities; and each represents a proven approach that can be used as part of a wider cross-city plan.

I’ll start at the beginning, though, and describe why cross-city transformations can be hard to envision and deliver. Understanding why that can be the case will give us insight into which simpler, smaller-scale approaches can succeed more easily.

What’s so hard about a Smarter City?

Cities are complex ecosystems of people and organisations which need to work together to create and deliver Smarter City visions. Bringing them together to act in that way is difficult and time-consuming.

(Photo of Beijing by Trey Ratcliff)

Even where a city community has the time and willingness to do that, the fragmented nature of city systems makes it hard to agree a joint approach. Particularly in Europe and the UK, budgets and responsibilities are split between agenices; and services such as utilities and transport are contracted out and subject to performance measures that cannot easily be changed. Agreeing the objectives and priorities for a Smarter City vision in this context is hard enough; agreeing the financing mechanisms to fund programmes to deliver them is even more difficult.

Some of the cities that have made the most progress so far in Smarter City transformations have done so in part because they do not face these challenges – either because they are new-build cities like Masdar, or because they have more hierarchical systems of governance, such as Guangzhou in China. In other cases, critical challenges or unusual opportunities provide the impetus to act – for example in Rio, where an incredible cross-city operations centre has been implemented in preparation for the 2014 World cup and 2016 Olympics.

Elsewhere, cities must spend time and effort building a consensus. San Francisco, Dublin and Sunderland are amongst those who began that process some time ago; and many others are on the way.

But city-wide transformations are not the only approach to changing the way that cities work – they are just one of the five roads to a Smarter City. Four other approaches have been shown to work; and in many cases they are more straightforward as they are contained within individual domains of a city; or exploit changes that are taking place anyway.

Smarter infrastructure

Many cities in the UK and Europe are supported by transport and utility systems whose physical infrastructure is decades old. As urban populations rise and the pace of living increases, these systems are under increasing pressure. “Smarter” concepts and technologies can improve their efficiency and resilience whilst minimising the need to upgrade and expand them physically.

(Photo of a leaking tap by Vinoth Chandar. A project in Dubuque, Iowa showed that a community scheme involving smart meters and shared finances had a significant effect improving the repair of water leaks.)

In South Bend, Indiana, for example, an analytic system helps to predict and prevent wastewater overflows by more intelligently managing the existing infrastructure. The city estimates that they have avoided the need to invest in hundreds of millions of dollars of upgrades to the physical capacity of the infrastructure as a result. In Stockholm, a road-use charging system has significantly reduced congestion and improved environmental quality. In both cases, the systems have direct financial benefits that can be used to justify their cost.

These are just two examples of initiatives that offer a simplified approach to Smarter Cities; they deliver city-wide benefits but their implementation is within the sphere of a single organisation’s responsibility and finances.

Smarter micro-cities 

Environments such as sports stadiums, University campuses, business parks, ports and airports, shopping malls or retirement communities are cities in microcosm. Within them, operational authority and budgetary control across systems such as safety, transportation and communication usually reside with a single organisation. This can make it more straightforward to invest in a technology platform to provide insight into how those systems are operating together – as the Miami Dolphins have done in their Sun Life Stadium.

Other examples of such Smarter “micro-Cities” include the iPark industrial estate in Wuxi, China where a Cloud computing platform provides shared support services to small businesses; and the Louvre museum in Paris where “Intelligent Building” technology controls the performance of the environmental systems that protect the museum’s visitors and exhibits.

(Photo of the Louvre exhibition “‘The Golden Antiquity. Innovations and resistance in the 18th century” from the IBM press release for the Louvre project)

Improving the operation of such “micro-cities” can have a significant impact on the  cities and regions in which they are located – they are often major contributors to the economy and environment.

Shared Public Services

Across the world demographic and financial pressures are causing transformative change in public sector. City and regional leaders have said that their organisations are facing unprecedented challenges. In the UK it is estimated that nearly 900,000 public sector jobs will be lost over 5 years – approximately 3% of national employment.

In order to reduce costs whilst minimising impact to frontline services, many public sector agencies are making arrangements to share the delivery of common administrative services with each other, such as human resources, procurement, finance and customer relationship management.

Often these arrangements are being made locally between organisations that know and trust each other because they have a long history of working together. Sharing services means sharing business applications, IT platforms, and data; as town and village councils did in the Municipal Shared Services Cloud project.

As a result shared IT platforms with co-located information and applications are now deployed in many cities and regions. Smarter City systems depend on access to such information. Sunderland City Council are very aware of this; their CEO and CIO have both spoken about the opportunity for the City Cloud they are deploying to provide information to support public and private-sector innovation. Such platforms are an important enabler for the last trend I’d like to discuss: open data.

Open Data

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

The open data movement lobbies for information from public systems to be made openly available and transparent, in order that citizens and entrepreneurial businesses can find new ways to use it.

