Are Smarter Cities the Key to Social Mobility?

July 18, 2012 2 Comments

(Photo of Santa Cruz by Cortto)

An interview with Chris Cooper, IBM UK Architect for Smarter Cities

My colleague Chris Cooper was recently appointed as IBM UK’s Architect for Smarter Cities. For many years Chris has helped IBM’s customers and partners in the transport industry build smarter systems with positive social and environmental impact; so he came to his new role with a wealth of experience.

Chris wrote a great paper a couple of weeks ago on the important connections between transport, open data and social mobility (it’s available here, though you need a subscription to access the full article). This week we explored those themes further in a discussion that I thought was worth sharing.

[Rick]: You’ve spoken and written about “Social Mobility” in the context of Smarter Transport and Smarter Cities; can you summarise what you mean by the concept?

[Chris]: Social mobility in the context of Smarter Transport systems is the ability to move people and resources in an informed way that achieves positive social outcomes. It relies on the use of information and communication technologies to facilitate the organisation and optimisation of connections between goods, services and human capital. In short, it can enable communities to work together to achieve their goals.

The real challenge for such systems is how to measure the value of their social, environmental and economic impact. Today, we measure value in monetary terms. But that’s very much a point-in-time measure; and there’s an argument that the full cost of goods and services are not identified and included in their financial price – particularly the social and environmental costs. It’s possible that such costs could be quantified by measures such as standard of living or the “happiness index” that has been suggested by the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, amongst others.

I recently read a speech by Christine Lagard, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, ahead of the Rio+20 Summit. She called for a sustainable and equitably distributed recovery to economic growth; and stated that a barrier to achieving that was that the social and environmental costs you’ve referred to are not included in the prices we pay for goods and services. You’ve described “Social Mobility” as a vision for transport that addresses those challenges and empowers communities.

Yes, absolutely. But one of the challenges we will face is that the companies who operate our transport services are expected to peform against traditional financial measures – and they are audited in the same way. Those measures do not take account of social and environmental impact. If those measures were to be augmented by a “sustainability index” that assessed longer term contributions to society and the environment, then we might look back on current assessments of company performance and view them rather differently.

So if in the future mechanisms such as Carbon Taxes were introduced and became accepted components of financial performance, would we look back at the assessments we’re making today and consider them incomplete?

(Photo of carbon dioxide scrubber from Steve Simpson)

That’s very possible. Our current systems measure short term performance and don’t provide an incentive to plan for the future. It’s becoming more important to correct this as competition for our finite resources intensifies. To do so we need to introduce mechanisms to adjust the cost of resources to recognise their scarcity and the impact of consuming them.

A good precedent can be seen in the way we have combated acid rain. Social and political pressure resulted in the application of financial penalties to the use of the chemicals that contributed to acid rain. Over time those financial penalties made the causative chemicals prohibitively expensive to use; or made it cost-effective to install equipment to prevent their emission, such as the the carbon dioxide scrubbers that are now commonplace in power stations.

No-one argues with the logic of doing that anymore; and we no longer suffer from acid rain. Of course, in today’s globalised economy its important that such measures are applied universally so that they don’t create imbalances in competition, and that’s by no means a simple challenge to resolve.

At the Base Cities London conference we both attended recently, the Deputy Mayor for Environment for Los Angeles told us that in contrast to the relatively weak agreement between national leaders at Rio 20+, city leaders had returned from their own conference in Rio determined to implement the changes required to achieve sustainable economic growth. How do you see the ideas we’ve discussed working in city economies?

If companies published the “sustainability index” I’ve described, consumers could consider it when choosing which companies they should buy goods and services from. That could be a very powerful tool for influencing the impact of the millions of buying decisions made every day by individuals in local markets.

Rather than acting as an overhead or a barrier to innovation, such an index could enable companies to improve their performance. In order to transform operations to more measurably sustainable models, companies will need to invest in  understanding their supply chains, operations and markets in more depth. Doing so will undoubtedly provide opportunities for optimisation.

More generally, localism is going to be an increasingly important concept as we realise that it’s more realistic and effective to affect the communities around us rather than the world at large.

We haven’t spoken much about transport; I’ve seen some interesting studies recently that have highlighted the challenges some communities in cities have in accessing effective transport. To what extent is the concept of social mobility concerned with enabling city communities to travel to where they need to to live, shop and work?

