David Ricketts, Innovation Fellow, Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard
In the United States, cities are run by mayors, and Smart City initiatives are not typically a priority for them. However, through the work of Chief Information/Innovation Officers (CIOs), we are in fact making great progress in this area. How does this happen? There are several factors at play:
- Mayors are elected every four years, therefore, they must focus on giving voters what they want so they can be re elected.
- Citizens often do not see the value in Smart Cities projects (versus traditional projects like fixing roads and bridges) so the mayor cannot justify putting valuable budget dollars into these areas.
- CIOs, who work for the mayor, are finding creative ways around funding issues to make Smart City projects a reality.
- As Smart City initiatives roll out, we are making progress on educating citizens about the value of these projects, so perhaps in the future, they may become a bigger priority for mayors.
Below I will share some examples of how this is happening, but first, let’s address the Smart City model which dates back to 1854.
Smart Cities’ Humble Beginnings
One of the first Smart Cities projects actually dates back to 1854 in London. This ‘model’ of how Smart Cities works is still being used today.
At that time, citizens were concerned about a huge cholera outbreak and Dr. John Snow decided to plot the deaths around his neighborhood so he could make sense of the outbreak. He noticed many deaths were centered around the water pump. The solution was, therefore, to remove the pump handle. It was a simple solution, but nobody wanted to listen until Reverend Henry Whitehead reasoned with them.
One hundred and sixty-two years have gone by and today’s Smart City projects still look a lot like this. Citizens have a problem, and we look to the city to solve it. We collect data, analyze it and take action. And in 2016, the biggest challenge we still face is engagement and adoption by the people. In this way, we must understand that technology is not the problem and Smart Cities really isn’t about technology. Although technology can enable us to do things, Smart Cities is about the people and, using data to make smart decisions to solve citizen problems.
Air Pollution in Louisville
A more modern example of Smart City innovation in the United States took place in Louisville under the direction of former CIO Ted Smith. As one of the top 10 most polluted cities, Louisville had a large problem with asthma and health care costs. Since Smart City projects are all about addressing citizen problems at the city level, Ted decided to start by tackling that problem.
At the time, Ted had heard of a company that was making smart inhalers. The smart inhalers were connected to the cell towers and allowed the company to track usage so they knew when a patient would need a new inhaler. The company approached Ted about the possibility of using the data from the inhalers to learn about air quality throughout the city. However, when Ted went to the mayor, the mayor refused the project, saying that voters were not interested in spending budget money on a smart inhaler project.
Ted instead went to a wealthy donor who contributed $150,000 in private money. The mayor agreed to let the project go on, as long as it did not require city money. The private funds were used to purchase 844 inhalers, which tracked the usage of 78 individuals from 2012 to 2013.
Data from the study identified high usage areas, which were not connected to the person’s home zip code but clustered in specific areas of the city – in particular, industrial areas and wealthy neighborhoods had cut down trees and therefore had no filters. The predictive models identified the areas of highest risk and the mayor could then target them for intervention.
Rain Sensors in Seattle
A second example comes to us from Seattle, under the direction of CIO Michael Matt Miller. Seattle has the most rainy days in the United States, but after putting out rain sensors they found that there is actually huge variation around the city – an eight-inch difference in rainfall depending on the area.
Rainfall can cause sewers to overflow and other issues as well – problems that affect the citizens. With a hyper-local realization of where the rain is falling the most, the city could find a better way to deal with heavy rainstorms and cut costs.
Once again, this project was not funded by the city. The Seattle Public Utilities, a water company that sells water to Seattle residents, gave a grant to the University of Washington, which provided the sensor technology and data analysis.
School and City Apps in Boston
In Boston, Smart City projects are coordinated not by the city but by a company called New Urban Mechanics, led by Nigel Jacobs. The company is funded by a grant from the Bloomberg Foundation. Using private money, New Urban Mechanics can focus on problems that citizens care about and innovate the city.
New Urban Mechanics has worked on many projects, including:
- School Registration App: Signing up for school is a problem in Boston. Parents get four pages of instructions to follow to make sure their children are enrolled in time. The complexities have caused social inequality, with higher-income families more likely to follow the complex instructions. New Urban Mechanics simplified things by creating a relatively inexpensive app. This different way of engaging citizens is helping lower income parents register their children.
- Where Is My School Bus? App: Parents want to know where their children are when they are commuting to and from school on the school bus. They worry about road conditions, snow storms, if the bus breaks down, and why it may be late. New Urban Mechanics developed an app that parents can use to track exactly where the school bus is in real time. It has been well-received by parents.
- Citizen Connect App: This app developed by New Urban Mechanics allows people to take pictures of what is wrong in the city and send them in, for example, if there is a pothole or a broken sidewalk. This is a way for the city to engage with the citizens and it has also been expanded into a separate app for city workers.
Overcoming Challenges
The main challenges to Smart Cities are funding and citizen engagement/adoption. The examples provided above give us hope that these challenges may eventually be overcome.
In terms of funding, there is no model to finance Smart Cities in the United States; you’ve got to figure out a way to do it. Some of the solutions that have been used are private funding, public support, and self-funding.
For the city, the mayor cannot justify investing in a project that the citizens don’t understand the ROI on. If they can’t articulate the ROI and get the citizens to understand it, it just won’t work. Citizens have long understood the ROI of fixing a bridge; however, they do not yet understand the value of paying someone $150,000 to create an app to track a school bus.
To get citizens to understand the ROI of Smart Cities projects, we must engage them — which is exactly what the projects above have been able to do. Showing citizens the impact that these projects have will demonstrate the value, which can then shift the mayor’s priorities. In this way, smart solutions aren’t about technology — they are about citizens and impact, driven by the citizen’s perspective on value.