The Smart City Revolution

By Abhijit Verekar

Smart City — It’s a term that gets tossed about a lot these days, particularly in the realm of municipal governments. It’s something that many leaders are striving toward, but in all of the discussions, all of the articles, and podcasts, there doesn’t seem to be a unified idea about what it takes to make a city “smart.” What, exactly, are leaders meant to be striving toward? How will citizens know when their own city achieves it? By and large, the concept is so vague that it has become almost meaningless.

You may have your own ideas about what it takes to make a smart city. If you’re like most municipal leaders, you probably think primarily in terms of acquiring sophisticated technology, such as fancy waste management systems and cutting-edge street lighting. In many municipalities, the term “smart city” is associated almost exclusively with the Internet of Things (IoT), whereby your tech and systems are able to talk to each other and share data. The value of sharing real-time data to do things like managing traffic certainly can be beneficial, but is it enough to earn the title?

Ultimately, the essence of the smart city has less to do with fancy technological advancements than it does delivering quality-of-life improvements to citizens. Indeed, the real goal of smart cities should be leveraging the latest technology in smart ways that provide higher quality services to all of your constituents. Simply investing in amazing tech doesn’t matter all that much if you don’t find efficient ways to use it that improve the everyday reality of living and working there.

Are You Using What You’ve Got?

The ability to share data in real-time is incredibly important, but many municipal leaders are failing to advantage of available technology in ways that would make a dramatic difference in the quality of services they deliver. Everyone does this to a certain degree. Rick Cole, former city manager of Santa Monica, shared an eye-opening example from his own experience. As he pointed out, most people already own a super-powerful computer that fits in the palm of their hands: a smartphone. There are thousands, if not millions, of apps available on your smartphone that do all sorts of amazing things, but if you’re like most people, you only use a handful of them.

That means there’s a lot of power and potential that you’re not aware of or haven’t bothered to take advantage of. Do you enjoy holding on to inconvenience? Probably not. In reality, most smartphone users simply haven’t figured out how to tap into all of the capabilities that are at their fingertips. They don’t know which apps are available, what they can do, or how to make the best use of them to improve their lives.

But there are those rare users who use their smartphones to do all sorts of great things: coordinate family schedules, track and improve their investment portfolio, make energy-efficient choices for their home, track their health, improve their budget and spending, find the best prices for things they need to buy, and so much more. Their whole lives are healthier and happier, they’re using their money more wisely, achieving their life goals more efficiently, all by leveraging the technology already contained in that tiny pocket computer.

This is also the key to a smart city. It’s not a city enamored with the latest shiny gadgets, but a city that is getting the most out of its technology in order to improve the lives of its citizens. What does this look like in principle?

Rick was City Manager of Santa Monica from 2015 to 2020. He shared his experiences dealing with that city’s homeless crisis. Their principal source of data on the problem was an annual homeless count. According to Cole, “Once a year, we mobilized about 300 volunteers to tromp around the city and count homeless people.” It was a sophisticated effort that was very well run, but that information wasn’t being used to make life easier and better for the homeless population.

Here’s a typical scenario that happened all too often:

A concerned citizen sees a homeless individual sleeping on the sidewalk and assumes they need help. They call emergency services, which sends a crew check on this person. However, they find that there is no medical emergency.

Later, police get called about that same person wandering down the street, so two or three squad cars arrive. The police have a brief conversation with the individual, determine that he’s not a danger to himself or others, so they part ways. That same individual then walks to the library, where another citizen calls in a complaint. More police cars show up, and another conversation takes place.

In each of these instances, police and fire department officials are essentially encountering a complete stranger. Where did he come from? What are his needs? Is he mentally ill? Does he have a substance abuse problem? Has he recently been paroled? Information is not being shared between departments. Therefore, each time a city employee interacts with him, they’re starting from square one, and the constant calls end up costing an enormous amount of taxpayer money, with no meaningful outcome over time.

Santa Monica didn’t need merely an infusion of cutting-edge technology. They needed a way to connect the fire department, police, and public works with a database that provided meaningful information about the needs of homeless individuals in the city so they could provide them with what they needed.

To do that, they created the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), which allows multiple agencies to coordinate their efforts, so they’re not wasting time, duplicating each other’s efforts, or failing to address the specific individual needs of the homeless population in Santa Monica.

This is the heart and soul of what makes a smart city “smart”: efficiently using available technology and resources to better serve people.

The Foundational Importance of Empathy

Doing this well, however, requires design thinking, as you encourage your teams to innovate. With design thinking, you take into consideration the problems your people are dealing with, so you can make creative changes to your processes in order to resolve those problems. It’s an empathetic and human-centered approach that uses continuous improvement in order to deliver better results to users.

In point of fact, the term “smart city” scares a lot of municipal leaders and planners because it requires making uncomfortable changes. One of the biggest reasons why innovation is so difficult is because people tend to stick to the processes and systems that they’re already comfortable and familiar with.

Organizations hire people to perform processes and keep their systems running, not necessarily to innovate or change them. Think about the message leaders communicate during onboarding and training, “Read the handbook. It explains the processes we’ve developed for this role. Now follow them.”

There’s rarely an expectation that team members should be doing continuous improvement to the processes they’re handed. So, when you try to improve service delivery, you find that you have a team of people who are neither trained nor empowered to think outside of the norm. So, if you want to improve service delivery and become a truly smart city, you’re going to have to make your processes a major part of your optimization and modernization efforts.

Actually, improving your processes may need to become the biggest priority. Nothing is going to hinder your attempts to introduce new technology than outdated or inefficient processes, and it’s those processes that your team members will tend to replicate.

Here’s an example that was shared by Mark Wheeler, Philadelphia’s CIO, during a podcast chat. Let’s suppose you invest in a set of mobile optical sensors that all of your city vehicles can use to evaluate the condition of your roadways and then feed that data into machine-learning tools. It won’t do much good if you don’t improve your processes in a way that encourages team members to take that data and use it help budget or identify areas of needed improvement.

As long as design thinking is the foundation of your smart city initiative, you are sure to move in a direction that leverages available technology and resources to improve service delivery from a place of empathy.

Think about the example of Santa Monica, which was discussed earlier. Their goal wasn’t simply to see how much information could be accrued about the homeless population using the latest technology. Far from it. The core of the initiative was empathy for the homeless individuals in the city. While the outcomes were more far-reaching—saving money for the city and taxpayers through increased efficiency and coordination of departments and agencies—the real end goal was to humanize homeless people and better deliver the services they needed.

And that is what makes a smart city “smart.” Even if you lack the latest cutting-edge gadgets, if you will leverage technology and improve your processes through innovation and continuous improvement so you can serve your constituents better and more efficiently, your municipality will indeed become part of the “smart city” revolution.