Rethinking Smart Cities From The Ground Up

RETHINKING
SMART CITIES
FROM THE
GROUND UP
Tom Saunders and Peter Baeck
June 2015
Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to help people and

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Nesta 2015
RETHINKING SMART CITIES

FROM THE GROUND UP
CONTENTS

Forewords
Acknowledgements
PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLECENTRED SMART CITIES
PART 2 SMART CITIES PAST AND PRESENT
16
2.1 A brief history of the smart city
16
2.2 How are cities piloting smart city technologies today?
22
PART 3 USING COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

TO ADDRESS URBAN CHALLENGES
29
3.1 Smarter ways to use city resources: the collaborative economy
30
3.2 Smarter ways to collect data: crowdsourcing
37
3.3 Smarter ways to make decisions: collective intelligence
44
PART 4 HOW COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES ARE HELPING 53

PEOPLE SHAPE THE FUTURE OF THEIR CITIES

PART 5 A VISION FOR PEOPLECENTRED SMART CITIES
61
ANNEX
64
What else is Nesta doing to make cities smarter?
64
Interviewees
66
67
About the authors
Endnotes
68
RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP
Foreword
CY Yeung, Director, Corporate Responsibility, Intel China; Vice Chair
of the Board, Cinnovate Center
At Intel China, corporate social responsibility is not only about
what we do, but what we can make possible.
Many of the prevailing social and environmental challenges today
are the outcomes of rapid economic growth, well beyond the grasp
of individual organisations. For this reason it is imperative that we
bring together the best minds around the world to learn, explore
and cocreate solutions that tap into the potential in grassroots
innovation and building on this, to bring the entrepreneurial
fervour, intellectual rigor and discipline of the business world into a
societal context in the name of social innovation.
Urbanisation has been viewed as a panacea for development by
many emerging economies. However, if the ultimate goal of cities is
to ensure sustainable growth and make citizens happy and fulfilled,
they have to adopt and develop tools that tap into the skills and
knowledge of citizens. To do this we need to redefine smart cities
as peoplecentred smart cities, or smart cities 2.0.
We believe in the power of corporate social innovation whereby
leading organisations, with their global footprint and touch points,
leverage their core capabilities. If the purpose of technology is
to improve peoples lives, we have to break down the boundaries
between technology innovation and social innovation.
With this vision in mind, in 2012 Intel China incubated an
independent notforprofit organisation, Cinnovate, with the
support of the Chinese government to champion social innovation
by catalysing crosssector collaboration among government, civil
society, industry and the academic community.
We are delighted to work with Nesta and the UNDP China on
Rethinking smart cities from the ground up and hope it will stimulate
thinking and action from cities around the world in how to use the
combination of technology and people to make cities smarter.
Foreword
Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive, Nesta
Cities tend to attract smart people and smart institutions. With
each generation of technological change theyve been given new
ways to make the most of their brain power from telephones
and broadband to link people up, to smartphones that can guide
people around city streets, to online platforms that can bring them
together to solve complex problems.
Over the last two decades the label smart city has been applied
to a family of technologies that can speed up the flow of things
around the city and reduce the physical frustrations of urban life
free flowing traffic instead of jams; smart flows of energy and less
waste; public services better targeted where they are most needed.
Many of these innovations are obviously useful. At their best they
oil the wheels of city life, and looking ahead there can be little
doubt that every aspect of city life will be reshaped by far greater
flows of data and communications.
But some of the smart city ideas took a wrong turn, too often
emphasising expensive hardware rather than cheaper solutions
using the internet; too often showcasing technologically interesting
ideas rather than responding to citizens real needs (how many
people really want their refrigerator to tell them when theyre
running low on essential foods?); and too often making over
inflated promises that couldnt be supported by hard evidence.
Thats why the smart city movement is now turning in a rather
different direction. Its combining the best of new generations of
technology that can use data, to coordinate, analyse and target,
while also involving citizens much more closely in shaping how
cities can work. As in many other fields, technological innovation is
being combined with social innovation and as a result achieving a
lot more.
Our work at Nesta touches on many aspects of the smart city

weve developed new ways to map patterns of economic change
and the growth of industries like games and software; weve
invested in many companies with clever tech solutions; weve
experimented with new ways of tapping citizen brainpower in
fields like healthcare; and weve helped city governments plan and
innovate more effectively.
Intel has been a pioneer in many of these fields, and China is now
the site of more smart city experiments than anywhere else in the
world. So were delighted to be able to partner with Intel China in
producing this report which we hope will both inspire and guide
cities in China and elsewhere to harvest the best ideas of all of their
citizens to make cities more liveable.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Intel (China) for their financial contribution
and input throughout the project, particularly CY Yeung, Yuhan
Song and Bingfeng Huang. We would also like to thank the UNDP
(China), particularly Samantha Anderson, James Chan and Patrick
Haverman for their insights into urban issues in China and their
work on the Chinese case studies (a full set of which will be
published separately). We are very grateful to the interviewees who
generously gave their time, expertise and insights for the project.
They are all named in the Annex. For research support we would
like to thank Jamie Myers and Lucile Stengel. Thanks to Adam
Greenfield and Ben Hawes who reviewed and commented on early
drafts of the report. Thanks also to Nesta staff members Kirsten
Bound, Kathleen Stokes, Florence Engasser, Stian Westlake and
Geoff Mulgan for their comments on the draft. The views expressed
in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily
reflect those of the project partners.
PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES
PART 1
THE CASE FOR PEOPLECENTRED

SMART CITIES
s cities bring people together to live, work and play, they

amplify their ability to create wealth and ideas. But scale
and density also bring acute challenges: how to move
around people and things; how to provide energy; how to keep
people safe. For several decades the ideas brought together under
the label smart cities have offered answers to these challenges.
The combination of sensors, data and advanced computing has
promised to speed up information flows, reduce waste and sharply
improve how efficiently resources can be managed.
Cities and national governments around the world are investing
in the potential of smart cities at an ever increasing rate: in China
and India alone almost 300 smart city pilots are currently planned,
and Arup predicts a global market for smart city technologies and
services worth $408 billion by 2020.1
There can be little doubt that successive waves of digital
technology will continue to transform how cities are run. But the
advocates of smart cities have often faced criticism: for being too
concerned with hardware rather than with people; too focused on
finding uses for new technologies rather than finding technologies
that can solve pressing problems; and for emphasising marketing
and promotion at the expense of hard evidence and testing
solutions out in the real world.2
As a result, many smart city ideas have failed to deliver on their

promise, combining high costs and low returns. As we explore
in this paper, many city governments are now trying to put this
right, to reap the full potential of new digital technologies while
not repeating the mistakes of the past. They are looking for
answers that involve the public in both shaping technologies and
implementing them; solutions that are cheaper and more modular;
and they are seeking out evidence instead of hype. Here is a
snapshot of some of the many examples discussed in this report:

Mapping urban flooding and air pollution

Building on the successful examples of Ushahidi and
OpenStreetMap, people are using digital technology to measure
and map their cities. Individuals and community groups can use
lowcost environmental sensing kits like the Smart Citizen Kit to
measure air pollution and upload the data to create crowdsourced
maps. This data could be used to supplement professional sensing
networks in the near future.
In Jakarta, a city which experiences severe annual flooding during
the rainy season, researchers have developed PetaJakarta, a real
time map of flooding in the city created by crowdsourcing flood
reports from Twitter.
Connecting urban communities to improve sustainability

In Seoul, South Korea, the city government is helping residents
make better use of the things they own with the Sharing City
Seoul initiative. It has supported a range of projects from local
carsharing company SoCar to websites like Billiji that help people
share things with their neighbours. The goal of these services is to
provide people with an alternative to owning things they rarely use.
In Beijing residents can use

the I love Beijing app to
report issues such as broken
streetlights and potholes to
the city government. The
app extends the features
offered by succesful
issue reporting apps like
FixMyStreet in the UK, by
also including a map of the
citys informal food markets.
Residents can add a range
Tomas Diez
Tapping into the

knowledge of citizens
Smart Citizen Kit

The Smart Citizen Kit is a lowcost
environmental sensing kit.
10
of information to the map including opening times, new markets and

what type of goods they sell.
Opening up decision making

In Reykjavik, Iceland, citizens can use the Better Reykjavik website
to propose, debate and vote on ideas for improving the city. Each
month the city council debates the most popular ideas from the
website and the city government has so far spent 1.9 million on
developing more than 200 projects proposed by citizens.
In Paris, Madame Mayor, I have an idea is a crowdsourcing and
participatory budgeting process that lets citizens propose and vote
on ideas for projects in Paris. The process will allocate 500m Euros
between 2014 and 2020.
Bringing people into the planning process

In Bangalore, local NGO the MOD Institute enabled residents
to create a community vision for the future of the Shanthingar
neighbourhood of the city by encouraging online debate. The
project identified abandoned urban spaces as a major issue of
concern for residents and created software which residents will be
able to use to map these spaces via smartphone and SMS.
Traffic management
In Jakarta, residents can use Twitter to organise shared car
journeys to work. The Nebengers Twitter account has 83,000
followers and reTweets 1,000 requests for ride shares each day. This
could contribute to easing traffic woes in the city if the platform
continues to grow.
Rethinking smart cities from the ground up