That’s a really important point. The urban spaces we inhabit – including the surrounding rural spaces which supply them – need to be designed in harmony with the transport systems that move people and goods around them.

Whether that’s best accomplished by a “grid” system or through networks of urban villages; and how those ideas apply to new-build cities in emerging economies or the transformation of existing cities in developed economies are subjects that are hotly debated.

I personally think that mixed developments that concentrate a critical mass of people, goods and services within walking distance are the key to enabling the transactions through which cities create value and wealth to take place more frequently and at lower financial, social and environmental cost. Travel doesn’t just consume resources; it’s often an unproductive use of time.

So is it more important to focus on enabling travel within cities than between them in national systems?

Research has shown that cities are the most efficient systems for generating social and economic value; but it’s well known that some cities are losing population, or are losing key skills from their population to their suburbs and commuter belts. The reasons for that include the desire for more space; to live in more attractive environments; or to have better access to quality education for children. All of those challenges could be addressed by more holistic thinking, planning and investment in city systems, including their transport. And they would bring people with important skills and experience back into the diverse, creative environments of our cities.

One possible approach would be to allow cities to expand into the greenbelts surrounding them. By allowing cities and their transport systems to expand as little as one mile (1.5 kilometres) into their surrounding greenbelts – which are an artificial creation – we could significantly increase their size in a way that exploits their existing infrastructure.

Has the privatisation of transport in the UK over the past few decades resulted in a system that is cost-effective to provide – on a strictly financial basis – rather than one that is optimally beneficial to city communities and economies?

That’s certainly a concern, though key organisations in transport are starting to look ahead to new strategies for the future. Rather than focus on what we can’t predict – whether high-speed rail or hovercars will be our transport of choice, for example – I think we should focus on what we want our transport systems to achieve for us – such as universal access to local and national travel – and how we make progress towards such goals over the next few years.

So to summarise our discussion, would you agree that the challenge for cities is to evolve in ways that encourage the development of spaces, communities and transport systems in harmony so that they enable local transactions and interactions as a more sustainable form of growth?

(IBM’s Smarter City Technology Centre in Dublin)

Yes. It’s important for local communities, cities, regions and even nations to become conscious of their unique strengths; to exploit local transactions to reinforce them; and to trade them with regional and national partners.

Cities are increasingly looking for these differentiators; and multi-national companies such as IBM are looking to build relationships based on them. Such relationships – in Moscow, Dublin and Dubuque, for example – connect the ideas, experience and economies of scale that accrue from global operations to the intricacies and unique expertise of local markets. And they do it with the passion that comes from local engagement.

Chris, thankyou, that’s been a really interesting discussion. As individuals we all care about the places and communities in which we live; the ideas we’ve discussed today give us the reason and opportunity to contribute to those communities through our work as well as in our private lives in very important and exciting ways. 

Filed under Economics Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

The simple idea behind Smarter Cities: take better-informed, more forward-looking decisions

July 11, 2012 6 Comments

(Photo by Tanakawho)

I’m sometimes staggered by the sheer breadth of topics that we concern ourselves with in working to make cities Smarter. We encompass technology, social systems, the individual motivation of citizens, financial models, and the really big challenges of demographics and sustainability in our thinking.

I’m also struck by the level of sophistication of some of that debate. This week, I finally read the great paper by Geoffrey West and colleagues on urban scaling laws, “Growth, innovation, scaling and the pace of life in cities“. The paper applies to cities techniques that I recall from my Doctoral studies in the Physics and Engineering of Superconducting Devices for studying the emergent properties of self-organising complex systems. (Translate that to “understanding the outcomes of the interactions between the 100,000s or millions of human beings with free will who inhabit cities” and I hope you can see the similarity).

The paper is a less intimidating read than it might sound, and draws fascinating conclusions about the relationship between the size of city populations; their ability to create wealth through innovation; sustainability; and what many of us experience as the increasing speed of modern life. It’s well worth reading, as are David Roberts’ recent thoughts on the same subject on the Birmingham Science City blog.

However, I like to keep my feet on the ground; and there’s a very simple way of thinking about what’s really important about Smarter Cities.

