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

October 11, 2015 6 Comments

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(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.

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6 inconvenient truths about Smart Cities

February 15, 2015 26 Comments

(When cities forget about people: La Defense, Paris, photographed by Phil Beard)

(I recently took the difficult decision to resign from IBM after nearly 20 years to become IT Director for Smart Data and Technology for Amey, one of the largest infrastructure and services companies in the UK, and a subsidiary of the Ferrovial Group. It’s a really exciting opportunity for me to build a team to create new Smart City services and infrastructures. If you’d like to work in the Smart Cities field, please have a look at the roles I’m hiring for. I’ll be continuing to write the Urban Technologist, and this seemed a good point to share my view of the current state of the Smart Cities movement.)

The last year has shown a huge acceleration of interest and action in the Smart Cities market – in the UK, and around the world. What has long been a topic of interest to technology companies, academics, urban designers and local authorities was covered extensively by mainstream media organisation such as the BBC, the Independent newspaper, New Statesman magazine and marketing magazine The Drum.

But what progress has been made implementing Smart Cities ideas?

In the UK, many local authorities have implemented Open Data portals, usually using Open Source platforms such as CKAN and investing a few £10,000s of resources. These are important first steps for building the ecosystems to share and build new service models using data. Some cities, notably Glasgow and Milton Keynes, have been successful deploying more sophisticated schemes supported by research and innovation grants – though as I pointed out last year, exciting as these initiatives are, research and innovation funds will not scale to support every city in the country.

Further afield, local authorities in Europe, the United States and Asia have constructed more substantial, multi-million Euro / Dollar business cases to invest their own funds in platforms that combine static open data with realtime data from sensors and infrastructure, and which use social media and smartphones to improve engagement between citizens, communities, businesses and both public- and private-sector service providers. The Center for Data Innovation recently wrote a nice summary of two reports explaining the financing vehicles that these cities are using.

This has not happened in the UK yet to the same extent. The highly centralised nature of public sector spending means that cities here have not yet been able to construct such ambitious business cases – Centre for Cities’ report “Outlook for Cities 2014” highlighted this as a general barrier to the UK’s cities carrying out initiatives to improve themselves, and reported that UK cities have autonomy over only about 17% of their funding as compared to an average of 55% across countries represented by the OECD.

As more city deals are signed and the city devolution agenda progresses, this will start to change – but I think that will still take a long time to happen.

(The London Underground is just one example of a transport operator using technology to help it operate more efficiently, safely and effectively)

Where similar technology platforms and channels of engagement are nevertheless starting to appear in the UK is through business cases based on efficiencies and increased customer satisfaction for private sector organisations that offer services such as transportation and asset management to cities, citizens and local authorities.

This approach means there’s even more of a need for collaboration between stakeholders in local ecosystems in order to establish and express common objectives – such as resilience, economic growth and social mobility – which can then guide the outcomes of those smart services through policy tools such as procurement practises and planning frameworks. Recent recommendations from the British Standards Institute on the adaptation of city planning policy to enable the Smart City agenda have highlighted the need for such collaboration.

As a consequence of this increased activity, more and more people and organisations of every type are becoming interested in Smart Cities – from oil companies to car manufacturers to politicians. This broadening of interest led to some extraordinary personal experiences for me last year, which included discussing Smart Cities with ex-US Vice President Al Gore (whose investment company Generation IM explores opportunities to invest in assets, technologies and developments that promote sustainability) and very briefly with the UK’s Princess Anne, a supporter of a leadership training scheme that will focus on Smart Cities this year.

But to be honest, I still don’t think we have really understood what a “Smart City” is; why it’s one of the most important concepts of our time; or how we can turn the concept into reality broadly and at scale.

I’ll explore six “inconvenient truths” in this article to describe why I think that’s the case; and what we can do about it:

  1. The “Smart City” isn’t a technology concept; it’s the political challenge of adapting one of the most powerful economic and social forces of our time to the needs of the places where most of us live and work.
  2. Cities won’t get smart if their leaders aren’t involved.
  3. We can’t leave Smart Cities to the market, we need the courage to shape the market.
  4. Smart cities aren’t top down or bottom up. They’re both.
  5. We need to tell honest stories.
  6. No-one will do this for us – we have to act for ourselves.

1. The “Smart City” isn’t a technology concept; it’s the political challenge of adapting one of the most powerful economic and social forces of our time to the needs of the places where most of us live and work

(Photograph of Macau in the evening by Michael Jenkin illustrating some the great complexity of cities: economic growth, social inequality and pollution)

One topic that’s endlessly revisited as more and more people encounter and consider the idea of a Smart City is just how we define that idea. The best definition I thought I had developed is this, updated slightly from the article “7 Steps to a Smarter City“:

A Smart City systematically creates and encourages innovations in city systems that are enabled by technology; that change the relationships between the creation of economic and social value and the consumption of resources; and that contribute to achieving a vision and clear objectives that are supported by a broad and active collaboration amongst city stakeholders.

But such definitions are contentious. Most obviously there’s the basic issue of whether “smart” implies a central role for digital technology – every technology company takes this approach, of course – or whether it’s simply about being more creative in the way that we manipulate the resources around us to achieve the outcomes we desire, whether that involves digital technology or not.

More broadly, a “city” is such a terrifically broad, complex and multi-disciplinary entity – and one whose behaviour is the aggregate of the millions of individual behaviours of its inhabitants, both enabled and constrained by the environment they experience – that it’s pretty much impossible to create any concise definition without missing out something important.

And of course those who live or work in towns and rural areas raise the challenge that limiting the discussion to “cities” omits important stakeholders from discussions about our future – as do those concerned with the national infrastructures that are not located wholly in cities, but without which neither cities nor any other habitations could survive as they do today.

I don’t think we’ll ever achieve a formal, functional definition of a “Smart City” that everyone will agree to. Much as the popularity of the term “Web 2.0” between (roughly) 2003 and 2010 marked the period in time when interest in the internet re-emerged following the “dot com crash“, rather than defining a specific architecture or group of technologies, I think our interest in “Smart Cities” is best understood as the consequence of a period in history in which a large number of people became aware of – and convinced by – a set of inter-related trends:

In this context, it’s less useful to attempt to precisely define the concept of a smart city, and more important to encourage and enable each of us – every community, city, government and organisation – to develop our own understanding of the changes needed to overcome the challenges and take the opportunities before us, and of the rapidly evolving role of technology in doing so.

Why is it so important that we do that?

In their report “Cities Outlook 1901“, Centre for Cities explored the previous century of urban development in the UK, examining why at various times some cities thrived and some did not. They concluded that the single most important influence on the success of cities was their ability to provide their citizens with the right skills and opportunities to find employment, as the skills required in the economy changed as technology evolved.

The challenges faced by cities and their residents in this century will be unlike any we have faced before; and technology is changing more quickly, and becoming more powerful, than it ever has before. Creating “Smart Cities” involves taking the right political, economic, social and engineering approaches to meeting those challenges.

Cities that do so will be successful. Cities that don’t, won’t be. That is the digital divide of the 21st Century, and for everyone’s sake, I hope we are all on the right side of it.

2. Cities won’t get smart if their leaders aren’t involved

(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, and arising from Sunderland’s Smart City strategy)

Let me tell a short tale of two cities and their Smart transformations.

For a long time I’ve written occasional articles on this blog about Sunderland, a city whose leaders, people and social entrepreneurs have inspired me. Sunderland is one of the very few cities in the UK who have spent significant sums of their own money on Smart City projects and supporting technologies, justified by well-constructed business cases. They have publicised investments of well over £10 million, most recently including their visionary “City Intelligence Hub” initiative.

The seeds of the Intelligence Hub idea were apparent when I first worked with the Council, as can be seen from an article written at the time by the Council’s Chief Executive, Dave Smith, for the Guardian’s Local Government Network Blog, explaining why data and Open Data are crucial to the future of effective, transparent public services.

It is no coincidence at all that one of the cities that has been boldest in investing in technology to support its economic, social and environmental objectives has a Chief Executive who shows belief, leadership and engagement in the ideas of Smart Cities.

Milton Keynes have approached their Smart City agenda in a different way. Rather than making significant investments themselves to procure solutions, they have succeeded in attracting enormous investments from technology companies, universities and innovation bodies to develop and test new solutions in the city.