The overhyped claims of the smart city have been mirrored in
over pessimistic critiques. This report argues that we need to

move beyond both to recognise the huge potential for digital

technologies to improve how cities work, while going beyond the
simplistic habits of technology push. Successful smart cities of the
future will combine the best aspects of technology infrastructure
while making the most of the growing potential of collaborative
technologies, and above all the citizens who power them.3
But how can this work in practice? How can cities effectively
harness the power of citizens through digital technologies?4
Drawing on examples from all around the world from Beijing to
Amsterdam, and from London to Jakarta we investigate four
emerging methods which are helping city governments to do this,
powered by the growing ubiquity of smartphones, the increasing
preference for online transactions, combined with the emergence
of lowcost hardware and peertopeer technologies.
The collaborative economy: connecting distributed groups of
people, using the internet and digital technologies, to make
better use of goods, skills and space. This is important in cities
where resources, particularly space, are limited.
Crowdsourcing data: People can use lowcost sensors to
measure and create crowdsourced maps of their environments;
city governments can crowdsource data from social media sites
and sensors in mobile phones, as a supplement to citywide
Internet of Things networks.
Collective intelligence: Decision making and problem solving are
usually left to experts, yet citizens know a huge amount about
their cities. New digital tools make it easier for people to get
involved in policymaking, planning and budgeting, and this could
help cities make smarter and more democratic decisions.
Crowdfunding: People can connect with each other online to
collaboratively fund community projects and city governments
can use crowdfunding to make spending decisions that more
accurately reflect the needs and wishes of citizens.
In the chapters that follow we look in more detail at the impact
that these four methods are having on cities. In particular, in Part 3
we explore the outcomes they can help cities achieve, focusing
11
12
Madame Mayor
In Paris the city government will invest 2 million in vertical
garden projects after they received over 20,000 votes as
part of the Madame Mayor, I have an idea participatory
budgeting process.
Image by Snoeziesterre. Licence CC BY 2.0.

on: smarter use of resources, smarter ways of collecting data

and smarter ways to make decisions. As well as helping city
governments work better, digital technologies can also empower
citizens to directly address issues that matter to them. Part 4 looks
at how digital technologies are helping people shape the future of
their cities. Finally, Part 5 offers a vision for what peoplecentred
smart cities might look like in the near future.
Many of the examples discussed in this report are early stage and
would be easy to dismiss as tinkering at the edges. We explore the
potential of these technologies and argue that to have a chance
of helping cities address the tough problems they face, further
investment and support are needed to generate evidence about
which approaches are most effective, so that other cities around
the world can adopt and build on the most successful of them.
Based on our research, we offer cities and national governments
that are embarking on smart city pilots the following set of
recommendations on how to do this.
How to run a peoplecentred smart city pilot

1. Set up a civic innovation lab to drive innovation in
collaborative technologies
To explore the potential of using digital technologies to
collaborate with citizens, city governments should set up
civic innovation labs. One of the primary goals of these labs
should be generating evidence about which models can most
effectively harness the power of collaborative technologies
an area of work that is currently underdeveloped. The Seoul
Innovation Bureau, and the Boston Mayors Office of New
Urban Mechanics (MONUM) are two examples of how a civic
innovation lab could work. National governments should also
consider setting up a civic labs network, to support knowledge
sharing between individual labs.
13
14
2. Use open data and open platforms to mobilise collective

knowledge
Smart city pilots should be open platforms, rather than proprietary
projects, to tap into the collective brainpower of citizens and
smaller companies. In practice, this means cities should:
Support open source collaborative technologies, such as those
developed by OpenPlans, rather than developing proprietary
tools from scratch. This will contribute to the creation of
common tools that all cities can draw on.
Open up problem solving to citizens, using online tools
that let people debate ideas and decide which of them get
implemented rather than simply asking for suggestions. Better
Reykjavik is an example of how to do this.
Open up data to the public to help generate innovative
solutions to urban challenges, but pay equal attention to
finding productive uses for the data. For example, the Open
Data Challenge series, a project by Nesta and the Open
Data Institute brings businesses, community groups and city
governments together to develop new ways of using city data.
Involve smaller companies and civil society organisations in
smart city pilots, as they are often behind some of the most
inspiring digital solutions. The UKs Small Business Research
Initiative (SBRI) helps small innovative companies access
public R&D projects and could be used in smart city pilots.
3. Take human behaviour as seriously as technology
The smart city vision often fails to recognise the role that
behaviour and culture play in the way cities work. And yet, new
technologies and data streams will only be beneficial if they are
accompanied by changes in culture a greater willingness to
engage with data, incorporate new technologies into traditional
workflows and to embrace the potential of bottomup
solutions.

Similarly, unsustainable patterns of living such as the heavy

use of resources or private transport undermine data and
technologyled efforts to make cities more sustainable.
Alongside investments in hardware, city governments should
promote the collaborative economy, where people can
access the things they need, but only occasionally use. City
governments should look to the example of Seoul, which has
supported a range of collaborative economy initiatives.
4. Invest in smart people, not just smart technology
Without the ability to interpret data and understand how
and why it is collected, there is a serious risk that it will be
misinterpreted or ignored by city government employees. City
governments should invest in training to give all staff a baseline
understanding of data handling as well as hiring data specialists
with advanced skills.
A smart cities pilot should also invest in digital skills for citizens.
Successful programmes include: CoderDojo, a global movement
of communitybased programming clubs for young people, and
hackathons organised by the Singapore Government, which
teach people how to use open data.
5. Spread the potential of collaborative technologies to all parts
of society
Collaborative technologies require connected citizens. However
not everyone uses a smartphone, has internet access or the
time to engage with their city governments. Communities
that are underserved by these technologies are usually the
elderly, the young, the sick and the poor. When supporting and
piloting collaborative technologies, cities should explore ways
to expand their potential to these communities. Working with
intermediaries including community groups, charities and NGOs
could be one way to do this.
15
16
PART 2
SMART CITIES PAST AND PRESENT
efore looking ahead to the future, it is important to

understand where the idea of the smart city comes from and
what its promises and limitations are.
2.1 A brief history of the smart city

In 1997, the Smart Cities World Forum predicted that there would
be 50,000 smart cities across the world by 2007.5 While this
vision never materialised the hype about smart cities hasnt gone
away and there are now an abundance of smart city conferences,
rankings, newsletters and consultancies. Investment in smart cities
is also rocketing. According to Navigant Research the market
for smart cities was worth $8.8 billion in 2014.6 A review for the
UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) by Arup,
the engineering, planning and consulting firm, predicted a global
market for smart city technologies and services worth $408 billion
by 2020.7
But what does it mean to be a smart city? The term has many
interpretations but it most often refers to a hightech city in the
near future which includes the following elements:
More efficient city management A citywide sensing network
gives city managers access to a realtime, integrated stream
of data about the current state of services, infrastructure and
energy flows in the city, which they can use to improve services
and monitor and control resource usage. Intelligent software uses
this data to analyse past trends and predict future problems.8
Economic development Local companies can build on the citys
advanced infrastructure to become world leaders in advanced
technologies and export them to cities around the world.9

Prestige Political leaders want their cities to rise up smart city

rankings; they believe that smart cities will be attractive places
for people and businesses to move to.10
Prominent attempts at creating smart cities include Masdar
in Abu Dhabi, which aimed to use advanced technologies to
become the worlds first zero carbon city;11 Songdo in South
Korea, a city covered in sensors to improve sustainability and city
management;12 and Plan IT valley in Portugal, with its vision of an
urban operating system used to manage the whole city.13 All of
these projects were about creating new hitech cities from scratch,
however none of them turned out as planned. Masdar City, which
broke ground in 2008, is home to only a handful of buildings which
make up the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology and
around 100 student residents.14 Plan IT valley ultimately wasnt built
because of the financial crisis. Songdo is the most developed of
the three but it is unclear whether the $35 billion spent on it has
resulted in a city that is more sustainable and liveable than regular
cities.15
Many of the champions of these early smart cities were IT
companies who knew a lot about advanced networking
technologies and data analytics but little about how cities work,
which is why they focused on building new cities from scratch
rather than engaging with the issues actual cities face. However,
critics showed how impractical it would be to apply technology
developed for utopian visions to realworld cities. As a result IT
companies began to develop products and services to sell to
existing cities. One way they did this was by trying to understand
the challenges cities face. For example, in 2010, IBM set up its
Smarter Cities Challenge, where cities could apply to have an IBM
engineer seconded to them to work on realworld issues.16
Despite what companies have learned by working with cities, the
tools on offer to city governments today are still cuttingedge
technologies. For example, at the centre of the smart city offer is
often a central control centre, where city managers can monitor
their cities on hundreds of computers and on giant wallmounted
screens, a practice drawn from traffic management but now being
extended to the city and its various systems as a whole.17
17
18
Smart city visions so far have been confined to a handful of small

scale or oneoff pilots. However, this is set to change now that
China and India have decided to fully embrace the concept. Since
2013, 193 cities or city districts in China have developed plans
to set up a smart city pilot and in 2015 the Indian government
announced that it would invest in 100 smart cities.
Smart cities are now at a turning point. Will they continue to focus
on cutting edge technology or will they begin to consider the
needs of people and the role that they can play in making their
cities work better?
All the signs from China and India so far are that these pilots
will focus primarily on the hardware aspects of smart city
development. A note from Chinas National Development and
Reform Commission states that smart city pilots should use
intelligent monitoring and automated control systems to make
city environments more liveable and integrated digital city
management information systems to make city management
more efficient and precise. While there are many examples of cities
across China using digital technology to engage citizens, some of
which we discuss in this report, these are rarely included in official
smart city plans.18