I’m not thinking of the challenges facing our cities and societies – I’ve touched on those in numerous other blog posts, especially here and here. Rather, I’m concerned with what I think is the straightforward elegance of the proposition that technology offers us to address them.

Technology has developed in recent years at an incredible rate in three ways that are relevant to this discussion. For a long time, IBM has termed them “Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent”.

“Instrumented” refers to our increasingly sophisticated ability to connect Information Technology systems with the physical world; whether that’s through sensors that measure the performance of environmental infrastructures; through integrating technology more closely with our own bodies; or through controlling the physical environment via technologies such as actuators and 3D printing.

“Interconnected” refers to the continued growth in the bandwidth and coverage of communication infrastructures, particularly the internet. Whilst very, very significant challenges remain – such as the lack of access to broadband connectivity of large swathes of the population, or the lack of cheap, low-power connectivity at ground level where the components of environmental infrastructures are located – in general, communication and connectivity have improved out of all recognition in recent years.

(IBM’s Watson computer challenges human opponents in the US TV quiz show Jeopardy)

“Intelligent” refers to our capability to make sense of the ever increasing volume of data made available by instrumented, interconnected systems. Computers can now process data to the extent that they can compete successfully against human beings in general knowledge TV game shows; predict the occurrence of crime; and help healthcare professionals make accurate diagnoses based on research literature they’ve never read. Throughout my life I’ve read a lot of science fiction that has predicted a lot of amazing things; but none of it foresaw anything as impressive as these achievements.

I can sum up all of this in a single sentance that encapsulates the value technology brings to Smarter Cities:

By making more complete and accurate information available to decision makers, we can enable them to take better-informed, more forward-looking decisions.

Simple common sense tells us that if we implemented that idea across city systems, we would improve any number of social, environmental and financial outcomes. Real examples of enacting that principle already exist in such diverse areas as preventative social care in Medway and enabling commuters to take better travel choices in California.

(The city operations centre in Rio de Janeiro provides the city’s management team with incredibly rich information on which to base decisions.)

A really exciting possibility for the future lies in the ability of local currencies and trading systems to enable consumers and citizens to take such choices more frequently throughout their everyday lives. Such systems can incorporate regional social and environmental impact in the apparent cost of goods and services. Whilst today that ability is limited to goods and services created within the scope of the trading system, in future the Open Data movement will increasingly make the social and environmental footprint of all goods and services transparent such that local trading schemes can incorporate them. For my money, that’s a truly exciting prospect for the future.

The challenge that prevents us from enacting this principle more frequently is implicit in my description of it. Providing more complete and accurate information has an upfront cost; but the financial returns that follow from “more forward-looking” decisions by definition are realised after some period of time. Worse; the organisational and budgetary structure of cities imply that the organisations responsible for those upfront costs are rarely the ones that are able to realise the consequent financial benefits.

In the last couple of points, my focus shifted from “social, environmental and financial” outcomes to “financial benefits”. The former might be the ultimate objectives of cities considering Smarter City initiatives; but they will only win investment funding where they can demonstrate short term financial returns for investors.

So in arguing that there’s a simple way to describe the core idea that underpins Smarter Cities, I’m not arguing that it’s a simple matter to secure the funding to implement it. However, securing such funding from decision makers and investors who are short of time and who are not from a technical background could certainly be made easier by communicating to them a simple idea that’s rooted in common sense.

And that’s exactly how I think we can and should describe Smarter Cities; so I’ll do it again for completeness: use more complete and accurate information to take better-informed, more forward-looking decisions.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Filed under Smarter Cities Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Could the future of money be city currencies?

July 5, 2012 19 Comments

(Photo of a halfpenny minted by Matthew Boulton in Birmingham; from Smabs Sputzer)

It’s just possible that this week marks a tipping point in the events that have engulfed the UK banking industry since the economic crisis that began in 2008.

Around that time, I questioned whether there was a need to think differently about how we measure the exchange of value, and cited a special edition of the New Scientist magazine as supporting evidence. My last couple of blog posts have raised similar questions supported first by a publication from the UK Royal Society, then by a speech by Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.

This week the sources calling for change became much harder to ignore, because – in the context of UK banking – they came much closer to home.

An editorial of the London Financial Times stated that the evidence of a culture of corruption in banking was now so clear that there was no alternative but to properly separate investment banks who take speculative risks to generate profit from retail banks who look after our personal financial livelihoods and nurture the growth of small businesses (read the article here, it requires free registration).

