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Who wants to be a dumb city?

17 October 2017

by Nick Michell

Arriving in Washington DC last Monday for Smart Cities Week—three days of interesting discussions—the US immigration official was keen to know exactly which event I was attending.

“Smart Cities Week,” I told him.

“So you are telling me there are smart cities and dumb cities?” he replied.

It made me smile but at the same time, he is right—it is quite a divisive term. Cities need to work together whatever their capacity or level of development so are some smarter than others? How do we measure ‘smart’ in the first place?

Of course the term was coined by a technology vendor not the cities themselves. IBM trademarked Smarter Cities in 2011 having sent its teams out globally to push cities to take on their systems and consulting services. Ironically now the term has become entrenched, IBM’s focus has moved in a different direction with its marketing dollars invested in promoting its artificial intelligence platform Watson.

Peter Auhl, Chief Information Officer of Adelaide, told me before the keynote panel on day one of Smart Cities Week, that although he was from a technology background, Adelaide’s ‘smart city’ programme was far from being tech driven. “I am a problem solver but it is not driven by technologies.”

George Atalla, Global Leader, Government and Public Sector, EY

Technology needs to be employed to the best long-term interests of the residents of the city or “customer outcomes” as Auhl calls it. An example is Adelaide’s plan to install a fibre-optic network for its 5,000 businesses to attract global and national data-driven businesses to invest in Adelaide because of the reliable infrastructure that the project will create. The Ten Gigabit project will offer connection speeds far greater than standard internet service providers by linking into global cloud-based data centres.

George Atalla, Global Leader of Public Sector at EY, who provided the plenary keynote on day two, says many of the firms which pushed the smart city agenda never really got traction from that. But with those like Auhl, who worked in the private sector, now taking up roles as city managers, the opportunities are opening up for cities to benefit.

“Understanding how the technology works is tremendous because technology has been changing dramatically,” said Atalla. “When you do have people coming from the private sector, they have seen the technology applied elsewhere. Those are the best discussions we have [with cities].”

Mayors (though perhaps not their investment promotions people) that we have interviewed prefer to say “smart communities” rather than “smart cities” indicating that cities need to adopt a bottom-up approach, relying on citizens not only for their buy-in but also for their ideas through start-ups and new ventures supporting the development of their own city.

The 2020 Cities urban mobility meeting brought together 20 city leaders in Dublin

Such thinking has driven Cities Today to launch the 2020 Cities meeting which I attended immediately after Washington. The venue was Dublin and the focus was city mobility, with the meeting bringing together 20 city leaders (deputy mayors, heads of transport and CEOs of transport authorities) with three vital partners for city development: major private sector companies like HERE, Car2Go, Uber and Volvo; not-for-profits like TNO; and start-ups like Optibus, which were selected to showcase their innovation to the cities present.

Being smart can mean getting back to basics and pushing citizens to adopt different behaviour rather than importing the latest technology.

“We have seen how the Netherlands and Scandinavia have built a great ‘culture of cycling’ and the numbers illustrate that but this is certainly not something we have yet in Brussels,” said Pascal Smet, Minister for Mobility and Public Works in the Brussels-Capital Region, during the roundtable session. “Brussels is an immigrant city with so many different nationalities and some view the cycling as a mode of transport for the poor, with the car still seen as a status symbol. This is not an easy mindset to change but we have to get across the message that cycling is a fast, reliable and healthy way of travelling around the city.”

Pascal Smet, Minister for Mobility and Public Works in the Brussels-Capital Region

2020 Cities has developed from a high-level discussion group allowing cities to share pains and progress with their peers to becoming an accelerator for both established companies and start-ups who can both drive development in partnership with cities. The idea is to identify challenges and develop partners to find solutions rather than gathering a set of vendors who tell you theirs is the smartest option.

Pascal Smet will host the next European meeting in Brussels and on other continents, we are holding meetings in Lima and Cape Town. We are looking for cities and start-ups that want to share in this club of cities. Eighty-six cities are already participating in our programme and our corporate members are seeking cities in which to launch pilots. For further information click here to see a video, and to join an upcoming event, please contact info@2020cities.com and forward your details and one of the 2020 team will be in touch.

And by the way, dumb cities are welcome.

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