Is systemic innovation the key to creating the smart cities of the future?
The degree of complexity of an urban environment should not be underestimated when facing its challenges. Singular thinking is not only a naive approach but also often a reason for failure.
As COVID-19 has spread through our cities, many experts of the urban environment have vocalised the need to embrace the opportunity for adapting our city systems as a better place to live. This subsequently enables a new normality in the future - a more sustainable, healthier and efficient order. However, does this refer to creating a different reality for cities, or is it referring to a natural evolution of the urban systems?
An engineering approach: What type of systems are cities?
For the development of this section, some analogies are formulated by quoting some simple laws of thermodynamics. I kindly ask the engineers and physicists not to over evaluate the physical concepts but instead to try to think of the parallelism between the postulations.
Considering the simplest definition, a thermodynamic system is a body of matter and/or radiation, confined in space by walls, with defined permeabilities, which separate it from its surroundings.
Therefore, as we consider this definition within the context of a city, the city is a body of matter with different components. These are confined by a non-physical boundary with defined permeabilities, such as the access points for transportation. Thereafter, the concept fits well with the definition of a thermodynamic system.
In addition, considering the type of systems (open, closed and isolated), cities during non-pandemic times exchange energy and matter with their surroundings, so they easily fall into the open systems category.
Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, only tends to increase, at the same time as a system can reach thermodynamic equilibrium with constant entropy if there are not flows of matter and energy between the system and its surroundings. (Entropy is for this purpose can be considered the degree of chaos)
Accordingly, the outbreak of COVID-19 has represented the closest that the urban system has ever been to becoming an isolated system or even a closed system. And even though the pandemic is not over yet, during the lockdowns (times where cities were closer to isolated systems), the level of physical disorder (similar to entropy) did not increase. In addition, when cities reach equilibrium with their surroundings, they must have exchanges with them in order to function well, in contrast to the thermodynamic systems.
One even can consider that cities are systems of systems.
This is why the city could be a thermodynamic system but cannot act according to the second law of thermodynamics. Thus, we can discard the physics approach when analysing human societal systems such as cities. Such systems are far more complex, as they are not only involving the physical but also social, economic and environmental perspectives.
A socio-technical approach: What type of systems are cities?
A very interesting theory is the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) developed by Professor Frank W. Geels that can address a complex system such as a city, something that (obviously) the old 19th-century thermodynamics laws could not.
Accordingly, a system is made up of the societal parameters and the ways in which we use technology, thereby referred to as socio-technical systems. Considering that a city is a socio-technical system, this has a current regime consisting of the defined rules and norms such as the type of culture, laws and policies. So, the way that citizens act and live in a city is included in the regime. For example, the mobility aspect, on how people move from point A to B and their reasons for doing so.
Moreover, as all systems evolve and/or change, there is an aspect called the landscape, which, in a very simple manner, consists of the external and internal developments that can create pressure on the regime for its adaptation. For instance, COVID-19 is a very good example of a landscape development that has made cities’ regimes start to be less resilient to adjustments, opening so-called windows of opportunity that will be taken over by new trends.
Trends (or niches) will represent the novel ideas and actions that will change the regime, improving the system in order to be resilient to the new conditions set by the landscape developments. For example, cities impacted by COVID-19 (previously mentioned as a landscape development), see an increase in new trends such as the use of the creation of active mobility infrastructure, teleworking, the usage of data and artificial intelligence for social distancing, the utilisation of outdoor spaces for activities instead of for parking, among many others, will take the window of opportunity and establish themselves in the new regime.
This phenomenom is not adaptation — it is systemic innovation responding to landscape developments.
Coming back to the original questions, we can conclude that we are not creating a new reality for cities nor urban environments. Instead, we are responding to landscape developments, as new conditions in the system emerge. Therefore, fostering systemic innovation exists from the demand of solving new challenges and the urgency of implementing them. This does not happen by any physical law but instead occurs to improve the complex systems that make up the fabric of society.