The four flaws with the smart city vision

Starting with technology rather than urban challenges
Work on smart cities often begins with the question: what uses
can be found for cutting edge technologies? This is because the
primary goal of smart city pilots is often economic development:
supporting companies to create and commercialise technologies
that can be sold to cities around the world.
Insufficient use or generation of evidence
Despite the huge sums invested in smart cities worldwide, there
is little published evidence showing that the solutions they offer
help cities address realworld challenges. Installing sensors
on infrastructure throughout the city or using data to predict
traffic patterns might make cities more efficient and sustainable.
Alternatively, it might cost more than it saves, especially when
maintenance is factored in. Cities currently have no clear guidance
regarding what technologies to invest in, and this will remain the
case until smart city pilots start sharing their findings.
Lack of awareness of how others are trying to improve cities
The smart cities field is often too insular, with technologists talking
to each other, but not linking to the work that others groups are
doing to address urban challenges, such as those working within
city government in areas from transport and planning to economic
development and public participation.
Little role for citizen engagement
Many smart city strategies offer citizens little chance to engage
in the design and deployment of new technologies. While citizens
tend to be the implied beneficiaries of smart city projects, they
are rarely consulted about what they want and their ability to
contribute to making the city work better is often ignored.
19
20

A SHORT HISTORY OF SMART CITIES

The first use of urban modelling tools
Transport planners began to use rapidly developing
computer technologies to model transport flows in cities.
Building smart cities

The construction of
entirely new technology
driven cities such as
Masdar and Songdo.
Present and beyond
Cities develop schemes such as
Better Reykjavik to improve
collaboration with citizens and
tap into their collective
knowledge.
1950
1990
e-gove
rnment
arrives
2000
e-government arrives
Cities start using the
internet and digital
technology to improve
internal government
processes and to deliver
public services.
The emergence of civic
technology
Companies and NGOs
begin developing digital
tools such as FixMyStreet
that let people map
local issues and share
these with government.
Repurposing cities to be smarter:

Pilots such as Smart Santander and MK
Smart focus on making existing cities
smarter through the large scale
deployment of sensors across the city.
21
22
2.2 How are cities piloting smart city technologies today?

Hardware and infrastructure have always been a fundamental part
of the way cities work.
In London, street lighting arrived in the mid18th century,
followed by telephone exchanges, a sewage system, public
access to electricity, electric street lights, buses and the London
Underground in the 19th century. In the 20th century, air travel,
mobile phones, and the internet all made their mark on the city.
Now, new digital technologies are starting to have a profound
impact on the way London works, from the congestion charging
zone, which uses cameras and software to automatically recognise
car number plates, and the London Air Quality Network, which
measures and maps air pollution with digital sensing equipment.
In the near future, a Transport for London pilot could see sensors
being used at road crossings to make them safer for pedestrians.
The city also plans to invest in modernised grids, known as smart
grids, which are more efficient than older grids, and a 3D map of
the pipes and cables under Londons streets, which will make road
maintenance and construction much easier.19
As Londons evolution over the past few centuries demonstrates,
cities are using technology to constantly evolve and adapt to
suit the needs of the people who live and work in them. New
technologies such as sensors and data analysis are part of this
evolution. They are currently being piloted in cities around the
world and their realworld impact can be understood through a
number of technological trends.
The Internet of Things

Many cities are experimenting with the Internet of Things (IoT):
objects embedded with sensors and the ability to communicate,
sharing data with people and other objects. Here is a snapshot of a
few of the cutting edge applications of IoT in cities today:

Barcelona smart bins: A pilot using sensors on bins is testing

whether the routes of refuse collection vans can be optimised by
only sending them to full bins. The city estimates that the system
could save 10 per cent on waste disposal.20
Glasgow intelligent streetlights: This pilot is testing whether
sensors on streetlights will save energy by allowing lights to
automatically turn on and off when people walk past them at
night.21
Singapore traffic management: Singapores Intelligent
Transport System includes electronic road pricing (ERP) and
sensors attached to taxis that help the government map traffic
conditions. ERP, alongside regulation, has helped reduce the
number of journeys by private car in Singapore.22
City wide sensing in Santander: The Spanish city of Santander
is home to one of the largest citywide sensing pilots in the
world with over 12,000 sensors collecting data on everything
from parking space availability to air quality. According to the
evaluation of the pilot, the project was about testing the concept
of citywide sensing networks rather than helping the city
government make practical changes.23
Smart buildings in London: In 2014 the Canary Wharf group
launched the Cognicity Challenge, an accelerator designed to
identify and pilot smart city technologies on the Canary Wharf
estate. Technologies that the challenge is currently testing
include Demand Logic, which aims to help businesses reduce
electricity costs by intelligently monitoring electricity usage.24
The Internet of Things is likely to become an important part of
how cities operate in the future, but it is not something that cities
can currently invest in and expect to see immediate returns. Dr
Ellie Cosgrave, a researcher at University College London explains
that Internet of Things pilots taking place in cities around the
world today are best seen as research tools: They are exploratory
science, and that is ultimately good for cities. But she also believes
that these pilots are at a very early stage and there is often a false
sense of usefulness about the data that they produce.25 For the
23
Image by Argonne National

Laboratory. Licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
24
near future at least, IoT

pilots in cities are likely
to be mainly funded by
national governments and
private companies, as in
Glasgow, Milton Keynes,
Chicago and across China.
One interesting trend
in sensing pilots is an
evolution from a closed,
proprietary model to one
Array of Things sensing pilot
based around modular
platforms and open
specifications. For example, in Chicago, the Argonne National
Laboratory has partnered with the city government and Chicago
University to create the Array of Things, a network of sensors
which will be installed across the city. Rather than focus on
developing proprietary sensors, the project instead seeks to create
an open, modular network, which can accept sensors from a range
of organisations. The researchers are also publishing opensource
specifications for all of the software and hardware the project
develops. This contrasts with earlier sensing pilots which focused
on deploying proprietary sensors and shared little information
about their technology or findings. According to Tomas Diez,
founder of the Smart Citizen Kit, making pilots modular and open
can make them much cheaper than proprietary pilots.26
Data: Integration, analytics and visualisation

Data is at the heart of many visions of the future city: for instance,
information about traffic, the movements of people throughout
a city and air quality. In the smart city vision, this data can be
integrated, analysed and visualised to improve city management. In
practice, this can work in a number of ways:

Data integration
Cities struggle with data integration. London for example has
33 boroughs that all generate their own data but share little of
it with each other. A lesson from US cities, as analysed in The
Responsive City by Stephen Goldsmith, is that the process of
upgrading local government data systems is costly and time
consuming.27 While data integration can bring huge benefits, it
requires significant changes in culture, as well as city staff who
understand how to interpret findings.28 However, in the smart
city, data integration often becomes more about multimillion
pound city control rooms rather than addressing difficult issues
around skills and culture.
Data analysis and visualisation
Cities around the world, from Dublin to Singapore, are
experimenting with data dashboards.29 This involves displaying data
relating to city life on a screen, usually using maps and charts.
The goal is to provide decision makers in city government with
detailed measures of city performance to help them make better
decisions.30 Dashboards are also paired with intelligent software
that analyses the data to provide actionable insights.
The effects of data dashboards on decision making in cities
arent yet widely understood, but one critique is that their users
are unaware of the subjective decisions that have gone into
selecting and processing the data for example, which metrics
are included and which are deliberately left out.31
Predictive analytics
Many cities, particularly in the US, are experimenting with
predictive analytics, which involves mining data relating to the
past to identify patterns and predict future behaviour. This
approach is adapted from industry where, for example, sensors
on Formula One engines collect large amounts of data, which
manufacturers can use to predict how the engines will behave
in the future.32 There are pilots exploring predictive analytics in
several cities around the world, but only a few examples of real
world impact. Chicago has had some success in tackling its rat
problems and this is one of the most cited examples.33
25
26
Singapore Smart Nation Programme

In 2014, Singapore launched its Smart Nation
Programme to test advanced technologies in
the city.
TILT Photography

CASE STUDY
Singapore: The Worlds first Smart Nation

In 2014, Singapore launched its Smart Nation Programme, a vision
that will see the citystate use data and advanced technology to
drive economic growth and improve quality of life.
Like many cities, Singapore wants to attract companies to test
their smart city technologies on the island. A few key attributes
mean that Singapore will likely succeed here where other cities
will struggle: Singapore is a compact citystate with world class IT
infrastructure, a highly educated population and, crucially, only one
layer of government, an advantage that many cities dont have.
As the population continues to increase, mobility is a big challenge
for Singapore. Therefore, reducing the number of journeys made
across the city by car is a major goal for the Government. To
address this problem the Government is piloting an ondemand
service that enables people to use their smartphones to order a
bus. All of the requests by individuals will be analysed to create an
optimal route. It is hoped that the service will be more convenient
than a regular bus, but cost less than a taxi. The government is
aware that it needs to make the system work for people, such as
the elderly, who dont have smartphones, and is considering ways
of tackling this issue alongside technical development.
Among its attributes, the Singapore Government is open to new
ideas and is keen to study other projects taking place around the
world and improve on these where it can, for instance through
developing an open data strategy. However, it notes that some
open data initiatives have been more successful than others in
engaging citizens in actively using open data. To do this it has
been running open data hackathons to encourage more civic
participation in data collection and analysis and has recently
started organising data literacy boot camps to build the skills of
people who would like to work with open data.
Based on an interview with Tan Kok Yam, head of Singapores Smart
Nation Programme Office.
27
28
Lessons for city governments

When experimenting with Internet of Things sensing pilots and
data projects, cities should:
Realise that technology is only part of the equation integrating
advanced technologies and new data methods into traditional
workflows will require difficult changes in organisational culture
and investment in data skills, both basic skills for all employees
as well as advanced skills for data specialists.
Set up open sensing platforms which can accept sensors from a
variety of organisations rather than building proprietary, closed
projects. This will allow the city to harness creative ideas and
technologies from different sized companies.
Evaluate pilots and share the data with other cities around the
world, so they know which technologies they should invest in.

