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The 20s – The decade of the Smart City and smarter planning?

‘Smart Cities’ and the built environment profession

The ‘Smart Cities’ movement was formulated over the last decade, gaining increasing prominence in the built environment industry in recent years. The concept has historically been considered (very broadly) to relate to how access to data and technology can be utilised by cities, including to understand people and place. However, it still remains a puzzling concept for many with no single definition; what actually is a Smart City? How are we (or could we) be applying this concept? Despite its increasing prominence in the 2010s, why is it not a concept that is fully engrained within the planning and built environment profession?

What is a Smart City?

As a city known for its digital and creative industries, Bristol always strives to be at the forefront of new movements and has taken up the challenge of becoming a leading Smart City [1], publishing its own Bristol Smart City Strategy ‘Connecting Bristol’, in August 2019.

This strategy provides a revived, welcome explanation and interpretation of how Bristol can develop as a Smart City and what we understand the concept to be today.

Bristol moves away from the traditional Smart City definition with an over-emphasis on data and technology and instead defines a Smart City as a:

“liveable, sustainable and prosperous city[…]our approach is shifting to using civic and social innovation in combination with technology to enhance, not degrade the messy, human magic of Bristol”

Here we start to see core concepts in planning and urban design such as ‘liveability’ and ‘sustainability’ become embedded in what defines a Smart City. We also start to see recognition that technology can be an enhancement, as well as a potential threat, to the nature of our cities. This ‘city-specific’ definition put forward by Bristol may provide means of making Smart Cities a more tangible and applicable concept by providing clarity on its relevance to our profession. Moreover, this could prove as a catalyst for other cities to apply the concept to their own planning and development ambitions for their people and places.

What does it mean for planners?

The prospect of how planners can engage with the Smart City concept and the use of big data and technology to enhance a city is daunting, but presents an exciting opportunity. Discussions and comment pieces around this topic in recent years have principally focussed on: 

  • the use of technology and data to enhance community engagement and consultation;
  • using real time data to inform decision-making, interactive mapping and planning policy;
  • opportunities that big data and technology provide for combating climate change and encouraging sustainability; and
  • the use of data and technology in placemaking exercises and flexible use of public space.

The Smart Cities movement can offer the built environment, and in particular the planning profession, a wealth of opportunity. With this in mind, and using the example of Bristol, the Smart City Strategy aims to create a ‘Bristol Digital Twin’ [2]. This will be a virtual city model which will allow live analysis, visualisations, data-driven management and planning and predictive modelling. To help us better engage with such ideas, we have started to consider how a ‘Digital Twin’ and different types of data sets could be used to help shape the future of cities like Bristol as liveable, sustainable and prosperous places.

The Smart Cities movement is based on the concept of real-time cities. However, as planners, it is our principal role to be forward looking, planning for the future. In contrast, Smart Cities offers the possibility for all buildings, including homes, employment space, schools and hospitals to be interconnected and ‘live’. Data would therefore be available to confirm if buildings are in operation and to what level they are being utilised.

How can we utilise real-time data in practice?

Engaging with this principle could help to make the planning system more responsive to changes in demand for differing development uses. For example, with live housing data, local authorities could have instant and accurate statistics regarding housing numbers, which would go some way to de-mystifying outstanding housing requirements within authority areas. Theoretically, the same notion could be applied to demonstrate that there is an over-supply of employment land. Development Plans would therefore no longer be static documents, they could be constantly monitored and updated for their relevance and accuracy, and supported by showing the data on a virtual city model. After all, a fundamental way to create a ‘liveable’ city for future generations is to understand how it is lived in here and now. Engaging with this data provides this opportunity.

This has been clearly recognised in the recent Policy Exchange Report ‘Rethinking the Planning System for the 21st Century’, published in January 2020. This emphasises that:

“[…]local planning departments should increase their use of metrics and spatial modelling, enhanced through the use of autonomous data collection and assessment, to better understand their influence over land prices, rents, commuting times and patterns.

The role of planners should be to monitor these data sets in real time and identify when policy needs to be adjusted so that places can adapt to changing circumstances”

As acknowledged by the mention of commuting times and patterns, this is an approach that could be taken further and assist in the realms of transport planning for new development. In 2017, the technology company Uber announced the release of Uber Movement, which is a free publication of movement data within cities that they operate.

In an isolated form, the Uber Movement data only covers private taxi journeys booked through the Uber application. The power of this available data is fully realised when integrated into a Bristol Digital Twin style model and coupled with data from local bus operators and information from Google and Apple on private journeys. Taken further, fitness application Strava will (for a cost) release grouped data through ‘Strava Metro’, which covers journeys made on foot and by bicycle. Strava are explicit in stating that this is not just data on ‘athletes’, but is relevant to commuting. In addition, the Met Office has recently confirmed that they will be investing in a ‘billion pound’ [3] supercomputer  that will provide significantly more accurate meteorological data than currently provided, which will be shared with various government departments.

Amalgamating all of this data will help to identify trends in how people use the city and its spaces; our desire lines and movement habits – the ‘human magic’. It will also demonstrate how cities function in different real life scenarios, such as mass floods, or when Greta Thunberg attends a climate march in Bristol City Centre.

Developers and local authorities could utilise this information to accurately identify where new development should be located. Local and national government could also use this to accurately model the future investment in infrastructure. Additional future data could then demonstrate the success of the development. The more information added to the ‘digital twin’ and effectively interrogated, the more accurate and beneficial the outputs become. The challenge, however, may be in working out how to harness this information to influence a relatively inflexible and in some instances rigid planning system.

What challenges do we face?

A caveat, cities across the UK can only flourish as Smart Cities if there are the relevant skillsets available locally to accurately interrogate this information. Renowned for its creative and digital industries, with two leading universities and as a hub for innovation, Bristol appears to be leading the way on how to implement a Smart City.

As professionals within the built environment, we need to fully engage and embrace such initiatives, which could enhance and enable cities to function in a more effective manner. We are interested to see a push for this nationally, following the recent Policy Exchange report. However, across the country, a current lack of skills, money and time, both within the private and public sectors are all barriers to achieving this vision. Finally, there needs to be a willingness from the private sector to collaborate with public services to make data available and share expertise, ultimately to create truly liveable cities that respond to human needs and habits. It is only then that we may start to see Smart Cities become part of our day-to-day vocabulary as planners; watch this space over the next decade.

We would be interested in hearing more about our clients, developers and stakeholders’ thoughts on this topic and what it means for the planning industry. Please contact George Wilyman or Jadine Havill if you would like to discuss.

10 March 2020

[1] UK Smart Cities Index, published by Huawei and Navigant Consulting, October 2017

[2] Page 24 of the Smart City Strategy, August 2019

[3] David Shukman, BBC News, 17 February 2020