Leveraging Emerging Technologies for Urban Challenges

What does it mean to leverage emerging technologies for urban challenges? At first, you’d probably think of challenges such as climate, mobility, equity and other quality of life matters. Yet, after listening to Cisco's session on the topic at this year’s Barcelona Smart City Expo World Congress, I came away wondering about a different set of challenges – how governance, understanding the needs of the community, and civic engagement challenges can stand in the way of rapid deployment. In order to release the power of technology to overcome our most serious problems, capitalizing on innovative technology necessitates new ways of engaging stakeholders.?

One of the most critical items standing in the way of broader and faster adoption of these technical applications involves community participation and feedback. The session moderator, Natalia Olson-Urtecho brings attention to these questions of governance and implementation. Even her job title -- ‘Co-Founder of The disruptive Factory”—highlights the difficulties faced by leaders aspiring for digital transformation. Afterall, not many people elect their mayor or other senior elected official because they want disruption; yet disruption often serves as the front door to innovation. So how do we bridge the gap between current practice and what’s needed in a way that produces the broader participation necessary to support change.

Olson-Urtecho tells us that people feel disenfranchised and unheard. She recalled that when Philadelphia broadly reached out with a zoning question it received only 120 responses. But when they implemented even the simplest of technologies – a Survey Monkey – they received over 5000 responses. That’s a more than 4000% increase in participation. Technology itself can pave the path towards deeper community understanding that supports necessary changes. For example, one way to incorporate community views is through the use of anonymous sentiment mining, or polling. ?Technology can be either the problem or the solution depending on the creativity of those developing the uses.

Another roadblock to community participation and creative solutions is the absence of good mapping data. Panelist, Sameh Wahba: Global Director, Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice at the World Bank advocates for more crowd sourcing and mapping, citing the fact that many of the cities he works with are insufficiently mapped. He argues ?that the value gained from broad community participation – including supplying localized information about their areas – will ?enhance city responses to concerns like flood risks or covid-19 hot spots and will facilitate optimization of city services.

As Wahba emphasizes, cross sector collaboration is challenging, and can often cause planning to be done in a silo. He argues for spatial coordination especially in jurisdictions such as San Paolo with 39 municipalities.?Wahba supports using machine learning to help governments set up emergency services and program long term investments by the use of digital mapping.

This coming together requires increasing connectivity and data literacy of a city, its workers and residents. Denver and San Francisco accomplished these goals through data academies that offer classes to public employees.

These governance challenges include a broader need for investment in people and education and increased accessibility to technology. Daniel Quintero Calle, Mayor of Medellin, highlights that the need for active public public sector policy setting in so that important public private ?collaborations equitably increase?internet access and connectivity.

There is also the need to make sure that we are investing in the training of students who will enter the ever-evolving tech world and will need the skills and knowledge to keep up. Panelist ?Cassie Roach , Vice President, Global Public Sector of Cisco references the company’s work across 44 countries including ?Networking Academies that have trained millions of students to bring to the workforce another set of skills. In the words of panelist Hessen’s Digital Minister, Professor Kristina Sinemus, “government needs to ensure the presence of a data platform that streamlines administrative processes and makes them more efficient.” ?

Entrepreneurs, tech companies and others each day are utilizing technology to more private value and profit. The challenge now is to take those same technologies and translate them to public value. Natalia Urtecho rightfully pointed out that technology was born not only out of entrepreneurialism, but out of good policies. This action will take community support, digital platforms and increasingly more people with the right skills. We have examples of all of these—but officials need a sense of urgency and the legal authority to implement. To do so will literally save lives and communities.?