RESEARCH REPORT D2
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The Smart City World Expo 2016 was held in Barcelona from November 15-17 and brought together innovators in smart cities and future urban development. The consulting firm TGAC attended to research innovations that will shape cities and mobility in the future, such as for their work on the 2020 Dubai World Expo. Over three days, TGAC attended talks from thought leaders and interacted with technologies. Key topics discussed included the challenges of rapid urbanization, taking a human-centered approach to development, and ensuring new technologies actually improve quality of life.
RESEARCH REPORT D2
- 1. 15th – 17th November 2016 SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS 2016: THE STATE OF THE FUTURE VIEWS AND RESPONSES NOTES PREPARED BY PETE GARDOM AND TIM GARDOM WWW.TGACOM.COM
- 2. SMART CITY WORLD EXPO 2016 Smart City World Expo 2016 (SCWE16) was held at the new Fira de Barcelona Centre in Barcelona, from the 15th to the 17th of November. SCWE16 is one of the largest events of its kind in the world, bringing Smart City and Future City innovators, technologists, data specialists, service providers, academics, inventors and more into one space to showcase the best and the brightest looking at advancing urban development. SCWE16 was a dynamic event, full to bursting with information exchanges flashing left, right and centre between visitors and exhibitors, speakers and futurists… TGAC, one of the leading UK creative consultancies, was there to research innovations and initiatives that will be shaping the world we live in and how we will move through the world of tomorrow. TGAC, alongside Fosters + Partners and Land Design Studio, are developing the Mobility Pavilion for the Dubai World Expo in 2020 and wanted to get to the core of how people are thinking, what people are talking about and crucially, what people are doing at the moment, with regards to the development of Smart Cities and the cities of the future.
- 3. Over the three days, TGAC attended talks from a wide range of global thought leaders, local/ national government and NGO representatives, as well as, public and private innovators. We also had the opportunity to interact with a huge variety of technologies and speak with the individuals, organisations and companies working at the forefront of these advancing technologies and social developments. At the Smart City World Expo was the Smart City Congress; a who’s who of the movers and shakers in the smart city and future city development world. From Ellen MacArthur to MIT professors, EU Commissioners, City representatives, Artist/ Engineers and Special Envoys; we heard about the trends and initiatives shaping the places we live in now and some tantalising glimpses of potential landscapes of the world of tomorrow. We listened and asked questions and wonderfully got the opportunity to talk with many of the speaker to probe them a bit more – all of whom we hope to continue exchanging with throughout the development of World Expo 2020, Dubai, and beyond.are, as well as, the amazing possibilities; for example, where and who will data not be able to help? How can we measure the intangible qualities of a place, district, city or region? In this sense we see a clear disconnect between what we can measure and what we need to know. BEFORE WE WENT… In preparation for this Smart City World Expo, the team at TGAC had been doing in depth research into the current trends, advancing technologies and major players moving in the Mobility field, as well as attending events like Wired: Next Generation, in London. While this was a little underpowered on the technology side, the messages were clear – you can do anything and there have never been more ways to get it involved – Creativity was the key message, feed it, value it and don’t ever give it up was a sentiment strongly put forward by speakers, including visionary gastronomist, Heston Blumenthal. Alongside this we had been having a range of highlevel meetings and conversations with Smart and Future City leaders like Intel, ICRI, Future Cities Catapult, Crossrail, Bell Labs and more. During this process, we’ve been dealing with some complex concepts which have been emerging, such as; the circular economy, reversible destiny, multimodal transport, natural systems design, polycentric cities, cognitive computing, mobility as a service, as well as, the huge range of ideas that different people include in the term ‘Smart City’. We are moving into a world of bold claims and high intentions, technologies that are apparently going to ‘change the way we…’, do everything, amid oceans of data. But when it comes down to it research often raises more questions than it answers: What are the cities of the future going to look like? What will it be like to live in them? Who is going to make it happen and how will we assess the results? On these points there is little agreement.
