Innovation and Disruption with Smart Cities
So thus far I’ve covered that the Smart City concept spans a lot of different technologies from monitoring chips in smart devices to coordination software. The basic tenants of Smart City align very closely with the tech-industry’s concept of Innovation and Disruption by nature because the ‘Smart’ in Smart Cities usually connotes tech which will be used generally for the promotion of a more integrated city. Often Smart Cities have been viewed in a lens of Millennial goals for cities around the world, and the goals of those cities have been largely to enhance their sustainability and resilience in the face of global warming, while also empowering their citizens to both participate in those goals, and experience a better run city as an end result. To understand to what degree Smart City is innovative or disruptive of the current or previous management of cities, we should take a look through the lens of the stated mission of cities that are clear leaders, or participants in Smart City programs and coalitions. Some of the most interesting trends in smart city tech are that cities are increasingly able to share best practices across borders and in a peer to peer style that circumvents international bodies altogether.
Smart City strategy is defined in a number of ways. In Barcelona, a leader in Smart City goals, Júlia López i Ventura of the City Council for Urban Habitat defined their goals like this in 2011:
“Barcelona’s Smart City Strategy takes a holistic view of the various projects being developed throughout the city and uses technology as a transversal tool to manage the city’s resources and services in a more efficient way. In doing so, it guarantees sustainable social, economic and urban development with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of life of Barcelona’s citizens.”
Barcelona’s goals are to take whatever technology they can, in order to enhance city life. These enhancements rest not only in improvement of city services, but also resource sustainability. In this way Barcelona’s goals are innovative. They take the city function of basic human services such as infrastructure to water distribution to waste collection and alters the focus of how and why the city performs those functions. This definition is from the website of C40 Cities Climate Leadership group, which is a number of major cities that have come together to commit themselves to sustainable leadership goals. C40 defines its mission best, as including climate change resolutions as a tentpole for all other city goals, such as addressing poverty and inequality as well as the meta-goal of climate change. The members of C40 are adamant that cities can and must lead on multiple fronts for the betterment of the human condition.
There is a relative advantage to Smart City technology over how cities were previously run. You don’t even have to touch on the motifs of crime and corruption that are prevalent in most cities to see the value in having more information on how things run, to better city management. Given the climate and human scale goals that these cities hope to achieve, the only way they can disrupt old operating principals is to have a wildly different approach. This is where we see the tech sector approach of reaching 10x growth or improvement. If the world recognizes the huge problems from overcrowding, inequality, pollution, and the instability that can come with badly managing those problems, you begin to see how fast we need to improves how cities run themselves.
It is important to realize that the solution of cities wanting to collect data on themselves began with a problem. More and more cities are experiencing acute shocks to their economic and infrastructure growth, as well as their populations’ well being. In many cases they must be compatible with fast growth in sustainability because they have experienced how resilient they must be given the forces of nature produced by climate change. Another group that is more focused on that resilience is 100 Resilient Cities. Started recently, in just 2013, 100 Resilient Cities sets out to get cities to collaborate on the more immediate affects of climate change and our modern era as well as sustainability because cities are starting to experience shocks. Their website defines Urban Resilience as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.”
The innovation required by cities must be disruptive because of the new challenges posed by the modern era. To properly take care of its citizens, a city must now respond in a ‘war on all fronts’ method to tackle the inherent flaws in a centrally managed government with little information to the more flexible model of distributed management with a lot more information. Because cities are not able to function well without adopting a new paradigm. Cities are met by technologists in this to meet 10x growth goals to improve management. One of the most prominent of these companies is Google’s city improvement project Sidewalk Labs, and they illustrate how to meet the some of the challenges represented to cities:
Given the implications of things like SuperStorms, previously unseen levels of Inequality, Public health crises and more, cities have embraced making improvements through peer groups, coalitions and think tanks to address the challenges presented. In many cases the only way to meet the challenges is to disrupt the way that things have been done previously. Cities are meeting challenges in collaboration with each other as well as separate entities to build on successes. Entities like utilities are also being brought in to build on these goals, specifically along the lines of transitioning to to distributed energy management. To manage with their partners, cities must set goals like with 100 Resilient Cities or C40, or bring in technology partners like Sidewalk Labs. All and all there are many many challenges facing cities today, so there must be disruptive innovation both from collaboration, goal setting and technology advances all to bring our world cities to sustain themselves and teach other benefits of coordination on other important goals.
