Pablo Vaggione _ Urban challenges and “smartness”

Urban planning challenges and “smartness”

14 September 2011
Pablo Vaggione
1 of 18 p.vaggione@designconvergence.org

Urban planning challenges

• 70% of urban population by 2050
• 3 billion new urban dwellers in the next 40 years
• Building a city like Barcelona every 2 weeks
• 70-90% will take place in developing countries
• North: doing more with existing infrastructure
• South: delivering basic infrastructure
• Huge financing gaps
• Informality and urban poverty
• Environmental drawbacks of growth
• Planning under-resourced and peripheral


Challenge: revising the “modern” approach to planning

• Our cities today are based on industrial revolution
assumptions
– Affordability of individual transport through industrialization
– Cheap fossil energy
• High resource consumption
– 4x population increase 1900-2000
– 16x resource consumption increase in the same period
• Unsustainable outcome
– Single-use zoning has induced high infrastructure and services
costs, mobility inefficiencies
– Questionable land use model – 50% to road infrastructure
– Social collateral effects with inequality and segregation


Challenge: access to infrastructure and services

• Congestion costs 6% of GDP in • 884 million people have no
Bangkok access to potable water
• Tourism is 7% of Thailand’s GDP • 4,7 trillion liters lost to home
leakages in the US per year

Source: TAT, Water.org, Asian Development Bank, EPA


Challenge: behaviour change

• 800 million people do not have enough to eat • Increase of solid waste in Spain:
• 1 billion “heavier than advised” 39% between 1994 and 2004
• Waste generated per capita
higher than France, Italy,
Germany, UK

Source: The Guardian, University of North Carolina (2007), Eurostat


Challenge: responding to immediate needs

Palmanova 1590 Brasilia 1960 Songdo 2010

• Security
• Symbolism
• Economic opportunity
Source: Gale International


Challenge: being visionary

Manhattan 1811
• A visionary plan that was able to accommodate key technological
solutions well in advance – electricity, tram, car
• Addressed urgent needs: reducing diseases and increasing
construction affordability


Questions to the current smart city discourse

• “Technology will save us”
– Are tech-based panaceas realistic?

• Focus on products rather than integrated vision
– (Pilot) projects successful by themselves but lack transformative
effect

• Lots of “sensoring” and raw data collection
– Do decision makers have the right information and a holistic
mindset?

• Adaptiveness to austerity
– Financial constraints and resource allocation to “mission critical”


Questions to the current smart city discourse

• How smart is a smart city?
– Currently most metrics are IT-based
• Sectoral indicators respond to sectoral approach
– Holistic city IQ metrics still to be developed
• Would indicate a direction for the evolution of the approach

• Addressing possible conflicts of interest
– Product-focused approach and neutral advise

• “Smart” does not sound right to many cultures
– Can imply lack of intelligence in what they are currently doing

• Avoiding trivialisation


What a smart city could do

• Identify pressing needs and choose effective strategies
that address priorities

• Know how to efficiently manage assets and resources

• Be open to engage people in thinking and doing

• Learn from implemented projects and implementers


Key aspects of “smartness” (1/4): efficient use of assets and resources

• In new and existing cities, developed countries:
– Retrofit and “built-in” intelligence in buildings
– Land value, location strategies and housing occupancy
– Modelling demands in transport, utilities, services
– Services on demand including energy

• In fast-growing and new cities, developing countries:
– Smart affordability addressing upfront investment
– Identify and prioritise pressing needs & match with right solution
– Accelerate delivery of infrastructure and services
– Facilitate transition to clean urbanisation & industrialisation


Key aspects of “smartness” (2/4): learning

• “You can’t manage what you don't know”
– A limited number of performance indicators aligned to vision and
organisational capacity
– Survey community for perception and qualitative measuring
– Integrate information in readable dashboards

• Monitoring information supports decision making
– Feedback findings to strategic planning stages
– Link metrics to the budgeting process

• The community needs to know that progress is being made
– Monitoring is an opportunity to strengthen civic commitment
– De-politize metrics
Quote: M Bloomberg / C40


Key aspects of “smartness” (3/4): open to civic engagement

• Participation is brain power
– One million ideas better than a single perspective
– Needs good facilitators to extract actionable points

• Public sector beyond regulator
– Manager of a continuous process of change
– Capable of articulating a durable collective vision
– Leadership that mobilises actors into “urban authors”

• Transforming citizens into agents of sustainability
– Sustainability is a task for each one of us
– Conflictive vs constructive resolution of divergences
– Decentralised infrastructure


Key aspects of “smartness” (4/4): soft infrastructure

• Governance and leadership
– Lead by example by making smart decisions
– Synchronising watches of stakeholders with different horizons

• Public-public partnerships
– Aligning supra-municipal agendas
– Creating critical mass at the local level

• Reform planning and delivery cycle
– Upstream implementation knowledge
– Procurement methods

• Align private sector competencies to city agenda
– Finance, drive, skills
– Life cycle business models addressing higher upfront costs


Linking urban planning to bankability

• Most city development will not be in AAA/AA cities
– Cities with limited spending capacity

• Cities need to be investible
– Credible roadmap: vision, plan and civic support
– Set metrics and demonstrate city performance
– De-politise infrastructure
– Transparency and enabling business climate

• A good urban plan can help reduce investment risk
– Predictability
– Bankable projects aligned with long-term structural vision

• Cities need to deliver quality of life at the right price point
– Jobs, services, civic amenities
– Cost of living, taxes


Key messages

• We cannot meet urbanisation challenges with our current
methods

• A “smart city” is not a “gadget city”

• An intelligent city makes intelligent decisions that have a
positive impact on living conditions


Gracias

p.vaggione@designconvergence.org


Pablo Vaggione _ Urban challenges and “smartness”

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