Last Wednesday I attended the Ecobuild conference and construction industry event. Of interest were two really great panels.
‘Smart cities’ was rather oddly defined, in one sense referring to the intersection of the Internet, the release of council and regional real time data to web developers and the benefits that will occur from this (for instance the real benefits of the app city mapper) and the other, a much broader definition.
Volker Buscher, of Arup extended the concept of a smart city to include five major points or ‘smarts’ Political, Sustainable, Humane, Environmental and Economic. He gave good examples of the intelligence of Copenhagen, and of Christchurch. Christchurch has a scheme known as sensing city, with apparently one of the most broadest sensors in use currently.
“Sensors streaming real-time information on everything from traffic to weather and water systems, and even how many people are on the city’s streets.
This is Roger Dennis’ plan to make Christchurch unique.
For the past 12 months the Christchurch technology expert has been living and breathing a concept called The Sensing City, which would see sensors installed underneath the city’s roads and at the top of street lights.
They would then stream real-time information that could be used by city planners to create a “snapshot of how cities actually work”.”
– Source: Stuff.co.nz
Copenhagen was another interesting example as he cited the city being unusual, in the way it exports global leadership on green growth, sending out experts to the rest of the world’s cities. As a former Copenhagen resident I can attest to this. I recall particularly at the end of my internship in Denmark finally attending a discussion in which I understood the Danish being spoken and this same topic came up in the panel discussion, where firms, including my own at the time (COBE) spoke about how they were now taking their intelligence to other municipalities around the world. This is something that Jan Gehl has done for many years, but given the incredibly intelligent urban design that is cultivated in universities in the region, an increase in global expert exports makes perfect sense.
Speaker Kevin O’Malley, the Future City Team Manager, Bristol City Council spoke about Bristol’s initiatives and involving citizens in the process – key ideas in technology and citizens “how they use it, is it relevant? getting it across, understanding it, and crucially trust – can the citizens trust the council?”
Finally the London chair Dennis Moynihan, spoke about visualisations of the city, new analyses for information technology and releasing information for planners and developers. This by far was the most banal section of the discussion and lead me to ask the panel afterwards about the competitive nature of cities. I cited both Copenhagen and Australia as places that made explicit their competitive urge to attract the best resources and skills within their city, through creating a fantastic city and in essence to compete with other global cities for the economic benefits that result. Without sounding impolite I was quite surprised at the lesser level of sophistication that such a huge city has – although I merely hinted at this, the speaker for Arup seemed to understand the underlying question and explained that London could be very slow, in smart city technology uptake (to paraphrase) in comparison to other major cities due to its many councils. Less impressive was the response from Moynihan, answering that as part of the C40 it and other cities actually worked together. It found this quite disingenuous. After this though he admitted that yes they did want the best.
Interesting quote: “decouple aspirational growth with ecology” – Buscher
Note: Read up on Arups cities reports. These sound like they could be a great resource.