BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

Imagine then that you are the Mayor of a city somewhere in the world. Your city may be large or small, a rural town or a busy financial center, expanding or in decline; whatever your city is like, you have the right to aspire to a vision in which your citizens can live a dignified life and look to the future with optimism and trust in their government. Indeed, you may be asking: Are these new trends and technologies relevant to me and my people? If I engage with citizens and local communities and promote open innovation leveraging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to their fullest potential, what difference will it make? How are the real (wicked) problems we are facing going to be addressed, and what will my city look like as a result?

Let's start with one of the leading approaches that applies ICT to urban settings: the Smart City model. This concept is based on the city-wide deployment of sophisticated technology infrastructures capable of sensing what is happening in a city in fine detail: where cars are parked, which hospital beds are empty, what the water quality in the river is, etc. ICT networks bring all that information together into an integrated overview of city processes and critical issues, while interactive control systems allow direct intervention (rescheduling stop lights, redirecting ambulances, etc). to fine-tune this city-as-machine, adapting it to specific needs and circumstances.

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Defining Standards for Open Data Services

In the EU's CitySDK project, cities and developers worked together to define common technical standards for Open Data, through which applications can access information and services from any city that adopts the common interface. Standards were defined for tourism and transport data and also for citizen reporting of city issues.

This Smart City vision is a very technology-driven approach to understanding the way a city works. Nonetheless, it is a useful model for two main reasons: a) many of the underlying technology systems are technically mature and can potentially bring real advantages to the management of city services, and b) the integrated vision at the base of the Smart City model, where the key is not so much the single networks but the systemic impact of interconnecting them, draws our attention to the need for a fully cross-sector perspective.

A brief look at one of the main Smart City systems – infrastructures for the distribution of electrical energy called Smart Grids – illustrates how this interactive and integrated approach can lead to significant gains. The concept here is to replace the one-way distribution networks, designed to deliver electricity from centralized power plants to individual homes and businesses, with an interactive two-way system. This new approach not only allows individuals to generate electricity as well as consume it in a technically savvy way, through meters that allow locally produced energy to enter the grid for distribution elsewhere, but also provides a detailed and real time awareness of where energy comes from and where it's going.

On the one hand, this opens the way for an increased adoption of renewable energy sources, whose unpredictable behavior (energy production is generally reliant on the presence of sun, wind, waves, etc). makes it difficult to plan for. On the other, a widespread distribution of affordable sensors and actuators – some installations monitor and control every appliance in a home – helps individuals, families, and local groups and communities be aware of exactly how much energy they are consuming at any given moment and why. In most such installations, people can remotely control appliances to save consumption or to program an appliance to turn on and off as energy becomes available. In this way, a key determinant for more sustainable energy usage – individual and collective behavior – is influenced by the availability of appropriate information together with the possibility to take action.

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Smart Santander

One of the Smart City vision's earlier large-scale experiments is being carried out in the Spanish city of Santander, now an ENoLL Living Lab. 12,000 sensors have been deployed to monitor environmental parameters, parking space occupancy, traffic intensity, and parks and gardens irrigation. These sensors are all connected to a city monitoring and control network and allow the development of specific applications.

A fully developed Smart City schema applies a similar logic to all the functional elements of a city – transportation networks, waste management, air, and water quality monitoring, etc. – to allow for an integrated control of city systems, especially when such systems are linked with the different departments of a city administration that are relevant for each service. In addition, combining information provided by sensor networks with applications running on citizens' smartphones allows to personalize city services according to both what's going on in the surrounding world as well as a user's specific position, profile, and patterns of behavior.

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Smart City Malaga

The Malaga Living Lab is specifically focused on Smart City infrastructures for energy, deploying state-of-the-art technologies in power generation, storage, demand management, efficient lighting, electric mobility, and energy efficiency in office and residential buildings. These infrastructures are integrated with smart management technologies for energy supply and demand.

The futuristic Smart City vision has a strong appeal, particularly in its promise of being able to control an increasingly complex world. Problems often arise during implementation, however, and this suggests that technology alone is not enough. Sophisticated and complex infrastructures and systems can have very high costs, often making roll-out a lengthy process; even if and when things go well, important components may be outdated by the time they're fully operational. While such systems appear to work well on paper or even in pilot tests, the real world is inevitably more complex, with both human and system behaviors that are impossible to fully model and predict. Continuous adjustments and fixes can make the final price tag rise far beyond original expectations, with the additional risk of 'technology lock-in' forever tying a city to a given provider's proprietary standards. Finally, complex technology systems often introduce governance mechanisms that are external to - if not in conflict with - the structure and operations of a city administration; this mismatch between the technology system's implicit structure and the real workings of city life is what most often leads to problems.

In short, the human dimension is too often missing from Smart City models. For all the user-centered design processes, user profiling, and context awareness, when people are considered as 'end users' and not an integral part of the system itself, they end up doing things differently than the engineers expected. The only way to really bring people into the process is to start with people, not the technologies, from the initial moments of conceiving and designing a technological system or a service application. This is what brings us back to the Living Lab and similar approaches, which were originally conceived of as research methods. Indeed the starting point is to realize that by now technologies are no longer an end-product, but rather a platform allowing a continuous process of creation, development, and modification.

In a similar fashion, running a city is no longer only a question of efficient administration, but has essentially become a continuous co-design process, engaging with different stakeholders and exploring new solutions together. Previously, citizens were considered as passive objects of city services: they take the bus, dump the trash, send children to school, etc. The job of the Mayor and city administration was to provide those services at a sufficient level of quality to keep people happy. Not only is this scenario no longer possible, but each of these services – transportation, waste management, education, and so forth – is changing rapidly, in part due to the impact of new technologies. Perhaps one of their most important effects has however been that, as city budgets are cut and essential services reduced or even lacking entirely, citizens demonstrate the ability to organize alternative solutions themselves, from car-pooling to caring for the disabled, up to the organization of local currencies.