Photo: Greater London Authority

Lessons from London on fixing the smart city ‘plumbing’

20 October 2021

by Sarah Wray

Smart city programmes around the world are delivering benefits but some challenges persist: the difficulty of scaling pilots, internal silos and fragmentation and, in some cases, a perceived disconnect between technology projects and residents’ lives.

The UK capital of London, with its 32 boroughs and population of nine million people, offers lessons for other cities of all sizes on overcoming these issues.

London’s first Chief Digital Officer Theo Blackwell, who was appointed in 2017, has focused on fixing the digital ‘plumbing’ following feedback from residents during the largest-ever listening exercise by the mayor’s office. This has paid off during the pandemic and paves the way to more joined-up, inclusive digital services for the future.

Speaking at the recent Cities Today Institute Leadership Forum in London, attended by digital and innovation leaders from local governments across Europe, Blackwell said this plumbing means three fundamental areas: designing digital services consistently and around residents’ needs; joining up data across the boroughs, public services and partners; and expanding digital infrastructure.

“We’ve adopted common digital principles, created new teams and developed new approaches to engage with the ecosystem,” Blackwell said.

User-focused services

Designing services to meet the needs of Londoners applies to systems procured externally as well as those created in-house, and requires finding ways to bring residents into the smart city conversation.

During the pandemic, third-party crowdfunding platforms Pay It Forward and Crowdfund London were adapted to meet Londoners’ needs around increasing cashflow to businesses and funding for neighbourhood projects.

“It’s not a case of just buying something and plonking it in the city; it’s about engaging with those companies,” Blackwell said.

The city also redesigned its own Talk London community engagement platform to make it more user-friendly.

“This was vital during the pandemic, where we had to move all of these consultations online about how we’re going to spend money on recovery,” Blackwell said.

In recent years, cities have witnessed a burgeoning ‘techlash’ with people pushing back against perceived solutionism from big tech firms. To counter this, London recently launched its Emerging Technology Charter. It was developed with input from citizens and businesses to guide the ethical deployment of technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality and autonomous vehicles in the capital.

“This practical guide means we can make the environment consistent and have productive conversations on a no-surprises basis with innovators,” Blackwell said.

Joining up data

Having made several upgrades to its open Datastore since the launch in 2010, London is now in the process of rebuilding the hub as a common platform which can incorporate more types of data and partnerships and evolve over time.

“What’s more important [than the number of datasets] is the methodology of how you run purpose-led data projects around the data needs that have emerged from teams,” Blackwell said.

Examples have included data to map green infrastructure, cultural institutions, underground assets and air quality.

The idea is for the data hub to become less of a ‘store’ and more of a ‘register’, powered by Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), that respects the federated nature of the various boroughs in London.

Priorities include working with academic institutions on air quality data and with the private sector to increase the flow of economic data.

A current example is focused on using data to better understand economic activity and recovery across London’s 600 high streets.

In collaboration with London Councils and 21 London boroughs, London’s City Hall launched the High Streets Data Service. The subscription tool pulls in aggregated and anonymised spend data from Mastercard and footfall data from O2, both in its raw form to enable bespoke analysis, and via a custom-built Data Explorer tool. This data provides a much more up-to-date view of what is happening at the neighbourhood-level than was available before.

Julia Thomson, Smart Cities Policy Lead at Greater London Authority, who led the project, explained how previously boroughs had to negotiate directly with data suppliers or commission consultants to undertake detailed analysis and reporting. This is expensive and only gives a small snapshot of activity over time. Through working together, the councils have been able to buy proprietary data more cost-effectively, build the data explorer tool in-house that is specifically designed for users, and get a London-wide view of high street activity. Borough officers can compare, collaborate and share approaches and insights.

“It’s really important that we got this analysis and that it goes directly into the hands of local policymakers who can make a difference with money or other decisions,” said Blackwell.

Streamlining innovation

London’s Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) plays an important role in streamlining efforts across London’s boroughs.

“We cannot try and run London like a 32-piece jigsaw puzzle,” said Eddie Copeland, Director, LOTI.

The five-person team’s capacities include training staff, convening networks, establishing joint capacities and running projects. Key areas are procurement, data-sharing and digital inclusion.