In cities such as Chicago (pictured on the left) and Dublin, open data platforms have resulted in the creation of “Apps” that provide useful information and services to citizens; and in the formation of startup companies with new, data-based business models.

There are many challenges and costs involved in providing good quality, usable open data to city communities; but the shared service platforms I’ve described can help to overcome them, and provide the infrastructure for the market-based innovations in city systems that can lead to sustainable economic growth.

Let’s build Smarter Cities … together

All of these approaches can succeed as independent Smarter City initiatives, or as contributions to an overall city-wide plan. The last two in particular seem to be widely applicable. Demographics and economics are driving an inevitable transformation to shared services in public sector; and the open data movement and the phenomenon of “civic hacking” demonstrate the willingness and capability of communities to use technology to create innovations in city systems.

As a result, technology vendors, local authorities and city communities have an exciting opportunity to collaborate. The former have the ability to deliver the robust, scalable, secure infrastructures required to provide and protect information about cities and individual citizens; the latter have the ability to use those platforms to create local innovations in business and service delivery.

At the 3rd EU Summit on Future Internet in Helsinki earlier this year, Juanjo Hierro, Chief Architect for the FI-WARE “future internet platform” project and Chief Technologist for Telefonica,  addressed this topic and identified the specific challenges that civic hackers face that could be addressed by such city information infrastructures; he included real-time access to information from physical city infrastructures; tools for analysing “big data“; and access to technologies to ensure privacy and trust.

Cities such as Sunderland, Birmingham, Dublin, Chicago and San Francisco are amongst those investing in such platforms, and in programmes to engage with communities to stimulate innovation in city systems. Working together, they are taking impressive steps towards making cities smarter.

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How Smarter Cities Get Started

July 26, 2012 17 Comments

(Photo of The Cube in Birmingham by Elliott Brown)

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

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

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

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

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

Does the city have a plan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does the city have an effective stakeholder forum?

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

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

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

Is the city community acting together?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How cities can exploit the Information Revolution

June 9, 2012 6 Comments

(This post was first published as part of the “Growth Factory” report from the thinktank TLG Lab).

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

Cities and regions in the UK face ever-increasing economic, social and environmental challenges. They compete for investment in what is now a single global economy. Demographics are changing with more than 90% of the population now living in urban areas, and where the number of people aged over 65 will double to 19 million by 2050. The resources we consume are becoming more expensive, with cities especially vulnerable to disruptions in supply.

The concept of “Smarter systems” has captured the imagination of experts as an approach to turn these challenges into opportunities for more sustainable economic and social growth; particularly in cities, where most of us live and work. Smarter systems – in cities, transportation, government and industry –can analyse the vast amounts of data being generated around us to help make more informed decisions, operate more efficiently or even predict the future.

These systems enable city planners around the world to design urban environments that promote safety, community vitality and economic growth. They can bring real-time information together from city transportation, social media, emergency services and leisure facilities to better enable cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, to manage major public events. They can enable transport systems to better manage traffic flow and reduce congestion, as in Singapore. They can stimulate economic growth by enabling small businesses to better compete for business in collaboration with regional trading partners, in systems such as that operated by the University of Warwick.

Government policies such as Open Data, personal care budgets and open public services will dramatically increase the information available to citizens to help them take well-informed decisions. This information will be rich, complex and associated with caveats and conditions. Making it usable by the broad population is an immense challenge which will not be addressed by technology alone. Data needs not only to be made available, but understandable so that it can inform better decision-making.

Where does Smarter city data come from?

Raw data for Smarter systems is derived from three sources: the city’s inhabitants, existing IT systems and readings from the physical environment.

Information from people has become more accessible with the continued spread of connected mobile devices, such as smartphones. Open Street Map, for example, provides a global mapping information service sourced from the activities of volunteers with portable satellite navigation devices. However, the quality and availability of crowd-sourced information depends on the availability and resources of volunteers, who cannot be held accountable for whether information is accurate, complete or up-to-date.

It is also important to understand data ownership and the associated privacy concerns. There is a difference between data freely and knowingly contributed by an individual for a specific purpose and information created as a side-effect of their activity – for example, the record of a person’s movements created by the GPS sensor in their smartphone.

The Open Data movement, supported by central government, will dramatically increase the availability of data from public systems. For example, efforts are underway to make NHS healthcare data available, with appropriate security measures, to Life Sciences organisations to reinforce the UK’s pre-eminent position in drug discovery research. However, the infrastructure required to make large volumes of data widely and rapidly available in a usable form will not be created for free. Until their cost is included in future government procurements – or until commercial systems of funding are created – then much data will likely only be made open on a more limited “best efforts” basis.

Furthermore, not all city data is held by public bodies. Many transportation and utility systems are owned and operated by the private sector, and it is not generally established what information they should make available, and how. Many Smarter city systems that use data from such sources are private partnerships rather than open systems.