Simon Walker, the Head of the UK’s Institute of Directors, made a blunt call for a clear-out of senior figures in the industry, as reported by the Guardian newspaper; and Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, was similarly uncompromising, eventually leading to the resignation of Barclays’ CEO, Bob Diamond.

These people and organisations are at the heart of the UK’s business and financial community; Barclay’s CEO could not ignore them. Their combined weight might just mark an overall tipping point and lead to serious reform of the industry.

But why should I be concerned with this in a blog that focuses on the exploitation of emerging technology in city ecosystems?

To answer that, I need to look back to the 1780’s and the birth of the Industrial Revolution. At the time, the UK’s Royal Mint was using hand-powered presses to make coins; and they were struggling badly to keep pace with the demand for coinage caused by a growing economy. The country was experiencing a “coin famine”.

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

Enter Matthew Boulton and James Watt. James Watt invented the world’s most efficient steam engine; and Boulton commercialised it to power the Industrial Revolution. In particular, Boulton realised that by combining steam power with intricate machinery, it was possible to mass-manufacture sophisticated, designed objects such as enamelled badges, engraved brooches and complex metal fastenings. This innovation marked the fist appearance of mid-market “designed goods” in the space between functional commodities and one-off pieces of art. Some of the original machines that produced these goods can still be seen in Birmingham’s Science Museum and they make Heath Robinson’s imaginary contraptions look like penny toys.

Boulton realised that using such machines, he could literally print money, and produce coins faster and at much lower cost than the Royal Mint. He never formally won the right to do that from the national Government, but he did print coinage and “trade tokens” for employers in cities all over the country who quite simply needed something to pay their workers with. In many of those cities, Boulton’s coins replaced the national currency for a considerable time until the Royal Mint transformed its operations and provided sufficient national coinage again. Some of this history can be found on wikipedia, but for the full story Jenny Uglow’s wonderful book “The Lunar Men” can’t be beaten.

If the steam engine was the disruptive technology of the Industrial Revolution, I’m increasingly convinced that the digital marketplace platform is the equivalent for city systems today.

(Photo of the Brixton Pound by Matt Brown)

Marketplaces need currencies, of course; and sure enough, new currencies are starting to emerge. The Brixton Pound was set up by a social enterprise in 2009; and the scheme was adopted in Bristol this year. Startups such as Workstars are developing innovative new models for hyperlocal reward schemes involving employers and retailers that are an uncanny modern echo of Boulton’s 18th century trade tokens. And entrepreneurs in Birmingham have launched the local smartphone payment app “Droplet”.

The interesting thing about these schemes is that they have a more localised sense of value than the global monetary system; and they can reinforce the local economic synergies that are the key to sustainable growth in cities and regions.

In this context, it’s interesting to note the remarks of Romeo Pascual, Los Angeles Deputy Mayor of the Environment, at the Base Cities London conference recently. Deputy Mayor Pascual had just returned from the Rio+C40 Cities meeting. In contrast to what many believe to be the relatively weak agreement signed by national leaders at the Rio+20 meeting, he said that he and his colleagues had been united in their resolve to take strong action to lead cities towards sustainable growth.

Technology can now offer cities very interesting possibilities for creating local systems of exchange, whether we call them local currencies, reward schemes or virtual money. There’s no reason why they should behave in the same way as the currencies we know well today; and every reason to be optimistic that new types of organisation such as social enterprises will find ways to use them to create social and environmental, as well as financial, value.

Of course these innovations are on a relatively small scale for now. But they are emerging at the same time that city leaders are determined to make changes; and at a time that – in the UK at least – traditional systems of banking are under serious scrutiny. The future of money could hold some very interesting – and important – surprises for us.

Filed under Economics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Platforms for Smarter City Market-Making

June 20, 2012 20 Comments

Local delicacies for sale in Phnom Penh’s central market

There’s been a distinct change recently in how we describe what a “Smarter City” is. Whereas in the past we’ve focused on the capabilities of technology to make city systems more intelligent, we’re now looking to marketplace economics to describe the defining characteristics of Smarter City behaviour.