It is similarly no coincidence that – like Bristol, London and Glasgow, to name just three more – Milton Keynes Council have senior leadership figures – initially the then Chief Executive, Dave Hill, followed by Director of Strategy, Geoff Snelson – who regularly attend Smart Cities conferences and government bodies, and who actively convene Smart Cities collaborations. Their very visible presence demonstrates their belief in the importance of Smart City approaches to those organisations seeking to invest in developing them.

A strategy to transform the operations of a local authority (or any other organisation) using technology, and to re-invest the savings achieved by doing so into new services and initiatives that create economic growth, social mobility and resilience is not going to succeed without direct Executive leadership. Similarly, technology vendors, service providers and research funding bodies are most attracted to invest in developing new ideas and capabilities in cities whose most senior leaders are directly seeking them – they all need the outcomes of their investment to achieve real change, and it’s only through the leaders that such change will happen.

For the most part, where this level of leadership is not engaged I have not seen cities create business cases and issue procurements for Smart City solutions, and I have not seen them be successful winning research and innovation investments.

Finally, let’s be really clear about what most of those city leaders need to do: they need to follow Sunderland’s lead, not Milton Keynes’s.

The research and innovation funding from the EU and the UK that Milton Keynes has attracted will only fund  projects that explore for the first time the capabilities of new, technology-enabled approaches to urban challenges. Those funding sources will not support the widespread deployment of successful approaches in cities around the UK and around the world.

The vast majority of cities will only benefit from Smart Cities initiatives by financing them through robust business cases based on a combination of financial efficiency and social, environmental or economic value – as Sunderland and some cities outside the UK are already doing.

Cities won’t get smart if their leaders aren’t involved in actively driving their institutions to adopt new business cases and operating models. Those that don’t risk leaving the fate of their cities not to chance; but to “the market”.

3. We can’t leave Smart Cities to the market, we need the courage to shape the market

(Photograph by Martin Deutsche of plans to redevelop Queen Elizabeth Park, site of the 2012 London Olympics. The London Legacy Development’s intention, in support of the Smart London Plan, is “for the Park to become one of the world’s leading digital environments, providing a unique opportunity to showcase how digital technology enhances urban living. The aim is to use the Park as a testing ground for the use of new digital technology in transport systems and energy services.”)

As I wrote in my last article on this blog, as the price of digital technologies such as smartphones, sensors, analytics, open source software and cloud platforms reduces rapidly, market dynamics will drive their aggressive adoption to make construction, infrastructure and city services more efficient, and hence make their providers more competitive.

But those market dynamics do not guarantee that we will get everything we want for the future of our cities: efficiency and resilience are not the same as health, happiness and opportunity for every citizen.

If we are to achieve those objectives, then we need the right policy environment – at national and local level – to augment the business case for efficient, resilient “smart city” infrastructures to ensure that they are deployed in a way that makes them open to access and adaptation by ordinary people, businesses and communities; and so that they create the conditions and environment in which vibrant, fair digital cities grow from the successful innovations of their citizens, communities and businesses in the information economy.

In far too many discussions of Smart Cities I hear the argument that we can’t invest in these ideas because we lack the “normalised evidence base” that proves their benefits. I think that’s the wrong view. There are more than enough qualitative examples and stories that demonstrate that these ideas have real value and can make lives better. If we insist on moving no further until there’s a deeper, broader corpus of quantified evidence, then there’ll be no projects to deliver the evidence – a chicken and egg problem.

Writing in “The Plundered Planet”, the economist Paul Collier asserts that any proposed infrastructure of reasonable novelty and significant scale is effectively so unique – especially when considered in its geographic, political, social and economic context – that an accurate cost/benefit case simply cannot be constructed in advance based on comparable prior examples, because those examples don’t – and never will – exist.

Instead we need policy legislation to recognise the importance of digital infrastructure for cities so that it becomes a “given” in any public service or infrastructure business case, not something that has to be individually justified.

This is not a new idea. For example, the Economist magazine wrote recently about the efforts involved in distributing the benefits of the industrial revolution to society at large rather than solely to business owners and the professional classes.

More specifically to cities, in her seminal 1961 work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“, Jane Jacobs wrote that:

“Private investment shapes cities, but social ideas (and laws) shape private investment. First comes the image of what we want, then the machinery is adapted to turn out that image. The financial machinery has been adjusted to create anti-city images because, and only because, we as a society thought this would be good for us. If and when we think that lively, diversified city, capable of continual, close- grained improvement and change, is desirable, then we will adjust the financial machinery to get that.”

The “anti-city images” Jacobs was referring to were the vast urban highways built over the last half century to enable the levels of road traffic thought to be vital to economic growth. Since Jacobs’ time, a growing chorus of urbanists from Bogota’s ex-Mayor Enrique Penalosa to town planner Jeff Speck, architect Jan Gehl and London’s current Mayor Boris Johnson has criticised those infrastructures for the great harm they cause to human life – they create noise, pollution, a physical barrier to walking through our cities, and too often they injure or kill us.

Just as Jacobs reminded us to focus on the nature of individual human life in order to understand how cities should be built, Dan Hill of the Future Cities Catapult wrote as long ago as 2008 on the need to understand similar subtleties in the application of digital technology to cities.

Fifty years after she wrote, we should follow Dan’s example and take Jane Jacobs’ advice.

4. Smart cities aren’t top down or bottom up. They’re both.

(The SMS for Life project uses the cheap and widely used SMS infrastructure – very much the product of “top-down” investment – to create a dynamic, collaborative supply chain for medicines between pharmacies in Africa – a “bottom-up” innovation. Photo by Novartis AG)

In case it wasn’t really clear last time I wrote about it (or the time before that), I am utterly fed up with the unconstructive argument about whether cities are best served by “top down” or “bottom up” thinking.

It’s perfectly obvious that we need both: the “bottom up” creativity through which everyone seeks to create a better life for themselves, their family, their business and their community from the resources available to them; and the top-down policies and planning that – when they work best – seek to distribute resources fairly so that everyone has the opportunity to innovate successfully.

It’s only by creating harmony between these two approaches that we will shape the market to create the cities we want and need.

Over the last few years I’ve been inspired by extraordinary thinkers from many disciplines who have tackled the need for this balance. Some of them are creating new ideas now; others created amazing ideas years or decades ago that are nevertheless imperative today. All of them are worth reading and learning from:

  • The economist E F Schumacher, who identified that investment in the distribution and accessibility of “appropriate technologies” was the best way to stimulate and support development in a way that gave rise to the broadest possible opportunities for people to be successful.
  • Andrew Zolli, head of the philanthropic PopTech foundation, who describes the inspiring innovators who synthesise top-down and bottom-up approaches to achieve phenomenal societal changes as “translational leaders” – people with the ability to engage with both small-scale, informal innovation in communities and large-scale, formal institutions with resources.
  • Jan Gehl who inspired the “human scale cities” movement by relating the scale of city structures –  from pavements to housing blocks to skyscrapers – to the human senses, and the nature of our lives and movement.
  • And, of course, Jane Jacobs, whose book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” was the first written in the context of modern society and cities to point out that cities, however vast their physical size and population, can only ever be understood by considering the banal minutiae of the daily lives of ordinary people like you and I – why we walk along this street or that; how well we know our neighbours; how far it is to walk to the nearest school, shop or park; and whether we and our families feel happy and safe.

5. We need to tell honest stories

(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.)

Any “smart city” initiative that successfully uses digital technology to create a financially sustainable social, economic or environmental improvement, in a particular physical place and on behalf of a particular community, must draw together skills from a wide variety of disciplines such as architecture, economics, social science, psychology and technology. Experts from these disciplines use a vast and confusing array of language and terminology; and all of us are frequently guilty of focussing on the concerns of our discipline, rather than communicating the benefits of our work in plain language.

The leaders of city institutions and businesses, who we are asking to take the courageous and forward-looking decisions to invest in our ideas, are understandably not familiar with this torrent of technical terminology, which can easily appear to be (and too often is) jargon; and new ideas that appear to be presented in jargon are unlikely to be trusted.

Simon Giles of Accenture was quoted in an article on UBM’s Future Cities site as saying that the Smart Cities industry has not done a good enough job of selling the benefits of its ideas to a wide audience. Simon is a very smart guy, and I think that’s a challenge we need to face up to, and start to tell better stories about the differences Smart Cities will make to everyday lives.

In the Community Lover’s Guide to Birmingham, for example, Nick Booth describes the way his volunteer-led social media surgeries helped the Central Birmingham Neighbourhood Forum, Brandwood End Cemetery and Jubilee Debt Campaign to benefit from technology.

