Open Source Cities

Open Source Cities (OSC) spoke with Tim Campbell, Chairman of the Urban Age Institute about his new book Beyond Smart Cities. This is part one of a two-part interview OSC is conducting in association with the Meeting of the Minds 2011 gathering.

Background
Tim Campbell has worked for almost four decades in urban development with experience in scores of countries and hundreds of cities in Latin America, South and East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. His areas of expertise include strategic urban planning, city development strategies, decentralization, urban policy, and social and poverty impact of urban development.

Prior to his current position at The Urban Age Institute, Tim spent more than 17 years at The World Bank, working in various capacities in the urban sector.  He was the head of the World Bank Institute urban team and also led the Urban Partnership, which was responsible for identifying changing demand and developing new Bank products and services for cities.

Some of our readers may not be familiar with The Urban Age Institute, perhaps we could start off with you telling us a bit about the organization and its mission.

The Urban Age Institute grew out of a relationship with the World Bank when I was still working there, originally as the publisher of a magazine by the same name, The Urban Age, which was circulated in six languages, roughly 40,000 issues four times a year. Urban Age was set up to support the mission of the Bank and also support its own major thrust, which was to focus on leadership and innovation in cities around the world, and to foster exchange of good ideas between and among cities. The Urban Age Institute continues this mission, along with the organization of conferences, and the conduct of research.

You have authored a number of scholarly papers on urban development and knowledge economies which are available on the Urban Age website. One of your most recent papers, which, from what I understand is a draft of your latest book, is called Beyond Smart Cities. There has been a lot of press and even advertising about the idea of “Smart Cities”; IBM’s current brand strategy is centered on this. Based on your research in this area, can you give us your perspective on what you see as vital factors for cities developing into so-called “smart cities” and how you see this as a conversation that might actually move beyond that?

My perception is that some of the corporate world, you’ve mentioned IBM and there are others, and some of the academic world, speak of “smart cities”, and they have in mind principly the idea of electronic and IT connectedness, which is a perfectly valid concept; that cities increasingly today, with the spread of the web and handheld devices and other technologies are much more connected together, and cities would be able to benefit from sensors of all kind. For instance, in traffic, in tracking down health and looking for water leaks and understanding power consumption and so on, and to formulate policies that help to smooth out the congestion and kinks and wrinkles that infrastructure runs into using smart cities and smart sensors.

My idea is, and the reason that I chose this title “Beyond Smart Cities” is that cities that are smart are also cities that learn, cities that can innovate, cities that, in a corporate way, in a collective way, gather resources from many sources, some of them from far-flung places around the world, of experiences that can be applied back home. Cities that are smart cities are also cities that invest in knowledge acquisition and applying outside ideas to solve local problems. I think the key to all of this is not high-tech connectedness and electronic infrastructure working in the virtual world. It boils down to a surprising but old, well-worn understanding that groups, particularly in collected and very complicated settings like cities, have to trust one another in order to understand and agree upon a new technology or a new idea, and have to build on trust to figure out how new ideas can be applied at home.

So it’s this trust issue that’s the vital factor. It’s the understanding and the ability for groups of people who work in informal networks within the city who are planning a future to be able to understand and share each others’ values, and to bring this understanding into the deliberation process that allows useful and productive applications of new knowledge from outside. It’s like any technology exchange, any technology adaptation, any technology transfer; we’ve seen this literature over four or five decades speak in the same way, but we’ve gotten away from it in terms of cities. With cities on the rise now, as they are around the world, meaning there are over 500 cities with over one million population, cities are poised to be major players in the next three or four decades on climate change, on infrastructure, on economic development, on poverty alleviation, on many areas. The world will have to rely on cities to solve these problems. International organizations and institutions and national policy-makers ought to be supporting cities as they acquire new knowledge and try to solve their problems.

The idea of trust, it makes me think of the open source movement, and the modality of knowledge sharing that has been going on in the open source software movement.

I think you’re spot on there. The key comparator is that there is a shared sense of values in the open source world; that people believe in something larger and participate in that way. They’re not there, for the most part, to game the system or to get something out of it for themselves. They are contributing in some way.

