"SMART" OPPORTUNITIES FOR SCOTLAND'S CITIES

By Iain McCreaddie, Policy Executive, Scottish Cities Alliance, Scottish Council for Development and Industry

By 2050 seven out of every ten people will live in cities. Globally, city leaders are responding by developing smart strategies around infrastructure, service delivery and work practices in the knowledge that smart planning now will enable their city to effectively embrace the opportunities and manage the resource pressures commensurate with population growth. Technology is the tool that will enable city leaders to develop their vision of an efficient and responsive city which can predict problems before they occur and design tailored services which make city living better for both its citizens and the economy.

Technology is the tool that will enable city leaders to develop their vision of an efficient and responsive city which can predict problems before they occur

In April 2013, the Scottish Cities Alliance Leadership Group agreed to develop a collaborative programme around Smart Cities as part of its Strategic Implementation Plan. Since April the strategic rationale, approach and a plan for designing this investment programme has been agreed by the Alliance partners. The premise is to accelerate the adoption of “Smart City” service transformation focused on the Alliance’s objectives of creating the conditions for growth and supporting investment in Scotland's cities. Scotland's cities are well placed to be at the forefront of developing a common vision for the smart delivery of public services, building on Glasgow's success in securing £24 million from the UK Technology Strategy Board Future Cities Demonstrator programme. The developing Alliance programme will help to disseminate the learning from Glasgow’s Demonstrator to the other six cities. Work will be undertaken with the individual cities to understand where in the smart city journey each city is and where it wants to go. Leaders from each city will be supported to build a shared vision and develop a roadmap for investment and transformation for their city and Scotland as a whole.

The Alliance is an important conduit to developing a Scotland wide Smart Cities strategy because it brings together public, private and academic stakeholders able to collectively develop and implement innovative ideas in a way that they could not do so working independently. Working collaboratively with the Scottish Government, the Alliance is seeking to secure European Structural Funding to help cities realise their ambitions. The EU Horizon 2020 Research and Development programme has a ‘Smart City’ focus and the Alliance is working with industry, academia and the cities to access the €92 million of innovation funding for 2014-2015. Concurrently, the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation will also work with the Alliance to identify, prioritise and accelerate a series of smart city projects across Scotland informed by international learning from the programme’s partners.

Scotland’s city leaders’ rationale for progressing a Smart Cities programme is supported by best practice worldwide. McKinsey's recently published report ‘How to make a city great’ outlines numerous global examples of good city leadership, many of which have a smart cities approach at their core. For example, the report acknowledges that the way city leaders integrate the environment into economic decision making is vital to smart growth. In 2011, New York City decided to use technology to efficiently retrofit, monitor and control the energy usage of the Empire State Building, reducing annual energy consumption by 38% with a payback period of 3.5 years. The report also acknowledges that using data and technologies can help engage citizens and businesses in the process of improving a city and its services. In Buncheon City, South Korea, drivers are able to access real time traffic information generated from numerous sources, including CCTV cameras, helping them avoid congested roads and helping the city authority to make informed decisions on how to address road congestion and keep the city moving.

the way city leaders integrate the environment into economic decision making is vital to smart growth.

Notably, some of the planned outputs of Glasgow’s Demonstrator align with many of the smart examples of city leadership detailed in McKinsey’s report. Glasgow has identified a range of buildings for inclusion in the Demonstrator which will use smart methodologies to monitor and reduce their energy usage. The energy data collected will be disseminated to citizens and businesses through newly established data platforms and used to leverage financial advantage or incentives from energy providers. The Demonstrator will also establish an Integrated Operations Centre which will use CCTV and Road Management Systems to meet a number of key objectives including improved, sustainable and integrated transport movement, improved city planning and city safety.

Integral to the Glasgow plan is to make the city’s citizens part of their service delivery standards; moving the city council and its partners away from being providers of a service for citizens towards providing a service with citizens. The ‘MyGlasgow’ Smartphone app will enable citizens to develop a dialogue with council services, gain a better understanding of what is going on in their city and play an important role in influencing city decisions. The commonalities between the Glasgow Demonstrator and McKinsey’s examples of good city leadership confirm that all of Scotland’s cities are right to learn from Glasgow’s approach. This is because the Demonstrator project recognises that in a resource constrained world, cities need to develop and integrate systems that optimise their use of resources and delivery of services across the key systems of energy, transport, water and waste using data and ICT.

the global market for smart city solutions and the additional services required to deploy them is$408 billion by 2020. The UK's strengths in design, research, finance and engineering services could allow it to capitalise on 25% of the total smart cities market.

Arup's paper ‘Smart City Market Opportunities for the UK’, gives an indication of the scale of the economic opportunity for smart city solutions. The paper estimates the global market for smart city solutions and the additional services required to deploy them to be $408 billion by 2020. The UK's strengths in design, research, finance and engineering services could allow it to capitalise on approximately 25% of the total smart cities market. On this basis there is a real opportunity for Scotland to develop smart city services for our cities and their citizens to create a platform from which our companies can exploit the growing global market for smart service solutions.

IBM’s ‘5 in 5’ report gives an aspirational outlook on what smart service provision could look like if cities were sentient. The sentient city will use the breadth of technologies capabilities to “respond in real time, predict problems before they occur and deliver up more tailored services to make city life better for everyone… Cities and their leaders will make decisions based on infinite different types of information that will be visualised on fluid heat maps of city systems… Using advanced analytics, it will be possible to understand and continually digest new information freely provided by citizens.” This is an aspiration shared by the Leaders of Scotland’s cities who, working collaboratively with the Alliance partners, are best placed to deliver our citizens and businesses Smart opportunities.

Iain McCreaddie is Policy Executive – Scottish Cities Alliance at Scottish Council for Development and Industry

By Iain McCreaddie, Policy Executive, Scottish Cities Alliance, Scottish Council for Development and Industry

Issue 8: January 2014