- 4. QUALITY OF LIFE...TOWARDS SMART CITIES… According to some estimates, the global Smart City market will hit around $1.6 trillion in 2020, with more than 13 Smart Cities expected in Europe and North America by 2025. There is also a strong trend, growing for the last several decades, of global urbanisation, the rebound from Cold War de-centralisation. Predictions about numbers of city dwellers vary, but often they run close to some 80% (in developed countries) by 2025. This is going to cause serious problems and challenges for city planners, yet at the same time, opportunity. The decisions we make now will set the tone for future developments, and the principles we instil in this development process need to ensure that the end user, the citizen, the individual…you and I…are the core considerations. Cities and governments are starting to make the move from the traditional silo-based approach and organisation to one of increasingly dynamic and strong collaborations, but this is new territory and finding the path between genuine opportunity and wasted time and investment is proving a challenge. One of the most effective ways to guide success is broadly shared knowledge between citizens, city planners and the technical providers. It is the work of companies like TGAC and City- Insights to work with and at the intersections of governments, public and private sector teams, and especially communities to develop creative urban ‘knowledge interventions’ and creative physical- digital placemaking projects, growing knowledge where people want to share it, capturing, developing and playing with sense of place to have a meaningful and valuable impact. There is an idea rising that cities are ‘machines for living’ in both academia and almost across the board with technologists; a utopian ideal where all problems can be solved with a handy tech intervention, or the natural frictions that occur when lots of people have to share space and resources will disappear because of big data… But it is important to remember that there are times and cases where this is demonstrably not the case, one issue that clearly highlights this potential disconnect is equality…We need to know what the limits of a Smart City are, as well as, the amazing possibilities; for example, where and who will data not be able to help? How can we measure the intangible qualities of a place, district, city or region? In this sense we see a clear disconnect between what we can measure and what we need to know.
- 5. There is a large body of research into the quality of life effects of technology, and the results aren’t always what the tech companies want to hear. The disconnected, text-based communication is making it more difficult for people to understand what others really think or mean even to really know who they are, and 24 hour access to distraction has made it difficult for the younger generation to ‘be in the moment’ and appreciate the world and experiences happening around them. Studies are showing that the average attention span is dropping, not to mention the rapid changes that language is undergoing at the hands of a tech savvy, instant-gratification culture. In many ways we are outsourcing our intelligence without integrating the benefits it into our own – the desire for Artificial Intelligence (smarter machines) has outpaced the desire for Intelligence Augmentation (smarter humans). The e-book, after an initial boom, has seen a dip in sales and has been taken up most enthusiastically by unexpected sections of the population Megalithic online institutions, like the newspaper broadsheets before them, now run the serious risk of being undercut by alt media despite monumental investments into online resources/services. One question to raise here is, how do we judge a project to be a success, what could/should our metrics be? For a company, sure, increased optimisations and efficiencies mean greater profits, but what if the result of those gains to the company means that more CO2 enters the atmosphere – is it still a success? According to Natalie Jeremijenko, of the Environmental Health Clinic, one of the best metrics for success you can use, on any project, is health; does this intervention/initiative/innovation add to the health of the people? Not in an atomised and prescriptive and expensive way, like a pill from a doctor, but on a grander scale, the greater good; Will this project make the air better for everyone? Will this new way of moving be accessible to anyone and everyone? Is this project something everyone can benefit from even if they aren’t a data producer or consumer? It is important to establish these desired and desirable outcomes from the start, to build a human-centred environment within which to innovate and which will produce results aimed at improving the quality of life for all people
- 6. STARTING WHERE WE ARE... What is called for now is serious thought and commitment of cities, local and national governments, as well as public and private companies to develop urban spaces in a way considerate to and driven by social issues, quality of life and the deep, intangible qualities that give a city its identity and make people want to be there. The reality is we live in the same buildings our predecessors did, and the most popular places to visit are usually hundreds, if not thousands of years old – how can we marry this to the idea of many technologists that the cities of the future will be unrecognisable – that technology will change the way we live? Lots of people like the way they live. To do this will take a serious amount of research and in-depth and rigorous comparative studies. Casestudies are well and good but what is needed is for researchers to be looking at what has worked, where, for whom and why, is it replicable and is it scalable? There is no doubt that some of the leading technology companies in the world are getting their teeth into the Smart City movement, but the question still remains to be seen; Will Smart Cities deliver better urban living? And more importantly, what does ‘better’ urban living mean? Looking around the world at places that have survived thousands of years of earthquakes and natural disasters for example, it behoves urban designers to understand how and why they manage it – in many cases there is a back-to- nature potential to learn from our environment and the unimaginable complexity and synergy of nature. There is a danger that cities simply end up using a patchwork of technologies to ‘deal with symptoms rather than the disease’.