But the trust that I’m talking about is much more closed-in and focused within relatively small groups. For instance, I asked the head of the technology center in Barcelona in a series of interviews how the city was managed. He thought for a minute and looked at me and said “You know, there are 100 people who run this city.” I said, “Oh really, name me some of them.” We got into the discussion of how decisions were made, but it’s not just the political game that’s played in cities, the political business, it’s also the exchange of ideas and understanding and looking in someone’s eyes and saying, “Is this really going to fly? Do I really trust this idea? What do I know about this person who is trying to push this idea?” The more that people trust each other, and it could be in an open source arrangement or they could be sitting across the table from each other, the more likely it is that ideas will begin to get due consideration, not be dismissed. I hatched this idea five or six years ago and began to test it by doing interviews and looking at how cities make decisions about technology change and innovation. This is a key idea, this is why cities have to go beyond being “smart” and being plugged-in and universally connected. It’s creating sort of a collective thought process.

This idea goes back to the private sector. It goes back to Ikujiro Nonaka who, in the 70’s and 80’s on the west coast began to study organizational learning on the assembly line in the production of high tech and even low tech equipment. The key person was the one who was on the assembly line but who was also in touch with management and who could interpret management’s ideas and bring them into a realistic portrayal for people who had their hands on the machinery. The whole idea that Nonaka saw was that this idea of trust had to be engendered somehow so that from top to bottom an organization was moving in one single coherent direction. So that’s sort of the genesis of this idea of trust in “Beyond Smart Cities.”

In many of your papers, you described a kind of “shadow economy”, a market of knowledge exchange that is growing in cities around the world. You recently did a study of 45 cities to understand how cities share and acquire knowledge and what some of the outcomes of city learning look like. Can you tell us a little more about this emerging knowledge economy?

The genesis of the study was based on observations of a dozen or so cities where we began to see that there were large numbers of exchanges going on. Cities like Seattle beginning in the early 1990’s organized specific study missions, meaning that 100 business and civic leaders would go to another city, spend ten days there on a very well thought-out, highly organized tour of the city to gather information. If you talk to the people who organize those missions, they have several objectives in mind. One of them is to benchmark themselves, another is to find out what’s going on, what business opportunities might exist but also what ideas can be exchanged and brought back to Seattle. And most of all to bond together. So the 100 business and civic leaders repeat these things, they’ve gone on 30 of them now, so Seattle is building a cadre of leadership through this process.

I began to think, “well, let’s see how many cities are doing this?” So I put a web-based survey together, and through intermediaries distributed it to four or five hundred cities around the world. I got roughly a 10% response rate, which wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t totally representative and I would hesitate lean on it as a very solid source of statistical reliability for testing hypotheses, but it certainly did demonstrate that cities are doing a lot to exchange information. For instance, I did the survey in two waves, and in the first wave I created a set of categories of “how many times does your city go out and visit other cities?” 90% of the responses were in the upper end of the range of ten or more per year. So in the second wave I thought that I really had to expand this out, so I expanded it out to “more than 30” and 75% of the responses were in that range.

Then I began to ask specific cities for more specific numbers. If you take these numbers to be broadly representative of the five hundred cities around the world that have more than 1 million population, you see that these numbers of visits could be in the thousands or tens of thousands per year. It was a shocking number; I was surprised myself, and I was looking for this but didn’t expect it to be this high. Big cities have many departments and sometimes the water authority or the power authority or the solid waste group do their own studies, and they can be semi-independent, so these numbers add up.

So what I’m seeing, the reason I call it a “shadow economy” is that these thousand of visits taking place around the world between and among cities every year are taking place outside, off of the radar screen of nations, even of the cities themselves sometimes. Cities don’t have policies about this, they don’t foster it, they don’t help “titrate” the knowledge to make it more applicable, they are not publishing the results much, and international development institutions like the World Bank have no idea how much is going on but instead create their own parallel efforts to help cities exchange information. But here is this gigantic market taking place sort of in the shadows, and that’s why I call it a shadow economy.

You have some really interesting spider diagrams that you’ve generated from some of this research that drew a picture of this “social networking”, if you will, between cities. They actually reminded me of some other studies I’ve seen around visually mapping out on-line social network structures and how knowledge and communication is exchanged. I think it’s really interesting to map it out in this way, it’s very instructional.

This is essentially a network analysis. One can look at it this way, which is what I’ve begun to do. One can see that even by looking at a complicated diagram of who visits whom in one snapshot, you get a picture of, for example, all of the cities in southeast Asia focussing on only a few key cities which are leaders, and yet there are others, Ulan Bator, for instance, that has exchanged only within Mongolia, with five or six cities there. And one can see how that’s appropriate, but perhaps with a little help a city like Ulan Bator or some of its sister cities inside of Mongolia might want to go further afield where they might find more appropriate or more useful information.