Meanwhile, certain kinds of data are becoming far more accessible through the advancing ability of computer systems to understand human language. IBM’s Watson computer demonstrated this recently by competing and winning against world champions in the American television quiz show, Jeopardy! Wellpoint is using this kind of technology to draw insight from medical information held in similar forms. Its aim is to better tackle diseases such as cancer by empowering physicians to rapidly evaluate potential diagnoses and explore the latest supporting medical evidence. Similar technology can draw insight from case notes in social care systems, as Medway Youth Trust is doing, or from the reports of engineers maintaining roads, sewers, and other city systems.

An early “mashup” application using open data from Chicago’s police force

Information is also becoming more readily available from the physical environment. In Galway Bay, a network of underwater microphones is connected to a system that can identify and locate the sounds of dolphins and porpoises. Their location provides a dynamic indication of which parts of the Bay have the cleanest water. That information is made available to companies in the Bay to allow them to control their discharges of water; and to the fishing and leisure industries who are dependent on marine life. This Open Data approach is being used by cities across the world such as Dublin, Chicago and London as a resource for citizens and businesses.

Whilst advances in technology have lowered the cost of generating information from physical environments, challenges remain. From the perspective of a mobile telephone user, much of the UK has signal coverage. However, telephones are used one metre or more above ground level; at ground level, where many parts of our transport and utility infrastructures are located, coverage is much poorer. Additionally, mobile transmitters and receivers are relatively expensive and power-hungry. Cheaper, lower power technologies are needed to improve coverage, such as the “Weightless” standard being developed to use transmission bandwidth no-longer needed by analogue television.

Using and combining data appropriately

In order to make information from multiple sources available appropriately and usefully, several issues need to be tackled.

When computer systems are used to analyse information and take decisions, then the data formats and protocols used by those systems need to be matched. Information as simple as locations and dates may need to be converted between formats. At an engineering level, the protocols used to transmit data across cities using wired or wireless communications behave differently and require systems that integrate them.

The meaning of information from related sources also needs to be understood and adapted to context. Citizens who go shopping in wheelchairs need to know how to get between car-parks and shops with lifts, accessible public toilets and cash points. However, the computer systems of the organisations who own those facilities will encode the information separately, in ways that support their efficient management, not that support journey-planning between them.

The City of Portland in Oregon has gone further in a project to understand how information from systems across the city is related. They are now able to better predict the impact that key decisions will have on the entire city, years in advance.

Privacy and ownership of data may affect its subsequent use, often with terms and conditions in place for governing its access. Furthermore, safeguards are required to ensure that sensitive information cannot be inferred from a combination of sources. For example the location of a safe house or shelter being identified from building usage, building ownership and /or information concerning taxi journeys by the employees of particular council agencies.

The human dimension

Smarter systems will only succeed in improving cities if there is wide consumer engagement. To be of value, information will likely need to be timely and presented in a manner appropriate to consumer context. Individual behaviour will only change where personal value is derived as a result of new information being presented – a saving in time or money, or access to something of value to their family.

(Photo of traffic in Dhaka, Bangladesh, from Joisey Showa)

Many cities are experimenting with technologies that predict the future build up of traffic, by comparing real-time measurements to databases of past patterns of traffic flow. In Stockholm, this information is used by a road-use charging system that supports variable pricing. In California, commuters in a pilot project were given personalised predictions of their commuting time each day. Both systems encourage individuals to make choices based on new information.

Utility providers are exploring how information from smart meters can encourage water and energy users to change behaviour. A recent study in Dubuque, Iowa, showed that when householders were shown how their water usage compared to the average for their neighbours, they became better at conserving water – by fixing leaks, or using domestic appliances more efficiently. Skills across artistic and engineering disciplines are helping us understand how this type of information can be communicated more effectively. Many people will not want to study figures and charts on a smart meter or website; instead “ambient” information sources may be more effective – such as a glow-globe that changes colour from green to orange to red depending on household electricity use.

Systems that improve the sustainability of cities could also affect economic development. Lowering congestion through Smarter transportation schemes can improve productivity by reducing time lost by workers delayed by traffic. By making information and educational resources widely available, Smarter systems could improve access to opportunity across city communities. A city with vibrant communities of well-informed citizens may appear a more forward-looking and attractive place to live for educated professionals and, in turn, for businesses considering relocation. New York has improved its attractiveness since the 1970s by lowering the fear of crime. One of its tools is a “real-time crime centre” that brings information together from across the city in order to better react to crime and public order incidents. The system can even help to prevent crime by intelligently deploying police resources to the areas most likely to experience incidents based on past patterns of activity – on days with similar weather, transportation conditions or public events.

Success in delivering against these broader objectives is much more likely to be achieved where the cities themselves are more clearly accountable for them.

