The vision of a socially inclusive and liveable smart city

My colleague Ricky and I had the pleasure to interview Anja about her opinion on Smart Cities. Since 2016, Anja has been Head of Smart City at the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). Before joining SBB in 2012, Anja worked for the German Railways (DB) for three years. Anja earned a Bachelor in Tourism Management, a Master in Business Administration and passed an executive education programme at INSEAD.

A socially inclusive and liveable smart city

Daniel: What is your vision of a truly smart city?

Anja: For me, the vision of a smart city is one that is socially inclusive. It is not all about digitalisation in the first place. I know that digitalisation is a very important part for smart cities, of course, and it helps to make smart cities more resource efficient. But, smart cities are still a place where you live. I don’t think that digitalisation on its own will help cities to be more liveable. Therefore, digitalisation is more a means to an end but not the whole point about a smart city. So, for me a truly smart city is green and has areas, where different groups of people can socialize and be comfortable.

Right now, during the lockdown, we value public spaces where we can mingle with people and keep a safe physical distance. A truly smart city always has a good mix of digital and analogue means like parks and nice architecture available for the whole community, and not only for a certain group of people.

 Source: Parkroyal Collection Pickering, Singapore

Daniel: If you envision a smart city, how does it look like?

Anja: The first thing, which comes into my mind is that smart cities are green. For example, Singapore is doing a great job with green buildings such as the PARKROYAL COLLECTION hotel. You can see that people are just sitting around the open spaces to enjoy the greenery. Smart cities should feel inviting and have a personality. What you see today is that many international cities look the same in many ways. The cities of today are super-efficient, but often not very cosy and nice.

Another fact is the thing around inclusiveness. You see cities differently if you have children – looking at the world with the “Urban95 perspective”, i.e. height of 95cm, a typical 3-year old child. I was in Dubai for holidays with my family and I was walking around with a buggy – it’s not so easy to go around as the city was not built for walking. Cities are generally lacking the perspective of children or of a handicapped person as urban planners have not been building cities to be inclusive. In my view, this is an important aspect for smart cities to pay attention to. To sum up, I envision smart cities to be green, liveable and inclusive.

SBB is bringing two smart city disciplines together

Ricky: Why is the Swiss federal railway dealing with the topic of smart cities?

Anja: When we started the initiative in 2016, we wanted to define what a smart city is to SBB. When I looked up the term “smart city” Google back then, there were 2 million hits. Today, you can find more than 40 million hits. As SBB, we are not only the federal railway provider, we are also a real estate developer in Switzerland owning the spaces around the stations and depots. When certain parts of our train stations are no longer used for their original purpose, we will carry out real estate development. For example, we have apartment buildings, shopping malls, and universities. A very good example is the “Europaallee” area at the Zurich main station.

Source: www.sbb.ch

We see ourselves as playing a part in shaping and developing Swiss cities. We are able to help cities to be smarter due to our experience in mobility and transportation planning as well as real estate development. There are many synergies by bringing these two disciplines together. We observe that many cities tend to separate these two disciplines. Singapore is a pleasant exception! When we made a study tour to Singapore in 2016, we observed how the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and Urban Redevelopment Agency (URA) work together closely and are thinking in a cross disciplinary manner. This is new to many cities that historically tend to be more siloed and disconnected in their processes.

Ricky: Can you give us some more insight on your smart cities activities’ strategic foundation?

Anja: As I invested two years of my professional life to develop the strategic paper on smart cities and kick off our smart city initiative at SBB, I love to share some insights! You can find the link here to the smart city paper of SBB. We took the human-centred smart city wheel from Boyd Cohen back then and highlighted the areas where we are active in. We came up with five core areas:

1.    Smart mobility

2.    Smart building

3.    Smart public space

4.    Smart energy

5.    Smart connectivity

To further specify our contribution in these fields of action, we organised workshops with 200 people all over SBB. While I wrote this paper, I involved many colleagues in the process, who are engaged in this topic in one way or the other. At the same time, this enabled us to communicate internally that SBB is now going into the smart city direction. Many of my colleagues had already been doing smart things and initiated smart activities, but they were not aware that they actually contributed to that overall aim.

In 2018, our group management board, signed the strategic paper and the Smart City Lab Basel is currently our main activity.

Source: www.smartcityhub.ch/

Ricky: Why did you choose Basel as the Smart City Lab?

Anja: The freight terminal Wolf in the city of Basel is currently SBB’s largest real estate development of all about 150 projects in progress. Basel is interesting, because you are in the intersection of three countries: France, Germany and Switzerland. The city is international and it is a well-known logistics hub – many logistics companies are already located at the Wolf terminal. At the same time, the Canton of Basel was very supportive of the smart city initiative and we, therefore, initiated the Smart City Lab as a co-creation between SBB and the public administration of Basel.

