How we’re designing a People-Powered Smart City

As the rollout of contact tracing apps — rapidly designed and developed to help people manage responses to COVID-19 exposure and help mitigate further public health escalations — bumbles along internationally, the need to place people’s needs central to the creation of socially targeted smart tech becomes clearer.

Photo by 🇨🇭 Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

Concerns around the centralisation of data, lack of trust through pushing adoption and focus on the financial costs over social outcomes have blighted the launch of the Covidsafe app in Australia and engendered a culture of deep suspicion around the still to be confirmed launch of the U.K.s own version.

Yet, the case for SmartCity technology has been bolstered in the pandemic’s wake, as civil society, community groups and people locally have rallied and used technology to support vulnerable groups, manage healthcare responses and organise, all using technology to facilitate their work.

SmartCities have a role to play in the future of how places collaborate in serving and supporting their residents, workers and visitors, but as much as looking at what we create to address the cracks that have been magnified in healthcare, education, working culture and transportation, how we design and develop SmartCity initiatives is just as important.

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It’s a question we’ve been pondering at the Greater Manchester (GM) Responsible Tech Collective for the past few months. Fuelled by our research into both traditional (and tech first) plus progressive (and collaborative) approaches to SmartCities globally, gaps emerged, around engaging the people and communities which the sensors and surveillance tech deployed is intended to serve.

Looking into how we might enable such a thing, where the needs and problems of the people living in a place might be placed central to the planning of SmartCity efforts has been our core focus In GM where Manchester is looking ahead to its second SmartCity initiative and Salford is launching an ambitious collaborative effort, we have ample opportunity too.

Building on our research and guided by a specially formulated project team (including Manchester City Council, Open Data Manchester, Kainos and Sigma), we opened up conversation with local authorities across the U.K., civil society leaders across the region and co-design experts to explore the needs and opportunities to make a People-Powered SmartCity a reality.

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Led by Tech for Good stalwart and social impact designer Rebecca Rae-Evans at Reply, throughout May and June 2020, we’ve hosted scoping and ideation workshops with the GM Responsible Tech Collective, working with Manchester and Newcastle Council, plus Dsposal, Invisible Cities, Salford CVS and FutureEverything to explore potential.

Here are some of the initial insights from the three groups we hosted:

Reaching Diverse Audiences through Communication

• Building on the ambition to look towards outcomes with an impact mindset when it comes to co-creating a people-powered SmartCity, providing people with access, being mindful of language used and building trust with diverse audiences were all deemed key.
• Concerns exist around being able to engage a diverse range of voices, looking at who has traditionally been left behind and those people where intersectional experiences of prejudice and discrimination occur.
• Therefore, targeting audiences and personalising messages, and engaging through the VSCE sector or community groups may help. Better articulating the purpose and benefit of SmartCity technology and breaking down issues to help people understand where opportunities might lie was also seen as essential.
• Ideas floated included building a culture of understanding and engagement over time — with openness and transparency at its core — and taking people on a journey when it comes to co-creating a people-powered SmartCity. Developing engagement tools, using practical examples to demonstrate public benefits and breaking down the tech were all posited.

Enabling Co-Production through Collaboration

• Being outcome and impact-focused was raised again, with a focus on diverse engagement and communications surrounding a people-powered SmartCity was flagged. The need to build confidence amongst audiences was also deemed essential.
• While the people living in a place (residents) are important, workers and visitors were flagged too, but the opportunity to put people’s needs first, instead of starting with a tech solution, was reiterated.
• The funding of SmartCity projects — whether from government or driven by local authorities themselves — has a significant impact on both the agenda and longevity of any initiative, and at a Greater Manchester level, local geography and cross-borough politics plays a part.
• Ideas around citizen engagement were flagged, including hacks, but the need to engage local authorities to instil training around understanding citizen needs and undertake service design training was flagged, as was more focus on robust data principles and measurement principles

Influencing Local Authorities through Empowerment

• Working with local authorities, the need is to focus on the limited budgets, compounded by a lack of resources, capacity and skills. With budgets due to be further impacted by costs of COVID-19, the need for collaborative working, across the department and local authority, is about to become even greater, working on issues that go beyond place.
• Consultation is happening but isn’t reaching smaller community or VCSE organisations, but within these issue-led sectors there is significant reach and expertise. Trust too, as the willingness and ability to engage with institutions is low. Healthcare, education and the environment all offer great potential too to unite organisations across places.
• However, siloed-working — both within and across local authorities — means that within contained SmartCity projects, context is often missed, and the constant drive for efficiency means wider trends and therefore opportunities are overlooked.
• Ideas offered built on suggestions made in other working groups, including the need to take both citizens and local authorities on a journey with SmartCity potential, and the power of engaging the social sectors and their wider networks.
• Within and across local authorities, we have the opportunity to engage CTO’s and governance boards, plus digital leads and digital inclusion officers, with the need to share resources and learning. Outside of local authorities, creating innovation hubs where ideas can be submitted and explored, using local shared spaces (e.g. libraries) or public services (e.g. BBC) and giving people ownership (and potential commercial power) over their own data was also flagged.

Now in the process of building on the insight gathered, community communication, cross-sector collaboration and local authority empowerment are central to the early-stage prototype we’re developing, and launching on Monday 20th July. Find out where we’ve landed and our next steps by joining us here.