Why Should Cities and the Tech Industry Partner?
While most cities and technology companies know they should partner more closely, they sometimes struggle to articulate why or how. Many in cities are resistant to change and would prefer to operate as they always have. Governance, they may say, is a conservative field, where institutions necessarily lag their private sector counterparts. Innovation may be great, they argue, but city officials shouldn’t put political capital and taxpayer money at risk to implement unproven technologies. Similarly, many believe that the tech industry has no need to work directly with cities. they believe cities to be two slow-moving and too captured by incumbent vendors to be good partners.
The reality, however, is that cities and the tech industry need each other. tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Uber are universally based in cities or close-in suburbs, and all are, in their own way, reshaping their own urban environments. Urban success and prosperity is critical to these companies’ long-term business models and growth. Furthermore, tech is no longer something that only happens on screens: for companies like Amazon and Uber, urban populations play a critical role in achieving scale.
The reality is that both cities and startups are recognizing the increasing value of partnership, even if both sides rarely have the expertise they need to capitalize. Improving technology adoption therefore remains among the pieces of low-hanging fruit for cities looking to invest in resilience, and a largely untapped business opportunity for startups.
While there are doubtless also others, CityXChange has identified three reasons for cities to seek closer partnerships with tech:
- Improving operations and service delivery
- Managing disruption fueled by new technologies and the growing centrality of technology to daily life
- Leveraging data to make better decisions
Improving Services
As cities continue to grow, they will need to find ways to do more with the same resources, increasing efficiency and reducing both capital costs and operating costs. to some extent, cities have no choice but to turn to technology to drive those improvements: the cost of providing services and building infrastructure cannot continue to climb at current rates. Many city government processes remain stuck in the pre-digital era: there is tremendous opportunity to leverage technology to improve efficiency, particularly as aging workforces begin to retire.
Athens’ tree canopy is one of its most vital tools in its efforts to manage urban temperatures and meet climate goals, in addition to contributing to the overall quality of life in the City. However, given Greece’s ongoing economic difficulties, the City cannot replace public gardeners as they retire, resulting in declining manpower and a loss of expertise and knowledge.
At CityXChange Summit 2018, Athens worked with participants to identify and create implementation models for digital tools that would allow the City to develop a comprehensive understanding of its tree canopy — including location, type, age, and condition of existing trees — that will enable more efficient management, and include citizens in caring for the trees in their community.
As technology changes, citizens’ expectations for the types of services cities provide also changes. technology can, of course, help cities provide those new public services, enhancing quality of life and building resilience to both shocks and stresses. Inertia may often stand in the way of developing these new services, but city leaders should work to overcome that inertia, both for governance and political reasons: innovation provides a rare opportunity for city leaders to demonstrate concrete progress to citizens.
OneConcern, a CityXChange 2018 participant, uses machine learning to predict the impact of natural disasters, helping decision makers take appropriate action before, during, and after a crisis. The platform allows cities to better understand the interdependencies of city ecosystems, analyze risks to critical infrastructure, and allocate resources to the highest-priority issues. Cities desperately need these kinds of services, but it is virtually impossible for them to develop them in-house.
Managing the Blurring Boundaries Between Government and Tech
Tech companies are increasingly starting to provide services that have been the traditional purview of government, using cities as testbeds for new ideas and building new urban infrastructure privately. Some of these innovations, like ride-sharing, are likely here to stay, whereas others, like dockless bike sharing, may be flashes in the pan. there is perhaps nothing especially new about this leveraging of private capital for the public good: after all, many key pieces of what we now consider public infrastructure, including public transit systems and electrical grids, began as privately-managed companies.
Cities can choose to fight these companies, but in most cases, they will be better served by trying to channel this innovation into pathways that provide benefits for cities, citizens, and startups. Many startups would happily find ways to serve low-income citizens, build specialized infrastructure, and pay taxes, in exchange for official acceptance.
We go back to the premise that if we are going to build and invest in these systems, and we are going to use public right-of-ways as the factories in order to create these products, then there has to be a societal benefit… What’s missing is that cities all around the world are having these conversations…but it’s not happening in the Silicon Valley.
— 2018 City participant
Just as startups are beginning to provide services in the traditional purview of government, the boundary between critical public infrastructure and technology is blurring. Cities and citizens depend more and more on the services the private-sector provides. Ten years ago, an outage at a major tech company might be an inconvenience. Today, an outage or data breach at google or apple could be catastrophic. Even our biggest national security threats these days touch the technology industry, from fake news on social media to power grid hacks.
Tech companies therefore increasingly understand the dilemmas governments face or ignore them at their peril; cities can correspondingly learn much from how companies manage risk in the mission-critical cloud-based services that the global economy depends on.
Cities, therefore, are likely best served by proactively engaging with tech companies to determine how partnership can be beneficial to companies, cities, and citizens alike. This could mean agreeing to share data, as many cities have done with Waze, Uber and Lyft, and using that data to improve city services. It could also mean cooperating to improve security and plan for better disaster response.
Propeller Health, a 2017 CityXChange Summit startup participant, partnered with the city of Louisville to provide a public service that the City could never provide on its own. Propeller developed a unique sensoring technology that allows respiratory disease patients to better manage their health, while giving cities valuable data they can use to improve respiratory disease outcomes. To implement this technology, Propeller partnered with the City to create AIR Louisville, a unique public-private partnership funded by stakeholders in the City’s healthcare and business communities. The City of Louisville played a crucial role in convening AIR Louisville, but did not directly fund the project.
I put in my first bike lane, and more people are pissed off about that [than anything else I’ve done.] But if the majority were to win, I would pull out that bike lane. But we push for it, and I think in the end, people start to see why and the controversy dies down. It gives me the confidence to continue.
— 2018 City participant
Leveraging Data to Make Better Decisions
Too often, cities still make critical planning decisions based on instinct or political expediency, not hard data. Technology can also help cities transform their decision-making processes through bottom-up, data-centric models. Better data will allow cities to better understand how real people use city services, and transform top-down planning processes into participatory, people-centric decisions. As cities and citizens generate ever-more data, smart planning tools increasingly allow citizens to actively participate in building their communities, and see the impact policy decisions will have on their everyday lives. This will both enable better decision-making and help cities address the challenges of today and tomorrow.
2018 Summit participant Calgary has undertaken numerous initiatives to collect better data from citizens. Every year, the City asks people to tweet out how many trick-or-treaters they got on Halloween. This data helps cities understand changing neighborhood demographics, including where families are moving, and where citizens feel safe and unsafe. The City also runs an Engagement Bus, on which people can commute for free, but they need to answer questions from City employees on the bus about their commutes and other aspects of daily life. At the 2018 Summit, Calgary explored how to use predictive analytics to more effectively provide affordable housing to residents.
Demonstrating that cities are basing decisions on data, not instinct, can have a transformative impact on stakeholders. Cities work hard to include citizens in decisions, but today’s processes and tools make two-way communication difficult. This doesn’t just impact the quality of the decisions, it makes it hard for city leaders to develop trust with stakeholders around critical decisions. Technology can help contextualize the impact of a policy or investment, demonstrating to stakeholders that the decision is in their interest. This can help build consensus among often difficult stakeholders, and de-risk projects for cities and startups alike.
The primary risks in cities are always mitigated by community consensus. It’s the coin of the realm. If you can get different community groups with different agendas to coalesce and to come together around a certain idea, that idea has huge political momentum, and is less risky because it’s less likely to be abruptly terminated in an election cycle.
– 2018 Startup participant