Another Birmingham initiative, the Northfield Ecocentre, crowdfunded £10,000 to support their “Urban Harvest” project. The funds helped the Ecocentre pick unwanted fruit from trees in domestic gardens in Birmingham and distribute it between volunteers, children’s centres, food bank customers and organisations promoting healthy eating; and to make some of it into jams, pickles and chutneys to raise money so that in future years the initiative can become self-sustaining.

In the village of Chale on the Isle of Wight, a community not served by the national gas power network and with significant levels of fuel poverty, my IBM colleague Andy Stanford-Clark has helped an initiative not only to deploy solar panels and smart meters to generate energy and measure its use by each household; but to co-design with residents how they will use that technology, so that the whole community feels a sense of ownership and inclusion in the initiative. The project has resulted in a significant drop in rent arrears as residents use the technology to reduce their utility bills, in some cases by up to 50 percent. Less obviously, the sense of shared purpose has extended to the creation of a communal allotment area in the village and a successful campaign to halve bus fares to nearby towns.

There are countless other examples. Play Fitness “gamify” exercise to persuade children to get fit, and work very hard to ensure that their products are accessible to children in communities of any level of wealth. Casserole Club use social media to introduce people who can’t cook for themselves to people who are prepared to volunteer to cook for others. The West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace uses analytics technology to help it’s 10,000 member businesses work together to win more than £4billion in new contracts each year. … and so on.

None of these initiatives are purely to do with technology. But they all use technologies that simply were not available and accessible as recently as a few years ago to achieve outcomes that are important to cities and communities. By understanding how the potential of technology was apparent to the stakeholders in such initiatives, why it was affordable and accessible to them, and how they acquired the skills to exploit it, we can learn how to design Smart Cities in a way that encourages widespread grass-roots, localised innovation.

It’s vital that these stories are honest and grounded in reality. London School of Economics Professor Adam Greenfield rightly criticised technology companies that have overstated (and misunderstood) the potential benefits of Smart Cities ideas by describing “autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits”. No-one trusts such hyperbole, and it undermines our efforts to communicate sensibly the very real difference that sympathetically applied technology can make to real lives, businesses, communities and places.
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6. No-one will do this for us – we have to act for ourselves

Harborne Food School

(The Harborne Food School, started by Shaleen Meelu in 2014, as a community business initiative to promote healthy, sustainable approaches to food)

No single person or organisation can shape the Smart Cities market so that it delivers the cities that we need. Local governments have the ethics of civic duty and care but lack the expertise in financing and business model innovation to convert existing spending schemes into the outcomes they desire. Private sector corporations as institutions are literally amoral and strongly incentivised by the financial markets to maximise profits. Many social enterprises are enormously admirable attempts to fuse these two models, but often lack the resources and ability to scale.

Ultimately, though, all of these organisations are staffed and run by people like you and I; and we can choose to influence their behaviour. Hence my new employer Amey measures itself against a balanced scorecard that measures social, environmental and wellbeing performance in addition to financial profits; and my previous employer IBM has implemented a re-use and recycling system so sophisticated and effective that only 0.3% of the resources and assets that reach the end of their initial useful life are disposed of in landfill or by incineration: the vast majority are re-used, have their components re-manufactured or materials recycled.

Most of us won’t ever be in a position to determine the reporting model or approach to recycling of corporations as large as Amey or IBM. But all of us make choices every day about the products we buy, the organisations we work for, the politicians we vote for, the blog articles we read, share and write and the activities we prioritise our resources on.

Those choices have real effects, and digital technology gives us all the opportunity for our choices to have more impact than ever before. This blog, which costs me nothing to operate other than the time it takes me to write articles, now reaches thousands of readers in over 150 counties. Air BnB took 2 years to accumulate the same number of rentable rooms that it took the Hilton Hotel chain 50 years to build.

It has never been easier to express an opinion widely or create a new way of doing things. That’s exactly what Shaleen Meelu did when she started the Harborne Food School to promote healthier, more sustainable approaches to food, with the support of Birmingham’s Smart City community. It’s an opportunity all of us should seize; and it’s absolutely the best opportunity we have to create better cities and a better world for ourselves.

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Can digital technology help us build better cities? A workshop at the Academy of Urbanism Annual Congress, Bradford, Thursday 16th May

April 22, 2013 11 Comments

(Protesters at Occupy Wallstreet using digital technology to coordinate their demonstration. Photo by David Shankbone)

Over the course of the last two decades, digital technologies such as the Internet, mobile telephone and touchscreen have transformed the way we communicate, work and live; and in so doing have caused industries such as publishing and music to change out of all recognition.

These developments clearly change the way that we behave in cities – the way we travel; and where and when we work, shop and communicate.

And they lead to new demands on the urban environment from residents, visitors, businesses and communities: the availability of mobile and broadband connectivity; open data portals; and transient working environments such as the Hub Westminster collaborative workspace – or simply cafes with wi-fi and power outlets.

Should these technologies change the way we design and build cities, and if so, how? Do technologies offer solutions to difficult problems such as offering more flexible, coordinated transport services? Or are they a distraction on focussing on what really matters – the physical, social and economic needs of people and their communities? And how do they compare to long-standing debates within the more traditional domains of urbanism about how good cities are created, regardless of technology?

(The collaborative working space of Hub Westminster which is constantly refactored to support new uses, exploiting furniture and spatial technology laser-cut from digital designs)
(The collaborative working space of Hub Westminster which is constantly refactored to support new uses, exploiting furniture and spatial technology laser-cut from digital designs)

The Academy of Urbanism, a body of several hundred professionals, researchers and policy-makers involved in the design and operation of cities from perspectives as diverse as town planning, social science and technology is holding a workshop at it’s Annual Congress in Bradford this year to explore these issues.

The workshop will feature opening contributions from speakers from a variety of backgrounds, and with differing opinions on the value and relevance of digital technology to good urbanism. Our intention is to stimulate an informed and frank debate to follow;  from which we hope that useful, practical insights will emerge on whether and how the technology agenda is relevant to cities.

Some of the questions we’d like to consider in the debate are:

  • Do emerging uses of technology in cities have implications for spatial or master-planning – for example, the provision of physical space for cabling, or the specification of policies or standards for information from city infrastructures to be made openly available?
  • What implications do technology trends such as online commerce and virtual working have for requirements for physical space and transport in cities?
  • If cities need the flexibility in their physical infrastructure implied by such approaches as “Smart Urbanism“, then can technology enable that flexibility? And what are the design principles for technology that should be applied in order to do so?
  • If technology professionals and urban designers are applying their skills in the same context domain (city systems) can we use tools common to both professions, such as design patterns, to combine and share our expertise?
  • What are the new investment and management models for funding, delivering and governing “smart” systems? How do they reflect the achievement of long term social, economic and environment objectives? How can the achievements of entrepreneurial and social enterprises be replicated at city-scale?

Our plans are still forming; so I’d value your thoughts on the theme and scope of the workshop; the structure of the debate; questions that will stimulate a constructive and worthwhile discussion … and any speakers on this topic – whether they are proponents or sceptics of technology in cities – who you think would be particularly interesting. (I’ll update this blog soon with our initial speakers once I’ve confirmed them).

And of course, I’d love you to simply attend the conference and the workshop and join the debate! I hope to see some of you there.

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Better stories for Smarter Cities: three trends in urbanism that will reshape our world

January 30, 2013 5 Comments

(Stories of Mumbai: an exploration of Mumbai’s history of urban development, and its prospects for the future, using storytelling and puppetshows, by the BMW Guggenheim Lab)

Towards the end of last year, it became clearer how cities could take practical steps to position themselves to transform to meet the increasing economic, environmental and social challenges facing them; and to seek investment to support those transformations, as I described in “Smart Ideas for Everyday Cities“.

Equally important as those practical approaches to organisation, though, are the conceptual tools that will shape those transformations. Across fields as diverse as psychology, town planning, mathematics, construction, service-design and technology, some striking common themes have emerged that are shaping those tools.

Those themes imply that we will need to take radically different approaches to city systems driven by the astonishing, exciting and sometimes disturbing changes that we’re likely to see taking place increasingly rapidly in our world over the next decade.

To adopt the terminology of Irene Ng, a Researcher in new economic models and service science at the University of Warwick, these changes will create both “needs-led” and “capability-led” drivers to do things differently.