The link between the two views is the ability of emerging technology platforms to enable the formation of new marketplaces which make possible new exchanges of resources, information and value. Historically, growth in Internet coverage and bandwidth led to the disintermediation of value chains in industries such as retail, publishing and music. Soon we will see technologies that connect information with the physical world in more intimate ways cause disruptions in industries such as food supply, manufacturing and healthcare.

There are two reasons we’ve switched focus from a technology to an economic perspective of Smarter Cities. The first is that these new marketplaces are the way to make both public service delivery and economic growth within cities sustainable. The second is that it’s only by examining the money flows within them that we can identify the revenue streams that will fund the construction and operation of their supporting technology platforms.

The importance of driving sustainable, equitably distributed recovery to economic growth from the current financial crisis was championed by Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, in her speech ahead of the Rio +20 Summit. She emphasised the role of stability in enabling such a recovery. Instability is change, and managing change consumes resources. So stable systems – or stable cities – consume less resources than unstable ones. And they’re much more comfortable places to live.

(Photo of a Portuguese call centre by Vitor Lima)

This concept explains a shift in the economic strategy of some cities and nations. In recent decades cities have used Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) tools such as tax breaks to incent existing businesses to relocate to their economies. When cities such as Sunderland and Birmingham lost 10%-25% of their jobs in less than two decades in the 1980’s and 1990’s, FDI provided the emergency fix that brought in new jobs in call centres, financial services and manufacturing.

But businesses that find it possible and cost-effective to relocate for these reasons can and do relocate again when more attractive incentives are offered elsewhere. So they tend to integrate relatively shallowly in local economies – retaining their existing globalised supply chains, for example. When they move on, they cause expensive, socially damaging instabilities in the cities they leave behind.

(Photo of the Clock Tower in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter by Roland Turner)

The new focus is on sustainable, organic economic growth driven by SMEs in locally re-inforcing clusters. By building clusters of companies providing related products and services with strong input/output linkages, cities can create economies that are more deeply rooted in their locality. Examples include the cluster of wireless technology companies in Cambridge with strong ties to the local university; or Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, an incredibly dense cluster of designers, manufacturers and retailers who work with Birmingham City University’s School of Jewellery and Horology and their Jewellery Innovation Centre. Many cities I work with are focussing their economic development resources on clusters in the specific industry sectors where they can demonstrate unique strength.

In order to succeed, such clusters need access to transactional marketplaces for trading with each other; and for winning business in local, national and international markets. The disruptive, disintermediating capabilities of Smarter City technologies could help such marketplaces to work more quickly, at lower cost; to extend the market reach of their members; to find new innovations through discovering synergies across traditional industry sectors; or to support the formation of innovative business models that recognise and capitalise social and environmental value. These marketplaces are also exactly what’s needed to support the transformation to open public services.

(Photo of cattle market in Kashgar, China by By Ben Paarmann)


Marketplaces need infrastructure. In traditional terms, that infrastructure might have consisted – in the case of my local cattle market in Kidderminster say – of a physical building; a hinterland connected by transport routes; a governing authority; a system of payments; and a means of determining the quality and value of goods and services to be exchanged. Smarter City markets are no different. They may be based on technology platforms rather than in buildings; but they need governance, identity and reputation management, payment systems and other supporting services. The implementation and operation of those infrastructure capabilities has a significant cost.

This is where large and small organisations need to partner to deliver meaningful innovation in Smarter Cities. The resources of larger organisations – whether they are national governments, local councils, transport providers, employers or technology vendors – are required to underwrite infrastructure investments on the basis of future financial returns in the form of commercial revenues or tax receipts. But innovations in the delivery of value to local communities are likely to be created by small, agile organisations deeply embedded in those communities. An example where this is already happening is in Dublin, where entrepreneurial organisations are using the city’s open data portal to develop new business models that are winning venture capital backing.

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


In order to replicate at scale what’s happening in Dublin and Sunderland, we need to define the open standards through which agile “Apps” developed by local innovators can access the capabilities of new marketplace infrastructures. Those standards need to be associated with financial models that balance affordability for citizens, communities and entrepreneurial businesses with the cost of operating resilient infrastructures.

If we can get that balance right, then stakeholders across city systems everywhere could work more effectively together to deliver Smarter City solutions that really address the big survival challenges facing us: reliable systems that everyone can use across the rich diversity of our cities, communities and citizens.

