Smart City Indexes

I recently read a post on Linkedin about how to rank Smart Cities and a number of comments underneath pointed at various methodologies used to do this. Having looked at a number of these over the years I thought that I’d give my own take on this.

How to Rank Smart Cities

You don’t. This isn’t a competition and there is no requirement to see who’s ‘best’. 

The whole point of a smart city is to make the lives of its citizens better. How you define better will depend on the city and the unique issues that that city has. You can not therefore create a general index of cities across the world and try to rank them into some type of leaderboard based on a set of generic criteria. 

Each country is very unique and each city and town within those countries is also unique and they suffer from individual problems. Measuring a city’s smartness based on whether they have a car parking app is completely irrelevant (one example of a measure I’ve seen!). There are many cities where poverty is a huge problem and owning a car is a pipe dream to many let alone worrying about saving two minutes on a journey to park it! 

Even looking at poverty across the world, the differences are huge, compare some of the worst areas of the UK to those of Brazil or India, again huge disparity and each city will need it’s own unique smart solutions and the measure of success of these solutions may take years to fully understand the impact. 

What we do need instead of a meaningless ranking list is a list of cities, issues, solutions and results. Only then will we have a real idea about how technology and smart thinking is really helping to improve citizens lives. Solutions that work well in Brasil, may not work well in India or the UK. The cultural make up, politics, history and background of cities will be a huge factor in the success of programmes. 

Taking the smart parking app as a use case, as it’s a current pet hate of mine. These rankings are measuring if a city has one. What they’re not looking at is the number of users vs drivers not using, number of spaces available, number of spaces not available when you arrive at the destination, the average journey time saved of those using the app vs those not, drop in emissions due to this saving, effect on people's health due to the app. When we start seeing figures coming out around the technology and real long term air quality benefits that have real health improvements, then using this as a ranking tool is irrelevant. Of course there needs to be pilots of this technology but the results from multiple cities need measuring and publishing. And remember the answer to parking issues might be more car parks, removing on-road parking, park and rides, etc. But you won’t know this until the studies are complete. 

But if in your index or competition you score points for having the parking app then some cities will install this without really understanding the problem it solves or the outcomes of that or the differences it will make to peoples lives.

So for now, can we stop worrying about where cities are on a meaningless index and look at the actual problems that have been identified and the solutions that are being put in place and the outcomes of these. 

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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.

Smart Cities - what is the problem?

When exploring or researching Smart Cities it is difficult to find much in the way of problem-solving solutions, of real-world problems, with backed up evidence of how these problems have been solved. Most of the information is from the tech companies providing the tools to measure the problem and ideas on what the solution may be without really solving anything.

The issue for me lies in the fact that tech companies are building products and then finding a problem it solves without really understanding if it is a problem in the first place. For example, when I worked at Peterborough City Council I was often ‘sold’ solutions to make traffic flow quicker. But as a city, Peterborough had the second fastest commuting time in the country. Peterborough’s issue was around Health and Social Care and that’s where we needed the technology companies to stand up and provide offerings.

Parking space occupancy sensors are all well and good, but is on street parking causing that much of a problem, is it causing more emissions, affecting people’s health? Once installed, how many cars are using the app, how many cars are going for the same space, how much emissions has it reduced and what long term difference does this really make? Surely the sensible ‘smart’ solution is not to have on street parking and have multi-storey car parks or park and rides where parking traffic is removed completely.

A problem, a tool to measure and a solution

The point being made here is that for smart or smarter cities to really have an impact then there needs to be three things; a problem, a tool to measure the problem and a solution. And it needs to happen in that order. What I would like to see is the technology companies working closer with the public sector to understand the unique difficulties of each city (there’s more cities in the UK than just London) and then look at the best way to use technology to measure the problem (there’s still a place for sensors) and then work with Urban Planners, Architects, Landscape Architects and Scientists etc. to actually provide plausible solutions that make a real difference.