“Needs-led” changes will be driven by the massive growth taking place in the global middle class as economies across the world modernise. The impacts will be varied and widespread, including increasing business competition in a single, integrated economy; increasing competition for resources such as food, water and energy; and increasing fragility in the systems that supply those resources to a population that is ever more concentrated in cities. We are already seeing these effects in our everyday lives: many of us are paying more for our food as a proportion of our income than a few years ago.

At a recent lecture on behalf of the International Federation for Housing and Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning, Sir Peter Hall, Professor of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School of Planning, spoke of the importance of making the growth of cities sustainable through the careful design of the transport systems that support them. In the industrial revolution, as Edward Glaeser described in Triumph of the City, cities grew up around lifts powered by steam engines; Sir Peter described how more recently they have grown outwards into suburbs populated with middle-class car-owners who habitually drive to work, schools, shops, gyms and parks.

This lifestyle simply cannot be sustained – in the developed world or in emerging economies – across such an explosively growing number of people who have the immediate wealth to afford it, but who are not paying the full price of the resources it consumes. According to the exhibition in Siemens’ “Crystal” building, where Sir Peter’s lecture was held, today’s middle class is consuming resources at one-and-a-half times the rate the world creates them; unless something changes, the rate of growth of that lifestyle will hurl us towards a global catastrophe.

So, as the Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) observed in their study of the ongoing evolution of Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, the structure of movement and the economy will have to change.

(Siemens’ Crystal building in London, a show case for sustainable technology in cities, photographed by Martin Deutsch)

Meanwhile, the evolution of technology is creating incredible new opportunities for “capability-led” change.

In the last two decades, we have seen the world revolutionised by information and communication technologies such as the internet and SmartPhones; but this is only the very start of a transformation that is still gathering pace. Whilst so far these technologies have created an explosion in the availability of information, recent advances in touch-screen technology and speech recognition are just starting to demonstrate that the boundary between the information world and physical, biological and neural systems is starting to disappear.

For example, a paralysed woman recently controlled a robotic arm by thought; and prosthetic limbs, a working gun and living biological structures such as muscle fibre and skin are just some of the things that can be 3D printed on demand from raw materials and digital designs.

What changes to our urban systems will these developments – and the ones that follow them – lead to?

Following the decline of industries such as manufacturing, resource-mining and ship-building,  many post-industrial cities in the developed world are rebuilding their economies around sectors with growth potential, such as environmental technology and creative media. They are also working with the education system to provide their citizens with access to the skills those sectors require.

Supplying the skills that today’s economy needs can be a challenge. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt lambasted the British Education system last year for producing insufficient computer programming skills; and a cross-industry report, “Engineering the Future“, laid out the need for increased focus on environmental, manufacturing, technology and engineering skills to support future economic growth in the UK. As the rate of change in science and technology increases, the skills required in a consequently changing economy will also change more rapidly; providing those skills will be an even bigger challenge.

Or will it? How much of a leap forward is required from the technologies I’ve just described, to imagining that by 2030, people will respond to the need for changing skills in the market by downloading expertise Matrix-style to exploit new employment opportunities?

Most predictions of the future turn out to be wrong, and I’m sure that this one will be, in part or in whole. But as an indication of the magnitude of changes we can expect across technology, business, society and our own physical and mental behaviour I expect it will be representative.

Our challenge is to understand how these needs-led and capability-led transformations can collectively create a world that is sustainable; and that is sympathetic to us as human beings and communities. That challenge will be most acute where both needs and capabilities are most concentrated – in cities. And across economics, architecture, technology and human behaviour, three trends in urban thinking have emerged – or, at least, become more prominent – in recent years that provide guiding principles for how we might meet that challenge.

The attraction of opposites, part 1: producer and consumer

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(Photograph of 3D printers by Rob Boudon)

In the Web 2.0 era (roughly 2003-2009), the middle classes of the developed world became connected by “always-on” broadband connections, turning these hundreds of millions of information-consumers into information-producers. That is why in 2007 (and every year since) more new information was created than in all of the previous 5 millenia. Industries such as publishing, music and telecommunications have been utterly transformed as a result.

The disappearance of the boundary between  information, physical and biological systems, and the explosive growth in the population with access to the technologies responsible for that disappearance, will transform every economic and social structure we can imagine through the same producer / consumer revolution.

We can already produce as well as consume transport resources by participating in car-sharing schemes; and energy by exploiting domestic solar power and bio-energy. The falling cost and increasing sophistication of 3D printers are just starting to make it feasible to manufacture some products in the home, particularly in specialist areas such as railway modelling; and platforms such as the Amazon Turk and Slivers of Time can quickly connect producers and consumers in the service industries.

Business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketplaces such as Big Barn and Sustaination provide the same service in local food systems. And the transport industry is evolving to serve these new markets: for instance, Shutl provide a marketplace for home delivery services through a community of independent couriers; and a handful of cities are deploying or planning recycling systems in which individual items of waste are distributed to processing centres through pneumatically powered underground transport networks.

Of course, from the earliest development of farming in human culture, we have all been both producers and consumers in a diversified economy. What’s new is the opportunity for technology to dramatically improve the flexibility, timeliness and efficiency of the value-chains that connect those two roles. Car-sharing not only reduces the amount of fuel used by our journeys; it could reduce the resources consumed by manufacturing vehicles that spend the majority of their lives stationary on drives or in car parks. Markets that more efficiently connect food production, processing and consumption could reduce the thousands of miles that food currently travels between farm and fork, often crossing its own path several times; they could create employment opportunities in small-scale food processing; not to mention reducing the vast quantity of food that is produced but not eaten, and goes to waste.

Irene Ng explores these themes wonderfully in her new book, “Value and Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy“; they offer us exciting opportunities for economic and social growth, and an evolution towards a more sustainable urban future – if we can harness them in that way.

The attraction of opposites, part 2: little and big

Some infrastructures can be “blunt” instruments: from roads and railway lines which connect their destinations but which cut apart the communities they pass through; to open data platforms which provide vast quantities of data “as-is” but little in the way of information and services customised to the needs of local individuals and communities.

Architects such as Jan Gehl have argued that the design process for cities should concentrate on the life between buildings, rather than on the structure of buildings; and that cities should be constructed at a “human-scale” – medium-sized buildings, not tower-blocks and sky-scrapers; and streets that are walkable and cycle-able, not dominated by cars. In transport, elevated cycleways and pedestrian roundabouts have appeared in Europe and Asia. These structures prevent road traffic infrastructures form impeding the fluid movement of cycling and walking – transport modes which allow people to stop and interact in a city more easily and often than driving.

At a meeting held in London last year to establish the UK’s chapter to the City Protocol Society, Keith Coleman of Capgemini offered a different view by comparing the growth in size of cities to the structure of the world’s largest biological organisms. In particular, Keith contrasted the need to provide infrastructure – such as the Pando forest in Utah, a single, long-lived and vastly extensive root system supporting millions of individual trees that live, grow and die independently – with the need to provide capabilities – such as those encoded in the genes of the Neptune sea grass, which is not a single organism, but rather a genetically identical colony which collectively covers 5% of the Mediterranean sea floor.

The Collective Research Initiatives Trust‘s study of Mumbai, “Being Nicely Messy“, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s “Collage City“, Manu Fernandez’s “Human Scale Cities” project and CHORA’s Taiwan Strait Atlas project have all suggested an approach to urban systems that is more like the Neptune sea grass than the Pando forest: the provision of a “toolkit” for individuals and organisations to apply in their local context

My own work, initially in Sunderland, was similarly informed by the Knight Foundation’s report on the Information Needs of Communities, to which I was introduced by Conn Crawford of Sunderland City Council. It counsels for a process of engagement and understanding between city institutions and communities, in order that the resources of large organisations can be focused on providing the information and services that can be most effectively used by individual citizens, businesses and social organisations.

(The Bristol Pound, a local currency intended to encourage and reinforce local trading synergies.)

Kelvin Campbell of Urban Initiatives has perhaps taken this thinking furthest in the urban context in his concept of “Massive Small” and the “urban operating system”. Similar thinking appears throughout research on resilience in systems such as cities, coral reefs, terrorist networks and financial systems, as described by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy in “Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back“. And it is reflected in the work that many researchers and professionals across fields as diverse as city planning, economics and technology are doing to understand how institutional city systems can engage effectively with “informal” activity in the economy.

In IBM we have adapted our approach too. To take one example, a few years ago we launched our “Global Entrepreneur” programme, through which we engage directly with small, startup businesses using technology to develop what we call “Smarter Planet” and “Smarter Cities” solutions. These businesses are innovating in specific markets that they understand much better than we do; using operating models that IBM does not have. In turn, IBM’s resources can help them build more resilient solutions more quickly and cost-effectively, and reach a wider set of potential customers across the world.

