The "Smart" in Smart City does not Always mean "Tech" - Take Home Message #2 from Smart Cities Week in Silicon Valley
Many organisations entering or approaching the Smart City question and/or market presume that it is a given that Smart City is about technology, and must therefore be for the good.
At LVX our Scoping, Strategy and Development Sessions with cities that are formalising their Smart City Strategies and Frameworks deliberately start in a very different place and with a series of questions:
> Who are the people, businesses and institutions in the city, (hospitals, schools, universities)?
> What are the needs and wants of these people?
> What resources and processes are currently available to meet these expectations and requirements?
> Where are the gaps and overlaps?
It is at this point that many smart city plans start to derail because people assume that the "Smart" in Smart City means "Tech".
Smart is logically an approach; a way of thinking and some of the smartest things that come out of many of LVX's sessions with cities are ideas and approaches, not tech. This was reinforced in the workshops and discussion meetings with many city managers, mayors and leaders from around the world at Smart Cities Week.
The city of Seattle this year doubled its painting budget. Why? Because if all of the road lines are made 6 inches wide not 4 inches, and a new paint is used all autonomous and connected vehicles can be guided by them.
Sometimes smart is identifying things that should no longer be done or simply be done differently: ceasing paper handouts or letterbox drops or using a different language.
Las Vegas passed a law allowing anyone to register an autonomous vehicle so long as it complied with requirements and established guidelines for use.
The City of Santa Monica has created a Wellbeing Index to engage with communities and assess their actual and perceived quality of life in order to baseline and then track the qualitative benefits of their Smart City initiatives. Let's remember that a key remit of Smart City is all about improving the quality of life of citizens so if we don't have a handle on that then we are flying blind.
The City of Los Angeles has conducted a "Public Space Audit" called "Code the Kerb", cataloguing all areas of sidewalk and on street non-metered parking into an asset database in order to come up with innovate uses for this previously unrecognised asset.
By changing the use patterns of its main freeways, (5 lanes each way), Seattle has managed to increase the amount of vehicle throughput and transit speeds by 30% without using any technology or changing the infrastructure.
The City of Phoenix has signed off on a data sharing agreement with several other cities allowing larger and more aggregated data analysis to allow more informed decisions to be made. The key here is the sharing, not the analytics, as the analytics already exist.
Next time you are looking at your Smart City journey, before you go straight to the technology, really assess your needs and the resources you already have, for there is likely a huge amount of benefit that can be derived from thinking differently - being "Smart" - before you go "Tech".