In Europe, Taking Smart Cities to the People

Data from “Smart Citizen” trials can guide government decisions on carbon, resources, planning, and resilience.

Participants in Manchester’s Smart Citizen program are issued a small sensor that measures carbon dioxide, temperature, and other variables and transmits the data for open access. (smartcitizen.me)

Participants in Manchester’s Smart Citizen program are issued a small sensor that measures carbon dioxide, temperature, and other variables and transmits the data for open access. (smartcitizen.me)

The world’s first truly “smart city” may not yet exist, but for U.K. digital innovation lab FutureEverything, the concept is already ripe for reinvention.

Much like the technology that has allowed policy makers to envision the urban environment as better planned, more efficient, and intelligent, the definition of what smart city actually means is undergoing rapid change. And Drew Hemment, chief executive officer of FutureEverything, a nonprofit creative community-interest company based in Manchester, England, is just one of the digital innovators helping European cities understand the implications.

City leaders are listening attentively. FutureEverything is working closely not only with local government authorities in Manchester, loudly championed by the U.K. government as one of the country’s best examples of smart-city innovation, but also with the Met Office (the U.K.’s national weather service) and leading climate scientists on a European Commission–funded project that is using data to enhance resilience to climate change.

Thanks to FutureEverything, Manchester is now the third European city after Barcelona and Amsterdam to try the Smart Citizen project. It is a grass-roots digital initiative that provides decentralized open-data platforms and tools—available to anyone—to record their real-time interactions with their surroundings and provide critical data sets that will help define urban needs.

Alternative to Corporate Efforts

Smart Citizen is an alternative take on the prevailing smart-city formulas. Many municipal authorities have looked to large companies to develop technology that might be needed in this brave new world and engineer ways to reduce traffic congestion, manage waste, and even protect people from crime. “But,” says Hemment, “this ignores the most important dimension of cities—the people who live, work, and create within them.”

While Hemment says big tech solutions have their place, they alone cannot create better urban policies or foster the participatory society needed to support them. “The problem is that large companies have designed the agenda,” Hemment says. “They are designing systems to sell digital solutions to city authorities, and these systems offer only one view of what a city might need. They are based on supply-side thinking that precludes citizens from taking ownership of their own urban environment.”

FutureEverything’s solutions provide an alternative model to the one employed by Cisco in South Korea. There, Cisco is an exclusive supplier of digital infrastructure to Songdo IBD—a new city the size of Boston—wiring every inch of the 1,500-acre (600 ha) metropolis currently being built as it aims to be one of the most technologically sophisticated urban centers in the world. The “Smarter Planet” concept promoted by IBM is global in scope and is aimed at enabling smart grids, water management systems, and greener buildings using IBM hardware, software, and service solutions. But such solely corporate-driven efforts do not satisfy Hemment.

“Corporate-led packages misunderstand how the user experience works. Cities are messy. They are created from the ground up. You can’t design what is needed from afar. Solutions designed in this way will end up being redundant, and fairly quickly,” argues Hemment.

“A growing number of voices now believe the smart-city concept is flawed and that it will fail to deliver civic and economic benefits,” he says. “Bottom-up innovation and community engagement, combined with these top-down approaches, will enable people to codesign their cities.”

Sensors relay environmental data to a website, allowing meaningful measurements across the city. (smartcitizen.me)

Sensors relay environmental data to a website, allowing meaningful measurements across the city. (smartcitizen.me)

Going Hyperlocal

Enter Europe’s Smart Citizen project —a people-led approach that fosters public participation in monitoring the environment, and that is intended to bring deeper understanding of traffic, green transport, and a city’s carbon footprint. It is a hyperlocal idea made possible by a crowdfunded open-source environmental monitoring system named “Smart Citizen.”

The system works on sensor kits developed by Acrobotic Industries, an electronics company based in Pasadena, California; digital fabrication center Fab Lab Barcelona; and art production center Hangar, based in Barcelona. Unlike the centralized systems being designed by Cisco and IBM, these low-cost pieces of hardware (which are the size of a deck of cards) are supplied free to willing participants living or working within three miles (4.8 km) of Manchester’s city center.

The sensors—which are in place in about 700 locations in Europe today—measure carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide levels, temperature, humidity, light, and sound from buildings’ balconies, window sills, and rooftops. These data are then streamed over wi-fi and to a website and online application programming interface (API) that can then be accessed openly. The idea is that this will show meaningful measurements about the city. Acrobotic is developing similar kits to track energy consumption and air quality inside homes.

Proponents hope that eventually the kits will be so widely used that they will vacuum up a large, critical mass of information that can be aggregated into useful knowledge about how a city is functioning day to day. These data sets will then allow policy makers to make informed decisions, improve resilience, and ensure that resources are deployed to greater effect.