PART 3 USING COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES TO ADDRESS URBAN CHALLENGES
PART 3
USING COLLABORATIVE
TECHNOLOGIES TO ADDRESS URBAN
CHALLENGES
raditionally, community engagement has been confined

to charities or interest groups lobbying city governments,
or active citizens who have the time to attend community
meetings. City governments have been experimenting with digital
technologies to expand the number of people they engage with for
a long time. The early 90s saw the development of egovernment,
a concept that includes everything from putting public services
online to citizen participation in decision making.34 More recently,
the term Government 2.0 has emerged to describe the use of Web
2.0 tools to promote online collaboration.35
City governments have always found innovative ways of engaging
citizens in addressing urban challenges. Examples include the
famous participatory budgeting approaches used over many years
in Porto Alegre, where citizens participated directly in deciding
how a percentage of public money was spent, through to the
hundreds of participatory budgeting experiments underway
across the world; and the development of community visions and
action plans, an example of which was Bristols Choices for Bristol
initiative.34
Now a new set of methods, powered by smartphones, the growing
preference for online transactions, lowcost hardware and peerto
peer technologies are enabling cities to work with citizens to find
smarter ways to use resources, collect data and make decisions.
29
30
3.1 Smarter ways to use city resources: the collaborative

economy
Efficiency is at the heart of all smart city visions. One way to
achieve this is through the large scale deployment of sensors to
measure and monitor infrastructure, for example monitoring water
pipes to reduce leaks or monitoring and modelling traffic so it
flows smoothly.
Another way for a city to promote efficient use of resources
is to support digital tools that help people make better use of
underused assets. For example, people own things they rarely use,
they move around inefficiently in private cars, and many cities have
unused and underused spaces.
Making better use of existing assets through sharing and
collaboration is often defined as the collaborative economy.
Schemes that promote use rather than ownership have existed for
a long time: car clubs, bikesharing schemes and tool libraries, to
name a few. Now, the internet and digital technologies have the
potential to do a much better job of connecting distributed groups
of people to make better use of these assets.37
Cars are one of the prime examples of an underused asset, with
estimates showing that they are idle for 96 per cent of their life.38
This has a tremendous impact on cities in terms of the amount
of space that is dedicated to car parks. The UK as a whole has an
estimated eight to 11 million regulated parking spaces, and a further
17 million unregulated ones.39 Cars also require a city to dedicate a
huge amount of public space to roads, compared to other possible
uses. For example, in Singapore, a citystate where housing is
extremely dense and expensive, roads take up 12 per cent of the
total land area, compared to 14 per cent for housing.40
As well as intelligent software that makes traffic flow more
efficiently and sensors and apps that help make better use of
parking spaces, persuading citizens to make more sustainable
transport choices could help address the negative impact cars have
on cities.

31
Cities from Bremen to Shanghai have set up car clubs to encourage

car sharing.41 Rather than relying on the city governments or
companies, new digital tools now allow people to connect directly
with each other to rent out their cars by the hour. This peerto
peer (P2P) model is growing in popularity, and there are now
dozens of schemes in cities around the world. One example is
Drivy, which has around 500,000 members and 26,000 registered
cars in France and Germany. While many companies involved in the
collaborative economy are worried about regulation, some forms of
this could drive users to these services. For example, Drivy expects
to have a bumper year in Paris in 2015, which has just increased the
price of residential parking fees.42
An estimated 600 cities

worldwide have also set
up bikesharing schemes
another way of promoting
an alternative to car
ownership. Studies of these,
in Barcelona, Paris, Lyon and
Montreal, have shown that
between seven per cent and
thirteen per cent of users
were replacing car, taxi
or motorcycle trips.43 The
P2P model has also been
extended to cycling, with
services such as Spinlister
that enable users to rent
bikes from one another by
the hour.44
Image by Andy Enero.

Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
As well as renting cars from individuals by the hour, people can

also connect with each other to share car journeys. An example of
this is Nebengers in Jakarta, which uses Twitter to match people
who have space in their cars with people looking to share a ride.
The Nebengers Twitter account has 83,000 followers and seven
Nebengers employees reTweet around 1,000 requests for ride
shares per day.
Carpooling
Cars take up a huge amount of space
in cities. A peertopeer scheme that
helps people connect with each other
to share cars could help address the
negative impact cars have on cities.
32
Walk [Your City]

Walking is the most sustainable way to get around a city. It is also
the most efficient and equitable way to use city space. Yet today,
most major cities are designed far less for those walking than for
motorised transport.
Image: walkyourcity.org
Digital technologies offer people a way to campaign for city

streets built for them, not just cars. Walk [Your City] in the US
produces signs that explain how long it will take to walk between
popular destinations. These can be attached to lampposts or other
structures, and also have a QR code which brings up walking
directions, on Google maps, when scanned with a smartphone.
As well as helping people to get around the city, it can be used to
lobby governments to improve walkability.

Making better use of time, skills and everyday belongings

As well as helping cities be more efficient, bringing people
together to make better use of their time, skills and belongings
could help to strengthen communities, something that is rarely on
the agenda for smart cities.
One example is Peerby, a website and app that launched in 2012
to enable people to request and share items with their neighbours.
The company has over 100,000 users a month, mainly in
Amsterdam, London, Brussels and Berlin. Other examples include
BlockPooling, a social network for communities in Singapore, set
up in 2013 with a grant from the Government, to enable neighbours
to share belongings and offer or ask for services. The service has
the twin goals of strengthening communities in Singapore and
making more efficient use of resources.
Sharing Cities
City governments have an important role to play in changing
cultures and promoting the idea of people accessing assets when
they need them as an alternative to ownership. Sharing assets
doesnt necessarily come naturally to people in cities in the 21st
century, particularly when Amazon is only a click away. For instance,
Nesta research found that only 15 per cent of people surveyed in the
UK had either borrowed or lent something in the past year.45
Many city governments have realised the potential of the collaborative
economy to help address the various challenges they face. Beyond
individual projects, the term sharing city has emerged to describe a
more systematic approach to promoting the collaborative economy
in cities. While there isnt yet a common definition or framework
for what constitutes a sharing city, Berlin, Amsterdam, Seoul
and a network of 15 US cities are all experimenting with various
approaches.46
33
34
Sharehub, in Seoul, has been trying to promote public acceptance

of the collaborative economy as part of the Sharing City Seoul
initiative. Since it was launched in 2013, Sharehub organised a large
public engagement and education campaign with conferences,
seminars, reports and a book.47 The initiative has certified 50
projects, ranging from local carsharing companies to schemes
that match students struggling to find affordable housing with
elderly residents who have a spare room. The city government has
given grants to a number of these schemes.48
As well as supporting collaborative economy organisations,
cities could engage more actively in another area that has great
potential: collaborative schemes that give the public access to city
government assets, for instance car fleets, office space and tools.
Since 2012, Seoul has opened up almost 800 public buildings for
public meetings and events when they arent in use.49
Kyungsub Shin
Seoul Sharing City

Sharehub in Seoul is tasked
with engaging the public in
the collaborative economy as
part of the Sharing City Seoul
initiative. A big ear outside of
City Hall symbolizes Mayor
Park Wonsoons promise to
listen to citizens ideas and
complaints.

CASE STUDY
Amsterdam Sharing City

In Amsterdam, if you need to use a car you can find one on peer
topeer car rental service Snappcar. If youre planning to do a bit
of DIY but dont want to buy a drill that you will only ever use once
you can use Peerby to borrow one from your neighbours. And if
you want to pick up a new skill, from languages to coding, you can
use Konnektid to find neighbours who can teach you.
For Willem Koeman from the Amsterdam Economic Board, the city
government can play an important role by helping to coordinate,
promote and scale these activities. Thats why the city government
joined a coalition of partners in 2015 to launch the Amsterdam
Sharing City initiative, designed to make Amsterdam Europes first
sharing city.
Koeman believes that two ingredients are needed to make a
sharing city initiative successful. The first is a strong technical
foundation: Most collaborative economy services rely on the
internet and digital technology. Amsterdam citizens are very
well connected and digitally literate and this means that sharing
platforms are very popular in the city. The second factor is trust:
Dutch citizens have a high level of trust both in each other and in
local government.
The sharing city initiative was initially promoted by ShareNL, a
collaborative economy network and research organisation in the
Netherlands.50 ShareNL cofounder Pieter van de Glind believes
believes that the main beneficiaries of the collaborative economy
so far have been people who have good networks and own lots
of things, and that the next step is to reach out to disadvantaged
groups. There are already examples of this idea in practice in
Amsterdam, such as Shareyourmeal, a website where volunteers
can share meals with elderly people who arent able to cook for
themselves.
Based on interviews with: Pieter Van de Glind, ShareNL; Willem Koeman,
Amsterdam Economic Board and Maaike Osieck, Amsterdam Smart City.
35
36

Alongside investments in technologies that help cities waste fewer
resources, city governments should support the collaborative
economy to promote better use of the assets that both they and
their citizens own. To do this, they should first consider a range of
questions that will help them assess their starting point:
What assets does the city government own that arent being fully
utilised e.g. car fleets, office space, tools?
What collaborative economy services are companies,
entrepreneurs and community groups already offering in the city?
Are there any organisations in the city that actively promote the
collaborative economy that the city government could partner
with (as was the case with the Amsterdam Economic Board and
ShareNL)? If not, a city government could consider setting one
up (as happened with the Sharing City Seoul initiative).
Does the city have the necessary requirements to promote
a digitallyenabled collaborative economy for instance, an
ITsavvy population and a culture of trust and sharing? City
governments can increase the capacity for the collaborative
economy by promoting these attributes.
How will your city ensure that the collaborative economy can
benefit all citizens, not just the digitally connected elite?

