4 ways to get on with building Smart Cities. And the societal failure that stops us using them.

(William Robinson Leigh’s 1908 painting “Visionary City” envisaged future cities constructed from mile-long buildings of hundreds of storeys connected by gas-lit skyways for trams, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. A century later we’re starting to realise not only that developments in transport and power technology have eclipsed Leigh’s vision, but that we don’t want to live in cities constructed from buildings on this scale.)

The Smart City refuses to go away
In 2013 Adam Greenfield wrote “Against the Smart City”  in criticism of the large-scale corporate- and government-led projects in cities such as Masdar, Songdo and Rio that had begun to co-opt the original idea of “Smart Communities” and citizens, given a more powerful voice in their own governance by Internet communication, into what he saw – and what some still see – as a “top-down” approach to infrastructure and services divorced from the interest of ordinary citizens.

But despite regular reprisals of this theme accompanied by assertions that the Smart City is a misguided idea that is doomed to die away, notably last year in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the Smart City has neither been abandoned as mistaken nor faded from prominence as it would have done by now if it were nothing but a technology buzzword. (Whether they have disappeared entirely or simply become everyday parts of the landscape, ideas that once dominated the technology industry such as “Service Oriented Architecture“, “Web 2.0” and “e-business” have risen to prominence and disappeared again within the lifetime of “Smart Cities”).

Instead, the various industry, community, political, academic and design interests associated with the Smart City idea have gradually learned how to combine the large-scale, intelligent infrastructures needed to support the incredible level and speed of urbanisation around the world with the accessible technologies that allow citizens, communities and businesses to adapt those infrastructures to their own needs and create more successful lives for themselves. As a consequence, new cities and new media organisations are still adding to those already debating the idea – I’ve received invitations to new events in the UK, Ireland, Malaysia, China and the Middle East already this year, and mainstream reputable sources such as the Daily Telegraph, Fortune magazine, the Economist and Forbes have covered the trend.

Yet despite all of this interest from industry and the public sector, the reality is that we still haven’t seen significant investment in those ideas on a sustainable basis.

If you read this blog regularly then you’ll know that I don’t believe that our primary focus for funding Smart City initiatives should be through the innovation funds provided by bodies such as Innovate UK or programmes such as the European Union’s Horizon 2020. Those are both great vehicles for driving innovation out of research organisations into business and public services; but for any city facing an acute challenge the bidding processes take too long and consume too many resources; the high levels of competition mean there can be a relatively low chance of receiving funds; and projects funded in this way often don’t solve the challenge of paying for the resulting solution on an ongoing basis. Most of the sustainable solutions that result from them are new business products and services: once the initial funded pilot with a local authority has finished, where does the money come from to pay for an ongoing commercial solution?

There are, however, a clear set of routes to securing sustainable investment that the most forward-looking cities have demonstrated. They don’t require cities to attract flagship technology industries to invest in them as proving-grounds for new products and services; they don’t require the inward investment that comes from international sporting and cultural events; and they’re not the preserve of rich or fast-growing capital cities on the international stage.

They do require senior city leaders – Mayors, Council Leaders and their Executive officers – to adopt and drive them; and they also require collaboration and partnership with other city institutions and with private sector suppliers.

And they require bravery, integrity and commitment from those private sector suppliers – such as my employer Amey – to offer new partnerships to our customers. Smart Cities won’t come about through us selling our products and services in transactional exchanges; they’ll come about through new partnerships in which we agree to share not just the responsibility to invest in technology and innovation, but also responsibility for the risks involved in achieving the objectives that cities care about.

But while these approaches to delivering Smart Cities will require hard and careful work, and real investment in collaboration, they are all accessible to any city that chooses to use them; and there’s no reason at all why that process can’t begin today.

(The members of Birmingham’s Smart City Commission)

Getting started: agreeing on aspirations

The starting point to putting a Smart City strategy in place is to create a specific, aspirational vision rooted in the challenges, opportunities and capabilities of a particular place and its communities, and that can win support from local stakeholders. I have seen (broadly) two types of Smart Cities visions of this sort created over the last few years.

