"At the Smart City Expo. 30 minutes and bored already."
The expo was filled with hundreds of companies (large and small), academics, and decision-makers, all talking "smart": the days were packed with presentations from visualisations of traffic data and smart grids to smart water and e-government solutions. Companies such as IBM, Cisco, Accenture, and towns like Sant Cugat were showcasing smart city offers or projects underway.
So why get bored?
Cities are facing unprecedented social, environmental and economic challenges. Individual transport or metering projects won't be as valuable as finding ways to make the delivery of services more efficient, predicting failures and giving decision-makers options to act. Horizontal co-ordination across city departments by using new networking technologies is crucial, and many of the companies at the expo focused more on their smart city development frameworks rather than analysing the real challenges at hand.
Frameworks, however, aren't for everyone. Speakers from smaller startups such as Ashwin Mahesh of Mapunity and Usman Haque from Pachube were far more engaging in their presentations. They are encouraging citizens to get out there and find ways to collect and visualise data. Most importantly, they build applications that allow decision-makers or citizens new options for city services. A brilliant example is Carlo Ratti's waste tracking system that follows e-waste to see where it ends up.
These two camps do not disagree that cities can be made better through the use of new technologies, nor that citizen involvement is crucial. But they do disagree on how to make the smart city happen. Anthony Townsend summed it up with a slide entitled Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs. Robert Moses (good reading for city geeks: The Power Broker) believed in central planning and the automobile at the heart of the city. Jane Jacobs believed in citizens shaping the city for themselves. She believed in (as Adam Greenfield paraphrased) "spontaneous order from below. Places are built up over time by an infinity of small acts."
The heart of the matter is that some people have more confidence in the city as a place of predictability and efficiency. Others see it as a creative place where the citizen is a generator of ideas, services and solutions, rather than a recipient.
The reality is that both views are needed. Our cities are huge systems where infrastructure, technology and half the world's population interact. Some of those people will generate solutions themselves (adhering to the motto "think, don't try"), like Ashwin does. Most will be just consumers of services. The more efficient these services are, the cheaper they are, the better for the environment, and the higher the quality of life is for everyone. This is an integral part of what in The Climate Group call the "clean revolution". And it is already taking place in city halls across the world.
A key parameter of the clean revolution is leadership. And it is city leaders who will integrate these views. Their ability to live up to citizens' expectations and respond to long-term challenges such as climate change, and short-term ones such as traffic congestion, relies on recognising and enabling a new marketplace, the "information marketplace": an approach that embraces serendipity – and planning for efficiency.
Cities have always been in the business of making marketplaces. What we found in our new report Information Marketplaces: the New Economics of Cities launched last week with Arup, Accenture and Horizon (University of Nottingham), is that in the age of the internet and the smartphone and an explosion in the use of new tools like cheap sensors and mobile phones, cities now have new options for integrating technologies into existing infrastructure and services. But to enable social or environmental outcomes, they will need to choose between how much they want to manage and control infrastructures – particularly the emerging digital ones – and how much they want to control the relationship with the citizen (or indeed, leave it to private companies).
Opening up data will not by itself solve tough problems. But cities can do a lot: they need to ensure the quality of data is available to build apps, and perhaps build some of their own. They should engage with national or sub-national governments, which are often the ones setting building codes, regulating the energy sector or creating standards for the use of public data.
Adam Greenfield from Urbanscale noted that the real problem with the smart city is that most of us don't live there, so we don't yet know what will be possible.
But possible it is. If city leaders enable information marketplaces, and if they incorporate creativity from unexpected places, the possibilities are endless and truly exciting. It is our best chance for cleaner, smarter, better cities to live in.
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