37
3.2 Smarter ways to collect data: crowdsourcing

To make smarter decisions city governments are looking to
collect everincreasing amounts of data about their cities. As
well as finding new ways to aggregate and share data across city
governments and using the Internet of Things to collect new types
of data, crowdsourcing can be used to involve citizens in collecting
data.
The biggest potential benefit of crowdsourced data is that it could

enable governments to carry out data collection much more cheaply
than they currently do. With governments and researchers striving
to overlay cities with new sensor networks, its often forgotten,
as Anthony Townsend argues in Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic
Hackers, and the Quest for
A New Utopia, that cities
already have a citywide
sensor network, in the form
of increasingly popular
smartphones.51
In the US, Boston has been
experimenting with this
potential with Boston Street
Bump, an app developed
by the Office of New Urban
Mechanics and Boston
University researchers.
The software uses the
accelerometer in mobile
phones to sense when the
driver of a vehicle hits a
bump in the road, and then
sends this data back to the
city government.52 While
Fixmystreet
There are a range of apps that allow
citizens to map city issues, from
potholes to abuse by city officials.
In the case of the FixMyStreet,
some cities have taken it one step
further and integrated it into the city
workflow.
Image by San Francisco Bycicle Coalition

Photostream. Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
To crowdsource data, city governments can: use mobile

applications to directly interact with citizens; work with companies
already collecting data; mine social media; or work with
researchers who are creating lowcost, distributed sensors.
38
it is was primarily designed to identify potholes, data from the

app showed that bumps were four times more likely to be sunken
manhole covers. As a result, the city has now fixed over 1,250 of the
worst instances of these.53
Another option for city governments is to work with companies
to crowdsource data. One example of this is Googles Connected
Citizens Program, where Google shares data from its Waze
navigation app with ten cities around the world, including Jakarta
and Tel Aviv, to help them better understand traffic conditions.54
The advantage with this approach is that cities dont have to build
a user base for their own apps. Instead, they can access a ready
made audience and large amounts of preexisting data.
As well as being passively monitored, citizens can also directly
report issues to their city governments. They have always been
able to do this on the phone, in writing, or at community meetings,
and city governments often have websites where issues can be
reported. However, this frequently requires more time than citizens
are ready to spend, and issues are usually limited to a number of
narrow categories.
To address these challenges, cities are creating apps and services
that make it easy for citizens to report issues, for example by
enabling them to submit a photo from their smart phone of a
pothole they have encountered, or to Tweet a complaint about a
bus that hasnt arrived. These services take their lead from Fix My
Street, a website setup in 2007, which enables residents to report
problems to local councils by marking them on a map. Fix My
Street was developed by the NGO MySociety, and several councils
in the UK as well as cities around the world, including Helsinki in
Finland have incorporated it into their workflow.
In addition to helping cities cut costs, citizens can also use issue
reporting systems for a range of other purposes. For instance,
in Manila, they can report abuses by city officials through the I
am part of the solution app,55 and in India, women can use the
Safecity website to report and map sexual assaults. In these cases,
the maps also become a resource for activists who can lobby their
governments to deal with these issues.

CASE STUDY
Putting people at the heart of data collection in Jakarta

In 2014 Jakarta launched its smart city plan. But rather than focus
on the Internet of Things and big data, the organisers decided that
it would focus on citizen engagement.56 To do this, the Jakarta
provincial government developed the Smart City Platform which
consists of an issuereporting app, a crowdsourced flood map and
a crowdsourced traffic management tool.
Citizen reporting with Qlue
Like many similar platforms around the world, Jakartas citizen
reporting app, Qlue, lets residents upload photos of issues
they have spotted around the city, anything from potholes to
abandoned cars. Reports appear on a map of the city, which local
officers can use to identify issues that need fixing. The reporting
system is still in beta phase but initial results show that it is making
life much busier for city officials as departments that receive
reports have to respond to issues within a week otherwise they
receive a sanction.
Crowdsourced flood mapping with Petajakarta
Floods are a major issue in the city, with thousands of people
forced to abandon their homes every year. The Regional Disaster
Management Agency (BPBD) has developed an online map to give
citizens and city staff information about flooding, based on reports
that it receives from officers in the field. While the map is very
accurate it takes a long time to update.
Another option that Jakarta has started to experiment with is
crowdsourcing flood reports. It is a surprising fact that Jakarta
Tweets more than any other city in the world. This produces
a huge amount of data for researchers and city officials to
analyse. PetaJakarta, a joint project between researchers at the
University of Wollongong in Australia and the Jakarta provincial
government, was set up to take advantage of this.57 The software
uses Tweets about floods to create a real time, crowdsourced map
of flooding in the city. Accuracy is always an issue of concern with
crowdsourced data. Another innovative feature of the platform
39
40
is its partnership with Twitter: if a resident of Jakarata Tweets

the word flood, Twitter will send them a message asking for
verification. If the person confirms they were trying to report a
flood, the message will go on to the crowdsourced map. BPBD is
now trying to integrate the system into its existing workflow.58
Crowdsourced traffic management with Waze
A recent survey found that Jakarta has the worst congestion of
any city in the world. The city government is searching for new
ways to help manage traffic and one avenue they are exploring is
crowdsourced traffic reports.
With around 1 million monthly users of Waze, the Goolge-owned
navigation app, Jakarta was an ideal candidate for the Waze
Connected Cities program. City officials hope that the data
sharing agreement between the city and Waze will help alleviate
congestion in the city by giving drivers and city traffic managers
better data.
For Eko Haryadi, deputy head of the Office of Communication and
Public Information in the Jakarta provincial government, the value
of a people-centre approach to smart cities is obvious: We dont
have as many resources as cities in rich countries so this makes
us much more efficient.59 Despite this, companies visit Jakarta
regularly hoping to persuade the city to spend millions on cutting
edge smart city technologies, from intelligent transport systems to
advanced data modelling software.
Based on an interview with Eko Haryadi, deputy head of the Office of
Communication and Public Information, Jakarta provincial government.

Crowdsourcing environmental data

Many researchers are creating sensing equipment to crowdsource
environmental data, these technologies could soon be used to
supplement data collected by the city, with the benefit of being
much cheaper than professional equipment. While data collected
by professionals is highly accurate, a large enough number of low
cost sensors will produce results that are good enough to allow
policymakers to make decisions about air quality.
One of the most promising examples of this technology is the
PiMi Airbox developed by Tsinghua University.61 Individual devices
achieve a much higher level of accuracy than similar lowcost
sensors and they also upload all the data they collect to create a
crowdsourced map of indoor air pollution in Beijing.
While researchers get a crowdsourced map of the air pollution in
the city, volunteers who host the kit are more interested in what it
can tell them about the air quality in their homes. The ability of the
device to measure PM 2.5, the smallest and most dangerous type
of particulate matter, is one of the reasons that it has proved so
popular: over 500 people volunteered to host a PiMi Airbox within
a day of the project being launched.
Air pollution in
Chinese cities
Smog is a major issue for
many cities across China.
Citizens are starting to
use lowcost sensors
such as the PiMi Airbox
to measure and map air
pollution in their cities.
Image by Peter Dowley.

Licence CC BY 2.0.
41
42
CASE STUDY
Wo Ai Beijing (I Love Beijing) online map and mobile app

In China, smart city pilots are mostly about hardware and
infrastructure. But Song Gang, Director of the Science and
Technology Information Center of the Beijing City Administration
Bureau, believes that culture, not technology, is the main challenge:
Upgrading the hardware is not difficult at all. It is way more
difficult to change peoples mindsets and get them to embrace new
systems.
New systems that Song Gangs team have been experimenting
with include I love Beijing, a mobile app and online map that city
maintenance staff use to crowdsource reports about issues such as
potholes and broken streetlights. The app grew out of a successful
pilot project where unemployed people were given handheld
digital devices and asked to report issues they spotted around the
city.
The app also includes a map of over 600 informal food markets
in Beijing. Many of these markets are operated informally by
groups of neighbours and it is difficult for the city government
to keep track of their opening times, what they sell, and other
useful information. Beijing residents can use the I Love Beijing
app to score and comment on the quality of the markets, correct
inaccurate information and add new information, such as the
opening of new markets.
Beyond city management, digital technologies are helping people
who have left Beijing to maintain a cultural connection with the city.
For example, the Tuanjie lake district of Beijing has created 3D Tuanjie
Lake, a website where citizens can display photos of their artwork,
including paintings, calligraphy and ceramics. The Tuanjie Lake district
government office also posts photos of events in the community such
as Childrens Day celebrations. This feature is especially popular
with family members and former residents who now live overseas
as it gives them a way to connect with the community.
Based on an interview with Dr Song Gang, Director of the Science and
Technology Information Center of the Beijing City Administration Bureau.


