Guest blog by Paul Connell
The “Future City”, and specifically the Future City linking Leeds and Bradford, is currently taking up most of my working life at the moment. Smart City or Future City concepts seem to be everywhere, even on prime time TV ads for Tech Behemoths.
This concept is about Smart and Future City concepts and I’ll be using them interchangeably, some might say that there is a difference but as we’ll never get to the future and everything is defined as Smart (even my kettle) I think I can get away with it.
The straightforward position is that Smart Cities are becoming increasingly prevalent within political and commercial visions for the urban future; responding to pressures and challenges presented by growing city populations, sustainability challenges and advances in digital technology.
However, speak to fifty different people and I’m guessing that most won’t even know what you’re on about, and those that do will all give you a different answer of what it is and what it could be.
Concept
So, basic principles; for me the Smart City concept is best described by the European Smart Cities Project, where the following systems are interlinked:
Smart Economy
Smart People
Smart Governance
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Smart Mobility
Smart Environment
Smart Living
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Looking at cities in this way has a long lineage tracing back to the work of Jane Jacobs and Richard Florida.
Both argue that Cities succeed because they self-organise and are interdependent and driven by bottom up not top down interventions – usually by the enlightened self-interest of its people.
People
For me the work that I am involved in and the worldwide conversations that are occurring around this subject, are most interesting when we eventually get round to working out what it means for people. We shouldn’t forget that there is a huge business machine gearing up in this space:
According to the Smart Cities Market Data study from ABI Research, the global spend on Smart City technologies will grow from $8.1bn in 2011 to $39.5bn in 2016.
So how do we access the opportunities, whilst keeping our cities as place to live, fall in love, and have our messy unpredictable lives.
So as more and more of our city infrastructure and machines begin to have the capability to speak to each other and even make decisions about the day to day operation of our cities and how we live, with no direct human control, what does that mean for us?
Is it the world we see in some of the Smart City media propositions where a fictional worker (usually a man) has a super-efficient transport experience to his place of work, or a “cop” arrives 30 seconds before a crime is committed?
Or is it the concept of a “Shining City” – coined by Imran Ali & Colin Oliver – who used it separately within a day of each other.
A sparkly, messy, lived-in, city where it works as efficiently as possible yes, but also it is social, fun places where people fall in and out of love with each other and the City, live – grow up and grow old.
Social
So just as the internet grew up and exploded when it moved from a data driven functional resource and became social, became part of peoples lives, we need a Cluetrain M anifesto for Smart & Future Cities. It predicted the rise of the social networked internet, with a Strapline of Markets are Conversations, Talk is cheap, Silence is Fatal
So the question is what do we do with our smart city? can we build into the technology being proffered as solutions for our cities, the Fun, The Love, The Serendipity, Life (its ups & downs), alongside our efficient infrastructure.
I was at Ben Hamersley’s talk at the LSx last week and he spoke about how this would be the challenge in the next big thing for technology as it intersects even more with our lives at every level.
His talk in full is on this link.
Unfold Leeds
As a final point, a quick comment on the Unfold Leeds event last week, basically a commercial property conference for Leeds and the region.
As someone who has worked in Property and Construction for most of his working life, it is a world that I understand, but as I’ve been working in other areas for the past three years it was a surprise to be at an event without a hashtag, twitter stream or live blogging, and no digital platform for review of the seminars and workshops.
The stands representing the various developments proposed and underway in the regions and advisors – hinted at a rapidly changing world and one fundamentally different to the days of plenty before the property bubble burst, but there was no stand out development that I could recognise as “getting” what our places could be now or in the future. This is important as these developments will be with us for a long time, and as some have argued the lack of ambition in the recent architecture and place-making in Leeds has resulted in a number of mediocre buildings and developments.
What was refreshing was the clear ambition of Tony Reeves ( CEO Bradford) and Tom Riordon (CEO Leeds) and the “ballsyness of Lurene Joseph (CEO Leeds & Partners), who made no apologies for having high expectations for Leeds.
Around the stands there was some talk of places and lifestyles in the gaps between buildings, and leisure being part of the development mix. However, the concepts linked to the future of our cities were conspicuous by their absence. I didn’t see anywhere the property industry looking to fill the gap that we know is there for that third or fourth place that sits between Home (the first place) and work (the second Place) & sometimes Education (the Third place).
The interconnected nature of our lives, the light-speed advance of technology, the need to live more sustainably, hopefully using and needing less resources to live successfully are places that Unfold Leeds should be going sometime soon……………..
Paul Connell is a Director of Halcyon Innovation working on Future Cities, Sustainable Cities with Eon and advises the Sirius Engineering Group on Strategy.
For more linked posts in this conversation about how we live in our cities check out recent articles by Pete Zanzottera and numerous flaneuring posts by our Editor Phil Kirby
So. A few initial reactions to this after having had to reread a few times…
Firstly, any proposition that uses predicted financial growth as evidence of an issue’s importance isn’t one that’s taking account of the way the world has changed in the last few years. I think the jury is surely still out on the issue of whether financial growth is a good thing. It still also stands opposed to the possibility of worth being something measurable in non-financial terms.
Secondly, competitiveness doesn’t integrate well with either inclusiveness or social capital surely. It’s the introduction of competitiveness into social provision that’s destroying about 150 years of progressive social change at the moment.
Thirdly, this is all about the thought and language of top down strategies, and behind it is a fair amount of assumptions about what is good for people regardless of how they might feel. The inherent elitism is present in the grouping of ‘Quality of life’ and ‘culture’ together in the final category making up smart city thinking. Whose ‘culture’ are we talking about? What about those who don’t want ‘culture’? And if it’s related to quality of life who is making the judgments about quality?
