This week I am attending the above conference. The number of presentations is mind boggling. To give a little taste, there are three major bodies; Smart Cities, IWater and Circular Economy. There are 14,400 visitors, 590 Exhibitors, 421 Speakers and 600 Cities represented.
Over and above the usual, keynote, plenary and motivational speakers, there are numerous roundtables and many speakers in the following categories:
- Governance
- Economy
- Society
- Sustainability
- Mobility
- Data & technology
- Safety
After only day one I can confirm that it is highly recommended for anyone interested in strategy for local authorities.
A couple of interesting points;
- Cities have been around much longer than countries and will remain so in the future (consider what could happen to California and the USA!!)
- Modern cities developed more than 100 years ago and they must be much better in the next 100 years than they are today. Many have aging infrastructure, growing urbanisation means additional stress on the existing infrastructure, roads are clogged, housing is in short supply and too expensive for many including the elderly, the young and artists to name a few, technology is taking over jobs and many citizens are disengaged.
How can we use technology to improve things?
A couple of examples of what an old and modern city are doing.
Dubai
Dubai is now focused on the ‘happiness’ of citizens. They once focused on technology but found they need buy in from the people and therefore now focus on giving citizens the information they need to make better decisions.
This has led to the need to open up the cities data and they have an interesting method of doing this. Naturally in the initial stages department heads were very interested in obtaining the data from other departments but were adamant they weren’t going to open up their own data. However this has now been turned on its head once the power of the information was identified.
Dubai developed a collaboration between all departments of the city. They use WhatsApp Groups to communicate and experiment and challenge within the group. They initially focused on neighborhoods given that a city is a series of strong neighborhoods. They found that through collaboration there were many opportunities to do more with the limited resources available because energy, housing, community, water, cycling and walking etc. could all inter relate.
It is interesting to see the similarities here with my last post on the business improvement process ‘Toyota Kata’. Dubai have a big vision of the future that will continue to evolve but they broke this huge goal down into manageable steps by focusing on communities and then experimented and iterated to come up with the ideas that allowed them to develop cities with ‘happier’ citizens.
The final piece of advice from Dubai was that the key is to make a start. We can’t wait for perfect information, take one initiative, deploy it, learn from it and then scale it across the city.
Barcelona
Barcelona is considered one of the most advanced resilient cities in the world. Twelve years ago they had ZERO budget for sustainability but they began to collaborate and based on a shared value across all participants they began identifying opportunities.
Barcelona has set up a ‘Resilience Board’. This includes all council departments as well as all external contractors and is non competitive where they can discuss the city’s issues relating to water, energy, social housing and roading etc. Any upgrading is then considered by the board to maximize collaboration. All the city’s data is made available to this board. Many efficiencies have been identified which in itself supports resilience.
The city is well down the track of developing ‘superblocks’ (blocks within streets) to move from a car oriented city to a more resilient walking and cycling city. There will be a 60% decrease in roading available to cars within the city and a 70% increase in public space (much of this ex roads) for walking and cycling. As someone commented, we are created to walk not to sit and drive!! This has the added bonus’ of; better health from more exercise, much less pollution in the city and measurably lowered noise levels, not to mention citizens feeling much better about their city.
An interesting point was that initially they reduced the speed level in the ‘superblocks’ from 50 to 10 km/h and practically everyone stopped driving in these streets.
Food for thought. How do we make our cities more resilient? Remove cars and put the focus on walking and cycling which is better for us all?
A final thought passed on at the conference. Let’s make our focus not on the poor being able to afford a car but on the rich preferring to use public transport, walk or cycle.