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For future smart cities to thrive, it must be centred around people, not just infrastructure. This was the overwhelming message from a group of influential thinkers speaking at this year’s FutureEverything Summit. Steve Oxley went along to find out what smart-city planners can learn from citizens already fully engaged in a smart revolution…
In March this year, delegates from around the globe gathered at the FutureEverything Summit of Ideas & Digital Invention in Manchester. Representatives from Google, BBC, Intel, Vimeo and Kickstarter as well as from the Technology Strategy Board and engineering consultancy Arup, sat alongside artists and designers to discuss, amongst other things, Future Smart Cities. In a room packed with digital enthusiasts, one would think the messaging around smart cities would be extremely positive. However, it seems global corporations and the large-scale technology platforms they offer and promote seem to be at odds with many of the localised, small-scale technology projects showcased at the Summit and, indeed, the interests of citizens themselves. And if there was one stark warning that emerged from the Summit for city leaders thinking about investing in smart-city technology, it was ignore your citizens at your peril.
Martijn de Waal from UrbanIxD – a European research program working in the domain of technologically augmented, data-rich urban environments – notes that in a lot of the technology company literature on smart cities, their inhabitants are “mainly addressed as consumers rather than as citizens” and it is this visioning process that could ultimately lead to smart city failure.
“The usual vision is this: the city will start to collect data about everything we do and that data can then be used to make cities smarter or more efficient,” says de Waal. “The smart technology will control the city’s infrastructure, buildings, roads or safety. They call it ‘smart’ and ‘connected communities’ – but if you ask them what they mean by ‘communities’ it shows they have very much a business approach. They will tell you that they have created these data platforms on which all kinds of companies and their services can build upon and the lives of people will be better and we will have economic growth, more jobs and thus will make the community a better place.
“There is some truth to that of course, but it’s also a bit of a limited view. Yes, the city is collecting all this data – or at least a handful of companies are – and they’re allowing businesses to build services on top of that and some of those services may be handy – but what if you want to do something else, something that’s not provided by the companies themselves? If a group of citizens, for example, want to use that data to organise an action group against environmental pollution in their city the answer you get is not quite clear. At the moment it seems that the data platform is a closed platform and will be used for businesses to build services on top of them.”
Defining the city
Perhaps part of the problem in current dialogues around smart cities is the failure to understand what a city actually is. The smart city vision has tended to focus on buildings and infrastructure or traffic management and how technology can increase efficiency. Catherine Mulligan of Imperial College London says the reverential tones with which some smart-city speculators talk about technology is worrying: “They say these systems and computers can now make better decisions than human beings. But if you take the human beings out, it’s just a bunch of buildings talking to each other… and that’s not a city. The city is what it is because of the people.”
“Let’s not confuse drivers like buildings or technology with enablers,” says Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica. “The technology that we have around the internet is incredibly powerful, but let’s not confuse it with the reason why cities exist. We don’t make cities in order to make buildings and infrastructure or, indeed, technology – that’s a side effect of making cities. We create cities to come together, to create culture or commerce, to live, to work, to play – to create more people.”
So, whilst the value proposition that the big technology companies are offering is one of efficiency, human activity is decidedly inefficient and the sprawl of cities and diversity of city culture often reflects this. Usman Haque, Director of Haque Design + Research, goes one step further: “The city is a mess. It’s not simply an infrastructure and praying to the algorithm god in your data infrastructure is not going to solve its problems.
“Actually, a city is not even a problem to solve – we need to understand that cities are super wicked,”says Haque, referring to Rittel and Webber’s 1973 formulation of wicked problems in social policy planning: “Wicked problems are made to be so wicked that you can’t even define what the wicked problem is. They are essentially problems that are so difficult that they cannot be formulated or answered in any easy way.”
So can a city be ‘smart’ and inefficient at the same time? Perhaps it’s time to start looking at smart cities from the bottom up…
The rise of the Smart Citizen
“The thing about a lot of the big technology company visions of smart cities is that there aren’t any citizens in them,” says Anthony Townsend, Research Director at Institute for the Future and author of the upcoming book ‘SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia’. “Citizens are not employees or customers, they have to be dealt with on a different basis. So the idea that you can install the smart city like an upgrade and expect people to just live with it – especially when it takes power away from them – means they’re not going to accept it. So you have to engage with them and grow it from the bottom up.
