How well is my city performing? How smart is my city? There are hundreds of indices in the market today that measure one aspect or another of city progress – so many that it’s difficult to get a comprehensive assessment. However, there are some core fundamentals that can help cities assess how they are doing and improvements worth considering. Let’s look at eight very important ones.
1. There can be no smart city without smart leadership.
Leadership is utterly vital to pull what inevitably is a complex mix of stakeholders with multiple motives and perspectives together. Leadership is not just the mayor; though a mayor or equivalent is undoubtedly important. Rather, the goal is to pull together an appropriate group from across all sectors who can represent the built environment, services, communities, faith, learning, etc.
The art is in understanding how to balance scale and the ‘soft and hard’ aspects of such a group.
Unless a city can exhibit a coherent leadership group with the right behaviours and a common purpose, little of real sustained value will emerge. Actions will be the proverbial ‘sticking plaster on the wound,’ not something more purposeful and profound.
2. Set goals that are bold, audacious and smart.
It is not atypical for a city to have multiple visions, strategies, plans and targets developed over the years. Put together it is rare that these form a coherent picture.
That we need transformation of outcomes in cities is less in question now – public budget constraints and societal challenges are well understood today and provide a clear reminder if we are in doubt. The issue is what to do, when and how much.
Transformation requires boldness, which is why aligned leadership is so key. It also requires simplicity and believability of messaging which needs to be regularly communicated. All too often the multiplicity of strategies and plans only serve to confuse – not only within the walls of city hall but also amongst various groups that should support and help deliver them.
Maybe there’s a better approach. Hiding behind lengthy plans built in organisational silos that require everyone to be familiar with everyone else’s can breed defensiveness. A smarter approach may be to shift to simpler visual story-telling that makes things more overt, clear and consumable by everyone. Because everyone needs to embrace these bold goals – especially the communities within the city itself. No true transformation occurs unless everyone changes their habits and behaviours – consider transport, waste recycling, energy use and so on.
A perfect vision or strategy is not the goal. What is more important is to have a cohort of leaders and communities embrace the purpose and endpoint and take a nimble and human approach to tackling it.
3. Identify cross-cutting enablers that will transform outcomes.
The task of transformation can feel overwhelming. So much to do, with so little resource to do it with. As part of the visual story-telling, it is vital that the various initiatives that are proposed are clear, and that dependencies are clear too. The story needs logic. With it, all parties can get a clearer idea of where they fit in the overall picture, how it joins together and where it takes the city.
Beyond the more-visible initiatives, a city should identify the underbelly of cross-cutting enablers that build and sustain the foundations of the roadmap: building capabilities, establishing better planning practices, improving performance monitoring and ensuring a competent digital transformation.
4. Tackle a few quick wins to build confidence.
Any good journey starts with a few clever moves that help build confidence. So, a good smart city portfolio should contain a few initiatives that will be relatively easy to deliver to build the confidence of those who are making change and for those who are receiving the benefits of it. There are a handful of obvious quick wins that cities should consider building into their plans – things like smart lampposts, smart parking or smart waste management.
5. Put the right person in charge of the programme -- not a technologist.
That’s not to suggest every technologist is the wrong person to tackle the job. However, assuming ‘smart’ suggests technology, choosing the person who’s been struggling with the topic for the past decade to lead the effort is probably not a wise move.
The transformation of services and infrastructures is going to meet lots of resistance from all quarters, so finding a “poacher turned game-keeper” can be a smarter strategy. Someone who has the scars of building cities or improving services. Someone who has skills, experience and behaviours often of a different form than the traditional technologist. Indeed, these days even when ‘tech’ may be the perspective taken, the agenda is very much more about the data than the technology itself.
The good news is that more and more cities seem to be doing this well.
6. Address what all cities need to improve on: societal insights, engagement and participation.
No city will be smart unless it can effectively engage society. This is perhaps the key aspect that will prove to be the means to sustain improvements. And ‘society’ means the breadth of residents, visitors and businesses – not just those higher-cost citizens who are major consumers of public services. Although the latter are vital to address, if they are the predominant focus it can lead to a vicious cycle, where a virtuous cycle is needed. Unengaged society can be a vital force for improvement when city leaders focus on:
- Society – the full extent
- Insight – analyse and comprehend
- Engagement – legitimate trust-building
- Participation – accessing new resources, changing mindsets and behaviours towards jointly agreed upon better outcomes.
No city is excellent at this and the tools that can be used to get better are poorly understood and applied. It is an all-too-infrequently-practiced science that cities must find a way to embrace.
7. Develop a strategy to exploit city data and manage it responsibly.
The momentum behind opening city data is vital to shift the thinking from closed silos to more porous systems – which is a vital aspect of smart city services transformation.
However, if you consider the overall volume of data that flows around a city, open data is only a modest portion of the total. For a city to run effectively takes much more than just open data; there are five different types of data in a city (see illustration). Each has very different characteristics in terms of purpose, volume and growth projections, availability, quality, ownership, temporal form, sensitivity and the like. A smart city understands how to blend these different sources together to draw insight and run services more efficiently. It is through this blending of data that the challenges of availability, quality and governance are highlighted, and issues of valuation and monetisation become very evident. If data is received for free by one party and merged with other data sets, the new value and ownership of that data rapidly gets fuzzy.
Finally, and importantly, the requirements to manage data privacy and sensitivity in a more appropriate and fair manner is now receiving the attention it deserves. In Europe, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is testament to that focus.
8. Collaborate.
Smart cities realise their limitations --and the vast scale of the transformations they face. They also recognise that individually they are small compared to the ever-growing size of international businesses. Trying to be little islands of individualism is not going to lead to a fulfilling future. Neither will it help influence the provider market. Conversely, working together does not lose city uniqueness and lead to one-size-fits-all solutions. There is a balance to be struck, and given the scale, complexity, and imperatives we face the current approach is too individualistic.
Collaboration is not a ‘soft and fluffy’ thing; it is a game-changer for future-forward cities.
It is also a process that must be planned and managed. It results in some very hard and specific things – like much-needed guidance and standards. At present standards are things that cities very rarely engage with -- yet should. With standards, cities could make swifter, less-risky pre-procurement decisions and can specify with more confidence what they want from the market. Very likely that would be well-received by the market, as it would present a more consistent demand. The result of which would likely be cheaper solutions and deliver better longer-term outcomes. And what’s not to like about that?
Stay tuned for more! - The Integrated Planning Policy and Regulation Action Cluster in partnership with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, will publish a Smart Cities Guidance Package in October 2018.
Graham Colclough. Chair, Integrated Infrastructure Action Cluster