A civic infrastructure that combines economics and technology and that, whilst it has a long history,  is starting to evolve rapidly, is the local currency. Last year Bristol became the fifth place in the UK to launch its own currency; whilst in Switzerland an alternative currency, the Wir, is thought to have contributed to the stability of the Swiss economy for the last century by providing an alternative, more flexible basis for debt, by allowing repayments to made in kind through bartering, as well as in currency.

Such systems can promote local economic synergy, and enable the benefits of capital fluidity to be adapted to the needs of local contexts. And from innovations in mobile banking in Africa to Birmingham’s DropletPay SmartPhone payment system, they are rapidly exploiting new technologies. They are a clear example of a service that city and economic institutions can support; and that can be harnessed and used by individuals and organisations anywhere in a city ecosystem for the purposes that are most important and valuable to them.

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(The Co-operative Society building at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings)

Co-operative Governance

It’s increasingly obvious that on their own, traditional businesses and public and civic institutions won’t deliver the transformations that our cities, and our planet, need. The restructuring of our economy, cities and society to address the environmental and demographic challenges we face requires that social, environmental and long term economic goals drive our decisions, rather than short term financial returns alone.

Alternatives have been called for and proposed. In her speech ahead of the Rio +20 Summit, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said that one of the challenges for achieving a sustainable, equitably distributed return to growth following the recent economic challenges was that “externalities” such as social and environmental impacts are not currently included in the prices of goods and services.

I participated last year in a panel discussion at the World Bank’s “Rethinking Cities” conference which asked whether including those costs would incent consumers to chose to purchase sustainably provided goods and services. We examined several ways to create positive and negative incentives through pricing; but also examples of simply “removing the barriers” to making such choices. Our conclusion was that a combination of approaches was needed, including new ideas from game theory and technology, such as “open data”; and that evidence exists from a variety of examples to prove that consumer behaviour can and does adapt in response to well designed systems.

In “Co-op Capitalism“, Noreena Hertz proposed an alternative approach to enterprise based on social principles, where the objectives of collective endeavours are to return broad value to all of their stakeholders rather than to pay dividends to financial investors. This approach has a vital role in enabling communities across the entirety of city ecosystems to harness and benefit from technology in a sustainable way, and is exemplified by innovations such as MyDex in personal information management, Carbon Voyage in transport, and Eco-Island in energy.

New forms of cooperation have also emerged from resilience research, such as “constellations” and “articulations”. All of these approaches have important roles to play in specific city systems, community initiatives and new businesses, where they successfully create synergies between the financial, social and economic capabilities and needs of the participants involved.

But none of them directly address the need for cities to create a sustainable, cohesive drive towards a sustainable, equitable, successful future.

(Photo by Greg Marshall of the rocks known as “The Needles” just off the coast of the Isle of Wight; illustrating the potential for the island to exploit wave and tidal energy sources through the Eco-Island initiative)

In “Smart Ideas for Everyday Cities“, I described an approach that seems to be emerging from the cities that have made the most progress so far. It involves bringing together stakeholders across city systems – representatives of communities; city institutions; owners and operators of city systems and assets such as buildings, transportation and utilities; Universities and schools; and so on – into a group that can not only agree a vision and priorities for the city’s future; but that is empowered to take collective decisions accordingly.

The initiatives agreed by such a group will require individual “special purpose vehicles” (SPVs) to be created according to the specific set of stakeholder interests involved in each case – such as public/private partnerships to build infrastructure or Community Interest Companies and Energy Service Companies to operate local energy schemes. (There are some negative connotations associated with SPVs, which have been used in some cases by private organisations seeking to hide their debt or ownership; but in the Smarter Cities context they are frequently associated with more positive purposes).

Most importantly, though: where a series of such schemes and commercial ventures are initiated by a stable collaboration within a city, investors will see a reliable decision-making process and a mature understanding of shared risk and its management; making each individual initiative more likely to attract investment.

In his analysis of societal responses to critical environmental threats, Jared Diamond noted in his 2005 book “Collapse” that successful responses often emerge when choices are taken by leaders with long-term vested interests, working closely with their communities. In a modern economy, the interests of stakeholders are driven by many timescales – electoral cycles, business cycles, the presence of commuters, travellers and the transient and long-term residents of the city, for example. Bringing those stakeholders together can create a forum that transcends individual timescales, creating stability and the opportunity for a long-term outlook.

A challenge for 2013: better stories for Smarter Cities

Some cities are seizing the agenda for change that I have described in this article; and the very many of us across countries, professions and disciplines who are exploring that agenda are passionate about helping them to do so successfully.

In their report “Cities Outlook 1901“, Centre for Cities explored the previous century of urban development in the UK, examining why at various times some cities thrived and some did not. They concluded that actions taken by cities in areas such as planning, policy, skills development and economic strategy could have significant effects on their economic and social prosperity relative to others.

The need for cities to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the future using the old, new and evolving tools at their disposal is urgent. In the 20th Century, some cities suffered a gradual decline as they failed to respond successfully to the changes of their age. In the 21st Century those changes will be so striking, and take place so quickly, that failing to meet them could result in a decline that is catastrophic.

But there is a real impediment to our ability to apply these ideas in cities today: a lack of common understanding.

(Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch, Birmingham’s three fathers of the Industrial Revolution, photographed by Neil Howard)

As the industrial and information revolutions have led our world to develop at a faster and faster pace, human knowledge has not just grown dramatically; it has fragmented to an extraordinary extent.

Consequently, across disciplines such as architecture, economics, social science, psychology, technology and all the many other fields important to the behaviour of cities, a vast and confusing array of language and terminology is used – a Tower of Babel, no less. The leaders of many city institutions and businesses are understandably not familiar with what they can easily perceive as jargon; and new ideas that appear to be presented in jargon are unlikely to be trusted.

To address the challenge, those of us who believe in these new approaches to city systems need to tell better stories about them; stories about individuals and their lives in the places where they live and work; how they will be more healthy, better equiped to support themselves, and able to move around freely in a pleasant urban environment.

Professor Miles Tight at the University of Birmingham and his colleagues in the “Visions 2030” project have applied this idea to the description of future scenarios for transportation in cities. They have created a series of visually appealing animated depictions of everyday scenes in city streets and places that could be the result of the various forces affecting the development of transport over the next 20 years. Malcolm Allan, a colleague in the Academy of Urbanism, helps cities to tell “stories about place” as a tool for envisaging their future development in a way that people can understand and identify with. And my colleagues in IBM Research have been exploring more generally how storytelling can enable the exchange of knowledge in situations where collaborative creativity is required across multiple domains of specialisation.

If we can bring our knowledge of emerging technologies and new approaches to urbanism into conversations about specific places in the form of stories, we will build trust and understanding in those places, as well as envisioning their possible futures. And that will give us a real chance of achieving the visions we create. This is what I’ll be concentrating on doing in 2013; and it looks like being an exciting year.

(It’s been much longer than usual since I last wrote an article for this blog; following an extended break over Christmas and the New Year, I’ve had a very busy start to 2013. I hope to resume my usual frequency of writing for the rest of the year.

And finally, an apology: in my remarks on the panel discussion following Sir Peter Hall’s lecture at the Crystal, I gave a very brief summary of some of the ideas described in this article. In particular, I used the term “Massive / Small” without attributing it to Kelvin Campbell and Urban Initiatives. My apologies to Kelvin, whose work and influence on my thinking I hope I have now acknowledged properly).

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Happy Christmas, and thankyou, from the Urban Technologist

December 18, 2012 Leave a comment

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(The Empire State Building as seen from Greenwich Village, New Year’s Eve 2006)

As 2012 draws to a close, I’d like to look back briefly at the first year of “The Urban Technologist”.

Whilst I first opened this WordPress account in 2008, I used it rather sporadically as a personal blog, with a loose focus on emerging technology.

But 12 months ago I decide to write in a more regular and focused way about my work in Smarter Cities. My motivation was to share that experience and to start new conversations that I could learn from.

I have spent 15 years as a technologist, identifying new trends, and delivering projects to exploit them. That has never been simple; often exciting; and always full of challenges. But in cities I have experienced over the last few years by far the most complex, subtle, beautiful, challenging and meaningful contexts for that work in my career.