Crowdsourcing data could provide a cheaper alternative to city
wide Internet of Things networks by making use of technologies
people are already using for instance, mobile phones and social
media. To further explore the potential of this, cities should:
Implement websites and apps that allow citizens to send
feedback and report issues to the city government. Keep in mind
that citizens will quickly become disengaged if they feel their
input is being ignored. To make sure this doesnt happen, cities
should develop feedback functions in their reporting apps.
Explore ways to crowdsource data from social media as a
supplement to citywide sensing networks. Successful examples
include PetaJakartas crowdsourced flood map.
Keep in mind that crowdsourcing data from citizens will result in
a picture of the city that is less than complete. This is because
the people that engage with this are usually the most affluent,
educated and connected segment of a citys population.62 More
experimentation and evidence is needed to identify the best
ways to crowdsource data from a broader group of citizens
that are more representative of the whole community, but
in the meantime cities should be aware of the limitations of
crowdsourcing data.
Cities should also be aware that the use of these technologies
alone is not enough, and that the difficult work is not creating
the technology but incorporating it into their existing workflow.
43
44
3.3 Smarter ways to make decisions: collective intelligence

One of the fundamental goals of the smart city is to help city
governments make better decisions, for example by using big
data and predictive analytics. But another way for a city to make
smarter decisions which we define as decisions that that more
effectively respond to the needs and priorities of the community
is to use collaborative technologies to engage with citizens directly
on issues such as planning, budgeting and policymaking.
Cities have always consulted their citizens, through public
meetings, exhibitions or surveys. However, the numbers reached
have generally been small and unrepresentative of the overall
community. Now, new digital tools offer cities the chance to involve
a much wider group of people in these processes, and for these
people to have a much more direct impact on their cities.
Engaging with citizens also enables city governments to make
more legitimate decisions. For example participatory budgeting
can help to improve citizen understanding of how government
works, and the difficult decisions that have to be made. Engaging
citizens early in the planning process can prevent a backlash when
the full extent of a new proposal becomes widely known.
Participatory planning
Experts dominate city planning, with developers, architects and
city employees making key decisions. There are many critiques
of this approach. For example, geographer Gyrgy Enyedi notes:
Planners (experts) have a limited knowledge of local problems.
Statistical data on noise pollution or on crime rate cannot express
exactly how local people feel about these conflicts or how the
suggested solutions fit into their cultural traditions.63
Studies show that most community engagement in planning
involves a very low level of participation and that this is centred on
the provision of information.64

When citizens are consulted by city governments it is usually done

in an analogue way: community meetings, exhibits in public spaces
or sending letters to those that might be affected. As a result, city
planners often fail to reach many of those that will be affected by
a change in their community, and decisions can lack legitimacy. In
China, for example, developers often run several rounds of public
consultation and are still confronted with violent protests once
construction work begins.65
Digital tools offer cities the chance to engage citizens at a much
deeper level and to involve a wider section of the population in
planning. While there are examples of online planning consultations
in cities around the world, it is often thought of as an added extra
rather than a key requirement.
For example, since 2004, local authorities in the UK have been
required to publish a statement that explains how they will
involve the community in the planning process. Most of these
statements focus on offline engagement methods for instance,
public exhibitions and letters sent to local residents and only
include online consultation as a nonessential addition.66 Also,
when planning processes are moved online they generally arent
userfriendly: they are badly designed, full of jargon and overload
people with information.
Planning innovations
The challenge is to understand how new digital tools can help
planning become more democratic, and how the collective
intelligence of citizens can be harnessed to help cities make
smarter decisions. As with the other methods we look at in this
report, there is a growing list of cities and developers who are
doing good work in these areas.
When architecture firm ArchiTectonics and crowdinvesting
company the Prodigy Network wanted to create a plan to
redevelop the centre of Bogota, they set up a simple, easytouse
website, My Ideal City, where the citys residents could make
suggestions and comment on proposals. In terms of the numbers
45
46
Carticipe
of people reached, the

initiative was a huge
success. Helped by a
daily slot on the local
radio where residents
could debate issues
with planners, the site
received over 100,000
suggestions about
projects or changes
that people wanted to
happen in their city.67
Maps are another way to involve citizens in planning. French

platform Carticipe is a website where people can indicate changes
they would like to see in their city on a map, debate issues and
vote for their favourite ideas. It has been used by the Government
in Laval to collect suggestions for a local development plan, and
by a local newspaper in Strasbourg to stimulate debate ahead of
municipal elections.68
Games can also be an effective tool which can engage wider
communications in planning. Minecraft, a game simply described as
virtual Lego, has been used around the world, for example by UN
Habitat in Nairobi to facilitate community engagement in planning.
It works well due to the basic skills needed to play the game.69
Many tools used in planning consultations today are based on
proprietory software. Yet these tools are often expensive as cities
have to pay for them to be built from scratch. An alternative is to
support opensource tools. One example of this is OpenPlans, a
notforprofit organisation in the US that aims to create a set of
opensource tools for citizen engagement in urban planning, so
that cities can build on tools that other cities have built rather than
creating brand new tools.70

47
Next Bangalore
NGOs can also use technology to engage residents in planning.
Next Bangalore is an initiative organised by the MOD Institute in
Bangalore and Germanys Next Network to create a community
vision for the citys Shanthinagar neighbourhood.71 It combines
a website where residents can submit and debate ideas with
more traditional forms of engagement, including events and an
exhibition space. The initiative has helped to create a vision of what
residents want their area to look like, as well as capturing their
everyday needs and problems.
Next Network
One key aspect of the above was the identification of abandoned

urban spaces as a major issue of concern, as they are often used
as places to dump rubbish. Residents were asked to help map
these spaces and this was used to start a conversation about what
should be done. The NGO now plans to work with city planners to
try and get residents ideas adopted by the city government.72 In
addition to this, the project has also developed a pilot app that will
enable people to map abandoned urban spaces via smartphone
and SMS in the future.
Image by Carl Wycoff. Licence CC BY 2.0.
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Participatory budgeting
Involving citizens in
spending decisions, known
as participatory budgeting,
is one way to draw on the
collective intelligence of
people to make smarter
decisions.
Participatory budgeting
started in the Brazilian city
Better Reykjavik
of Porto Alegre in 1989
In Reykjavik citizens can use the
and has been used to fund
Better Reykjavik platform to submit
a huge range of projects
ideas on anything from school
around the world ever since,
opening times to new playgrounds.
from water supply networks
in Ilo, Peru, to allotments in
Seville, Spain, and lamppost refurbishment in San Antonio, Chile. It
has since spread to an estimated 1,700 municipalities worldwide.73
Could new digital tools offer governments the chance to engage
more people in participatory budgeting? All the evidence so
far shows that digital technologies are best at reaching new
audiences, and so should be used to supplement traditional
participatory processes rather than replace them. For example,
the main participants in the Estonian city of Tartus 2013 online
only participatory budgeting pilot where citizens could vote on
how they wanted to spend 1 per cent of the city budget were
30to 36yearolds, a demographic that doesnt usually attend
community meetings.74
The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo has been studying the
forerunners in this area closely and has tried to improve on them
with Paris own participatory budgeting scheme, Madame Mayor, I
have an idea, which will allocate 500 million to projects proposed
by citizens between 2014 and 2020, and claims to be the largest
exercise of this kind in the world. The pilot phase of the campaign,

launched in 2014, received over 5,000 proposals. While votes

and proposals could only be submitted online, the campaign
also organised physical meetings across the city to ensure that
older people werent left out.75 Budgets for the project have been
divided among the 20 districts in Paris based on economic need,
with the poorer, outer suburbs being allocated 15 times the amount
put aside for central Paris.76
Civic crowdfunding and smarter spending decisions

Like participatory budgeting, crowdfunding where large groups
of people collectively fund projects through small financial
contributions can be used by city governments as an innovative
way of funding urban projects and involving citizens in spending
decisions. This was the case in Rotterdam where local frustration
with the lack of safe opportunities to cross a highway led to citizens
crowdfunding the Luchtsingel wooden footbridge, with each donor
getting their name on a plank on the bridge. The idea proved so
popular that it attracted subsequent funding from the city.
While most civic crowdfunding projects are initiated and funded by
citizens, cities have sought to use crowdfunding through investing
in match funding schemes. In practice, this means cities will fund
projects if they meet their crowdfunding target. In London, as
part of its Pocket Park project, the city provided 5,000 of match
funding for small park projects if citizens could raise the first
5,000. Elsewhere, Plymouth also set aside 60,000 to match fund
local projects on Crowdfunder, a UKbased crowdfunding website.
Other projects start with funding from the city government
and turn to crowdfunding to validate the opportunity. Milan is
currently testing out this approach: it plans to launch a 430,000
fund which will pay half the costs of a series of largely socially
orientated projects, with the rest left to citizens to fund through a
crowdfunding website.77 Citizinvestor and Neighbor.ly in the US are
examples of other organisations operating similar models.
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Participatory policymaking
One of the main challenges for Paris and other similar participatory
budgeting schemes is deciding what to do with all the suggestions
they receive. The International Association of Public Participations
Spectrum of Public Participation framework lists four levels
of civic engagement: inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and
empower.78 Online citizen engagement often stops at the involve
level, collecting ideas from citizens without allowing them to
debate these with city officials or to directly take decisions about
which projects get implemented.
Many ways have been tried to move online engagement up the
public participation spectrum. At a national level, Open Ministry
in Finland facilitates the crowdsourcing of legislation, allowing
citizens to post policy ideas on their website. Following feedback
from other citizens and volunteers, policy experts then create a
draft bill, which is put to a public vote. The Finnish parliament has
agreed to debate and ultimately vote on any bill that gets more
than 50,000 public votes. This has so far led to one citizen bill
a proposal that makes it possible for samesex couples to get
married getting a yes vote from parliament.
An example of how this kind of project works at the city level is
Better Reykjavik, developed by the nonprofit Citizens Foundation
in Reykjavik, Iceland. It allows citizens to propose, debate and vote
on ideas for improving the city and its services. Each month the
city council debates the 10 to 15 most popular ideas. Between 2012
and 2014 almost 60 per cent of citizens were estimated to have
used Better Reykjavik, and the city spent 1.9 million developing
more than 200 projects based on citizen ideas.
One issue with participatory policymaking websites is how to
integrate them with existing policymaking processes. For example,
the Finnish Government recently refused to debate a batch of
crowdsourced bills that were developed on Open Ministry.79 To
help with integration, Nestas DCENT project is currently testing
prototypes for digital democracy at the local and national level
across Europe, with the aim of developing a set of opensource
tools which governments will be able to incorporate into their
existing policymaking processes.80

