A low tech smart city?
Tech startups abound in smart cities, who showcase their number in order to prove how innovative they are. Creating a good environment for these startups contribute to cities’ economic development and can play a part in tackling pressing urban challenges. However, we face a situation where tech solutionism and startup model risk to cannibalise other forms for innovative approaches, which may be more able to solve the social, environmental and economic challenges our societies face. We don’t need app for everything, do we?
Cities need to get back to the driver’s seat, involve the civil society to tackle those issues and ensure that the innovation they support brings added values for the society. In this way, we can build cities, which are not only smart but wise in satisfying the core needs of all citizens.
Local governments face an injunction to innovate and so-called “smart cities” strive to become innovation hotbeds. The rhetoric of New York City, as analysed by sociologist Sharon Zukin at a recent conference in Copenhagen is a blunt example of that. The Big Apple now claims to be the second city in the US when it comes to its “startup ecosystem” (2015). It’s like all cities dream to become the new Silicon Valley, where innovation rhymes with start-up creation.
France, which is on its way to becoming the biggest European VC market is no exception. President E. Macron went so far as to say “I want France to be start-up nation”.
Several initiatives involving the French public administration go in that direction, such as the State’s start-up program, launched in 2013. The program consists in forming small teams of 2 to 4 persons, whose responsibility is to invent a solution that addresses a specific problem linked to citizens need. They are independent but their work is financed by a public administration. Using methods like design thinking, their mission is to come up with a proof of concept after 6 months. Then a public body takes it from there and turns it into a longer term solution. The program has led to the creation of digital services such as MesAides (“My Supports”), which gives underprivileged people an easier overview of their rights regarding social support.
While such a program focuses on building innovation capacity within the administration, other initiatives, such as Numa’s program Datacity, seek to create partnerships between municipalities, industries and startups in order to develop new solutions to tackle urban challenges. In this case, entrepreneurs are presented with pressing urban problems and they get support to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) as well as an expertise in startup acceleration. In Copenhagen, a comparable program focusing on startup acceleration within urban tech is about to be launched by Rainmaking Loft. One can applause this type of projects: they contribute to build more user friendly and result-oriented administration and they bring creative solutions to pressing urban needs.
Yet, in cities, not all projects are meant to become services and even less so, commercial services.
Hubert Guillaud, with his biting way of writing, emphasizes that a prevailing model for innovation has imposed itself; the “startup model”. Working with its own logic, methods and actors, there is a risk that it will cannibalise other forms for innovation, promote the same type of outputs and overlook key challenges.
As a matter of fact, we now have a herd of services looking alike, such as peer-to-peer mobility platforms, short term rental services, food delivery services, etc. But do we need all these services? Are all innovative solutions necessary digital services? Who is addressing issues such as lack of inclusion? Social divide? Housing shortage?…
Several cities have become innovation hotbeds for startups. However, we are now facing a situation, where the focus is primarily on the amount of these companies and their ability to provide quick results. In doing so, the actual impact, creation of social value and even the purpose that the startups bring is often overseen. In his book A New Digital Deal, Bas Boorsma writes that one of the reasons why smart cities’ endeavours have not been as successful as many had hoped, is that way too often questions about proof of values weren’t asked. Researcher Anders Munk, specialised in techno-anthropology, explained similarly in a recent discussion that smart cities put a lot of focus on evidence-based policy making, but they often use the data they have rather than asking what kind of data they need.
The focus on innovation processes have helped cities enhance their capacity. Municipalities learn how to work with new actors, they have acquired new work methods, are more result-oriented and, most importantly, they thrive to answer citizens needs. However, in these innovation processes, cities are rarely the conductors. Most of the time, they react to new services rather than guiding innovation processes and they have a rather paradoxical position. Indeed, municipalities seek to support the creation of innovative services, but they often end up regulating them afterwards as the new startups often try to disrupt them. We have seen this with the handling of services like AirBnB or Uber, but examples are legion.
Now is the time for cities to go back to the driver’s seat and ensure that their innovation strategies serve the needs of the society and are accountable for their values creation.
Yes, innovation is a craft that everybody should acquire but it cannot be reduced to digital services and startup creation. Startups are per definition very different from local and national governments’ ways of functioning. Moreover, when discussing the concept of Smart Cities, it is easy to focus solely on the newest and hottest high tech developments in digital technology.
Yet, some of the “smartest” solutions to current urban challenges can be built upon older strategies and can rely on low tech solutions or user-friendly technologies which support citizen participation. The reinvention of cooperative models, whether in retail or housing is a good example of that. Another example can be found with the renewal of concierges’ services. It was very common in the 19th century in Paris, that the concierges had a small apartment on the ground floor of haussmannian buildings. They were handling many small tasks for the residents and were able to monitor all comings and going. The current reinvention of concierge happens in France at a neighbourhood’s scale and serves socio-economic purposes, as it is the case with La Conciergerie Solidaire.
The Municipality 1.0 was an authority, and became a service provider in version 2.0 — hence the “city as a service” concept — but now we can build a next chapter, where local governments will work with the civil society to shape the future we want to live in. Innovation processes involving non profit organisations and citizens will have to be encouraged to reach this vision. The great news is that a lot of progress has been made with regards to citizen participation the last decade (Danish) and people are willing to contribute to improving their cities, so there is a lot to build upon.
If local governments want to lead the way to sustainable societies, they have to encourage a variety of innovation forms and involve a diversity of actors. Copenhagen Innovation House, an autonomous public body, working under the City’s town council says: “we innovate also on innovation processes. Therefore, we permanently further develop the tools from our two boxes (design and business development) so we ensure that the work we conduct in the City of Copenhagen remains efficient and beneficiaI” (in Danish here).
To sum it up, we can call for some concrete actions:
1 / New data metrics need to be built in order to assess value creation.
2 / While tech accelerators are attractive solutions, models which involve a variety of actors and investigate other forms for innovation processes are worth exploring as well. Disruptive innovation may not be the solution to every problem. The designer Marc Chataigner, who has been exploring and comparing innovation processes and cultures in Europe and Asia, explained me recently that in China and Japan, incremental innovation processes are for example favoured.
3 / Cities need to move away from tech solutionism. The way the urban tech company Sidewalk Labs, owned by Alphabet, is dealing with citizen participation in Toronto can in this regards work as an eye opener.
To the question “what is innovative about your approach to community meetings?” asked by Project for Public Spaces, Sidewalk Labs’ Rit Aggarwala explains why low tech solutions may be valuable:
“At the end of the day, it’s talking and listening. There’s nothing you can improve on, from human interaction. While I think we will be looking to digital technology for information sharing, and to an extent, information gathering, right now we know that the greater risk is not that we’re not innovative in interacting with people, but rather that we get so innovative, that the people who might start out inclined to be nervous, might get even more intimidated by what we’re talking about. There’s a virtue in keeping it lower tech.” (Read the whole interview here).
In other words, smart cities are not to be solely associated with high tech. A smart city approach refers to a way of thinking and developing cities that is critical about technology and open when it comes to innovative approaches.
What do you think?
Join the debate in the comment section or reach out at caroline@sharinglab.dk
