Investing in a Smart City, where to start?

As suggested in the entry “The paradise of the Smart Cities”, the adoption of a strategy to become an intelligent city is very promising to promote cities in the global competing world. The label of a Smart City would surely help positioning the city at international level and thus attracting talent and investment. Recognising this, municipalities all around the globe have started allocating considerable amounts of budget to conceptualise a Smart City strategy for their cities and start developing immediately the projects that will make their cities stand out from the rest. In this sphere, with the money and the political commitment assured, local decision-makers face the following question, where do I start? Answering this question implies a deep knowledge of what is the future scenario that the city wants to attain, in other words, it implies having a clear view of what a Smart City should be.

But, what is a Smart City? The label of the Smart City is still a blurry concept. Some definitions are as  old as one decade. In 2000 the paper “The Vision of a Smart City”[1] expounded that the vision of “smart cities” is the urban centre of the future, made safe, secure environmentally green, and efficient because all structures – whether for power, water, transportation, etc. – are designed, constructed and maintained making use of advanced, integrated materials, sensors, electronics, and networks which are interfaced with computerized systems comprised of databases, tracking, and decision-making algorithms".

More recently, the working paper “Smart Cities in Europe”[2] offers another approximation to the idea explaining that any city can be defined as “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance”. This definition is also presented in the Wikipedia and you might recall it from many other posts.

What about the fields of action? It seems quite accepted that the main traditional components of a Smart City are (Wikipedia): 

• Smart Economy 
• Smart Mobility 
• Smart Environment 
• Smart Governance 
• Smart Living
• Smart People 

However, the components of a Smart City are as open as its own definition. It is the city’s own priorities who decide which should be the field of action to start with. And there is no mandatory requirement that says that an intelligent city must develop actions in each of the mentioned fields. The important thing is not to take them just as words put together but thinking what might be inside. For instance, what is the meaning of Smart People and how does it fit in a Smart City?

A Smart City project should be much more than just a project using IT. Technology should serve to urbanise, should be born from a urban need and not otherwise. Moreover, it should include their end-users in the whole creation process, from the first steps towards the concretion of the urban problem till the piloting testing phase, to assure their ultimate successful adoption. This is the place for the Smart People!

Going back to the title of this entry “Investing in a Smart City, where to start?”, city decision-makers with economical possibilities to run Smart City projects might well be receiving tons of invitations by private stakeholders with a folder under their arms containing the ultimate Smart City solutions. These last would be extremely happy to have the opportunity of showing which are the steps to take and where to invest the money. City leaders should be aware that it is the citizen’s worries and concerns who should guide and legitimate the investment process. Smart people should have a voice to decide which is the path that OUR cities should follow to become smart. As recognised by Rob Goodspeed in this post: “Only a democratically legitimate government can determine whether money is well spent on a food or crime tracking systems, versus other pressing concerns like education, health care, and infrastructure”. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that it is us, the citizeneers, who ultimately decide and legitimate governments.

“I have a queue of enterprises in front of my office waiting to sell their Smart City solutions. I argue them that it is me who has to tell them what do we want and not the other way”. I heard these words last Friday. They were pronounced by one top political leader of Barcelona. I just hope that the “it is me” also means “it is me and all the citizens who have chosen me to represent them who will tell what to do”. This is the path to follow. And I am happy to be able to see this project closely.

Where to start a Smart City project? Taking Smart People on board first.

[1] “The Vision of a Smart City”, Robert E. Hall (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA), 2nd International Life Extension Technology Workshop, Paris, 28th September 2000

[2] "Smart cities in Europe", Andrea Caragliu (Politecnico di Milano), Chiara del Bo (Università degli Studi di Milano) and Peter Nijkamp (VU University), Research Memorandum 2009-48

Photo by CubaGallery (Flickr)

Citizeneers: the city enablers

These last decades, the economic globalization process (which has tried hard to homogenise all of us and that has installed McDonald’s and Starbucks Coffee in every self-respecting city) have led cities to face new consuming global problems, problems that have been often fought with local solutions surpassing the city’s self-reaction power. As Zygmunt Bauman radically recognized in his book Liquid Times. Living in an age of uncertainty (2007), cities nowadays have become the rubbish dumps for the problems produced at global level. 


Our local urban environments are facing tremendous global concerns such as climate change, budget cuts, population raises and, specially, social discontentment and rupture. Cities have grown spectacularly these last decades mainly because of the arrival of populated waves of immigration. As a consequence, specially in North America and I am seeing this also in Europe, ethnic residential areas have appeared shaping “one-colour” isolated communities. By this impulse of belonging to a similar-minded community, citizens have kept away from the interaction with other realities and, consequently, from direct action.


In this context, the need has become urgent for cities to shift from fragmented barren places to alive spaces that ensure and smoother social cohesion and inclusion. Cities’ leaders, sometimes with limited space of action and lack of resources, have found themselves not enough prepared to allow this change. However, the advance and new possibilities of ICT has revolutionized urban development and has opened new easier channels to enable citizens action in this field. What is the new role for citizens then?


In her great article “The Enabling City”, appeared in the Summer 2011 Issue of Next American City, Chiara Camponeschi recognised the huge importance of political involvement in this radical empowerment change. According to her words decision-makers should commit for: “driving  long-term structural changes by unlocking the capacity of others to meaningfully participate in the life of a user-produced city”. That implies “a shift from control to enablement”.


Moreover, there will be no user-produced city without empowered citizens: citizeneers. As Saskia Sassen explained in this great speech at Lift “The Future of the Smart Cities” (every minute is worth seeing): “the logic of citizens is not the logic of managers”. This means that, to allow future success in urban decisions, citizeneers should be placed at the centre of any action, giving them the tools to be aware of the community’s concerns and the spaces, virtual or not, where to interact with other citizeneers. And government should carefully watch this process. I would like to stress here the watch, implying no action: the power and the action should be given to citizeneers. Using a gardening parallelism, the seed of self-action should be sowed in a fertilised land, left alone and harvested for processing once the plant has grown.


These innovative ways of social cooperation for an inclusive sustainability in cities are not new. Spaces like living labs (which deserve more than one blog’s entry) have been doing for years a great job providing meeting points for citizeneers from different communities and levels of knowledge, ready for interaction and ideas sharing. The first citizeneers have also pioneered in creating their own solutions for non-existing services. The fruit of cooperation for solving the community’s concerns has started to grow: some self-development projects are already here. Just to name some, the reporting tools Fix My Street from UK and Repara Ciudad (in Spanish, according to the website an English version is coming soon) from Spain or the car sharing French initiative BuzzCar (in French).

Image: think4photop / FreeDigitalPhotos.net