Luchtsingel
In Rotterdam local frustration with the lack of safe crossing
of a highway led to citizens coming together to crowdfund
the Luchtsingel wooden footbridge, with each donor
getting their name on a plank on the bridge.
Image by Frans Schouwenburg. Licence CC BY-NC 2.0.
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There is huge potential for city governments to make smarter
decisions by tapping into the collective intelligence of citizens. To
explore this potential cities should:
Create opensource, userfriendly websites where citizens can
engage with the planning process.
Agree to debate issues in the city council which have been
proposed, debated and received a minimum number of votes on
online platforms. Better Reykjavik and Open Ministry are good
examples of how to do this.
Give citizens the power to decide how a percentage of the citys
budget is spent, moving beyond a suggestion box model to one
where citizens are given genuine scope to debate and decide
which projects get implemented.
Make clear to citizens the kind of response they will receive if
they participate in these processes. Cities risk alienating citizens
if they feel that their suggestions and participation arent valued.

PART 4 HOW COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES ARE HELPING PEOPLE SHAPE THE FUTURE OF THEIR CITIES
PART 4
HOW COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

ARE HELPING PEOPLE SHAPE THE
FUTURE OF THEIR CITIES
s well as giving city governments smarter ways to use

city resources, collect data and make decisions, digital
technologies can also empower citizens to directly address
issues that matter to them: they can use lowcost sensors to map
and measure their communities, to raise awareness of problems
and lobby governments for change; they can crowdfund projects
they care about; and volunteer their time and skills to improve their
communities.
Raising awareness: environmental sensing

In the previous chapter we saw that researchers are creating low
cost sensors that may have the potential to supplement official air
quality measurements in the future, but at present there are still
reservations about the accuracy of the data they produce. But for
John Lynch from the UKs Future Cities Catapult, data accuracy
isnt the main issue: The question is, do we want to measure air
quality or do we want to change air quality? If you put a 50 piece
of kit in someones hands you are more likely to achieve change
its about mobilising people not feeding back data to official air
quality measurement channels.81
This is the goal of the Smart Citizen Kit, which combines low
cost sensing technology with an online crowdsourced map of air
pollution in cities across the world. According to founder Tomas
Diez, its about empowering people to take their city back.82
One issue with sensing kits is that there are often high barriers
to use as they require a certain level of technical knowledge.
Intermediaries can play an important role in giving citizens the
skills to engage with these technologies. For example, Manchester
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and Amsterdam have both experimented with creating smart

communities around the Smart Citizen Kit. In Amsterdam, the
Waag Society an independent foundation exploring how
emerging technologies can address social challenges and the
Amsterdam Economic board brought 100 volunteers together
to gather data and learn about their local environments by using
the kit as a measuring tool. At the end of the project 45 people
decided to buy the kit so they could carry on using it.83 Frank
Kresin, Research Director at the Waag Society explains: What
started as a technical project turned into a social project: it brought
a group together which stayed together afterwards and found
new uses for the technology.84
Wheelmap
Wheelmap is an online map which lets
people share information about how
accessible places are by wheelchair.
To date, users have mapped 500,000
locations across the world.
Another example of citizen

sensing is DustDuino, a
lowcost, opensource air
pollution sensing project
from Public Lab, a non
profit which develops
tools for environmental
exploration and
investigation. It is much
cheaper than other sensing
kits because it only focuses
on one type of air pollution:
particulate matter.85 The
advantage of DustDuino is
that in can be built relatively
easily by people with DIY
skills, using opensource
instructions and parts. The
devices have been used
to measure air quality in
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, a
city with severe air pollution
and a sparse network of
professional sensing
equipment.86

Citizen sensing projects from China

In 2014, a photograph of people running the Beijing marathon
in heavyduty facemasks spread around the world. The person
responsible for the air quality monitoring account of the US
embassy in Beijing once described an extremely severe air quality
reading in the city as crazy bad.87 As a result, apps that tell people
the official air quality readings are some of the most popular in the
city. Beyond this, students and entrepreneurs are creating lowcost
sensing equipment which people can use to measure their own air
quality:
Air. Air! is a portable air quality monitor which connects to a
smartphone and was succesfully funded on Kickstarter.
Design students at Tsinghua University developed an air pollution
monitor that gradually changes colour as air quality worsens,
making technical information easy to understand.88
Art can also be a powerful way to advocate for change. In
Beijing, designers created FLOAT smart kites to map air
pollution over the city and raise awareness of the problem.89
Image by J.C.Barros. Licence CC BY 2.0.
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Crowdsourced maps
In the age of Google maps, its easy to think that we have perfect
maps of cities. Yet many of the most important aspects of a city
arent mapped. This is where crowdsourced mapping can help.
For example, Wheelmap, an online map developed by the German
NGO Sozialhelden, enables people to share information about how
accessible places are by wheelchair.90 Launched in 2010, users have
mapped 500,000 locations across the world.91 Another example is
Clean Air Asias WALKability app, which people can use to score
places based on how easy they are to walk around and upload the
scores to create a crowdsourced map.92
With both of these NGOs, the maps have two functions: one is to
let people know how accessible the city is, the other is to change
the way city governments think about accessibility and give NGOs
and activists a tool to use to lobby for improvements.
Funding projects that matter to people: civic crowdfunding
Image by Di Cavalcanti, Lu. Licence CC BY-NC 2.0.
As well as helping cities make smarter decisions, as we discussed

in Part three, civic crowdfunding offers citizens a way to directly
initiate and collaboratively fund projects in their communities, from
buildings and parks to events and community centres.
Colour+City
Collaborative platforms
help people make
better use of resources,
which can make the
city more sustainable,
connected and fun. The
Colour+City platform
matches those with a
wall they would like
decorated with street
artists looking for
places to paint.

Spacehive is a crowdfunding company in the UK that has

pioneered much of the work in this space. Examples of typical
Spacehive projects include: Stockwell Urban Oasis, which raised
around 900 online (plus 900 at a community event) for an
educational forest garden for children in Stockwell, London; and
Minehead EYE youth and community centre in Somerset, which
raised over 5,400 to build a climbing room for young people.93
Highprofile examples of civic crowdfunding projects such as the
+Pool in New York, or the BD Bacat Skyscraper in Bogot are
not representative of how civic crowdfunding is used today, or its
true potential. The +Pool enjoyed a highprofile media campaign
and received donations from around the world.94 The BD Bacat
Skyscraper is less about citizen crowdfunding than a new type of
investment opportunity.95
In contrast to these examples, the potential of civic crowdfunding
is much more local, with residents funding lowbudget projects
that really matter to them. For example, out of 58 successfully
funded projects listed on the Spacehive website, 20 (36 per cent)
had a funding target of less than 1,000 and 41 (70 per cent) had a
goal of 10,000 or less.96
Crowdfunding slum upgrades in Mumbai

In developing countries, civic crowdfunding is mainly a form of
philanthropy, rather than local communities funding their own
projects. One example is the Homegrown Cities project in Mumbai,
which is trying to develop a better way to upgrade slums. In India
slum upgrading is usually achieved through clearing away informal
housing, and building blocks of flats. These flats are often very
poor quality, and in recent years there have been several instances
where they collapsed, killing and injuring dozens of people. The
Homegrown Cities project, which was successfully funded on
Indiegogo, promotes the idea of using local builders and materials,
combined with international best practices, to create highquality,
affordable housing within existing communities.97
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CASE STUDY
Engaging citizens with data and technology in London

The London Datastore is a website that provides access to data
about the city. In May 2015 the site had over 580 datasets on
everything from household waste to childrens tooth decay, and
reservoir levels. The point, according to Andrew Collinge of the
Greater London Authority (GLA), is not just to catalogue all
of Londons data but to turn the site into a home for dataled
innovation in the city. There are two challenges the datastore has
to overcome to make this happen. The first is getting access to
data and harmonising it. Unlike New York with its five boroughs,
London has 33 boroughs. Each is a separate political and service
entity, and all have different levels of expertise and commitment to
opening up the data they collect.
The second challenge is around finding productive uses for public
data. Opening this data up will only lead to positive outcomes
social or economic if there is a community of people and
businesses that have the skills to effectively use it. One way that
cities can help create such a community is through open data
challenges, and the GLA has recently announced plans to launch a
series of these.
Beyond open data, the GLA is using technology to harness
peoples collective intelligence with its Talk London website, a
citizen engagement tool that enables residents to debate the
big issues London faces, from crime to housing. Future plans
for the site centre on encouraging deeper levels of community
engagement, where residents will be given the opportunity to get
involved in policy and service design.
Based on interview with Andrew Collinge, Greater London Authority.

