John F Kennedy once said not to ask what the city can do for you but what you can do for the city.  Currently this is limited for many varied reasons but with the technology revolution many new opportunities are being devised.  Some of the interesting points raised at the 2016 Barcelona Smart Cities conference include;

Participatory budgeting.  Some cities including in Canada are now experimenting with using the internet to allow citizens to show their preferences for where limited funding should be focused.

Social housing.  In one experiment $1m of maintenance budget is allocated directly by the tenants.  They get ownership and participate in setting the priorities.  As is common when we give groups of people these responsibilities they use it at least as effectively as a local authorities maintenance team.

People as sensors.  Most people have a computer in their pockets these days and can easily feed back information from wherever they are in the city.  Rather than have a city full of electronic sensors which require significant maintenance, why not use people as the sensors?  This is already happening to some extent with ‘news as it happens’ and roading authorities (and the likes of Waze) take data from mobile phones to show how much traffic on any given road which is then used to advise the public of the likely travel times.

I see considerable potential for this developing further; one example; a small walled town in France has an issue with the wall crumbling as time goes on and this creates a potential health and safety issue.  Someone suggested installing many low cost sensors in the wall which would feedback centrally if there was movement in that part of the wall.  Maybe instead every citizen could have an app and when they notice any movement or cracking they could take a photo and send this to the council who could assess the photo and arrange for the necessary repairs.   Similarly I see potential for Local Authority apps so citizens can take a photo of say a leaking water pipe or an uprooted amenity tree and send it directly to the council to take the necessary actions.  The more people who report any particular fault would identify how significant the issue is and move the repair up the priority queue.

Additionally the app can make the feedback available to all people who live in a particular post code for example with an option to swipe ‘support’ or ‘don’t support’ and aggregating this citizens reporting data helps budget and prioritise.

As more and more cities become walk and bike friendly the greater the opportunity for them to be the city’s sensors.

Albania has gone from 17 cars to 170,000 cars over a short period of years and this has created the usual problems.  They now give people an app with access to CCTV throughout the city to encourage the use of public transport by showing signs of the pollution levels and what this can be reduced to when they legislate carless days.

While I was in Stuttgart, Germany (just prior to the Barcelona expo) there were electronic signs up throughout the city showing the ppm of toxic car fumes and there had recently been days when cars had been banned because the levels had reached unacceptable levels.  Another factor in the death knell of the Internal Combustion Engine.

So with all these living sensors in our city’s, let’s develop the means for them to be engaged with improving their local environment and in the process improve their sense of community.