- 7. SMART CITY EXPO HIGHLIGHTS Smart City as a work-in-progress As explained by Carlo Ratti, of MIT, and echoed by many speakers – Smart City is not a destination; instead it is a journey towards ever Smarter Cities. There is no one thing that we can wrap-up and put in a box and say, “Here is your Smart City”. We are moving into a world that will need to be built on dynamic, transdisciplinary collaboration and strong public-private-government partnerships. What we saw from the outset was clear evidence that companies and cities are thinking about Smart, but what isn’t happening yet is the necessary cooperation and collaboration; the sharing attitude that will be crucial to considered and meaningful development in the advancing socio-technical landscape. Speakers make it clear that the cities of the future will look, to all intents and purposes, remarkably similar to the cities of today, and the main changes will be seen in the ways we interact with them; how urban spaces and things will be able to speak to us and we to them – a two way data exchange. How we can use that knowledge, and massive collection of data, to improve quality of life and create ever more inclusive and accessible social experiences, were core themes across the speakers - notably championed by Geoffrey Hamilton of the EU Commission, Peter Friess, Pere Obrador, Daniele Quercia and Nesreen Barwari, the former Iraqi Minister of Municipalities and Public Works.
- 8. CHANGE OF OWNERSHIP Among the most prevalent ideas posed was the movement away from traditional ownership towards a service-based economy. As Ellen Macarthur put it; why do I need to own the materials that went into my washing machine, when I could simply have one on a pay-per-wash basis that the supplier can then retrieve and re-commoditise when I’ve finished with it? Or Robert Cervera of Berkeley, California, echoing several other speakers with the idea that the future of transport is dynamic, socially-networked ride-sharing… Now, while ride-sharing has been the norm in the developing world for generations, I don’t think Robert had this in mind… Rather, he and others spoke of interconnected, multimodal transport systems, talking to each other, allowing you the freedom to choose the transport you need, when you need it and only pay for the amount you used. For instance, “I have to take the kids on a birthday trip so we will need the minibus today”…or…“I fancy a drive up the coast, let’s get a convertible for the afternoon.” Connect this mobility as service model to smart devices and clever software and the potential for seamless personal mobility is huge! One demonstrator working in this field who we spoke with were the developers of Jiffiapp, running a trial project in Tartu, Estonia, at the moment.
- 9. VITAL PARTNERSHIPS Another major call, put forward by many of the speakers, was to create strong and flexible public-private-government partnerships with the ability to create demonstrably achievable, agile projects at the scale and speed necessary to address the complex, integrated, and global nature of accelerating change. There is a clear demand from citizens to have the advancing technologies of the 21st century be made widely available, and yet some of the most fundamental issues facing the world were not even touched on at the Smart City Expo. How are we going to power all these new smart devices? What are the limits of the Internet? What is the benefit to humanity of a billion connected devices when it is quite clear that the majority of companies and organisations have no idea what to do with the data they already have? It was Frans Anton Wermast, of the City of Amsterdam, who said on the Thursday that it is local governments’ role to organise the citizen demand which can be used to drive and focus private investment, to develop initiatives which are citizen-centred; building an Internet of Citizens instead of an Internet of Things. His clearest call, however, was that government should not subsidise private businesses in this endeavour, as he says; there is plenty of money in the private sector. Is he correct? – some of the smaller private companies are really the ones making big leaps, with the potential to be truly disruptive, and instead of the usual situation where they have a good idea and are immediately bought by a much larger company, it might be nice to see their work being recognised in equal partnerships – but the core of the message was clear.
- 10. UNEXPECTED ENTRY We have the technology, there are smart people all over the world getting together and inventing mindboggling bits of tech, like autonomous vehicles or frontline drone support for health workers in Africa. We also see a wave of new entrepreneurs leveraging existing and advancing technologies in new and innovative ways; like using the free space in your home to earn money and build a community (Storage Together), cryptocurrencies that could incentivise and reward positive behaviours (Currency Alliance) and new types of encryption and authentication which can transform a home video into a piece of courtroom quality evidence (Capester). Time and again, what we see holding us back are things like regulation and insurance. There are plenty of bugs to work out, true, but the biggest obstacles to this technology entering the market place, when it boils down to it; Who pays when an accident occurs? A discussion that will take years to resolve. But, keep an eye out for driverless freight movement – this may well be where some this technology makes its entrance, since there are clear economic benefits and a strong business model to work from/see returns in. SMART CITY HACK CHALLENGE One of the highlights of the event was the Smart City Hack Challenge 2016. Entrants were shortlisted to the top ten stand-out projects, who each had three minutes to pitch their idea/ product to the formidable panel of judges and the audience. Though all the projects were great, the winners and runners up rightfully earned their places, and at the same time showed that the younger generations are thinking about smart in a slightly different way. Firstly the winners, Storage Together; this was an energetic young group from Arizona who developed a system they term, “The Airbnb of storage.” In an outstanding pitch Co-Founder, Luke Amargo, showed how the extra space in your house could help build a community of sharers and problem-solvers in a safe, peer reviewed way with a clear shot at some of the big players’ revenues. Second Place went to, Psonrie; an anonymous online psychologist service offering counselling and specialising in the ‘problems of everyday life’. The idea is to catch and combat mental illness at its source by making advice, or just a person to talk to, available when people need it, not by appointment. What this showed was a clear desire from the younger developers and innovators to leverage advancing technologies for social good, as well as profit. The driving motivations for these millennials seemed to be rooted in the ‘human experience’, in a desire to make people’s lives better.