“This is an age in which very big things can come from massively co-ordinated human activity that doesn’t necessarily get planned from the top down. We need to stop thinking about building smart cities like a mainframe – which is this industry vision – and think about it more like we built the web, as loosely intercoupling networks. I don’t think we have a choice – these two sides are coming to blows. These are two different approaches to building smart cities and they’re playing out in this much bigger struggle over control between people and government.”
The struggle Townsend talks about can be seen worldwide on the streets around us. From an Occupy movement part organised on Twitter, the seeds of the Arab Spring part sown via the pages of Facebook and even the UK riots, aspects of which were organised – and cleaned up – via Blackberry Messenger. These are active and engaged citizens – or, as Dan Hill refers to them: ‘Smart Citizens’. “Despite the heavy infrastructure-led visions of the systems integrators and IT corporations, the most interesting and productive use of contemporary technology in the city is here, literally in the hands of citizens, via phones and social media,” he says. “The dynamics of social media have been adopted and adapted in the last few years to enable engaged and active citizens to organise rapidly and effectively; a network with a cause.
“‘Smart citizens’ seem to be emerging at a far faster rate than we’re seeing more formal technology-led smart cities emerging,” says Hill. “In the face of institutional collapse, active citizens are knitting together their own smart city, albeit not one envisaged by the systems integrators and technology corporations. “
Hill references an example of a bottom-up approach to an urban problem in Helsinki – Ravintolapäivä, or ‘Restaurant Day’, is an initiative in which local people bypass city laws to make and sell food in hundreds of diverse pop-up restaurants. The reason this food initiative happened is because it’s very difficult to run a small café or a street-food business in Helsinki as the regulations around food hygiene and safety are incredibly high. Yet demand for the like of bacon and egg muffins, empenadas or lasagna from an increasingly diverse population was so great that a group of citizens got together and organised Restaurant Day via Facebook and Twitter. “It’s an amazing day,” says Hill. “The streets come alive, the parks come alive, and you can buy a diverse range of food that you don’t normally see – but it’s all totally illegal. Yet the city has nothing it can do about it because it’s organised on Facebook and is ostensibly a set of instructions – and you can’t arrest a set of instructions. You can’t arrest a code. It’s a great example of a network organisation and how it can effortlessly sidestep bureaucracy.”
In many ways, social media has created a new interface for the city and how its citizens interact with it. Citizens have the opportunity to try something out, such as a pop-up café – and multiply it through social media and feedback via bespoke apps: physical activity and digital activity in harmony. Yet this appears to be contrary to the thinking behind many current smart systems which merely deliver information in order to change attitudes and behaviour.
Furthermore, Hill argues that current smart-systems thinking could lead us down a dangerous path towards passive citizens. As citizens – and city leaders – devolve their decision-making and responsibility to technology, their awareness of their environment diminishes in line with their ability to do something about it. “If you automate too much stuff, people stop thinking about the issues. Yes, it might be more efficient to make the lights go off automatically, but it stops us thinking about it, we’re not engaged – and when we’re disengaged that’s not a good idea. We want people to think about something like carbon. Besides, we can turn the lights off on the way out – it’s entirely possible, we’re quite a smart species potentially!”
City making and city management
Clearly, however, street food is a distraction. Hill acknowledges this is largely ‘hipster’ behaviour and that pop-ups do not strategically create systemic change – the day after Restaurant Day, Helsinki snaps back to its previous shape, with no diverse food offering. But perhaps Governments should take such disruptive innovations and absorb them into a resilient system, creating broader access.
“What’s clear from the institutional point of view is that the Government now has competition in terms of organising and deciding – citizens can now do an awful lot themselves using new tools which they just couldn’t do before effectively,” says Hill. “But we have to be careful when we talk about bottom-up networks, because we could get sidetracked whilst there are big decisions being made about light rail or major public buildings going through the traditional institutional approach. So my plea is to bind those together – active citizens and active government. We can’t just do bottom-up; we can learn a lot from the way that it works, but we can’t do it alone. How, for example, should Helsinki take the spirit of Restaurant Day and learn from it, shape its own regulations that benefits the city with better-quality street food and more active, democratic use of the street? Can we enable systemic outcomes rather than simply one-offs?”
