The good, bad, and beautiful of Smart Cities

There’s a lot of buzz around smart cities at the moment. We recently worked with Jacobs, the global infrastructure consultancy, to look at emerging trends in the smart cities space.

What do we mean by a smart city? It’s a technologically-modern urban area that uses different types of electronic methods, voice activation methods, and sensors to collect specific data.

It’s a confusing and complex space. Despite years of investment from leading cities across the globe, this intricity is the likely reason why we’re seeing a lack of successful large-scale rollouts.

We wanted to find examples of successful deployments underpinned with solid business models and have pulled together a few cases that we found inspiring, below.

But first, we looked at why these projects often ‘fail’ or don’t meet expectations in ways that mean they never scale.

The 3 main blockers:

• Privacy, security, and data concerns. City residents are wary about the use of technologies like 5G, sensors, and anything that analyses personal behaviour and data. YouGov found 36% of people in the UK had concerns about 5G and their data privacy, and so do central governments — the UK’s GCHQ has issued a warning about smart city applications being targets for cyber-attacks to get personal data. This reservation can prevent engagement with, or the take up of, smart services.

Governments and providers need to work together to ensure citizens are comfortable with ‘smart’ solutions and that they have minimised risk that can destroy faith in the technology and the wider city system.

• Too much reliance on citizens. Many usage cases rely on citizens having connectivity in the first place, alongside being technologically savvy. This often isn’t the case — particularly for the most disadvantaged and vulnerable that local governments serve most frequently. In one interview we heard about a programme in Scotland where users were given iPads. These were later understood to be unopened for fear of breaking them and being expected to pay for the iPad (of which they couldn’t afford).

Any organisation delivering these types of solutions needs to ensure they embrace the end user, understand their needs and demands and that they design the system to meet these. ‘Build it and they will come’ won’t work with many potential users for smart cities; the services need to be seamless.

• Insufficient funding or short-term business cases. Many of the examples we looked at were grant-funded without solid business cases behind them to make them sustainable — grant funding wasn’t provided to get the implementations to a break-even point where they could become sustainable businesses. Further, many projects were unrealistically designed to provide benefits within the political election cycle so political parties could claim credit for them.

Without a long-term funding plan, business case and political support these projects can’t thrive.

Our 3 main learnings:

The signs of a successful smart city deployment include:

• A solution that’s fit to run long term at scale. Our research identified many worthwhile pilots that had already ended or expired without viable operating and business models.
• A solution that meets real user needs — but with limited or no extra engagement required. Solutions that made service provision digital, but harder or more complicated than they were before, won’t succeed.
• A solution that delivers tangible benefits. Reduced fuel bills, better customer service, easier walking, and driving are all real benefits that solve real problems for residents of a city. Focus on these first and look at where cities can find efficiencies and benefits that flow from them. Don’t try to connect the whole city at once; start delivering small tangible benefits, learn from this and carry on.

Inspiring examples:

We saw some green shoots and exciting examples of where the blockers have been avoided.

ALBOA Social Housing — Denmark

What it is: A scheme that uses smart solar power and energy grid management to reduce costs for social housing residents. A unique risk-sharing model meant residents didn’t have to do anything to get lower energy bills and homes that created less carbon — a double win!

Why we loved it: As residents saw lower bills with no extra effort, they became more engaged with managing their energy use at home. By showing them these benefits, it was then easier to engage residents and increase their smart-energy usage by doing things like installing smart meters and appliances at home.

Happiness Meter — UAE

What it is: A simple way of gauging citizen and customer happiness across multiple digital channels. It simply asks if your experience left you ‘satisfied’, ‘neutral’ or ‘unsatisfied’, feeding these results into a city-wide dashboard that works across thousands of touchpoints for the private and public sectors.

Why we loved it: The design is simple, based on user needs and science, and built to support Dubai’s goal of being the happiest city on earth. The ‘Happiness Meter’ was scaled, capturing millions of interactions across thousands of touchpoints — and, who doesn’t want to be happy?

Smart Bins, multiple cities

What it is: Smart bins that send alerts when they need to be emptied save governments money by optimising work processes to only send staff to empty them when needed, optimising waste truck routing to save energy and minimise congestion. Solar power adds to their ‘smartness’ making them carbon neutral. In one city in Portugal, this knowledge lets the local government reduce the number of waste trucks it needs and operates by 20%. Similar results are starting to be seen in other major cities like Amsterdam, Atlanta, London, Melbourne, New York, Philadelphia.

Why we loved it: Waste management is one of the least glamorous parts of city management — but a significant cost. Cleaner cities, less congestion, and less pressure on city budgets are a sure win.

Connected traffic lights, USA

What it is: 10,000 traffic junctions that have been fitted out with networked traffic lights and sensors that help ease city congestion, in turn improving air quality and the city experience for drivers and pedestrians. Additionally, network functionality means some maintenance tasks can be done remotely which reduces lane closures and other on-street repairs. Data from the system can also inform traffic and navigation apps.

Why we liked it: Citizens receive obvious benefits without needing to engage. The technology improves the lives of various people in the city, creates budget efficiencies, and reduces maintenance tasks. It’s a win-win for the citizens and the city that doesn’t require citizens to do anything else.

Port management, Germany

What it is: Connected truck logistics for moving goods in and out of one of Europe’s busiest ports. Sensors on vehicles and ultra-fast, cutting-edge computing take factors into account that no person ever could, including driver behaviour, response time, and vehicle performance to optimize logistics that make the port increasingly effective and safe. The system aims to improve driver experience, reduce emissions and reduce damage to goods.

Why we like it: The high-tech system creates benefits that flow down from creating a good experience for drivers — they key users and stakeholders.

Are you working in this space? I’d love to hear what’s on your list of the good, bad and beautiful.

Jason DaPonte is Managing Consultant at Fluxx and magenticNorth, a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. We work with The Economist, Mars, Bupa, Condé Nast, National Grid, BEIS, Severn Trent Water and others. You can get in touch with Jason at: jason.daponte@fluxx.uk.com