1. Local Authority visions for digital services and infrastructure

Many local authorities have developed plans for smart, digital local services, coupled with plans for regional investment in infrastructure (such as 4G and broadband connectivity), digital skills and business-enablement. A good example is Hampshire County Council’s “Digital Hampshire” plan (Hampshire is a relatively large and economically healthy County in the UK with a population of 1.3 million and GDP just over £30billion).

One of the earliest examples was Sunderland’s “Economic Masterplan”, which which has driven around £15m of investment by the City Council so far, with further and potentially more significant initiatives now underway. (Sunderland are a medium-sized city in the UK, with a population of approximately 300,000. The city has been focussed for many years on modernising and diversifying its economy following the decline of the shipbuilding and coalmining industries. They are genuine, if often unacknowledged, thought leaders in Smart Cities).

2. City-wide or region-wide collaborative visions

In some cities and regions a wide variety of stakeholders, usually facilitated by a Local Authority or University leader, have developed collaborative plans including commitments and initiatives from local businesses, Universities, transport organisations and service providers as well as government agencies. These visions tend to contain more ambitious plans, for example the provision of “Smart Home” connectivity in new affordable housing developments, multi-modal transport payment schemes, local renewable energy generation schemes etc. London and Birmingham are good examples of this type of plan; and London in particular have used it to drive significant investments in Smart infrastructure through property development.

In both cities, formal collaborations were established to create these visions and drive the strategies to implement them – Birmingham’s Smart City Commission (which I’ve recently re-joined after having been a member of its first incarnation) and London’s Smart London Board (on which I briefly represented IBM before joining Amey).

Whether the first or the second type of plan is the right approach for any specific city, region or community depends on the level of support and collaboration amongst stakeholders in the local authority and the wider city and region – and of course, many plans in reality are somewhere between those two types. If the enthusiasm and leadership are there, neither type of plan need be a daunting process – Oxford recently built a plan of the second type from scratch between the City Council, local Universities and businesses in around 6 months by working with existing local partnerships and networks.

Moving forward: focussing on delivery and practical funding mechanisms

The degree to which cities and regions have then implemented these strategies is determined by how well they’ve focussed on realistic sources of investment and funding. For example, whilst some cities – notably Sunderland and London – have secured significant investments from sustainable sources rather than from research and innovation funds, many others – so far – have not.

I have probably tested some of my relationships with local authorities and innovation agencies to the limit by arguing repeatedly that many Smart City initiatives and debates focus far too much on applying for central Government funds and grants from Research and Innovation funding agencies; and far too little on sustainable business and investment models for new forms of city infrastructure and services.

I make these arguments because there are at least four approaches that any city can use to exploit existing, ongoing streams of funding and investment to implement a Smart City vision in a sustainable way – if their leaders and stakeholders have the conviction to make them happen; and because I passionately believe that these are the mechanisms that can unlock the opportunity for cities across the country and around the world to realise the huge social, economic and environmental benefits that technology developments can enable if they are harnessed in the right way:

1. Include Smart City criteria in the procurement of services by local authorities to encourage competitive innovation from private sector providers
2. Encourage development opportunities to include “smart” infrastructure
3. Commit to entrepreneurial programmes
4. Enable and support Social Enterprise

(The Sunderland Software Centre, a multi-£million new technology startup incubation facility in Sunderland’s city centre. The Centre is supported by a unique programme of events and mentoring delivered by IBM’s Academy of Technology as a condition of the award of a contract for provision of IT services to the centre, and arising from Sunderland’s Smart City strategy)

1. Include Smart City criteria in the procurement of services by local authorities to encourage competitive innovation from private sector providers

Sunderland City Council are at the forefront of investing in Smart City technology simply by reflecting their aspirations in their procurement practises for the goods and services they need to operate as a Council. They have included objectives from their Economic Masterplan in four procurements for IT solutions now, totalling around £15m – for example, the transformation of their IT infrastructure from a traditional platform to a Cloud computing platform was awarded to IBM based on IBM’s commitment to help the Council to use the Cloud platform to help local businesses, social enterprises, charities and entrepreneurs to succeed.

