"Smart technology is very likely to be mainly deployed to help us pick our way through our crumbling infrastructure"

Attended what was so far the best Smart City conference I have been to yesterday, the "How Scary are Smart Cities" session put on by The Edge and hosted at Buro Happold in London. It was probably the best I've been to, firstly because The Edge curated an audience with a vastly increased number of rational people, from a large number of disciplines, rather than (in my experience of past conferences, anyway) a surfeit of cool-tech kool-aid drinkers and various socio-whatever dreamers all peddling their particular urban socio-utopias. Secondly, the sessions had a large amount of time for debate at breakout tables, which was very high quality (read: tended to sort the wheat from the chaff).

Now I am a technologist first and foremost, but I find some of the Smart City/Internet of Things techie-utopia thinking ("We can monitor everything! Yay!") dangerously naive. I think if Orwell ever wrote a prequel to 1984 it would show how the road to Big Brother was paved with well intentioned sensors by earnest "do no evil" geeks. As to the various blue-sky-with-pies-in utopias peddled, well it was ever thus. The rotting tombstones of all past future utopias litter every major city, yet still they come. As one speaker noted, Google "Smart City" and look at the Images that come up, and you will see one glaring ommission - people. At any rate, I thought this was the first conference I'd been to where I felt a "wisdom of crowds" effect started to emerge. Not that everyone agreed with each other - not by a long chalk - but the boundaries to the "art of the possible and desirable" began to emerge:

Anyway, here are my notes, my take-away themes, somewhat expurgated, about the art of the possible and the emerging boundaries that came out again and again:

1. What is "Sustainability" and how does "Smart" help this - Efficiency vs Resilience

- People tend to put into Smart and Sustainable what they want, too many conflicting objectives result
- City infrastructure is a longer cycle than party politics, economic boom/bust and tech cycles, causes du jour etc
- You can't predict what a city needs in 1, 2, 3, 10 generations - redundancy and resilience are far more sustainable than any current "sustainability" fads, which will all be different in 10 years
- Focussing on only carbon footprint reduction (one major "Smart city Utopia" trope du jour) can work against resilience
- There are layers of smartness - sewerage is smart, road safety is smart, hospitals are smart. Need to maintain existing ones as well as build new ones
- Dense (hive) cities are the most efficient, but that is not what most people want (Tower block utopias lie rotting in every city you care to mention)
- Proponents of various Smart New Things need to prove that they have a more workable plan than what is possible with a bit of technology augmentation to a "dumb city", that can achieve 80% of desired impact at 20% of costs (eg favela cable cars in Medilin, above)

2. Future Proofing is critical (a subset of Sustainability but worth looking at on its own, as it impacts how we think about Smart Technologies today)

- Humans spend a lot of time thinking about the future but we are very bad at actually predicting and anticipating it.
- Future proofing - must be built on open platforms, not proprietary technlogy
- It's not about IT and Technology - these platforms rest on earlier platforms, all must interwork
- Open spaces were the first open platforms
- Future proof by having simpler buildings, easy to reconfigure
- Must understand materials and design - long term sustainable rather than short term fashion, and easy to pull down and rebuild if we make blunders (example: glass tower architecture - very expensive to cool and heat)
- Need to be honest and cull "fashionable" new approaches that aren't working - eg private battery car service providers are setting up proprietary spaces in cities, reducing the commons space and reducing network effects of integrating all transport effects

3. Ordinary people must buy into "Smart" if is to succeed

- Too often what is deemed as worthy is very educated (Western) middle class view, not what ordinary people want. Smart is just the latest potential victim
- "Smart" technology already means the relationship between citizen and infrastructure is changing, harder to impose worthies' views
- Citizen initiated (and managed?) infrastructure
- People should own the smart city - innovation by the 95% not for the 95%
- User centred design key
- Most "smart" systems today are really irritating, do not model what people do properly