It is always useful to understand one’s own strengths and limitations; and early on I realised that my amateur enthusiasm was not a sufficient basis from which to build a real understanding of cities. So I have consciously built new relationships with planners, architects, policy-makers, social enterprises, businesses and many of the other stakeholders who understand cities professionally; or who play a role in them. In the process, I have met an astonishing variety of people, all of whom taught me something; often through conversations in which they disagreed with me – or at least expanded my thinking – in interesting ways.

Social media, and in particular this blog, have given me the most incredible opportunity to extend those discussions: through comments posted on the blog itself; through discussions in the Linked-In groups I belong to; and through the wonderful conversations I have in person whenever I meet someone who’s read something I have written.

I’ve commented in many articles on this blog that new conversations between the stakeholders and communities in a city ecosystem are the key to creating the common interest and understanding needed to drive a city forward. That same principle applies to the creation of knowledge within the wider community of Smart Cities and future urbanism. I hope that by writing this blog, and by basing it on the insights discovered through the conversations I take part in, I have contributed in a small way to that community.

(The thoughtful statue floating in Barcelona's docks that I use as the header image for this blog)

(The thoughtful statue floating in Barcelona’s docks that I use as the header image for this blog)

I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off over Christmas; but I will use the break to update the “Six steps to a Smarter City” article that I maintain as a structured guide to the content on this blog.

Recent articles that I’ll add links to include the review of the decision-making, financing and governance processes that successful Smart City initiatives have followed in “Smart ideas for everyday cities” and “No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter“; the description of the engineering and information technologies that make Smarter city systems possible in “Pens, paper, and conversations. And the other technologies that will make cities Smarter.“; and the more philosophical discussions of the organic innovation that city environments – including their information infrastructures – should support and enable in “Inspirational Simpli-city“, “Zen and the art of messy urbanism” and “Should technology improve cities, or should cities improve technology?“.

In the meantime, though, I’d like to say Happy Christmas; and also thankyou to everyone who has read this blog or commented on it; and to everyone who’s thinking has informed and inspired me. I look forward to continuing our conversation in 2013.

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Pens, paper and conversations. And the other technologies that will make cities Smarter.

December 6, 2012 13 Comments

(Akihabara Street in Tokyo, a centre of high technology, photographed by Trey Ratcliff)

(Akihabara Street in Tokyo, a centre of high technology, photographed by Trey Ratcliff)

A great many factors will determine the future of our cities – for example, human behaviour, demographics, economics, and evolving thinking in urban planning and architecture.

The specific terms “Smart Cities” and “Smarter Cities”, though, are commonly applied to the concept that cities can exploit technology to find new ways to face their challenges. Boyd Cohen of Fast Company offered a useful definition in his article “The Top 10 Smart Cities On The Planet“:

“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.”

Some technology developments – such as Service-Oriented Architecture and distributed computing are technically cohesive and can be defined by a particular architecture. Others, however, are more loosely defined. For instance, “Web 2.0” – a term associated with the emergence of social media, smartphones and businesses such as e-Bay, Facebook and Twitter – was coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2003 as a banner to capture the idea that internet and related technologies had once again become valuable sources of innovation following the “dot.com crash”.

So what are the technologies that will make cities Smart?

To answer that question, we need to examine the convergence of two domains of staggering complexity, and of which the outcomes are hard to predict.

The first is the domain of cities: vast, overlapping systems of systems. Their behaviour is the aggregated behaviour of their hundreds of thousands or millions of citizens. Whilst early work is starting to understand the relationship between those systems in a quantitative and deterministic way, such as the City Protocol initiative, we are just at the start of that journey.

(An early example of the emerging technologies that are blurring the boundary between the physical world and information: Professor Kevin Warwick, who in 2002 embedded a silicon chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his nervous system. Photo by M1K3Y)

The second domain is technology. We are experiencing phenomenal growth in the availability of information and the invention of new forms of communication. In 2007, more new information was created in one year than in the preceding 5000 years. And whilst the telephone, invented in the mid-19th Century, took around 100 years to become widespread, internet-based communication tools such as Twitter can spread to hundreds of millions of users within a few years.

If we define a “new form of communication” as a means of enabling new patterns of exchange of information between individuals, rather than as a new underlying infrastructure, then we are inventing them – such as foursquare, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest – at a faster rate than at any previous time in history.

The discovery and exchange of ideas enabled by these technologies is increasing the rate of invention across many other fields of endeavour, including science and engineering. Indeed, this was deliberate: the evolution of the internet is closely entwined with the need of scientists and engineers to collaborate with each other. I recently surveyed some of the surprising new technologies, and their applications in cities, that are emerging as a result – including materials that grow themselves, 3D printing and mind-reading headsets.

So whilst common patterns are emerging from some Smarter City solutions – for example, the “Digital Cities Exchange” research programme at Imperial College, London; the “FI-WARE” project researching the core platform for the “future internet”; the “European Platform for Intelligent Cities (EPIC)“; and IBM’s own “Intelligent Operations Centre” all share a similar architecture – there is no single platform, architecture or technology that defines “Smart Cities”. Rather, the term defines a period in time in which we have collectively realized that it is critically important to explore the application of new technologies to change the way city systems work to make them more efficient, more equitable and more resilient in the face of the economic, environmental and social challenges facing us.

My own profession is information technology; and I spend much of my time focussed on the latest developments in that field. But in the context of cities, it is a relatively narrow domain. More broadly, developments in many disciplines of science, engineering and technology offer new possibilities for cities of the future.

I find the following framework useful in understanding the various engineering, information and communication technologies that can support Smart City projects. As with the other articles I post to this blog, this is not intended to be comprehensive or definitive – it’s far too early in the field for that; but I hope it is nevertheless a useful contribution.

And I will also find a place in it for one of the oldest and most important technologies that our species has invented: language; and it’s exploitation in “Smart” systems such as pens, paper and conversations.

1. Re-engineering the physical components of city systems

(Kohei Hayamizu’s first attempt to capture energy from pedestrian footfall in Shibuya, Tokyo)

The machinery that supports city systems generally converts raw materials and energy into some useful output. The efficiency of that machinery is limited by theory and engineering. The theoretical limit is created by the fact that machinery operates by transforming energy from one form – such as electricity – into another form – such as movement or heat. Physical laws, such as the Laws of Thermodynamics, limit the efficiency of those processes.

For example, the efficiency of a refrigerator is limited by the fact that it will always use some energy to create a temperature gradient in order that heat can be removed from the contents of the fridge; it then requires additional energy to actually perform that heat removal. Engineering challenges then further reduce efficiency – in the example of the fridge, because its moving components create heat and noise.

One way to improve the efficiency of city systems is to improve the efficiency of the machinery that supports them; either by adopting new approaches (for example, switching from petrol-fuelled to hydrogen-fuelled vehicles), or by increasing the engineering efficiency of existing approaches (for example, using turbo-chargers to increase the efficiency of petrol and diesel engines).

Examples of this approach include:

  • Using new forms of energy exchange, for example, capturing energy from vibrations caused by footfall;
  • Using more efficient energy generation or exchange technologies – such as re-using the heat from computers to heat offices, or using renewable bio-, wind-, or solar energy sources;
  • Using new transport technologies for people, resources or goods that changes the economics of the size and frequency of transport; or of the endpoints and routes – such as underground recycling networks;
  • Replacing transport with other technologies – such as online collaboration;
  • Reducing wastage and inefficiencies in operation,such as the creation of heat and noise – for example, by switching to lighting technologies such as LED that create less heat.

2. Using information  to optimise the operation of city systems

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

In principle, we can instrument and collect data from any aspect of the systems that support cities; use that data to draw insight into their performance; and use that insight to improve their performance and efficiency in realtime. The ability to do this in practical and affordable ways is relatively new; and offers us the possibility to support larger populations at a higher standard of living whilst using resources more efficiently.

There are challenges, of course. The availability of communication networks to transmit data from where it can be measured to where it can be analysed cannot be assumed. 3G and Wi-Fi coverage is much less complete at ground level, where many city infrastructure components are located, than at head height where humans use mobile phones. And these technologies require expensive, power-hungry transmitters and receivers. New initiatives and startups such as Weightless and SigFox are exploring the creation of communication technologies that promise widespread connectivity at low cost and with low power usage, but they are not yet proven or established.

Despite those challenges, a variety of successful examples exist. Shutl and Carbon Voyage, for example, both use recently emerged technologies to match capacity and demand across networks of transport suppliers; thereby increasing the overall efficiency of the transport systems in the cities where they operate. The Eco-Island Community Interest Company on the Isle of Wight are applying similar concepts to the supply and demand of renwable energy.