Whilst specific procurement choices in any given service are different in every case – whether to procure support for in-house delivery or to outsource to an external provider; or whether to form a PFI, Joint Venture or other such partnership structure for example – the principle of using business-as-usual procurements to invest in the Smart agenda is one that can be applied by any local authority or other organisation responsible for the delivery of public or city services or infrastructure.

This approach is dependent on the procurement of outcomes – for example, the quality of road surfaces, the smoothness of traffic flow, contributions to social mobility and small business growth – rather than of capabilities or resources. Outcomes-based procurements between competing providers create the incentive from the release of the tender through to the completion of the contract for private sector providers to invest in innovation and technology to deliver the most competitive offer to the customer.

Over the last 10 months in Amey, where many of our customer relationships are outcomes-based, whether they are with local governments, other public sector organisations or regulated industries such as utilities, I’ve rapidly put together a portfolio of Smart City initiatives that are supported by very straightforward business cases based on those commitments to outcomes. These initiatives are not just making our own operations more cost effective (and safer) – although they are doing both of those, and that’s what guarantees our ongoing financial commitment to them; they are also delivering new social insights, new forms of citizen engagement and new opportunities for community collaboration for our customers.

The stakeholders whose commitment is needed to implement this approach include Local Authority Chief Executives, Council Leaders, Cabinet members and their Chief Financial Officers or Finance Directors, as well as procuring Executives in services such as highways management, parking services, social care, health and wellbeing and IT. They can also include representatives of local transport organisations for initiatives focussed on transport and mobility.

I won’t pretend that an outcomes-based approach is always easy to adopt, either for local government organisations or their suppliers. In particular, if we want to apply this approach to the highest-level Smart City aspirations for social mobility, economic growth and resilience, then there is a need for dialogue between all parties to establish how to express those outcomes in a way that incentivises the private sector to invest in innovation to deliver them; and to do so in a way that both rewards them appropriately for their achievements whilst giving local government and the citizens and communities they serve good value for money and exemplary service.

In discussions at the last meeting of the UK Government’s Smart Cities Forum, recently re-convened after the general election, there was clearly an appetite for that discussion on both sides: but it needs a neutral, trusted intermediary to facilitate it. That’s not a role that anyone is playing at the moment – neither in government, nor in industry, nor in academia, nor in the conference circuit, nor in the various innovation agencies that are active in Smart Cities. It’s a role that we badly need one – or all of them – to step up to.

(The Urban Sciences Building at Newcastle Science Central, a huge, University-driven regeneration project in central Newcastle that combines facilities for the research and development of new solutions for urban infrastructure with on-site smart infrastructure and services)

2. Encourage development opportunities to include “smart” infrastructure
In 2012 after completing their first Smart City Vision, Birmingham City Council asked what was both an obvious and a fundamentally important question – but one that, to my knowledge, no-one had thought to ask before:

“How should our Planning Framework be updated to reflect our Smart City vision?”

Birmingham’s insight has the potential to unlock an incredible investment stream – the British Property Federation estimates that £14billion is spent each year in the UK on new-build developments alone. Just a tiny fraction of that sum would dwarf the level of direct investment in Smart Cities we’ve seen to date.

Birmingham’s resulting “Digital Blueprint” contains 10 “best practise recommendations” for planning and development drawn in part from a wider set that resulted from a workshop that I facilitated for the Academy of Urbanism, a professional body of town planners, urban designers and architects in the UK. The British Standards Institute has recently taken these ideas forward and published guidance that is starting to be used by other cities.

But progress is slow. To my knowledge the only example of these ideas being put into practise in the UK (though I’d love to be proven wrong) is through the Greater London Authority (GLA) and London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) who included criteria from the Smart London Plan in their process last year to award the East Wick and Sweetwater development opportunity to the private sector. This is a multi-£100million investment from a private sector pension fund to build 1,500 new homes on the London Olympics site along with business and retail space.