Filed under Economics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Will we reach our food future through evolution or catastrophe?

June 13, 2012 14 Comments

(Photo of Oregon Chai Tea and a vitamin pill by Sam Reckweg)

The food that we eat in 2050 will be dramatically different to what’s on our plates today; and it will reach our tables through an unrecognisable supply chain. We have some big choices to take – or more accurately a lot of small ones – in determining what that food future will look like; and whether we reach it through a deliberately chosen process of change, or by allowing a catastrophe to overtake us.

If that 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 effects of last year’s grain shortage.

The economic and social systems under pressure today are connected globally, and connected to food supply; and whilst the current crises were precipitated by short term circumstances, their severity is determined by longer term forces that are here to stay.

Three such forces are at work. The first and fundamental force is the expected growth in the world’s population towards 10 billion in 2070. Second is our expectation that we can continue to enjoy the resource-intensive lifestyles of today’s developed economies, and specifically to continue to eat a lot of cheap meat. This expectation will become unsustainable as growth in developing economies rightly corrects inbalances in the distribution of wealth and provides a better quality of life globally. Finally as global economic growth increases the demand for energy, and as fossil fuels become scarcer and harder to extract, the cost of the energy required to grow and transport food will increase (this article in The Economist magazine describes the complex issues around future energy availability).

Ahead of the the Rio+20 Sustainable Development Summit, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, has described in a stark but very grounded way the threats to life, wellbeing and the economy that these forces are already creating, particularly in some of the poorest regions on the planet. Her speech is a call to action to world leaders to drive a sustainable and fairly distributed economic recovery from today’s situation. The evidence and expert testimony asserting the critical importance of choosing to do that now is growing – see for example these publications from the Royal Society in the UK and the prestigious scientific journal, Nature.

Part of that journey has to be a more sustainable approach to food production, distribution and consumption. Some amazing new technology-enabled businesses are making it easier to buy locally produced, seasonal food, for instance. Sustaination and Big Barn connect local food producers and consumers directly, using social media to disintermediate the traditional supply chain; whilst Growing Birmingham and Landshare encourage the use of more urban land and private gardens to grow food.

However, cities – the environments in which more than 90% of the UK’s population, and more than 50% of the world’s population live – will never feed themselves through these means alone. One hectare of highly fertile, intensively farmed land can feed 10 people. Birmingham, my home city, has an area of 60,000 hectares of relatively infertile land, most of which is not available for farming at all; and a population of around 1 million. Those numbers don’t add up to food self-sufficiency. Unless we accept food sources from “Extreme Urbanism” such as vertical farming or lab-grown artificial meat, cities will always import the majority of their food.

(An example of local food processing: my own homemade chorizo.)

Many of the good reasons to choose local food, though, are really to do with reducing the industrialisation of food production. The simple act of transporting food from one place to another isn’t necessarily bad, within reason; and only constitutes 4% of its environmental footprint, even in today’s supply chain. The other 96% is simply the energy required to grow and process food; and that’s what we need to reduce.

One of our main opportunities to do that is to choose to eat different food. As Wendy Coch at Business Insider says, “It typically takes a long time and lots of grain to raise cattle. That’s why red meat has 18 times the carbon footprint as an equal amount of pasta.”

The other opportunity is to reduce food wastage. We produce more food, and catch more fish, than we need; and we throw too much of it away because it doesn’t meet quota restrictions, or because of inefficiencies in distribution. Those are big political challenges that world governments are wrestling with in the lead-up to the Rio summit. Whilst many are pessimistic that they will find and agree solutions, there was good news on this front from the European Union today with an agreement to ban fishing ships from throwing away their excess catch.

(Photo by Nick Saltmarsh)

But we as consumers are responsible for food waste too. Just one UK supplier of readymade sandwiches throws away 13,000 slices of bread every day because we don’t want to eat sandwiches made with crusts. We plan our meals and food-buying so poorly that much of the food we buy goes rotten before we use it. And few of us are familiar with the recipes and food processing techniques that make use of leftover food, or the tougher cuts of meat such as chuck steak and pork shoulder – homemade jams, soups, stews, sausages and pâtés, for example.