The rich cities, meaning those cities in OECD countries roughly, visit themselves more than others. They are not visiting the poor or middle income cities as much, which is understandable. The poor or lower income cities are doing a lot of South-South exchange, more than I would have anticipated. The other interesting pattern that one sees in this is that the number of visits that cities make and the fact that the biggest cities, the megacities, don’t visit other megacities, they look for smaller cities, meaning the 1 million-sized cities not the 10 million-sized cities. The 500,000-sized cities also look to the million-sized cities. Cities that are smaller and larger cities than 1 million-sized cities are going to the 1 million-sized cities because, in a way, they feel that they can get their arms around the city versus being completely overwhelmed by going to a New York, a London, a Paris, a Singapore or a Shanghai. These are very preliminary results but they are giving us some tantalizing leads to continue to pursue.

You have undertaken deep studies of several cities, including Curitiba, Bilbao, Torino, Barcelona and Portland. You state that among the cities Barcelona is the most widely connected. Would you give us some examples of how some these most connected learning cities are leading the way for the development of truly smart cities?

The common thing, the thing that I saw in Barcelona, and Seattle and Torino, just as examples, was a deliberation, a dedicated effort by key individuals inside of the city who hold important city-wide posts. In the case of Seattle it’s the Trade Development Alliance that’s connected to the Chamber of Commerce, in the case of Barcelona it’s the Metropolitan Planning Authority and a senior guy who has been in that chair for twenty years, who are all very thoughtful about what they needed to learn, where the gaps were, where they were having problems.

For instance, in Barcelona, the head of the MPA at one stage in the middle 1990’s said “we really need to address this health issue” and at another time said “we’re having problems with our solid waste transfer and disposal process as our city grows larger and as we grow into metropolitan arrangements with outlying municipalities, how are we going to coordinate this stuff.” So that person looked around to other cities in Europe that were having similar problems or that were raising similar questions but that could show some success, and selected cities specifically to take his small group to visit. They were quite deliberate in learning their lessons by picking their teachers, the host cities that they would visit.

Seattle plans ahead a couple of years each of its study missions, and announces them well in advance. They are planned by someone who is constantly in touch with civic leaders in Seattle to determine useful places to visit. Another example in Barcelona, the important players in the chamber of commerce and in the innovation district known as 22@Barcelona who went to Silicon Valley in a group to figure out how this venture capital thing worked. There were a lot of new start-ups that Barcelona was trying very hard to encourage in the biotech and life sciences areas, but Europe doesn’t offer the conditions in the financial sector for venture capital firms to form as fast as they would like to support these start-ups.

In Torino, the mayor played an important role after his election in 1993. Torino was concerned about a strategic plan, so they invited five cities from Europe that had done strategic plans and had them make presentations in sequence, in Torino, so that a larger group of civic leaders and the general public could understand how strategic planning worked. Believe it or not, no strategic plans had been done in Italy before 1993. Major land-use plans and partial plans had been done, but no sort of far-seeing, far-reaching strategic planning had been done. Torino did two in a row, and brought in these cities, and then went into other cities, including Barcelona. When the 2006 Olympic winter games became a possibility in Torino, the city visited other cities that had hosted Olympic games and invited them to Torino to understand all of the hard work and implications of what it takes to pull it off and make it a productive enterprise. These are just some of the examples of cities and how they choose, why they go and what kinds of things they learn. Lots and lots of research remains to be done. It’s exciting.

In the United States, and even globally, I’ve noticed kind of a virtuous competition developing between cities. A lot of it seems to revolve around climate change and sustainability issues; every city is competing to be perceived as the greenest city or the first carbon neutral city; Seattle in particular has been on the forefront of this. New York City has the PlaNYC initiative which is a long term sustainability strategy. I’d like to know how much collaboration or knowledge exchange is happening here domestically between U.S. cities. I think this competition is, of course, breeding innovation as well.

One of the things that we really don’t face in this country as much as some countries in the developing world is the growth of slums. World Bank studies report that the growth of slums continues to outpace the structured economic development of cities and thus their ability to provide services for these growing populations on the outskirts of society. You’ve done work in places like Rio looking at the conditions of the favelas and the effect that they have on social mobility and the general conditions of the urban poor. Can you tell us what you see as effective strategies for emerging cities to provide infrastructure to keep pace with these migrating and growing populations?