On behalf of IBM last year I contributed several Smart City elements of the winning proposal; it was astonishing to see how straightforward it was to justify committing multi-£million technology investments from the private sector in the development proposal simply because they would enable the construction and development consortium to win the opportunity to generate long-term profits at a much more significant level. Crucially, the LLDC demanded that the benefits of those investments should be felt not just by residents and businesses in the new development; but by residents and businesses in existing, adjoining neighbourhoods.

There is not much information on this aspect of the development in the public domain, but you can get some idea from this blog by the Master Planner subcontracted to the development. A similar approach is now being taken to an even larger redevelopment in London at Old Oak and Park Royal.

If cities in the UK and beyond are to take advantage of this potentially incredibly powerful mechanism, then we need to win over some crucial stakeholders: Local Authority Directors of Planning, regional development agencies, property developers, financiers and construction companies. Local Universities can be ideal partners for this approach – if they are growing and investing in new property development, there is a clear opportunity for their research departments to collaborate with property and infrastructure developers to create Smart City environments that showcase the capabilities of all parties. Newcastle Science Central is an example of this approach; it’s a real shame that elsewhere in the UK some significant investments are being made to extend University property – often on the basis of increased revenues from student fees – with no incorporation of these possibilities, at the same time that those same Universities’ own research groups are making countless bids into competitive research and innovation funds.

3. Commit to entrepreneurial programmes

[Priya Prakash of the entrepreneurial company Design 4 Social Change describes a project she is leading on behalf of Amey to improve citizen engagement with the services that we deliver for our customers]

Many Smart City initiatives are fundamentally business model innovations – new ways of combining financial success and sustainability with social, economic or environmental improvements in services such as transport, utilities or food. And most business model innovations are created by startup companies, funded by Venture Capital investment. Air B’n’B and Uber are two often-cited examples at the moment of how quickly such businesses, based on new, technology-enabled operating models, can create an enormous impact.

What if you could align that impact with the objectives of a city or region?

The “Cognicity” programme run by the Level 39 technology incubator in London’s Canary Wharf financial district has achieved this alignment by linking Venture Capital- and Angel-backed startup companies to the infrastructure requirements of the next phase of development at Canary Wharf. The West Midlands Public Transport Executive Centro and Innovation Birmingham have agreed a similar initiative to advance transport priorities in Birmingham through externally-funded innovation. Oxford are pursuing the same approach through their “Smart Oxford Challenge” in partnership with Nominet, a trust that supports social innovation. And Amey and our parent company Ferrovial are similarly supporting a “Smart Lab” in collaboration with the University of Sheffield and Sheffield City Council.

A variety of stakeholders are vital to creating entrepreneurial programmes that succeed and that crucially can attract finance to support the ideas that they generate – endless unfunded civic hackathons create ideas but too often fail to have an impact due to a lack of funding and a lack of genuine engagement from local authorities to adopt the solutions they make possible. Innovation funding agencies, especially those with a local or social focus are vital; as are the local Universities, technology incubators and social enterprise support organisations that both attract innovators and have the resources to support them. Finally, where they exist, local Angel Investors or Venture Capital organisations have an obvious role to play.

(Casserole Club, a social enterprise developed by FutureGov uses social media to connect people who have difficulty cooking for themselves with others who are happy to cook an extra portion for a neighbour; a great example of a locally-focused “sharing economy” business model which creates financially sustainable social value.)

4. Enable and support Social Enterprise

The objectives of Smart Cities (which I’d summarise for this purpose as “finding ways to invest in technology to enable social, environmental and economic improvements”) are analogous to the “triple bottom line” objectives of Social Enterprises – organisations whose finances are often sustained by revenues from the products or services that they provide, but that commit themselves to social, environmental or economic outcomes, rather than to maximising their financial returns to shareholders. A vast number of Smart City initiatives are carried out by these organisations when they innovate using technology.

Cities that find a way to systematically enable social enterprises to succeed could unlock a reservoir of beneficial innovation. An international example that began in the UK is the Impact Hub network, a global community of collaborative workspaces. The Impact Hub network has worked with a variety of national and local governments to create support programmes to encourage the formation of socially innovative and responsible organisations.