I’d love to see some of the big tech companies that talk about their smart city platforms or technologies then introduce me to a range of non-technical staff who fully understand how cities are designed and built and what improvements we can make or retrofit to improve people’s lives. Being able to then measure these changes will provide the business case for more investment into the sector.

As with a lot of projects that I come across, especially digital transformation ones, the focus is on the technology and not the transformation. The transformation is the key element that digital supports or enables. The same is true of Smart Cities, it is about improving the quality of lives and the technology is part of what enables it but is not the starting point. In the same way that digital transformation should be called ‘enabling transformation through digital technology’ smart cities should also be ‘enabling the improvement of life quality through smart technology’.

Home is Where the Smart is

Most of us are now aware of the Smart City concept whilst few still fully understand it or even how to start working towards it. For me the issue lies partly in the use of the word City, which immediately excludes the vast majority of councils, but also the focus on the technology, devices, sensors and the data. Whilst these are undoubtedly important, without understanding the why, what or the how behind them then it very quickly becomes another IT project destined to fail.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group report on Smart Cities gives some good background (with little detail) on what a Smart City is or should be but is very high level and doesn’t give the necessary detail to make this of use to most areas of the UK, but does lead the way in discussing the fact that it’s not necessarily about the technology.

So how do we make it relevant for all. Well firstly drop the word City. Then secondly we need to strip the concept right back to actually understanding what the issues are in the areas in which we live and the problems that we want to solve. I have a huge issue with ‘New’ Smart Cities, i.e. one’s built in the desert with lots of technology embedded in them. Unless you’re solving a known problem then how Smart can you really be.

I had the pleasure of attending the launch of “Ten Essays to Shape the Place of Future Places’ by Stride Treglown recently. The launch was headlined by Duncan Cadbury discussing the Bournville Village Trust covering both the history and the work they are currently engaged in.

What struck home was how relevant the vision of George Cadbury over 100 years ago still is to today’s society and how with the addition of technology could improve the lives of citizens up and down the country.

Before I jump straight back to the technology lets first take this back to the concept of the home. George Cadbury sought to provide decent quality homes in a healthy environment, something that is core of a councils ‘business’. The Local Government Act 2000 states that councils have a general power to ‘promote economic, social and environmental well-being’ and fundamentally under a range of different services the home is still core to this.

So what do we already know about the home that could help promote well-being for our citizens and how can we match this to Smart and technology.

Well first off, we know where the home is. And if we know where it is then that means we have access to all sorts of geospatial data about the area in which it sits. This could include socio-deprivation data, topography, access to parks and leisure facilities, local amenities, take-aways, betting shops and more.

Moving back to the house itself, we know all properties have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), we know the rough value (sites like Zoopla help this), we know the Council Tax Band, whether single person discount is applied, we’ll have voter registration information and should there be children of school age we’ll hold attainment and attendance information too. Just using these sets of data (assuming we have agreement to do so) starts to give us a very good view into a household, its make-up and the area in which it sits.

Multiply this over multiple homes across an area and you can start to gain a real insight into the area in which you operate and start to understand the issues that are affecting lives and wellbeing.

To begin to move this into the area of Smart, we can then add more subsets of data to this picture of the home and its surrounding area.

These could include Public Health data from Public Health England that covers a multitude of illness and health issues, and Public Health reports by councils. Agreeing a standard to operate to for making this data geospatial would benefit this more but it can work in its current guise. Again moving on a step and going back to location means we can now plot roads and now utilising Smart sensors we can also monitor traffic flows on those roads, air quality around the area of the home and weather on a micro-climate level.

So given all the information we now have we can see how traffic, air quality, deprivation can all impact on health and well being and start to look at the interventions that can be put in place to improve quality of life.

This may be as simple as planting trees between a road and a housing estate, to the cycle schemes of Groningen, to improving traffic flows to reduce emissions around pollution hot spots. By understanding the issues of the area then you can start to make Smart decisions about how to improve them.