Having said that the piece is absolutely right about the argument that “the lack of ambition in the recent architecture and place-making in Leeds has resulted in a number of mediocre buildings and developments”. I would argue that the language of commerce with it’s top down judgements and the ridiculous drive to value assess ‘social capital’ is part of the problem.
Having read this article it sort of pushes me in the direction of an old-school typically anarchist, ‘anti-gentrification’ headspace – which isn’t helpful for any discussions about further change in the built environment as it’s a unconditionally defensive standpoint.
Also I should clarify, it’s not the language of this piece that’s annoyed me so much as the language of the thinking it’s reporting on. Should have made that clear. Oops.
Hi Ivan, thanks for the clarification, the thinking i was reporting on, is beginning to soften, but i guess my point is that the direction of travel, is being set and the people who it affects should be involved in where it goes.
I’m slightly embarrassed that my “Shining City” metaphor originates with Ronald Reagan :$
I like the notion of “the spaces between” you referred to, as a philosophy for an alternative to smart cities… which should really be engines and platforms for those bits between the atoms 😉
Atoms – Particles – Mass – Energy
I’ve read this several times now and still can’t digest what it says – it’s a bit like trying to eat candy floss in a high wind.
The only thing I can make out for certain is that there’s a chunk of money up for grabs and a bunch of consultants churning out consultant speak in order to sound like they are in on the latest ideas. Some of these consultants will be specialists in “bottom down” and experts in “participation and empowerment”. These sort of consultants take the cash to tell the people who make things happen what they’d like to hear about the people who actually have to live with the consequences of new developments.
It’s depressing really.
Surely we can do better than this?
As I’ve said on this site many times before, the future cannot contain bullet points. As a rapper once said, technology doesn’t kill conversation, bullet points do.
Hi Phil,
I think you are agreeing with me?
I guess my standpoint on this, is with all the great technology that is available, and as we are arguably still in the greatest recession/crisis/depression of the century, whatever we do should be about people.
Wonder if any smart city people have read Ernesto Sirolli?
paul
Heck, I’ve not read Sirolli. Well, not much, I leave all that stuff to Mike Chitty.
Saying that “whatever we do should be about people” is one of those phrases like “everyone should be treated equally” – so vague that it’s pretty meaningless. I have absolutely no idea why I should be interested in all this smart city stuff, just seems the usual consultant claptrap.
Spent several years working with Ernesto Sirolli. A profound influence. Sadly we chose to invest in masonry in the form of Shine, Hillside and Rise (remember that?) rather than helping communities learn how to provide a fertile environment in which folk could do brave stuff…
Whatever we should do should be respectful of the folk that are already here. We spend too much time and energy polishing our city til it shines – which essentially means displacing the poor and replacing them with Mr Florida’s Creative Class. Jane Jacobs message about the meeting of difference on street corners has long been forgotten it seems…
We live in a top down city where the politicians, technologists and big employers develop their plans…and most of us sit on our hands waiting for them to ‘get it right’ to ‘reset the economy’ to ‘create us a job’, for our future to be ‘unfolded’.
This paradigm has had its day, but there is still money to be made in flogging the dying horse…
Mike, you said it better than i could, and that’s why I referenced Ernesto Sirolli’s work, as “respect for the folk who are already here” is central to his work.
Key thing for me is that the Smart & Future city thinking is here, but because it uses the internet (of things)and needs people to engage with it to work, we have the opportunity to shape it, possibly disrupt the status quo, where it doesn’t have to be about new infrastructure or new real estate, but is about doing things differently.
Connecting things and machines, as well as people will be how our future cities evolve and as I’m an optimist (big fault of mine) think that it will be a good thing.
cheers
paul
I’m with you Phil, I haven’t a clue what it all means either. Someone once described economic theory as competing religions. It works like this; on one side you have many highly paid, high priests of economics who debate the finer points of how many venture capitalist angels can fit onto one pin-head of real estate, and on the other side you have what actually happens.
So you build a temple of some sort with the expectation that people will use the space in a particular way producing certain ‘desired’ outcomes. What actually happens is rent-seeking, workarounds, profit maximisation, marginilisation and unexpected hurricane winds of change from afar. Nobody knows anything.
Firstly, I wanted to make a comment/addition on “third places” which are more than education… in fact, you could argue that Third Places are what CV specialises in: the places, spaces (and what happens in them) that connect people together. In the connected future (read: present) city, Twitter, Facebook and even this discussion thread also function as Third Places where we can network across what would normally be boundaries of neighbourhood and workplace.
Secondly, I feel that we’re moving very fast to either stand still or get back to the same place… the Competitiveness agenda (which is really what most of Richard Florida’s argument is about) is one which is a narrative for property owners and developers seeking to make a buck out of the “creative class” (which is probably many of us). Maybe we’ve been lucky in Leeds andf weathered being “trendy” well enough to come out of it still alive.
We also need to have a dialogue about “what is smart?”. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City was smart in its use of resources, Jane Jacobs’ Greenwich Village was smart in its connectivity, and Richard Florida’s Creative Class Cities are smart in their ability to fleece people by promising people the grass was greener with certain demographics – what we’re missing is that “smart” and “technological” are not the same thing – a low tech city can be smart and a high tech city can be dumb (don’t get me started on Eco-towns or the previous series of Chinese and Arabic flights of fancy)