Realising the dream of a UK Smart City
The focus must be on the life improvement as it also has to be on the transformation and that starts with understanding what problem you have that you are trying to solve.
I don’t think we’ll have a smart city for many years in the UK. How do you judge when a city becomes smart? There are lots of initiatives in lots of cities happening and all of them can be deemed as smart in some way or another. But I don’t believe that there’s a point at which he can say that one city is smart, and one isn’t. What the focus needs to be on is looking at cities that have identified a problem and then used technology to provide a real solution.
Although there are many definitions of smart and how it relates to devices ‘speaking’ to each other without human interaction, when it comes to smart cities, for me you can only be smart if you’ve identified a problem and fixed it. Surely that’s smart. Flooding a city with technology without real solutions isn’t smart in any way.
Whilst there’s been talk of brand-new cities being built around the world as smart cities, the fact is that this just relates to the technology side. How can a brand-new city where no-one lives yet be smart for no problems have been identified and resolved? I get that they have used information from other cities in their design, but until you have an active population living there it’s impossible to identify what the daily problems are going to be.
Not a one size fits all approach
What the private and public sector need to do is to ensure that when smart cities are being discussed that there is a broad range of expertise in the room. This will mean technology companies, scientists, architects, landscape architects, planners, energy companies, house builders all working together to find solutions to problems. Throwing technology at a problem doesn’t make it smart. And nor does a one size fits all approach. The key problems and issues of London will likely be different to Glasgow or Bristol or Norwich and therefore the smart city concept needs to be applied on an individual basis.
By bringing the public sector together to provide their main problems, technology companies can work with expertise to find solutions to measure the problems, and then solutions to help fix them on a meaningful basis for each city. The government should be facilitating these meetings if they want to showcase to the rest of the world how smart the UK is.
Being able to produce a business case or whitepaper that states here was the problem, this is what we did, and this was the outcome would be invaluable. The funding of this should also be government led as there is far too much budget crossover when it comes to the outcomes. Improving air quality for example by reducing traffic is a council initiative but the benefactors will be the NHS or even the social care service in maybe 20 years’ time. If we’re going to move to becoming smart cities, then we need long term sustainable funding being made available as the benefits of doing so may be years in the coming.
Long term funding for long term results
The government needs to take a long term view that the benefactors of smart cities are the citizens themselves and that seeing the benefits of smart solutions may not be evidenced for years to come (improving air quality may reduce the number of people with asthma, for example, but how long will that take to evidence this?)
In summary if the government really want to do smart cities properly then the focus needs to come off the technology and put on the problems, ensure that cities and experts are brought together to identify solutions and then agree long term funding for long term results.