Some of the common technologies that enable these solutions at appropriate levels of cost and complexity, are:

3. Co-ordinating the behaviour of multiple systems to contribute to city-wide outcomes

Many city systems are “silos” that have developed around engineering infrastructures or business and operational models that have evolved since city infrastructures were first laid down. In developed markets, those infrastructures may be more than a century old – London’s underground railway was constructed in the mid 19th Century, for example.

But the “outcomes” sought by cities, neighbourhoods and communities – such as social mobility, economic growth, wellbeing and happiness, safety and sustainability – are usually a consequence of a complex mix of effects of the behaviour of many of those systems – energy, economy, transport, healthcare, retail, education, policing and so on.

As information about the operation and performance of those systems becomes increasingly available; and as our ability to make sense of and exploit that information increases; we can start to analyse, model and predict how the behaviour of city systems affects each other, and how those interactions contribute to the overall outcomes of cities, and of the people and communities in them.

IBM’s recent “Smarter Cities Challenge” in my home city of Birmingham studied detailed maps of the systems in the city and their inputs and outputs, and helped Birmingham City Council understand how to developed those maps into a tool to predict the outcomes of proposed policy changes. In the city of Portland, Oregon, a similar interactive tool has already been produced. And Amsterdam and Dublin have both formed regional partnerships to share and exploit city information and co-ordinate portfolios of projects across city systems and agencies driven by common, city-wide objectives.

(A video describing the “systems dynamics” project carried out by IBM in Portland, Oregon to model the interactions between city systems)

We are in the very early stages of developing our ability to quantitatively understand the interrelationships between city systems in this way; but it is already possible to identify some of the technologies that will assist us in that process – in addition to those I mentioned in the previous section:

  • Cloud computing platforms, which enable data from multiple city systems to be co-located on a single infrastructure; and that can provide the “capacity on demand” to apply analytics and visualisation to that data when required.
  • Information and transaction integration technologies which join up data from multiple sources at a technical level; including master data management, and Service Orientated Architecture.
  • Information models for city systems that model the quantitative and semantic relationships between those systems.
  • Service brokerage capabilities to co-ordinate the behaviour of the IT systems that monitor and control city systems; and the service and data catalogues that make those systems and their information available to those brokers.
  • Federated security and identity management to enable citizens and city workers to seamlessly interact with services and information across city systems.
  • Dashboards and other user interface technologies which can present information and services from multiple sources to humans in an understandable and meaningful way.

4. Creating new marketplaces to encourage sustainable choices, and attract investment

As I’ve argued on many occasions on this blog, it is often important or useful to conceive of Smarter City solutions as marketplaces. Such thinking encourages us to consider how the information associated with city services can be used to influence individual choices and their collective impact; and the money-flows in marketplaces can be used to create business cases to support investment in new infrastructure.

The examples in transport innovation that I mentioned earlier in this article, Shutl and Carbon Voyage, can both be thought of as business that exploit information to operate new marketplaces for transport capacity. Eco-island have applied the same concept in energy; Streetline in car-parking; and Big Barn and Sustaination in business-to-consumer and business-to-business models for food distribution.

In addition to those I’ve previously described, systems that operate as transactional marketplaces often involve the following technologies:

Conversations, paper, technology

The articles I write on this blog cover many aspects of technology, future cities, and urbanism. In several recent articles, including this one, I have focussed in particular on issues concerning the application of technology to city systems.

I believe these issues are important. It is inarguable that technology has been changing our world since human beings first used tools; and overall the rate of change has been accelerating ever since. That acceleration has been particularly rapid in the past few decades. The fact that this blog, which costs me nothing to write other than my own time, has been read by people from 117 countries this year – including you – is just one very mundane example of something that would have been completely unthinkable when I started my University education.

But I absolutely do not want to give the impression that technology is the most important element of the future of cities; or that every “Smarter City” project requires all – or even any – of the technologies that I’ve described in this article.

Cities are about people; life is about people. Nothing matters unless it matters to people. In themselves, these are obvious statements; but consequently, our future cities will be successful only if they are built by consensus to meet the needs of all of the people who inhabit them. “Smarter” solutions will only achieve their objectives if they are designed and implemented so as to seamlessly integrate into the fabric of our lives. And sometimes the simplest ideas, using the simplest technology – or no technology at all – will be the most powerful.

Smarter Cities start with conversations between people; conversations build trust and understanding, and lead to the creation of new ideas. Many of those ideas are first shaped on pen and paper – often still the least invasive technology for co-creating and recording information that we have. Some of those ideas will be realised through the application of more recent technologies – and in fact will only be possible at all because of them. That is the real value that new technology brings to the future of cities.

But it’s important to get the order right, or we will not achieve the outcomes that we need. Conversations, paper, technology – that might just be the real roadmap for Smarter Cities.

(I would like to thank Steven Boxall for his comments on a previous article on this blog, “No-one is going to pay cities to become Smarter“, in the Academy of Urbanism‘s discussion group on Linked-In. Those comments helped me to shape the balance that I hope that I have achieved in this article between the roles that technology, people and conversations will play in creating the future of our cities).

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

August 20, 2012 6 Comments

(Photo of Chicago by Trey Ratcliff)

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

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

The intelligent web

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things that make themselves

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of mice, men and cyborgs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bartering 2.0

(Photo of the Brixton Pound by Matt Brown)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some things never change

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

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

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

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Virtualisation is bringing us back together

April 26, 2012 9 Comments

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(Image by Chris Drumm)

Back in 1953, Isaac Asimov’s “The Caves of Steel” was published, depicting a world of avatars, virtual collaboration and video-conferencing. It took the real world half a century to catch up with him. Asimov was a smart guy.

But he got one thing wrong. Asimov predicted that reliance on these forms of communication would make us terrified of meeting each other in person. Instead, research has shown that social media is often used to identify new and interesting people to meet in real life (see this article from the American Public Broadcasting Service, for example). In fact, this is exactly how I met my wife. More recently, I’ve enjoyed meeting @Sanfire_IA and @NewOptimists, amongst others, firstly on Twitter (go look them up), and then in real life. (In coffee shops, to be precise).

Tim Stonor and Dan Holowack have both written very interesting blog posts recently about the important role cities play in bringing people together, face-to-face, to create and share ideas. It’s the very lifeblood of the economy. (Edward Glaeser’s “Triumph of the City” discusses this topic in great and fascinating length).

The technologies that connect us virtually have a very important role to play in that aspects of our cities. I’ve met recently with people in cities including Birmingham, London and Sunderland who are involved in stimulating innovation and entrepreneurial activity in city economies. They are all passionate about the value that is created when creative people with disparate skills are brought together.

But they were also unanimous in voicing a concern that it’s tremendously difficult to persuade such people to take time away from the businesses they’re spending 60, 80 or 100 hours a week starting and running to meet people they don’t know; on the off-chance that a valuable new business idea will somehow spring into existence.

All of us face that challenge to some degree today. With the explosive growth in the flow of information we’ve experienced over the last 20 years or so, competition for our time and attention is intense. Social media is a significant part of that explosion of course; but it’s also a significant part of the answer.

Within a few minutes, on Freecycle I can find people near me who need what I no longer want; on LandShare I can find people whose untended land can be used to grow food, and on StumbleUpon I can find moments of genius in every domain from places I’d never in a million years have thought to look, but which StumbleUpon’s fuzzy search engine has ensured are nevertheless relevant to me. And then I can get in touch, arrange to meet, and find out more.

(I have deliberately chosen some of these examples, by the way, for their relevance to the efficiency with which natural resources are used to support economic activity. The recent “People and the Planet” report written by an incredible array of international experts on behalf of the Royal Society should leave us in no doubt at all of the importance of that topic).

This morning, I’ll be attending Birmingham’s Social Media cafe following a discussion about innovation in Birmingham in a Linked-In group, to discuss ideas for social business with people who I haven’t met before, but who I will probably soon be following on Twitter. That’s a great example of the interplay between virtual and physical interactions that’s speeding up the process of collaborative innovation and value-creation in cities today.

But it doesn’t stop there. Digitisation and mass customisation are long-standing trends in manufacturing, but technologies such as 3D printing are going to transform custom-manufacturing in the same way that global-sourcing and production line automation relatively recently transformed commodity manufacturing. And as this brilliant article in The Economist argues, the result will probably be to bring manufacturing activity back to be more local to the consumers of the goods being manufactured.