Social Enterprise UK help and support authorities seeking to work with Social Enterprises in this way through their “Social Enterprise Place” initiative; Oxfordshire was the first County to be awarded “Social Enterprise County” under this initiative in recognition of their engagement programme with Social Enterprise.

Another possibility is for local authorities to work in partnership with crowdfunding organisations. Plymouth City Council, for example, offer to match-fund any money raised from crowdfunding for social innovations. This approach can be tremendously powerful: whilst the availability of match-funding from the local authority attracts crowdfunded donations, often sufficient funds are donated through crowdfunding that ultimately the match funding is not required. Given the sustained pressure we’re seeing on public sector finances, this ability to enable a small amount of local authority investment go a very long way is really powerful.

The stakeholders whose commitment is required to make this approach effective include local authorities – whose financial commitment to support new ideas is vital – as well as representatives of the Charitable and Social Enterprise sectors; businesses with support programmes for Social Enterprise (such as Deloitte Consulting’s Social Innovation Pioneers programme); and local incubators and business support services for Social Enterprise.

Why Smart Cities are a societal failure

Market dynamics guarantee that we’ll see massive investment in smart technology over the next few years – the meteoric rise of Uber and Air B’n’B is just one manifestation of that imperative. Consider also how astonishing your SmartPhone is compared to anything you could have imagined a few years ago – and the phenomenal levels of investment in technology that have driven that development; or how quickly the level of technology available in the average car has increased – let alone what happens when self-driving, connected vehicles become widely available.

But what will be the result of all that investment?

Before the recent UK general election, I admonished a Member of Parliament who closed a Smart Cities discussion with the words “I don’t suppose we’ll be talking about this subject for a couple of months now; we’ve got an election to consider” with the response: “Apple have just posted the largest quarterly profit in Corporate history by selling mobile supercomputers to the ordinary people who vote for you. Why on earth isn’t the topic of “who benefits from this incredibly powerful technology that is reshaping our society” absolutely central to the election debate?” (Apple’s results had just been announced earlier that day).

That exchange (and the fact that these issues indeed barely surfaced at all throughout the election period) marks the core of the Smart Cities debate, and highlights our societal failure to address it.

Most politicians appreciate that technology is changing rapidly and that these changes merit attention; but they do not appreciate quite how fundamentally important and far-reaching those changes are. My sense is that they think they can deal with technology-related issues such as “Smart Cities” as self-contained subjects of secondary importance to the more pressing concerns of educational attainment, economic productivity and international competitiveness.

That is a fundamentally mistaken view. Over the next decade, developments in technology, and the way that we adapt to them, will be one of the most important factors influencing education, the economy and the character of our society.

Let me justify that assertion by considering the skills that any one of us will need in order to have a successful life as our society and economy develop.

It is obvious that we will need the right technical skills in order to use the technologies of the day effectively. But of course we will also need interpersonal skills to interact with colleagues and customers; economic skills to help focus our efforts on creating value for others; and organisational skills to enable us to do so in the context of the public and private institutions from which our society is constructed.

One single force is changing all of those skills more rapidly than we have ever known before: technology. When the Millennium began we would not have dreamed of speaking to our families wherever and whenever we liked using free video-calling, and we could not have started a business using the huge variety of online tools available to us today. From startups to multinational corporations, we are all comfortable building and operating companies that use continually evolving technology to coordinate the activities of people living in different countries on different continents; and to create innovative new ways of doing so.

Whatever you think are the most important issues in the world today, if you are not at least considering the role of technology within them, then you will misunderstand how they will develop over time. And the process of envisioning and creating that future is another way to define what we mean by Smart Cities and smart communities: the challenges and opportunities we face, and the changes that technology will create, come together in the places where we live, work, travel and play; and their outcomes will be determined both by the economics of those places, and by how how they are governed.