So at one level, the solution to our food challenge is simple. As a delegate at the New Optimists Food Forum (part of the EU Smart Agri Food programme) told me this week, if we choose to eat meat 2-3 times a week rather than 2-3 times a day, we would go a long way towards a sustainable food system. Choosing to be more organised in our domestic lives and learning some new kitchen skills would help too.

Of course the real challenge is persuading billions of human beings to make such new choices about buying, preparing and eating food every day. So whilst the ability of technology to continue to disintermediate new industries such as food is a marvellous adventure for our times; perhaps its real role in this context is much simpler: to spread awareness of the impact of our food consumption; to popularise meat-free dishes as a choice for all of us, not just for vegetarians; and to re-educate us about traditional techniques and recipes for using leftover food.

In summary: to promote and enable informed, responsible decisions about food. I hope I’ve done just a little bit of that today.

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

Smarter Regional Priorities in Mature European Economies

November 25, 2011 2 Comments

(Photo of Sunderland Civic Centre at night by Paul Boxley)

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks thinking about “Smarter Regions”. Smarter Regions are similar to the “Smarter Cities” concept shared by IBM and many other organisations; but they’re different in one obvious way and one not-so-obvious way – particularly in mature economies such as those of Western Europe.

A lot of the focus in Smarter Cities is concerned with instrumenting and interconnecting physical systems – such as utilities, transport and buildings – with the intelligence represented by IT systems, especially operational control and decision support tools. Solutions based on those ideas can deliver tremendous benefits, such as the congestion charging system that IBM and our partners have implemented for Stockholm.

However, in European cities, the business cases for investing in such systems are complicated, to put it mildly. Transportation, utilities and buildings are often operated by private sector organisations subject to a plethora of contractual and franchise obligations and oversight regimes; whereas the benefits of such systems – for example, reduced environental impact of city systems, and reducing the barriers to economic and productivity growth – often relate to medium to long term goals of local government organisations. Those cities – such as Stockholm and London – that have made such investments tend to be driven by what could be called “survival” concerns. They have identified a clear and pressing threat to their city systems and economies – in these cases, severe traffic congestion limiting economic growth – that must be addressed.

Smarter Regions are similar to Smarter Cities in that they seek to exploit advances in our ability to integrate and analyse information from a rich variety of systems and sources. But they are different in two ways:

  • Firstly, and obviously, whilst all cities are regions, not all regions are cities. Regions are broader, more diverse economic, geographical, political and social systems.
  • Secondly, in mature economies at least, regional priorities are concerned with a different set of systems. Their priorities are often economic growth; supporting ageing populations; and reducing the cost of their administrative, financial and public service operations whilst improving the outcomes that they deliver

Examples of initiatives addressing these priorities include IBM’s work in Bolzano, Italy, providing remote home monitoring and healthcare services in sheltered accommodation; our work with Medway Youth Trust in the UK, helping them to transform youth services to a predictive, preventative model; our “Smarter Cities Challenge” project in the city of Glasgow investigating fuel poverty; the Municipal Services Cloud that IBM Research developed for the State of New York to help small councils across the State reduce costs and implement “joined-up working”; and, of course, the Cloud Computing platform that IBM and Sunderland City Council announced last week, that will be used to deliver services and capabilities to stimulate growth and innovation in the City’s economy and public services, and that I blogged about recently.

In recent years, we’ve seen terrific pressure on regional administrations in the UK driven by the overall cuts in public sector budgets. Financial pressures in the Eurozone  area create similar drivers on the continent; and in the US the rising costs to public organisations of healthcare and pension liabilities to past and current employees created by ageing populations cause huge cost pressure too.

Despite all this, global competition for private sector investment and job creation are causing regions to seek ways to invest in addressing these challenges. Slowly but surely we are learning how to build business cases to justify those investments – often based on technologies that can both reduce internal operational costs and enable improved external outcomes (see this set of examples from IBM’s customers, for example).

There’s no panacea or silver bullet here; every region is different in its economic, social, political, financial, geographic and environmental characteristics (not to mention others that I’ve forgotten). All of those have to be taken into account when constructing business cases for Smarter Regional solutions.

But I have a sense that we’ve passed a tipping point in the build-up of momentum in this area; and I think we’re going to see a lot more exciting projects and initiatives announced by Cities and Regions in Europe over the next year.

It’s a great time to be a technologist working in local government.

Filed under Economics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Newer posts →