Moving back to the home we know have a range of Smart devices that can also add to the wealth of data already accessible about the home. These include such things as Temperature monitoring (Hive, Nest), Light Levels (there are many studies on the implications of this), Energy and Water Usage (Smart Meters) and with today’s social care IOT sensors even Movement, Eating (when are fridges and food cupboards opened) and waking times are possible to monitor.

Whilst this may come across to some as a bit ‘big brother’, understanding this data when mapped to the previous sets and then compared across regional divides or differing areas of deprivation can again give a real insight into how people are living their lives and we can start to correlate both positives and negatives that impact on health and wellbeing, both physically and mentally.

And yet there still more, as a council you will hold benefit data, possibly employment data, resident ages, social care, homelessness, maybe even waste data, how much from an area is recycled, how much green waste comes from an area etc. The list of data that relates to a home or a location is nearly endless but each bit is part of a jigsaw of data that can provide a valuable insight into the interventions required by the council to improve the lives of the residents it serves.

With the right permission from residents there is also no reason why you couldn’t the also map health data (fitness trackers), food / shopping data (after all the supermarkets collect this everyday in return for a voucher!), data on journeys to work (bus, train, walking, car), location of work, salary bracket and even ‘happiness’.

Why is this important?

Understanding the impact of the home environment is key to ensuring citizens have the best chance of living a healthy and happy life by delivering the right intervention at the right time.

To give an example we could look at a school boy or girl whose grades are failing and attendance records are declining. In today’s council this information will be available to the school and the education department only and it’s unlikely that they will have access to any other council data, nor will it be looked at. In this instance decisions will be made without the full information available. We know from studies that schools are designed to give children the best environment for learning. This can include lesson length, recreation time, class size and light levels.

However, most children then take homework home and do this in a completely different environment. Now what if that environment was noisy (road traffic), cold, dark potentially damp and let’s say the child also has a number of siblings. Now compare that environment to a child who goes home to a large house, that’s heated, large windows, in a cul-de-sac and has no siblings. Who’s getting the best advantage? With the correct data and understanding of the issue it may well be that the issue isn’t the child’s effort, but the location of where they do their homework.

If the homework is therefore of a poor level and that child feels despondent then this could lead to worse attention in classes and eventually lack of attendance. At which point the solution could be twofold, first could sit with the housing department to intervene in the home, sort the damp, improve the heating and fit double glazing to soundproof the windows. This is a one off capital cost with no direct return on investment but could provide huge long term benefits to the child. The second option could be to then run a homework club at the school and have the child do their homework in an environment designed for learning.

This is hypothetical but can show how data from a wider source could deliver more direct and better interventions than by using siloed departmental data.

The same information held could help Planning, looking at the impact of new housing estates or developments could impact on the surrounding areas, traffic and micro climates and maybe change the way we plan these.

What are the problems?

Where to start….. I can’t cover all the issues but a few key ones are below:

Permission to use the data will always be forefront in any problem relating to citizen information. Most of the data mentioned in the above is already available as open data. Recording and keeping personal data will always be the choice of the citizen but by showing tangible outcomes of using the data and making Smart concepts a reality rather than a theoretical concept to many will help with this.

Data standards and data quality will also have an impact on this. Part of the core message around moving councils to a single platform in order to collect data in a useable and shareable format and removing silo’s of data and applications that can’t speak to each other without expensive API’s. Currently most councils are set up to deliver services vertically through single services instead of horizontally or pan-council. The same home or household will touch a council in multiple areas and have data held in multiple systems. Creating that single view of the household will alleviate this and help councils deliver better services and interventions to its citizens.

