City Smarts
Volker Buscher heads the Smart Cities department at Arup, one of the world’s leading authorities on architecture and urban planning. Rob Alderson meets him to discuss his vision of innovation on a global scale…
Words Rob Alderson
Illustration Eve Lloyd Knight
The idea of the technology-run city of the future tends to conjure up sci- fantasies of hover taxis and mile-high apartment blocks towering above a seedy underbelly, shadowed by a layer of ancient smog. But the reality is that so-called smart cities are already developing all around us in myriad ways both obvious and subtle.
The Gartner research organisation estimates there are 1.1 billion connected things currently in use in smart cities; by 2020 it forecasts this will have leapt to 9.7 billion. From transport to housing, politics to healthcare, this digital agenda promises to revolutionise the relationship between the citizen and their city.
The possibilities are extraordinary: a city in which driver’s cars “speak” to each other, creating real-time traffic maps that can project where congestion may occur. A city in which a fleet of drones deliver much-needed medication to the elderly and housebound, based on health data submitted each morning. A city in which police presence is dictated by crunching historical crime data, establishing patterns based upon where and when the law has been broken in the past.
In May this year the Indian government announced it would build 100 new smart cities as part of a $10 billion scheme. But building a technologically-driven city from scratch is one thing, developing a sprawling, complex megacity into one is quite another. For Volker Buscher, it’s vital to acknowledge the context in which megacities exist.
“The cities have their own distinct vision and narrative, and that’s driven by location, weather, climate, economic development, governance and financing mechanisms,” he says. “These are the things that make cities unique, and you need to understand those. But if you then look at what makes a digital economy, there are also transferable issues.”
What Buscher calls “the tech drivers” are now global in terms of analytics and cloud computing tools, the role of big data and the internet of things. Moreover, the outcomes cities are seeking tend to fall into five categories, even when looking at very different metropolises with seemingly disparate histories, cultures and social needs. These are: economic growth and job creation; better infrastructure and increased efficiency; improving health and social care provision; increasing political engagement and empowering citizens and finally addressing environmental issues like air pollution, water use and energy independence.
To this Buscher adds a sixth, the idea of a humane city, which has emerged as the pursuit of these first five objectives has intensified in cities around the world. This stems from the concern that in the headlong rush towards some kind of techno-utopia, cities forget why they exist and the people who live there become dehumanised. Civic leaders have to think about this dimension if they want to take people with them.
“Is the citizen still who the city has been built for, or is the citizen just someone who generates data for others and is being moved around, as if by remote control?” Buscher asks. “We think there will be a lot more technology around us, but we need to think about delivering that in a humane way that retains the privacy and trust and control and ownership of the citizens.”
The point is that megacities are not theoretical entities or technological testing grounds; they are where people live and work, socialise and exercise, love and hate and dream and worry.
And it’s also important to remember that there are many different kinds of citizens that make up any one city. Buscher thinks the marketing collateral that surrounds smart city development often fixates on “the upwardly mobile urban elite… with their iPhones connected in real- time to the airport they’re jetting off from, looking to find temporary office space for an important meeting while sitting in a taxi and having a video call with their children.”
“Is the citizen still who the city has been built for, or is the citizen just someone who generates data for others?”
This elite clique of internationally mobile men and women are only one part of the story. “Megacities have a very different make-up so you have that layer, but you also have a poor class who can’t afford a car, for whom smart mobility is a very different thing; or you have an ageing population that is looking for excellent provisions of healthcare but also wants to have social contact with family members who may live in other cities.”
A wide-ranging political vision, one that empowers different citizens in different ways, is imperative. So too is a technological architecture that works in the complex context of a modern megacity, and so a lot of work is being done to develop systems that minimise cost and friction while maximising performance and security.
These changes cannot come from elected authorities alone. Smart cities will need enlightened and bold leadership, as well as networks of activists and enthusiasts driving innovation on the ground. As Buscher explains, this presents its own challenges.
“It’s not easy to run top-down and bottom-up at the same time, to be in a city where you have good policy and strategy that enable the city and its ecosystem to work better, and doesn’t stifle the bottom up economy. But equally, we’ve seen cities where the bottom-up was very strong and very vocal and almost became a brigade revolting against any policy or strategy work.That will also stop progress.”
Some have suggested that to deliver the right kind of policy and strategy, cities will increasingly need to take charge of their own affairs. In a 2014 World Economic Forum report on the future of government, Professor Razeen Sally wrote: “There is a strong argument for decentralising power and policy as much as possible to the municipal level. Cities are less bureaucratic and sluggish than higher levels of governance; they are better able to experiment, innovate and diffuse best practice.”
Buscher sees this rising tide of cities becoming emboldened, but isn’t sure how, or indeed if, it’s linked to the emergence of the smart city agenda.
“I think they are happening at the same time but it’s not necessarily cause and effect,” he says. “They might just be running in parallel. Devolution as a concept is a global phenomenon, driven by the need to come up with more innovative ways around the future cities agenda. But some things are just better placed locally, where the proximity between the citizen and the leadership is much closer than at national level. What we’re seeing is clarity emerging about which things are better done with certain geographical remit being the city, and where powers sit to deliver and design that, and which things are better done at a national level. Usually the better way of doing things prevails.”
Embracing digital innovation can and will shape the ways our megacities work, but what’s interesting is that nobody is quite sure how this will affect the way our cities look. In time, we will learn how to best harness the opportunities offered by big data and interconnected devices. Until that happens, it seems that the challenge is to merge technology and the megacity as effectively as possible.”
This is article is from Weapons of Reason’s second issue: Megacities.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
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