4. Huge Potential...

- Key is using technology to liberate human brain cycles, eg Open Innovation and peer production, but this attacks the professions so tends to be downplayed
- Major savings from co-ordinating currently un-linked services, self servicing of many things etc
- The case for the urban commons - lean thinking in space and time needed, space cannot have precise functions (aka multi-use), "non spaces" are becoming more important
- the "electric agora" as well as the physical one are driving collaboration, creativity etc

5. ...but we can't ignore the potential for Data Dystopia

- Data vs privacy huge nettle to grasp - widespread ignorance of data danger, even (especially?) among techies
- Very seductive - Informed and Lefty types all hate Amazon, Facebook surveillance etc - but all use it.
- Wide area surveillance drones, mashing Facebook to number plates, Visa can predict divorce with 90% accuracy etc. All possible, all useful, all risky
- Huge opportunities for behavioural data sucked off eg mobile phone (data often coming from war on terror technology and laws) - but huge implications for privacy invasion
- ICT does not have the capability of reflection, needs governance.
- Beware Siren calls for smart tech to be engaging, gamified etc - and drive behavioural change. Test first and long
- Too many of the Smart New Things have no smart planning - no tax, regulation, etc of these - could easily see mistakes of the past repeated
- Too many have naive views on "happy collaboration", also need to think about dealing with underhand citizens, criminals and cheats

6. Good Governance is the main factor in long term sucess

- You can take 2 cities of equal inputs - GDP, wealth, tech levels etc - and see huge differences in outcome just a few years later, never mind decades
- Large amount of local control tends to drive success of cities
- Level of financial control / tax revenue is a good proxy for local control, tells you about who has power and what the city can do
- Smart Cities will rely even more on good underlying infrastructure, sound laws, low corruption etc.
- Key is to make many people buy in (not just the "actives")
- Senses of Community and Trust are essential
- So challenge is to "create technology that increases trust and empathy"

There was a very useful concept of data being "translucent", and not transparent, to overcome the potential Data dystopia. But I think the best one line summary of these trends, for me, was by the participant who said he saw 2 main themes in the day:

1. Appropriateness - Smart technologies must be Appropriate technologies (there were various Schumacherian allusions during the day but to my mind this is an area of thought that really needs expanding on)
2. Appropriated - if the citizens fail to control the technology and its controllers, they most certainly will be.

Another thread that is useful to pull out is the emerging problem in the UK Cityscape for rest of the 2010s

- Although cities usually over perform vs. the country economically, in the UK this is only true for London as the UK ignores 2nd Tier cities
- countries (eg UK) that overinvest in the major city vs 2nd tier cities underperform overall
- Current UK politics drives conflicting objectives, gives impossible circles for City Halls to square, as the Future City must:

- drive economic development
- give everyone and equitable quality of life
- can't harm the environment
- And must be sustainable, resilient, affordable, equal, transparent etc etc

- But in UK, 80%+ of the City infrastructure has already been built, and much is old and expensive to maintain
- Digital Exclusion - reduced savings from Smart Tech unless all nearly can be be weaned off old systems, so how do we deal with the last 20%?
- And UK social spend is already not sustainable for legal welfare/social service obligations, never mind discretionary ones, so some very hard choices will have to be made soon
- All governments shy away from these hard choices, tend to wait until cliff appears. Cliff probably has appeared re benefits - people increasingly not supporting generous welfare, 60 to 23% over last c 2 decades
- Even so, UK will have to increase private sector finance as there is no more public sector money
- Need to blend state and market, need to have structures that allow entrepreneurs, Market, public sector stepping in where there is Market failure
- This is risky, interests are not aligned - so need good City governance - Not all these needs will self organise, not all needs will be profitable, not all suppliers will be trustworthy
- UK has to shift relationship between city and state, more decisions at city level

As one person summed it up, in the UK "smart technology is very likely to be mainly deployed to help us pick our way through our crumbling infrastructure"