DR LARISSA ROMUALDO SUZUKI How do you design a smart city? Dr Larissa Suzuki shares insights from her PhD thesis, which now forms the basis of London’s city data strategy.
How do you design a smart city? Dr Larissa Suzuki shares insights from her PhD thesis, which formed the basis of the GLA’s city data strategy
Every day nearly 180,000 people move to cities, resulting in more than 60 million new urban dwellers each year. London’s population is expected to reach over ten million by 2025.
Such rapid growth puts pressure on a city’s infrastructure (transport, energy, water, housing), and scarce infrastructure aggravates civil issues such as law and order and the delivery of basic services. For instance, studies suggest a typical driver spends 106 days of his/her life looking for parking spaces, while every year over 467,000 people die prematurely in Europe because of air pollution. In response to pressure from organisations and citizens, “smartening up” cities has become a priority for policy makers.
The “smart city” label has been applied to a range of technology developments powered by city data and digital technologies. It’s hoped these will help cities plan for population growth, introducing a more sustainable model for urban development.
We’ve already seen progress. Smart electricity grids, energy-efficient buildings and intelligent road crossings are examples of existing solutions. These are powered by data collected from many systems and stakeholders; matching high-quality data with digital services has the potential to drive economic growth, improve government transparency, and create innovative city services.
True smart cities
I’m a computer scientist and am passionate about how technology can benefit mankind. However, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of simply focusing on infusing technology in cities and disregarding true societal needs.
Despite the potential of smart cities, there are no fully implemented smart city initiatives, and unless cities change the way they design, we’ll never deliver on the true promise of smart cities. This is because smart cities have been designed mainly as centralised technology top-down projects led by corporations, which put municipalities under pressure to deploy their projects and in which citizens appear as consumers at best.
A true smart city is one where efficient urban services are available to all – including the disabled, senior, visually impaired and children. Our societies are stratified, and too many of the planned “smart” services (smart cars, for example) will probably only be available – in the next few decades, at least – for a privileged few. There are one billion people with some form of disability, and despite this huge demand, cities haven’t tailored their “smart services” to them.
Adopting a more disciplined and societal-needs orientated approach can give cities the clarity they need to think strategically about how they can function better. My PhD research provides a framework that helps cities on this journey. I now work for the Greater London Authority, helping it to deliver on its London Infrastructure 2050 programme goals.
Core principles of design
To unlock smart services for all, cities need to embrace not only technology but many other non-technological elements. They must address the needs and expectations of all users of services, reduce the digital divide, and build public trust around new services and data sharing. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach will never work. My PhD research framework – named SMARTify – is built around five core domains, all of which are designed to support the delivery of a city’s own smart cities vision.
1 Services design
Providing access to “smart things” designed without all society in mind isn’t providing access at all. To design services, you must understand the unique needs and expectations of all users, including senior citizens, disabled people and children.
We must establish which infrastructure and datasets are subject to greatest demand, and use them for the trial of new technologies and services. The Data.gov.uk portal has created the Open Data Users Group, which it consults to identify what data to release. The group also suggests improvements in the datasets currently provided.
Enabling integrated and responsive urban services often involves joining up data silos. It raises many security and privacy concerns around personal data (social media, GPS traces in phones), smart cards (transport usage patterns) and smart metering (lifestyle patterns).
When designing services, cities must address the privacy aspects of personal data, and define data management strategies to ensure compliance with national and international data protection regulations.
2 Technology design
The main technological challenge in smart city design is the fragmentation in urban services, infrastructure and data provision. City data and digital services are provided by many stakeholders, systems and applications. This fragmentation creates a range of technical, strategic and organisational issues around interoperability, cross-domain data exploitation, and policies and regulations in data-orientated business models.
The economic benefits and potential of smart cities relies upon the delivery of service innovation powered by interoperable technology. It can be facilitated by organising cities’ technological assets around a common platform that can manage data and services, and physical assets.
An initial step towards this endeavour is performing a city data-mapping exercise for a detailed picture of existing data and digital services. It includes identifying current and future: Data sources, volume, variety, temporal factors and security sensitivities (personal/private data); Processes and resources needed to manage data/services (computer and network power to respond to data requests, data storage requirements). Once a data and services inventory is created, it’s time to review existing metadata schema for each data type to identify standards with the greatest potential for reuse, and fill any gaps.
Reducing technology and data friction using reliable standards for interoperability can help create new integrated urban services.
3 Value network design
Cities find it tremendously difficult to specialise in all the competencies involved in designing smart city services. Even powerful organisations such as Google and Apple need to collaborate with members of their value network (developers) to provide inventive applications to end users.
Adopting the concept of datadriven value networks (DDVN) helps cities to decentralise their data and technology infrastructures and form an ecosystem of expert collaborators.
There are three types of partners in a DDVN. Partners should be chosen based on the specialisation they can bring, whereas cities should deeply specialise in their core competence – governance of the DDVN.
Supporting partners specialise in managing data and digital services, and making resources available to contributing partners. Disclosing technical blueprint details, for example, encourages open innovation, and enables partners to openly utilise resources.
A DDVN enables cities to become a platform for the dissemination and active consumption of services that will provide society with a high quality of life, while also meeting their ambitious sustainability agenda. The success in designing smart cities will be co-determined by the way cities nurture, incentivise and coordinate this network.
4 Value design
Smart cities’ data and services have social, economic, environmental and financial value. It can be generated through the independent use or reuse of data and services, or by combining them with other sources to become inputs into applications, services and decision-making.
For instance, city data can be input into complex algorithms and analysis to create insights through dashboards or visualisations. Cities must explore the value cases for the exploitation of data and services.
On the flip side, the provision of digital services and data isn’t free. Understanding the associated cost entails engaging with existing and potential publishers, so that effective ways of recovering such costs can be explored. In some instances, charging users to utilise premium services and data may help recover such costs and fund the release of data and services.
Structural partners can support the development of practical and diverse business models for data and digital services. Establishing business models and licencing agreements, including the Open Government Licence (OGL), can maximise the use of data and services. It may even increase competition on the platform as data providers fight (and collaborate) to provide the best-quality data and services to citizens.
5 Governance design
A strong leadership strategy can enable technology, data and digital assets to be exploited to its full effect to deliver smart city design and planning.
Designing smart cities as open platforms can create governance arrangements that provide a context in which distributed innovation, driven by the members of the platform ecosystem in the smart cities, can emerge.
Open and transparent engagement with partners on the strategic direction of the smart cities vision can guarantee the delivery of the actions and prevent regulation problems during rollout. The intended benefits of the smart city vision should be clearly articulated, measured, managed, delivered and evaluated in practice by all partners.
Besides working closely with the members of the DDVN, cities should actively promote services and innovation to demonstrate the value of smart cities. This can be achieved through government websites, hackathons, engagement with community groups – including those concerned with the ethics of sharing personal data – and addressing digital literacy to drive uptake of services.
Measuring success
So how do you know you’ve built a smart city? First, cities must keep their smart city vision in mind, and continuously assess their progress using critical success factors. For instance, wider participation among all the population, a reduction in pollution-triggered deaths, increased innovation. Based on those assessments, they can then amend and improve their “smart city” design.
Ultimately, a smart city design that’s aligned with a city’s own “smart vision” will provide it with a balance between social, environmental and economic opportunities.
“City data can be input into complex algorithms and analysis to create insights”