It is an initiative that has attracted the partnership of Intel, which has provided Manchester institutions with five Intel Galileo microcontroller super-sensor boards that will complement the data collected by the Smart Citizen community, believing these “intelligent devices” will help the public glean deep insight into the local environment.

However, smart-city innovation does not come cheap. By 2020, global investment in smart technology infrastructure is projected to reach $108 billion, according to market intelligence firm Boulder, Colorado–based Pike Research. And, as big corporations raise revenue from infrastructure installation, selling consumer-facing hardware and then services for that hardware, many of them are looking forward to multibillion-dollar profits.

Amsterdam also is choosing this more democratic approach. The municipal government and Dutch research nonprofit organization Waag Society recently deployed 100 such kits to residents. Data already captured have allowed Waag to create a noise-intensity map showing levels of sound pollution across the city as a whole over a one-week period.

The city was inspired by Fab Lab’s maiden scheme in Barcelona, which has 150 people reporting data to online servers—a project that earned it the World Smart Cities Award for innovation at the Spanish city’s expo in 2013, recognizing its contribution to the development of smart cities.

Tomas Diez, cocreator of the Smart Citizen project, says this approach to progressive urbanization competes with the technology that large corporates are producing. “I’ve been working with Intel and Cisco, and they are very curious about what we are doing,” he says. “In general, our sensor technology is either at the same level or is more advanced than what big brands are delivering.”

The current technology in use by cities to monitor things such as air pollution are too sparse and ineffective, Diez argues. He says he has been approached by construction companies looking to use Smart Citizen sensors on building sites because the builders are liable for fines if they pollute while they work.

“They could have a commercial application, too,” Diez says. “The sensors on the market that test air quality in buildings are not reliable. We tried every brand available, but 90 percent were not good enough.” He says the kits the project is using are less than a year away from commercial application. When that happens, they could help landlords identify tenants who need to work on their environmental impacts.

Developer Interest

Property companies in the United Kingdom have shown similar interest in FutureEverything’s work. In 2013, the firm formed a two-year partnership with Noma, a 20-acre (8 ha) mixed-use redevelopment project north of Manchester’s city center. The developers—the Co-Operative Group and U.K. fund manager Hermes Real Estate—are striving to make the £800 million (US $1.3 billion) new mixed-use neighborhood a hub of digital industry and technology.

In March, Noma, in collaboration with FutureEverything, hosted a pop-up speculative city in a new city square in the Noma neighborhood that invited visitors to envision city life in the future through workshops, architecture, art, and family-friendly workshops. “We don’t yet know what kind of applications smart cities need, but we need to go through the process of bringing all stakeholders together and deciding what the problems are,” Diez explains.

Elsewhere, the innovation lab is working on an open-data project that could help city planning—as well as other public services—become streamlined, complementing the work being undertaken through the Smart Citizen project.

The Greater Manchester Data Synchronisation Programme—a collaboration among FutureEverything; Connected Digital Economy Catapult, a national center to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); and urban innovation research center Future Cities Catapult—is working with three city councils in the region on the creation of digital resources that help data sharing among public departments, boroughs, and the public.

The aim is that municipal leaders will then be able to plan across departments, while SMEs will have access to data they need to provide innovative city products and services. Data experts, known as “code fellows,” are working with local authorities to help identify sporadic data sets held by public bodies and turn them into useful information. One area they are working on is planning.

“This is a major issue,” Hemment says. “One of the problems in Manchester is that there are so many data on land use, but they are held in different formats that aren’t quite accessible or it’s not clear what the big picture is.”

Greater Manchester, a flagship U.K. smart city, has been working to take advantage of data from mobile phones, vehicle systems, satellites, and cameras. It aims to bring all of this together to create an overview of the city, showing where people flows might have an impact on the transport system. It is hoped this will result in more efficient and reliable routes and give priority to buses on certain routes.

Hemment says that open-data projects like this are “absolutely” relevant to property companies. FutureEverything is currently working on custom systems for property companies on collecting data for them within buildings.

He says shopping centers are the ideal place for open-data capture because they generate intelligence on how people are using spaces. That helps landlords understand the improvements that can be made. “Data capture is problematic if it is not transparent. But you could create games, for instance, that people can play as they move around. It is then understood that their movements are being collated.

“Property development is not only about bricks and mortar but [also] about data and data infrastructure. Developers should be thinking about how to turn buildings into spaces where people can visit and create mobile applications. That opens a building up to something more dynamic,” Hemment says.

Lucy Anna Scott is a London-based freelance writer and coeditor of Lost in London magazine.

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Lucy Scott is deputy editor of Real Estate Capital, a London-based publication focussed on the European CRE lending markets. This summer, she co-authored a special report for the ULI’s 20th edition of Emerging Trends in Real Estate, exploring the major trends that have shaped the industry since its launch, as well as the issues set to shape the industry over the coming decades.
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