I turned 40 recently; traditionally a landmark that brings a certain degree of questioning of one’s direction in life. I have no such questions. The family that I now have after meeting my wife through social media is the most important part of that; and the privilege of living through these incredibly exciting and transformational times is the icing on the cake. I can’t wait to see where we’ll go next.

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This week’s reading

April 8, 2009 Leave a comment

Some great reading this week on technology, the economy, banking and smart transport … plus a little humour …

And on a lighter note:

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Social media – a reminiscence

April 3, 2009 10 Comments

Since June 2007 I’ve had an incredibly interesting job with IBM exploring the possibilities of social media and some of the other internet and related technologies that have emerged recently. I was first asked by Graham Spittle, who was then the Director of IBM’s Hursley Software Development Lab in the UK, to go and work with our customers to get a better understanding of what “Web 2.0” meant to them, and what it meant for how they would use our products.

One of the key things I learnt was that it’s pretty impossible to get hold of what Web 2.0 “is”. I quickly started to think of it as “everything that’s been done with internet technologies since the dot.com crash”. That tallies with O’Reilly Media’s 2003 coinage of the term as the name for a conference intended to revive business interest in the internet (see Tim O’Reilly interviewed by CNNMoney.com in 2007).

In 2007, Web 2.0 was already old hat in internet circles – and is much more so now. But for many “traditional” companies it was and remains something new, intangible, exciting, scary … but also, for its own sake, often irrelevant.

Do I really mean irrelevant? Not quite … I’ll explain with my personal conclusions and predictions for “Web 2.0” …

1. “Web 2.0” is an irrelevance to businesses …

Web 2.0 is best viewed as a banner term for the collection of internet-enabled technology, commercial and social phenomena that appeared between 2003 and the present time of writing. I don’t think that timeframe will expand much further for reasons that will become clear.

That definition covers such an incredibly broad area that in total it never has and never will be of interest to anyone other than technologists of one variety or another. “Web 2.0” is not relevant to any individual business (with the possible exception of Web 2.0 consultancies) – but elements within it are highly relevant in wildly different ways to (arguably) all individuals, businesses, communities and other organisations.

For those reasons, most organisations I talk to are not interested in “Web 2.0”, and many are frankly bored by the number of people who want to talk to them about it. However, they are very engaged by the way specific developments in internet technology are affecting their businesses and their industries.

2. … but does describe a period in history during which individuals, businesses, governments and social organisations harnessed an incredible variety of new technologies …

Depending on the client I’m working with and the area of their business we’re discussing, I’ll talk specifically with them about communicating intimately with their clients through social media, using Enterprise Mashup technology to create rapid, content-driven applications,  using community effects to create and commercialise new interactions in their ecosystem, using “Web-Oriented Architecture” to deliver scalable online content and services in an easy-to-consume form … etcetera. Our clients are exploring all of those possibilities – sometimes under the banner of Web 2.0, sometimes not.

For example, mobile telephone service providers maintain enormously expensive communications infrastructures that enable us to use our increasingly capable handsets to access a multitude of third-party applications and content in ways that do not necessarily deliver significant extra revenue to them. Conversely, they have a set of capabilities not easily replicable in an integrated manner elsewhere in the online world: they identify us through our SIM card; they bill us through our accounts with them, and the financial information we trust them with; they locate us through the cell network; and they can identify our friends, family and contacts through the entries in our address books. As a result, these organisations are investing huge energy exploring the potential of multi-platform social applications and gadgets that use these capabilities to create revenue-generating traffic through network subscriptions, data bandwidth usage, application licenses or transaction fees.

3. … and represents an ongoing fundamental change in the social and economic organisation of the world …

I really believe that the world is changing through this process. Web 2.0 didn’t start this – the Grameen bank, for example, have been harnessing (and creating) these ideas to enable microfinance to benefit the developing world since 1997. But the wave of activity and technology development driven by the evolution of the internet and represented by Web 2.0 has in many cases demolished the cost and difficulty involved in connecting people around the world with complimentary interests, and enabling them to interact with each other. Some examples:

  • Microfinance (e.g. Grameen, Kiva) – greatly increasing the ability of millions of people with not much to give to chose exactly how their donations are used to directly benefit those in need.
  • Online marketplaces (e.g. eBay, Amazon) – greatly increasingly the fluidity with which resources such as second hand goods are exchanged for cash, bartered, or given freely.
  • Collaborative business models (e.g. Threadless, Zopa, Zuda Comics) – directly connecting anyone with the ability to create clothing, music, video entertainment, comic art, handmade goods and many other products, with the people interested in consuming them, wherever they are, and no matter how few or many they be.

I’m passionate about this aspect of Web 2.0. I blogged recently about the combined impact of the current economic crisis and the environmental challenges we face, inspired by an excellent special issue of the New Scientist magazine. The implication is that we are in great need of these new models of economic interaction and resource optimisation to support a growing population with rising expectations on a finite planet.

4 … enabling individuals to interact without the aid of traditional organisations …

Consider peer-to-peer lending. Zopa in the UK have shown tremendous growth in recent months (see my previous blogpost). Zopa provide introduction, vetting and bad-debt recovery services to individuals wishing to enter into agreements to borrow from or lend money to each other. Internet technologies make the introduction part incredibly cheap.

That simple model replaces part of business of traditional Retail Banks or Building Societies, wherebv product design, sales & marketing, branches, call centres and a huge number of other operations are used to persuade and enable savers to deposit funds and lenders to request them on a sufficient scale that a regular operating margin and sustainable business model can be created.

Is it a huge business? Not yet. But is it interesting and growing fast? Definitely. Read this great post from the Financial Services Club’s blog for a balanced picture.

Online marketplaces enable a similar model: small traders using them can leverage a global infrastructure to reach markets they couldn’t dream of a few years ago; and by using the brand and reach of the parent marketplace, they don’t need to be experts in online marketing to do so.

5 … creating challenges and opportunities “traditional” organisations to reinvent themselves – or just evolve.

Newspapers. Record companies. Book sellers. Filmmakers. Software companies. Electronics retailers. Banks. Mobile telephone service providers. It’s easy to find news and opinion pieces every day citing the struggle these organisations are facing as the internet evolves – and the opportunities they are presented with.

And for sure, some of this is serious. In Tribes, Seth Godin wrote a great description of the way cheap music recording, production and distribution technology has undermined every aspect of the traditional business model of a music company. As a result, many traditional companies are struggling to get to grips with the new world, whilst newcomers such as iTunes flourish.

In other areas, the picture is less clear. Traditional media organisations such as broadcasters and newspaper publishers have seen advertising revenues plummet in their traditional channels as advertising spend shifts online – these revenues are the basis of their business models.  But they are – faster or slower, for better or worse – evolving their business models to embrace and commercialise the online world. The Daily Telegraph, for example, made great use of Twitter in covering the G20 summit.

Am I predicting imminent collapse for vast numbers of businesses? Not driven by the internet, no (current economic conditions are a different matter). But do I expect that in 5 and 10 years time we’ll see not just a different set of companies dominating the industries we recognise today, but in some cases a completely different set of industries themselves? Absolutely. Are Google today a dominant technology company, or a dominant media company? How do you breakdown a world in which the same digital content is accessible on your TV, PC and mobile and embedded in your MySpace page? We’re about to find out.

Moving On

As I’m moving on from my current role, I have a sense that the world is (finally) moving on from Web 2.0. Unlike Service-Oriented Architecture, the last sweeping trend to affect the technology world, I don’t think Web 2.0 will stick around – unlike SOA, it doesn’t have a cohesive, innate structure. And I don’t think it will be replaced by “Web 3.0” either – the internet was only created once, it will only ever cause one fundamental economic crash caused by the hype following that creation, and it will only ever emerge from that crash to be called “Web 2.0” once.

From here, a whole plethora of internet-enabled technologies, ideas, applications and models of commercial or social interaction will evolve along their own separate paths. The generation of people who grew up with a globally connected internet as a completely normal part of the everyday world are already inventing new forms of communication at a faster rate that ever seen before on this planet, and all of them, and those who seek to exploit them, will suffer their own individual trials and tribulations.

What I’ve learnt is that what’s interesting to me is not so much the technology, but the individual and organisational behaviours that affect its adoption and usage. It’s those thoughts that I’ll take into my new role, which whilst it won’t be focussed around Web 2.0 or any of its elements, will doubtless involve them – and many other new and exciting developments – in some way. More about that later.

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