smart cities

 by Esteve Almirall

Data & Cities

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Last Friday November 25 Barcelona City Hall & Esade held in Barcelona an event around the use and the governance of Data in Cities. Central to this event was the discussion of what cities have to do with data and how to approach the tsunami around Big Data, Data Analytics and Data Science that is shaking and transforming companies and organizations around the world.

It’s a very new subject and I think it is fair to say that local authorities are mostly unprepared to deal with it. To summarize, not only they lack the internal competencies but best practices and general policy frameworks don’t exist yet. Only a few cities: New York, Seoul, Amsterdam, Helsinki, now Barcelona … are exploring this uncharted territory with a diversity of approaches.

Last Friday we had the opportunity to be exposed to some of them. Among all I would like to highlight three.

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in Big Data / Data Analytics / Data Analytics in Cities 0 comments
 by Esteve Almirall

The future of eGov .-

open311

 

Last year I attended a presentation of what it was supposed to be the new eGov strategy of a major Smart City. They presented to us the motivation, how much technology has changed from a web presence to multi-channel, multi-screen. How people now look at more than one screen at the same time – do you have friends working in marketing? Then you know it ! – how cities have to keep up with these developments …

Underlying the presentation was a message expressed in the form of a metaphor: Wouldn’t it be nice if all city services were available in your mobile? The whole city services in your smartphone! The city-hall in your pocket !

Metaphors are always compelling! Our abilities as a specie are dramatically skewed towards visual representations which makes visual metaphors extremely easy to grasp and capable of mobilizing our imagination.  However, for this to happen they must be new, they should not be already incorporate into our lives. And, let me tell you, everybody was checking Facebook and twitter during this presentation …

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in IT & Entrepreneurship / Policies on Innovation & Smart Cities / Smart Cities 0 comments
 by Esteve Almirall

Smart Cities 2.0: Cities of & for the people !!!

SmartCities20

We are witnessing a transition point, a moment of change in the understanding of what a Smart City is.

Until very recently the predominant vision of a Smart Cities was defined around the use of centralized technology to aggregate information and manage cities more efficiently. The epitome of this perspective materialized with the command and control center. A centralized hearth and brains for cities that allow them to presumably manage almost everything more efficiently.

However, there was a big problem with this conception, a city is not a machine but a social structure made by and for citizens. Traffic, congestion and energy consumption matters, no doubt, but what matters most is how dynamic, fair, active, alive, entrepreneur and happy a cities and their citizens are. All of this has little to do with this vision of a centralized command and control center.

There is now a comeback to the basics: citizens and cities as the place for social interaction. The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), a peer to peer network of local government professionals from over 120 cities across the US and Canada comprising cities such as Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, Vancouver, etc., recently published a study Getting Smart About Smart Cities promoting the idea of Smart Cities 2.0 as putting “people first” and stressing the idea of technology as a tool to use in the service of citizens.

The idea is not really new. If you take a look at the Smart Cities projects in Europe you will find many going in this direction. Probably they were not as visible as the ones being backed by the industry but they are there.

However the devil, like in many occasions, hides behind the implementation. Implementing a centralized tech oriented view of Smart Cities is fairly easy, you can borrow decades of experience on developing technological systems and apply them, it is complicated, but not really complex.

However, using IT for redefining social interaction is in many ways, terra incognita.

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in Policies on Innovation & Smart Cities / Smart Cities 0 comments
 by Esteve Almirall

Open Innovation & Smart Cities

 

OI in the PS - coverThis is a quite old article that Henry Chesbrough and I wrote and got published in English on September 2014 due to the interest expressed by a large number of international delegations.

Our vision is changing, because Open Innovation is a moving field, particularly in the Public Sector and Smart Cities. However the one that we presented is still in many ways completely valid.

Here you can find the whole article and following the conclusions:

Innovation and cities are two concepts that have always gone hand in hand. Geoffrey West, who for many years was the director of the well-known Santa Fe Institute, has described the positive correlation between the size of cities and their innovation capacity in terms of a power-law (Bettencourt et al., 2007). That is, a city that is 10 times larg- er is 17 times more innovative, but a city that is 50 times big- ger is 130 times more innovative.

Large cities have always been considered places that welcome subcultures (Fischer, 1995) and non-conven- tional residents (Florida, 2005).

In this article, we have described the theory that the prevalent model of innovation in cities continues to be based on a structure of providing predefined services. This model does not include elements that enable cities to reinvent themselves, which is what is sought in smart city proposals (Florida, 2010).

The reinvention of cities, which should lead us closer to smart cities, requires the reinvention of the governance of cities themselves, particularly in terms of the manage- ment of innovation. This point is further supported if we consider the reality of cities as entities that compete for talent and creativity (Florida, 2008), in a world where competition is increasingly defined by the capacity to innovate, not just by efficiency or productivity.

In the article, we have focused particularly on inter- mediaries in innovation processes, particularly public intermediaries. We centred on a specific mechanism: the use of urban space as an area for research and experi- mentation by the citizens themselves through urban labs.

The existence of intermediaries is possibly one of the most relevant characteristics of open innovation process- es. However, although open innovation is prevalent in the private sector, it is only just beginning to be intro- duced in the private sector. Urban labs will definitely undergo considerable transformation in the coming years, and shape this new scenario of open innovation in the public field.

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