Unfortunately, most of us are not even engaged with these ideas. A recent poll conducted by Arqiva on behalf of YouGov found that 96% of respondents were unaware of any Smart City initiatives in the cities they lived in. If ordinary people don’t understand and believe in the value of Smart Cities, they are unlikely to vote for politicians who attempt to build them or enact policies that support them. That lack of appreciation represents a failure on the part of those of us – like me – who do appreciate the significance of the changes we’re living through to communicate them, and to make an effective case to take decisive action.

As an example of that failure, consider again Birmingham’s thought-leading “Digital Blueprint” and it’s ten design principles. To repeat, they are “best practise recommendations”: they are not policies. They are not mandatory or binding. And as a consequence, I am sorry to say that in practise they have not been applied to the literally £billions of investment in development and regeneration taking place in the city that I live in and love.

That’s a lost opportunity that greatly saddens me.

[Drones co-operate to build a rope bridge. As such machines become more capable and able to carry out more cheaply and safely tasks previously performed by people, and that are central to the construction and operation of city infrastructure and services, how do we ensure that society at large benefits from such technology?]

As a society we cannot afford to keep losing such opportunities (and Birmingham is not alone: taking those opportunities is by far the exception, and not the rule). If we do, our aspirations will be simply be overtaken by events, and the consequences could be profound.

Writing in “The 2nd Machine Age”, MIT Professors of Economics Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson argue that the “platform business models” of Air B’n’B and Uber are becoming a dominant force in the economy – they cite the enormous market valuations of corporations such as Nike, Google, Facebook and Amazon that use such models, in addition to the rapid growth of new businesses. Their analysis further demonstrates that, if left unchecked, the business models and market dynamics of the digital economy will concentrate the value created by those businesses into the hands of a small number of platform creators and shareholders to a far greater extent than traditional business models have done so throughout history to date. I had the opportunity to meet Andy and Erik earlier this year, and they were deeply concerned that we should act to prevent the stark increase in inequality that their findings predict.

These are innovative businesses using Smart technology, but those social and economic outcomes won’t make a smart world, a smart society or Smart Cities. The widespread controversy created by Uber’s business model is just the tip of the iceberg of the consequences that we could see.

As I’ve quoted many, many times on this blog, Jane Jacobs got this right in 1961 when she wrote in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” that:

“Private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machine is adapted to turn out that image.”

We have expressed over and over again the “image of what we want” in countless aspirational visions and documents. But we have not adapted the machine to turn out that image.

Our politicians – locally and nationally – have not understood that the idea of a “Smart City” is really a combination of technology, social, environmental and economic forces that will fundamentally transform the way our society works in a way that will change the life of everyone on this planet; that the outcomes of those changes are in no way understood, and in no way guaranteed to be beneficial; and that enacting the policies, practises and – yes – laws, to adapt those changes to the benefit of everyone is a defining political challenge for our age.

I am not a politician, but this is also a challenge for which I accept responsibility.

As a representative of business – in particular a business that delivers a vast number of services to the public sector – I recognise the enormous responsibility I accept by working in a leadership role for an example of what has become one of the most powerful forces in our economy: the private corporation. It is my responsibility – and that of my peers, colleagues and competitors – to drive our business forward in a way that is responsible to the interests of the society of which we are part, and that is not driven only by the narrow financial concerns of our shareholders.

There should be absolutely no conflict between a responsible, financially successful company and one that operates in the long term interest of the society which ultimately supports it.

But that long-term synergy is only made real by a constant focus on taking the right decisions every day. From the LIBOR scandal to cheating diesel emissions tests it’s all too obvious that there are many occasions when we get those decisions wrong. Businesses are run by people; people are part of society; and we need to treat those simple facts far more seriously as an imperative in everyday decision-making than we currently do.

It is inevitable that our world, our cities and our communities will be dramatically reshaped by the technologies that are developing today, and that will be developed in the near future. They will change – very quickly – out of all recognition from what we know today.

But whether we will honestly benefit from those technologies is a different and uncertain question. Answering that question with a “yes” is a personal, political, business and organisational challenge that all of us need to face up to much more seriously and urgently than we are have done so far.