Copeland said that technology delivers the most value when it’s scaled and data is most beneficial when it’s shared. London’s fragmented nature can hamper this: “The opportunity with LOTI is to find ways to enable boroughs to keep that local approach, but to collaborate where it matters on digital.”

An example of this is LOTI’s recent work on mapping digital exclusion, working with five London boroughs to create ‘personas’ of groups of people who are digitally excluded in different ways. The goal is that these are applicable across London, rather than every borough having to do its own ground research.

Connectivity

This is part of London’s multi-pronged effort to get more residents connected, particularly following the pandemic which highlighted unequal access to the internet, devices and digital skills in cities across the world.

Transport for London (TfL) recently awarded a 20-year concession to BAI Communications to enable 4G mobile coverage across the whole Tube network by the end of 2024.

In addition to removing ‘not spots’ for Tube riders and staff, the connectivity will generate additional revenue for TfL amid financial challenges.

More than 2,000 kilometres of cabling will be installed within tunnels and stations as part of the upgrade. The bigger picture is that this will also act as a ‘fibre backbone’ to connect city-owned assets such as buildings, street lighting and bus stops, supporting last-mile connectivity to homes and businesses in underserved neighbourhoods and paving the way for 5G.

On closing the digital divide, Blackwell said: “We need to be much more active. Working with businesses and civil society, we need to get to the people who need the support the most and treat digital inclusion more like a service to Londoners than we have done in the past.”

This means policy interventions as well.

“We’ve also strengthened our urban planning powers to ensure that full fibre connectivity is required in all new developments and made provisions over mobile coverage as well. This is something that we haven’t done before,” he added.

Open innovation

From here, Blackwell’s team is focused on several mayoral priorities that build on this progress and contribute to pandemic recovery.

Continuing to increase digital access for everyone in the city is paramount and work to advance data-sharing will continue, as well as progressing the Emerging Technology Charter.

London also wants to attract market investment on green innovation, which requires understanding the scale of the opportunity around programmes such as energy retrofits. Here, the EU-funded Sharing Cities programme has carried out foundational work, alongside projects to deploy and scale smart city infrastructure, new mobility and citizen engagement tools.

Open innovation is an emerging way to address some of the thorny problems the city’s boroughs face when off-the-shelf products don’t yet exist. London put out a series of challenges to the market to find solutions to issues such as online extremism, COVID-safe travel and bereavement during the pandemic.

Catherine Glossop, Senior Manager, Strategy, Innovation & Industrial Policy, Greater London Authority, said the open innovation approach gives the city an opportunity to not only find new solutions and partners but also to drive best practices with innovators, from adoption of the Emerging Technology Charter and user-centred design to encouraging the living wage and good quality working conditions.

She commented: “It’s an opportunity to help the innovations that emerge to better meet the needs of the city of London, and most importantly it’s an opportunity for us to collaborate with innovators and communities to really think about how we can do things differently – perhaps to be more radical in our approach and reframe and rethink problems that we’re facing every day.”

Blackwell also hopes to develop this on a bigger scale and further learn from the open innovation approach being pioneered by Transport for London.

Since November 2018, TfL has been collaborating with Bosch and others on several projects to boost traffic flow, improve road safety, and reduce air pollution.

On how to choose the right initiatives for an open innovation approach, Rikesh Shah, TfL’s Head of Commercial Innovation, said: “If you want to buy a pen or a chair you can work with the procurement team and get best value. But if you don’t know what the solution should be and you’ve got a problem that’s keeping you awake at night, then let’s start thinking about how you can innovate with the market to come up with a solution.

“Often, before we go out with a problem statement, we’ll run a market-sounding questionnaire to explore what’s already out there. If things are available, we just need to set up the framework and buy it. [For open innovation] it’s got to be genuinely innovative — that’s part of the test for my team.”

Based on experiments so far, TfL is now developing a framework to use as a blueprint for partnering with other firms on co-innovation projects, including the potential for joint commercialisation.

Blackwell said: “Identifying the big challenges where we can put some money in, talk to companies about their R&D budgets and attract private investment is something we are also exploring.”

On the future, Blackwell concluded: “The things that we will continue emphasising are totally based upon what London is telling us.”

More cities are now moving towards this thinking – flipping the original approach to smart cities on its head and starting with residents, rather than technology. In London, fixing the ‘plumbing’ is proving key to delivering on the ambition.

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