Funding — who pays for what and who benefits the most. Taking the homework example above, should the education department pay the housing costs or should the housing department pay. The beneficiary of keeping the child in school and in an environment where they thrive may have long term benefits to both health and social care too. Once you bring the CCG or NHS into the model the funding becomes even more complicated. One of the key recommendations of the APPG report is:

Develop Return on Investment models which recognise that smart solutions apply across departments and silos

This is vital in encouraging all government services in acting in the best interest of the citizen and not ring fencing their own budgets or savings. Until the funding model is fixed the concept of Smart Cities will remain a concept for most. However, every council, whether large or small can start to take steps as above to move to a Smart model with the home at the very heart of it.

The Birth of Circular Data

Ok so there already is such a thing as circular data, but it’s very different to the concept I’m going to talk about here.

There’s already been much written and lots of money spent over the years about the Circular Economy with many countries, cities and towns across the world looking at supporting the principles of its concept. In 2015 Peterborough won the World’s Smartest City award largely due to its work in this area. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation whose mission is to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, states that if there are three key principles to consider:

Design out waste and pollution

Keep products and materials in use

Regenerate natural systems

What’s clear though is that you can apply the same principles and thinking to data and how it is used across cities, towns, businesses and public services with regards to transforming services, by replacing some key words with the word data.

The Foundation also states that “Companies need to build core competencies in circular design to facilitate product reuse, recycling and cascading”. Again the word product can be easily replaced with the word data. Each of the three principles above are still valid and I will explain each of these in more detail below:

Design out waste and pollution

Many key systems are standalone and not designed to share data across services but through implementing a platform approach to both services and systems this data can be used more widely throughout the organisation (although inline with DPA principles) and siloed data that is used once and then ‘wasted’ can be designed out. This can be looked at in various guises such as single view of the customer or household through to using the data you hold in more ways than you currently do but also re-imagining services so that waste and lost effort are removed from the process and helping move to a data driven decision making model. Where possible data created by one system or service should be used to improve all the services you deliver and not ‘lost’. For pollution from a data perspective we should be thinking about removing duplicate records and bad data.

Keep data in use

As per the above point, keeping data in use is vital to achieving service improvements. I’ve worked with numerous public sector services where data is used by one team and not another; when it could clearly play a mutually beneficial role. Services need to learn and understand where ‘external’ data can be used to improve their services. By external data we mean any data not generated by the service itself. In the same way that a circular economy promotes the use of one company’s ‘waste’ to be another’s benefit; to keep materials and products in use, here we are keeping data in use. (Marmite probably being the world’s best example of this — and yes I love it). With machine learning, the machines are reliant on an ever increasing amount of good data to refine the responses and answers given. Arcus Answer which is a contact centre solution utilising the AWS Lex solution is a good example of this. All AI solutions can only ever be as good as the data they are utilising and there needs to be a constant feed.

Regenerate natural systems

We can look at this principle from a number of angles when relating it to data. For a pure natural system we could be looking at the Internet of Things (or the internet of data, as the data is the key not the ‘thing’ collecting it) which could look at everything from air and water quality (improving nature) through to a Social systems whereby transforming social care with IOT can both improve the lives of the vulnerable to look after themselves to enabling a family to be more in control of the care family members (and therefore improving the most natural of systems of family looking after family) which can now both be achieved. (https://www.youralcove.com/)

I’m passionate about data and its role in transforming services.The platform approach to Local Government services not only helps in transforming individual services but brings those services together to give that single view of the customer across multiple services. I’m also passionate about how better use of the data can improve services, a subject that I’ve presented to conferences previously, and how understanding the data you hold and being able to interrogate it in a meaningful and visual manner can show previously unseen patterns and anomalies.

It’s likely that as companies and services start to understand the concept of ‘Circular Data’ that it will will naturally spawn a circular data economy as well as playing a leading part in a helping to deliver the more conventional circular economy. The more that we all do to move towards both a circular economy and a circular data model then the better the services that can be delivered and the better economic and environmental health of our cities and countries can be achieved. With a lot of funding and effort being aimed at the Circular Economy, I think it’s time the the same levels should be applied to Circular Data taking the current Economy principles and frameworks and re-aligning them to better use of data.

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