- 11. What’s more is this seemed to go without s aying, which is the big take-away point here, the new faces are here to build communities and help people. The younger generation, just starting to enter these competitive spaces, have social impact built into their DNA, and this is something we have built into TGAC and City-Insights; technology is only as good as the experience that it can deliver and, when it comes down to it, every interaction will come back to the human experience. CONCLUSIONS… There were a number themes, trends and shortcomings that became clear over the three days of Smart City World Expo & Congress 2016. Almost any discussion about the socio-technical advancement of cities touched on, or poignantly omitted, these points in some combination. OPPORTUNITY Cooperation and Collaboration – These may have been the two most repeated words from the various stages of the Smart City World Congress. Not a talk passed that didn’t promote the vital need for companies, organisations, people and governments to be in close and constant contact, to implement iterative and two- way communications and working practices to develop solutions that benefit people, support the planet and remain commercially sustainable. What became painfully obvious whilst walking around the display stands in the various halls, was the clear disconnect between the speakers and the businesses. Even in large displays, like that of Microsoft, where we might hope to find a more integrated set of solutions being proposed, instead what we find are a collection of individuals doing their own thing, not sharing their knowledge and expertise with the people around them. What became clear is that we (Humanity) need a ‘global, multifaceted, general long-term view of the future with bold long-range goals to excite the imagination and inspire international collaboration’, but what we often see in these situations, as was definitely the case at SCWE16, are X-hundreds of discrete inventions that don’t speak to each other, jostling and competing with each other for space and recognition. The positive; there is a huge opportunity for a genuine revolution in the way things are being done. Mobility touches all areas of life from transport to healthcare to food and education. In the connected world integrated collaborative efforts, with life-long and life-wide objectives are more possible every day, so the future could definitely be bright.
- 12. CONNECTIONS Walking around Expo and talking with the innovators and representatives, we started to see the invisible connections between multiple stands, straddling the spaces where one innovation ends and another begins, how they could be woven together in interesting and dynamic ways to create much broader, more inclusive and people-centred solutions – how cryptocurrencies could link with environmental data, integrated multimodal transport systems, location based services, smart parking, intelligent IP systems and many more to create truly immersive, pre-emptive mixed-reality landscapes. We came here expecting to see things through an Expo lens, but the scope and potential on display goes far beyond. At Dubai Expo 2020, we have an opportunity to compose and deliver a real sense that the world of today is changing, that the world of tomorrow is unknown and rich in potential, but most importantly that it will be in safe hands. PEOPLE What we saw, backed up by many of the speakers, was a real need to start developing initiatives and projects from the human/citizen- centred perspective. When any innovation leaves the lab it enters the human realm with all its preconceived notions, biases and established ways of doing things. For an intervention to have meaning and impact it needs to be rooted in and aimed towards people and what they need – from their perspective – not just profit. Trends, like the move towards a subscription- based lifestyle, wove through the majority of the speakers and innovators showing their work at the Expo; the move away from traditional ownership models to a pay-per-use ways of living and working. By the end of Ellen MacArthur’s keynotes speech on day two; extolling the potential, need and opportunity to develop a complete circular economy, you could feel the sense that people agreed that user needs should be always be considered first, with the absurdity of built-in obsolescence, and of the individual needing to own the minerals that went into their machines. In the face of in-built componentisation, the complete reusability of an entire unit designed into the entire manufacturing process and smaller bills, the importance of ‘ownership’ as we’ve come to know it, the power of the person to have things, seemed a little daft, the rhetoric of consumerism breaking down and revealing itself for the selfish and destructive ideology it has grown into. So what is being asked for here? This new model with this new focus on people would require a seismic shift in the way manufacturing is done and systems designed – there has been no indication that this move is even recognised, let alone desirable, within a sector that has remained almost unchanged in more than two centuries since the industrial revolution, but maybe need or public demand will be able to tip the scales. Another serious point to be raised at this juncture, a glaring omission from many displays, was the fact that the vast majority of the showcase technologies were firmly aimed at the developed West, completely overlooking the 85% of the world’s population who live in other parts of the world. We know through research, and common sense, that the vast majority of global growth in the coming years will be in underdeveloped countries such as China and Africa. But, what does the rural African farmer care about smart parking, how does that make his life better?