It may be one of the biggest problems on the planet. If you look across the 120 or so countries that are attempting to “get out of the mud”, and by that I mean raise their levels of income. In the major cities in all of those countries there are large fractions of the populations that are living in sub-standard housing, housing that they have built by themselves, often on property that they don’t legally possess, and in areas where not only is there is incomplete extension of infrastructure of the most important kind, clean water in, dirty water out, but also that they are fragmented in a sense, that are not closely connected to other parts of the cities and they grow up in places that are often inappropriate for urban settlement; steep hillsides, flood plains, seismic zones. You only have to look to Haiti or New Orleans to understand the stakes involved. Haiti is not an example, strictly speaking of what I’m saying. A better example might be on the steep hillsides of La Paz, Bolivia, where a small shake or a large rain can bring down hundreds and hundreds of houses because they are not built well and the geology doesn’t support settlement.

Lots of cities are facing this problem of inadequate settlements and there are a couple of ways or new insights that we might gain vs. the standard approach. The standard approach is build out the infrastructure little by little, try to keep up, do one’s best from the point of view of the city and the nation to improve the construction of sub-standard housing through the extension of credit, putting in the roads, drainage, trying to keep alignments and open access to get in and out of these places. But what hasn’t been done, and I think a possible insight is that cities can learn from each other how to avoid false starts in policies that might not work. One of the most obvious is the forced removal of settlements. More often than not, this turns into not only a social but economic disaster. We only need to look at Hirare and Zimbabwe and what happened there with the forced removal of the downtown area which only set things back by many decades; several generations of people have to start over again.

But cities can learn from each other about things that work. Micro-credit for building materials on debit cards for instance, is one technique that has been tried and shows some promise. Micro-credits for the use of cell phones in Africa is another. Supporting self-help housing, and planning for the improvement of low income settlements, laying out the plans, getting addresses for each of the dwellings in the area, making these available to policy makers and pointing out “here we are, we’re 250,000 people living here.” Once the policy makers see the magnitude and see the organization, the allocation of resources can begin to shift a little bit. I think that Shack/Slum Dwellers International have made some great progress in these kinds of things. Those lessons need to be spread around more. And the coordination of infrastructure on the metropolitan scale is also critical, because almost all of these cities have to work across municipal boundaries, and those turn out to be obstacles in the coordination of services, bus routes, water lines, sewage, drainage, all kinds of things. This is not a problem that’s going to be solved with any one master stroke, but learning cities are another tool in the toolbox that can help.

There are several hundred cities that have over 1 million population, but by the year 2020 we expect to have more than 500 cities with 1 million population. It seems that even within the next decade, there are great opportunities for innovation that’s lead by this kind of knowledge sharing. I see that as a really promising outcome of your research.

It’s an area that hasn’t received a lot of attention, and I think we need to gauge how much can be extracted from these “self-starters”, these cities that are already beginning to go out and look. They can come away with bad ideas too. This has happened in the United States. I won’t name names, but one city visited another and came away with an idea of moving people that turned out to be unsuccessful. For instance, the skyways in Minneapolis are wonderful when you have extremely cold winters and you need to move people around, but to transport them to the South is a little nutty. But that has happened. In the Southern setting, where the winters aren’t quite so brutal, the sky transport just sucked the life right out of the streets, but it took ten years to learn that lesson, and at quite great expense. So bad ideas can float out there as well.

I think that one of the lessons of this idea of learning cities is that maybe some referees of a kind might be useful. Harvard and the Lincoln Institute host Mayors’ colloquia which could pay more attention to the transmission of these ideas and provide a kind of filter, a reference point, a peer group who could say, “well, maybe you don’t want to try these skyways in this particular setting.” There are some bad ideas as well as good ideas, but the point is that there are a lot of ideas being exchanged and I think that we have to look at this market more carefully and try to understand it.

Do you have any parting recommendations or comments you might make to the design community, people involved in urban planning and such, regarding your work and what designers might think about in terms of developing technologies, social networks, systems for this emerging world of smart cities?

The design profession has done so well, it seems to me, in establishing an edge in a progressive way about what new techniques and approaches are beneficial for the planet, particularly in questions of climate change, environment, re-densification of downtown, live/work/play, that kind of thing. I think that the design profession through its associations and membership organizations might play some role in this filtering process and this transmission of good ideas; to endow some ideas that seem to have legs with the backing of the design industry to help individuals in specific cities who are trying to figure their way out of a problem have more of a sense of confidence about whether an idea is a good one or not. But particularly under what circumstances and under what conditions. Context is everything, design has taught us this. To document and to understand the contextual factors that make or break a good idea are one of the most important things that I think the design profession can help cities with.