So where do we start?

Investments in Smarter systems often cut across organisations and budgets and many have objectives that are macro-economic, social and environmental, as well as financial. As such, they challenge existing accounting mechanisms. Whilst central government and the financial markets offer new investment solutions such as ethical funds, social impact bonds and city deals, so far these have not been used to fund the majority of Smarter solutions – many of which are supported by research programmes. The Technology Strategy Board’s investment in areas such as “Future Cities” and the “Connected Digital Economy” will provide a tremendous boost, but there is much to be done to assist cities in using new investment sources to fund Smarter initiatives – or to develop sustainable commercial or social-enterprise business models to deliver them.

Although progress can be driven by strong leadership, the issues of governance and fragmented budgets will need to be overcome if we are to take full advantage of the benefits technology can bring.

We live in an era of major global challenges – well described in the recent “People and the Planet” report by the Royal Society. At the same time, we have access to powerful new technologies and ideas to address them, such as those proposed by the 100 Academics who contributed essays to the book “The New Optimists”. When we focus those resources on cities, we focus on the structures in which we can have the greatest impact on the most people.

Already many forward-looking cities in the UK such as Sunderland and Birmingham are joining others around the world by investing in Smarter systems. If we can meet the technical, organisational and investment challenges, we will not only provide citizens, businesses and agencies with new choices and exciting opportunities; we’ll also position the UK economy to succeed as the Information Revolution gathers pace.

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Which cities will get Smarter fastest?

January 30, 2012 5 Comments

Birmingham is a diverse city currently undergoing the latest of many periods of regeneration

Last week the Centre for Cities published a report that IBM sponsored giving its 2012 Outlook for Cities in the UK. The report assesses economic and demographic statistics with the intention of identifying the cities most likely to succeed in improving their economic activity and prosperity. You can download a copy here.

The report is an interesting read, and offers challenging findings for cities such as Birmingham, where I live – whilst it is the second largest city in the UK, Birmingham has significant challenges and appears near the bottom of rankings for employment and the level of skills in the workforce.

However, in focussing on statistical information, the report takes insufficient account of two crucial factors. Because the report is seeking to influence the investment of government funds in the cities it identifies as best placed to succeed, I think these important omissions should be recognised.

Firstly, it does not take into account the specific initiatives currently taking place in many cities. You only have to look at the effect on Birmingham’s retail economy of the Council-led regeneration of the Bullring shopping centre to understand how fundamentally cities can be changed. The Bullring is now one of the most visited destinations in Europe and has transformed a city centre that used to attract relatively few visitors from outside.

Steps are also being taken to address the skills of the city’s workforce. The University of Birmingham recently announced that it will open a secondary school teaching a curriculum designed to develop successful University students. And last year, Birmingham City University and Maverick Television were two of the sponsors for Birmingham Ormiston Academy, an institution that will provide vocational education in creative media and performing arts. You could see both of these as vertical integrations in the supply chain of skills for the city’s economy. Centre for Cities’ report does not take account of the effect that these initiatives will have.

Looking to the future, the Royal Academy of Engineering recently published a paper assessing the potential and challenges for Smarter City Infrastructures to transform our cities. Several case studies have shown the benefit of applying sophisticated instrumentation and analytics to physical and information systems in areas such as transportation, water and social care. We can expect cities to continue to exploit such advances to transform themselves in new and unexpected ways.

The Centre for Cities report also fails to consider the willingness and ability of the ecosystem of political, economic and social organisations and their leaders to take effective action. Sunderland, for example, a city where I frequently work (see many previous posts in this blog, starting here) also scores poorly in many of the statistics in the report. However, a well developed “Economic Masterplan” has been agreed across organisations in the City, and the City Council has already made investments in citywide Broadband and Cloud Computing intended to move it forward. The strength and cohesion of leadership and vision across the city will be a tremendous asset in its transformation; by contrast, cities with more fragmented leadership or less crisp visions may make progress more slowly.

The 2012 Outlook for Cities does contain a wealth of important information that can help our cities understand their challenges and opportunities; and Center for Cities’ previous detailed research on the structure of city economies is also worth reading; particularly in light of one of their conclusions that I do agree strongly with – “cities with less dynamic private sectors … will find it more challenging to offset the combination of a weak national economy and the ongoing shrinkage of the public sector”.

But anyone who looked at the statistics of the technology industry prior to Steve Jobs return to Apple Computers in 1997 would have probably predicted nothing more than a continued decline for that company into a niche market for the graphic design community. So I hope the UK Government keeps an open mind and makes holistic assessments of Cities’ plans for transformation and their ability to execute them when deciding where to make investments, rather than relying on indicators of past performance.

One thing is for sure, though: we should all expect to see some surprises. History’s most reliable lesson is that it’s an imperfect guide to the future.

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