The lab area is 16 ha in size, which give us a large area to explore real-world developments. The following YouTube video will give you a short overview of the Smart City Lab and its setup. Since 2019, we started with the pilot projects, focussing on mobility and logistics companies, as it is the DNA of the area. We invited many logistics companies to collaborate with each other. Even though some of them are competitors, they see more benefit of working together and shaping a powerful city hub for an environmentally friendly last mile delivery within Basel.

We want people to experience what a smart city is all about. Many companies have developed smart solutions. As we connect these companies together, they become even smarter through their collaboration. We frequently share updates on our activities via our LinkedIn company page. Our role as SBB is to moderate the selection and on-boarding process of new partners that fit into the ecosystem.

Daniel: Did you gain interest of other Swiss cities or cities out of Switzerland?

Anja: Yes, of course! However, it is not our idea to have different smart city labs all over Switzerland. We develop the smart ideas there and apply them to other Swiss cities in the mid and long term. We have had quite a few visitors from near and far that are very interested to learn about the setup of the lab. All the attention exceeded our expectations by far. We also consider ourselves as start-up supporters since we give them the space for developing and testing purposes in our lab for free. They only need to pay for the utilities like water and electricity.

Ricky: It is very interesting to compare the Swiss approach with the approach we took in Singapore. Singapore came up with the smart nation topic very early. The main difference in Singapore is that it is a government-driven top down approach – which is quite standard in Singapore. Also, in Singapore you can never get free rents! Therefore, you have professional real estate companies like CapitaLand setting up the lab instead. I believe, the approach is somehow similar, but in my view SBB is doing much more and giving more support.

Anja: The thing is, it really depends on where the smart city movement is coming from. For example, the governments of bigger cities, need to be in the driver seat and push it much more than elsewhere. If you consider some medium-sized cities, they are often quite smart already, as the public utility companies pushed this development at an early stage. In smaller cities, you see a lot of grassroot movement, for instance from certain individuals or organisations that drive this change and eventually convince their local authorities.

When we investigate the smart city development in Switzerland, it seems that mid-sized cities like St. Gallen and Winterthur, have been one step ahead for quite some time. The reason is that the local energy providers jumped on the topic sooner than others, and they convinced the city government at a later stage and they just had to jump on the train.

A modular approach for real estate and mobility

Ricky: What is the biggest gap to close for the Swiss Federal Railways from ordinary mobility today to smart mobility of tomorrow?

Anja: Our understanding of smart mobility is that we do not think from railway station to railway station, but from point A to B, that is from the starting point of your journey to your very destination. For example, a commuter starts walking from home, taking the tram for the first part of the trip, having a seamless transition onto our trains, and using a shared bike for the last mile. This example shows that we need to think in mobility chains, not only from a physical standpoint but also from a digital standpoint.

It must be easy to book the whole journey with one ticket and not having to purchase different tickets from different providers. We are now focussing very much on the train part, our core business, and there is still some work to do. The next stage is to integrate other service providers like car-sharing and bike-sharing. From a real estate perspective, we offer spaces to switch your means of transport easily. However, when it comes to how to use and allocate the space, you have many stakeholders to consider.

If you talk to the city government, they may want to have as many bus stops as possible. If you ask the people, who live near to the train station, they want to have a quiet surrounding and a green park. The taxi operators will have to more space for taxi drivers to pick up passengers. However, we only have limited space and one piece of land to offer to the different stakeholders.

The big question is if there is a way to design things to be more modular during the course of the day.

Imagine a train station where you have green recreation areas, when you don’t need the taxis and buses during rush hour. The modular solution in the end shall serve all the different needs from the various stakeholders, as space has become so valuable and expensive over the last decades, especially within our city centres. In some train stations, we have created sharing zones, where you have these different means of transport on a very narrow space.

SBB as the “Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS)” provider

Daniel: I read, that you want to position yourselves as “Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS)” provider. Can you comment on that?

Anja: In my opinion, there is no better company in Switzerland to become the MaaS provider than SBB.

We have a very high number of people in Switzerland, who are using the so-called general subscription pass. It is an all-inclusive ticket you can use for buses, trams, ships and even cable cars in the mountains. Therefore, it should be easy to add more mobility services to that offering, as we already have many people using the general subscription today.

As a final note, I want to mention the initiative Smart City Hub Switzerland as it is very close to my heart. We established this association in 2018 in a joint project between several Swiss cities (e.g. Zurich, Zug, St.Gallen) and with the three state-owned companies, namely Swisscom, Swiss Post, and SBB. The management board consists of the cities’ smart city managers and those from the three companies (like Anja). We believe this association will help to accelerate the smart city development in Switzerland.

In our regular board meetings, we discuss the day-to-day challenges of the partner cities. We are keen to learn from each other and to avoid making the same mistakes that others have encountered. Perhaps that is an advantage of being a small country and being able to cooperate in a very pragmatic way!

 Daniel & Ricky: Thank you so much for your time and all the great insights, Anja!

Source: Ricky Foo