Martijn de Waal cites an interesting example from Hongdae in South Korea, where, up until about 10 or 15 years ago, it was a very traditional South Korean suburb. But as the population grew, residents started to build and develop add-ons to the basic buildings to accommodate offices, shops or studios. Inevitably, the pace of growth and demand for new buildings meant the citizens creating this new city were not adhering to the building code. However, instead of rigorously clamping down on its new breed of DIY builders, the city leaders and urban planners engaged with its citizens, adapted the city’s building codes accordingly whilst also steering the city growth in a particular way.
“What I find interesting about this is that the people of the Government see the city as a platform, with its citizens engaged in all kinds of activity, and they’re trying to build a base for that within a legal framework,” says de Waal. “This is a very different approach to top-down masterplanning, with big business saying this is what we think we can do with it – here, the people were doing things and the Government adapted to that. It’s the difference between city making and city management. And that’s a lesson that developers of smart cities should take from this – how can you open up your codes and make a platform that is open and can adapt to bottom-up practices.”
The democratisation of the technology
Despite the concerns voiced about current approaches to smart cities, speakers and delegates at FutureEverything agreed that existing institutions and infrastructure are ‘broken’ and that technology offers huge potential to address some of these problems. It is how we harness the technology and the way citizens engage with it that needs to be carefully considered.
Citizens are quite obviously embracing new technologies – but it isn’t always for reasons of efficiency: it’s about sociability; it’s about transparency; it’s about culture; and it’s also about fun – gaming and entertainment. Furthermore, a one-size-fits-all approach to smart cities will not easily work in an age where, even at the most basic level, apps designed for specific spaces or cities are prevalent on most mobile phones. Bespoke solutions will be required. As Anthony Townsend notes, the Dot.com Age mentality of scalability, generality and completeness has been replaced by situated software, designed for use by a specific social group rather than for a generic set of users. Using open-source technology, wi-fi and other cheap forms of networking, anybody can put together an application that only works for two or three thousand people.
“As an urbanist, I see this as a fantastic direction for technology,” says Townsend. “Historically, cities were built out of the materials that they stood on and the people who lived there and professional architects only designed a very small proportion of buildings. The democratisation of the technology would allow citizens to embark on this limitless journey of innovation over the coming years. This view is diametrically opposed to the message that mayors and city leaders and businesses around the world are getting rammed down their throat by big technology companies. You have to deal with cities individually when it comes to technological systems; you have to craft very bespoke solutions for smart infrastructure and services.”
“One of the things missing in a lot of the discussions around smart cities is creating a sense of play and a space for play for citizens to create and engage and understand these technologies,” says Imperial College’s Catherine Mulligan. “How do we reconcile the need for economies of scale, and the need for very large corporations – we actually need those guys to deliver the low-cost and highly valuable infrastructure – but in combination with giving citizens a sense of space and a sense of beauty in their environment which is enhanced by the digital technology that they use.”
“If we’re going to figure out what the smart city is about, we need to involve citizens,” concludes Dan Hill. “But citizens themselves won’t do enough; you need to engage in the Dark Matter of institutions to resolve it, for it to become systemic. Think about what we want the city to be about, how we want our city to work, how we want people to engage. We have to redesign all kinds of organisations from the bottom up for the 21st century. We’ll have to redesign most things and pull them together so we have active, engaged government alongside active, engaged citizens focusing their time on what the city can be in the first place – and with that we may end up with a much smarter city.”
For more detail and further views on smart cities and smart citizens, film of presentations from the Summit are now available to view HERE
*This is an updated version of the article that first appeared in the May/June issue of sustain’ Magazine and also supercedes the previous online version.
The FutureEverything Summit of Ideas and Digital Invention was held on 21-24 March 2013 in Manchester. Further info can be found at: http://futureeverything.org/