- 13. Knowing that the majority of the development of future cities will be happening in the developing world – we ask the question, could it be that underdeveloped countries might actually be in a better position to accept and incorporate the new technologies and systems due to the less established natures of their infrastructure and networks? To develop programs and initiatives that don’t feature these data poor regions, to continue the habit of leaving people outside of the conversation, could lead to even greater disparity and wealth inequality. There are people in the world who have almost no contact with data, they don’t consume it and they don’t produce it. We need to work with these communities, to use the analog methods to find out their needs and their dreams and ambitions for the future and develop solutions with them that are sensitive to the needs of all humanity. New socio-technical developments will need to be founded on principles of Inclusivity and Access to live up to the world’s expectations – people need to be involved from day one, before if possible. To give people the quality of life they desire, without destroying the planet will be the supreme challenge of the 21st century and I don’t think a lamppost that can tell you the temperature will cut it. DATA In this new landscape of smart devices, oceans of data will be produced. It is already being produced at such a rate that the vast majority of companies, organisations and governments have no clue what to do with it, but they all know it has value. The global companies, the FANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google), for example, have made their fortune off the back of data through providing free/almost free tools and services in exchange for it (there is no such thing as ‘free’, remember). There were demonstrations of new business models that are trying to get to grips with this new commodity. Peter Bjorn Larsen, of Hitachi Insight Group, for example was showcasing the City Data Exchange – a data marketplace where public and private sector bodies can access data on a subscription basis. This was a great initiative to make data available in usable forms, though it leaves the, “What can/should we do with data?”, question completely open.
- 14. This new commodity is vague and the uses of it are, as yet, little understood beyond the top line. Without a clear idea of the good that data can do, who can/should own it and how to use it, it seems likely that the flood gates will continue inching open and more and more data will accumulate, begging for the right conditions to recognise and realise its potential. We see that creative and dynamic partnerships of technologists, artists, writers, thinkers and more will provide the best toolbox for making sense of and envisioning these potentials. POLICY Over the three days we spoke with technology developers, City representatives, academics, politicians, NGOs and more… In the vast majority of cases the challenges and obstacles to be overcome are grounded in policy, regulation and enforcement. When a car is driverless, who is responsible for it? If there was a replacement for oil, how would countries cope without their vast oil revenues? What would a world look like where the petro-dollar was a quirky anachronism, where everyone has enough energy to power themselves for life? Our challenges are transnational in nature and will require transnational strategies to combat to overcome – that one country becomes carbon neutral is good, but it won’t change the state of things. We need to develop a global, multifaceted and long term view with goals set that bring together, excite and challenge the best thinkers in the world. In the face of rising global nationalism, we need to think clearly about the risk-reward equation of the free global movement of ideas compared with the tightening of national boundaries. What we took away from the Smart City World Expo 2016: Barcelona was a fascinating glimpse into potential of future city development; that while the technology marches on at an ever increasing speed (having now left Moore’s Law in the dust), People is the new conversation landscape. Who is this for, why, and how will it help them, is this a fair exchange, what do I want/need to own..? We are heading rapidly towards a crossroads in the development of our societies, not only in the developed West, but across the world. The centres of the world are shifting from West to East with more than a billion people expected to come online in China and India alone over the next decade. They will expect a better quality of life and access to new resources, to materials and, above all, to energy – at the moment what we see are comparatively poor countries like India investing heavily in sustainable technologies while countries like the US, on the whole, refuse to genuinely participate in the conversation. Academically, we seem to be moving in the right direction. Companies and organisations are starting to form new types of partnerships, adapting to new business models and paying attention to increasingly informed, focussed and powerful citizen demand. Technologically, we are seeing incredible advances and combinations of technologies that are quite literally changing the way humans behave and think, how we will spend our time, share knowledge and experience, or simply get from place to place. Socially, we are still in our infancy. Over the generations, many have tried to predict how life will be x number of years from now, which technologies we won’t be able to imagine our lives without...with varying degrees of success – though usually very little. The challenges/opportunities we face in this generation, and how we respond to them, will shape the world of the future; technology for technology’s sake is a mentality that needs to be revisited, alongside one of the real threats to the planet – consumerism. We have the capacity, as the human race, to not only face and overcome these challenges/opportunities, but to transcend them – to set in motion ways of being, living and interacting which benefit all of humanity through the caring, considered and considerate implementation of socio-technological developments and rational, human-centred approaches to dealing with change.