Collective action
Another benefit of civic crowdfunding for communities is its ability
to mobilise volunteers to work on community projects. According
to US civic crowdfunding service Iobby, 53 per cent of donors
volunteer their time to help the projects theyre supporting, in
addition to donating money.98 There are also now a range of digital
technologies that enable citizens to connect with each other, discuss
and develop community projects and volunteer their time and skills,
without necessarily having to make a financial contribution.
Examples include Change by Us, a website where residents can
discuss, propose and join projects, mainly involving community
gardens and renovating disused urban spaces.99 It is now available
in several US cities and in Amsterdam. Another example, I Clean
India, is a combination of an issuereporting app and a tool for city
governments across India to mobilise volunteers to get involved in
city cleaning drives.100
Peerby
In Amsterdam,
London and Brussels,
over 100,000 people
use the Peerby
website to connect
with their neighbours
online to share
everyday items such
as drills and bicycles.
Image by Hiro Putra.

Licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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The various ways that communities are using collaborative
technologies sensing and mapping their communities, funding
projects and connecting with each other to bring projects to life
could have an important impact on cities, from making them more
sustainable to building stronger communities. To support these
initiatives cities should:
Provide training opportunities to citizens to help them
understand and use technology and data. One successful
example of this was the Amsterdam city governments support
for communities to learn how to use the Smart Citizen Kit.
Work with NGOs and community groups to broaden the reach
of sensing, mapping, crowdfunding and collective action to
communities that wouldnt usually engage with these processes.
Explore opportunities to build bottom up collaborative
technologies into the citys workflow. For example, city
governments in Reykjavik and New York now officially support
Better Reykjavik and Change by Us, both of which were
developed by community organisations.

PART 5
A VISION FOR PEOPLECENTRED

SMART CITIES
s we discuss throughout this report, collaborative

technologies have the potential to make cities smarter
and improve urban life. However, at present many of the
most promising examples are early stage and small scale and if
integrated at all, sit at the periphery rather than at the core of
smart city strategies.
To have a chance of helping cities address some of the tough
problems they face, we argue that further investment and support
are needed to generate evidence about which approaches to using
collaborative technologies are most effective. Cities then need to
share these lessons so that other cities can adopt and build on the
most successful approaches.
In the introduction of this report we set out five main
recommendations on how cities can better achieve this.
1. Set up a civic innovation lab to drive innovation in
collaborative technologies.
2. Use open data and open platforms to mobilise collective
knowledge.
3. Take human behaviour as seriously as technology.
4. Invest in smart people, not just smart technology.
5. Spread the potential of collaborative technologies to all parts
of society.
How might this look in a realworld city in the near future? Below
we discuss what an alternative smart city vision for Beijing, one
of the worlds largest and most rapidly evolving cities, might look
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like, one that combines the best of top down cityled approaches
while making the most of the growing potential of bottomup
technologies, and above all the citizens who power them.
Smart Beijing 2025

Sustainability and transport
In 2025, air pollution sensors embedded in every smartphone and
the lowcost sensing kits that everyone has in their flats will allow
the city government to create a crowdsourced map of air pollution
in the city. Community groups will also use these maps to raise
awareness about how the choices people make, such as driving to
work, contribute to this problem.
Navigation apps used by drivers will give the city a detailed picture
of the flow of traffic in the city, allowing city planners to map the
most popular journeys and offer better public transport options.
Ondemand buses with efficient, bespoke schedules created
by mapping the movements of bus passengers that use the bus
reservation app will crisscross the city at almost the same speed
and level of comfort as taxis. Building on this, the Sharing City
Beijing initiative will partner with peertopeer car sharing, ride
sharing and bike sharing schemes to offer alternatives to individual
car journeys.
The Sharing City scheme will also work with citizens to map unused
assets, from car fleets to buildings, and build opensource websites
and apps to help citizens access these and promote their use.
Urban development
Beijings new 20252050 master plan, based on a series of
crowdsourced community plans, will set out a new vision for
the citys future development, based on the needs and everyday
challenges its residents face. It will also require future urban

development projects to seek significant engagement with citizens,

using collaborative technologies to call for ideas, promote debate
and empower citizens to take decisions about projects that will
affect them.
The city will also set aside 5 per cent of its budget to allow citizens
to propose and debate urban development projects, from parks
and community centres to improved cycling infrastructure and
decide which of these projects get implemented.
Inclusive and open government
To encourage citizen participation, the city will open up the
majority of the data it collects and appoint data officers to work
with citizens, businesses and NGOs on making the most of city
data. Companies that provide services to the city will have to
comply with open data standards and where possible digital tools
developed by or for the city will be open source to encourage
further collaboration.
To further encourage uptake and usage of data the city
government will organise data dives and hackathons with anyone
interested in analysing city data and invest in schemes that build
capacity in the city among NGOs, citizens and businesses to work
with data.
Evolving the smart city
As cities evolve new urban issues arise. To keep evolving the smart
city and developing solutions to new urban issues, the city will
set up a civic innovation lab where citizens, technologists and city
officials can work together on developing new ways to address
urban challenges. The lab will also mobilise entrepreneurs and
social innovators to develop and test practical solutions.
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64
ANNEX
What else is Nesta doing to make cities smarter?
CITIE (City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation, and
Entrepreneurship)
CITIE (City Initiatives for Technology, Innovation, and
Entrepreneurship) a collaboration between Accenture and Nesta
has analysed and benchmarked how 40 cities globally act across
nine policy areas: Regulator, Advocate, Customer, Host, Investor,
Connector, Strategist, Digital Governor, Datavore, diagnosing
their current performance, and through case studies with city
leaders shine a light on best practice. Together CITIE provides
city governments with a playbook for developing implementable
policy and contributes to fostering a network of crosslearning
between cities. CITIEs insights can help city governments make
incremental innovations in their policy environment which can yield
a transformational impact on a citys innovation ecosystems and
catalyse new growth.www.citie.org
Mapping sharing cities across the globe

We are beginning to see a number of cities across the world
developing strategies and activities that seek to generate social,
environmental and economic value from embracing and adopting
the sharing economy and the principles that underpin it. The term
sharing city is being adopted by many cities, from Amsterdam to
Seoul, to describe this practice. Building on CITIE, Nesta will create
a set of indicators for a sharing city, and use this to map sharing
cities across the world.
For more on Nestas sharing city work see:
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/8stepstowardsharingcity
Digital Social Innovation (DSI)

Funded by the European Commission, Nesta led a large
research project into Digital Social Innovation (DSI). The project
explored how digital technologies help civic action: mobilising
large communities, sharing resources and spreading power. To
understand the state of DSI in Europe the project developed
www.digitalsocial.eu which was used to map 1,000+ organisations
working on DSI, their characteristics and collaborative networks
between organisations.
DCENT: The role of technology and online platforms in

increasing democratic participation
DCENT is a Europewide, EUfunded project creating
decentralised and privacyaware applications for direct democracy
and economic empowerment. Together with citizens and
developers, the project is exploring the creation of a decentralised
social networking platform for largescale collaboration and
decision making.
Open Data Challenge Series

In the Open Data Challenge Series, we are running seven challenge
prizes that invite businesses, startups and individuals to develop
innovative solutions to social issues using open data in areas such
as Crime and Justice, Energy and Environment, Education, Housing
and Food. One example of a winning solution is MoveMaker, an app
which uses open housing data to help social tenants house swap.
nesta.org.co.uk/project/the-open-data-challenge-series
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Interviewees
Alejandro Rodriguez, Project
director, Geografia urbana
(Columbia)
Alexandra DeschampsSonsino,
Founder, Design Swarm
Andrew Collinge, Assistant
director of intelligence and
analysis, Greater London
Authority
Ben Hawes, Smart cities policy
lead, UK Department for Business
Innovation and Skills
Corrin Wilson, Smart Cities
Project Manager, UKTI
Ellie Cosgrave, Research
Associate, Liveable Cities
Programme, UCL
Eko Haryadi, Deputy head of
the Office of Communication
and Public Information, Jakarta
provincial government
Frank Kresin, Research Director,
Waag society
Helen Bedford Olsen, Head of
Communications Local Digital
Campaign, DCLG
John Lynch,Project Lead, Product
and Service Design, Future Cities
Catapult
Jonny Voon, Lead Technologist
Internet Technology, Innovate UK
Lorraine Huddson, Research

associate, Open University
Maaike Osieck, Communications
Manager, Amsterdam Smart
city
Mikele Brack, Project director,
Pivotal Innovations
Niraj Saraf, Lead Technologist for
Urban Living, Innovate UK
Pieter Van De Glind, Cofounder,
Share NL
Poon King Wang, Director,
LKY Centre for Liveable Cities
(Singapore)
Rebecca Rumbul, Head of
Research, My Society
Shang Jin, Editor, China
Information Times
Song Gang, Director of the
Science and Technology
Information Center of the Beijing
City Administration Bureau.
Tan Kok Yam, Head, Smart Nation
Programme Office (Singapore)
Tomas Diez, Founder, Smart
Citizen Kit
Willem Koeman, ICT cluster
manager, Amsterdam Economic
Board
Yodit Stanton, Founder,
Opensensors
About the authors

Tom Saunders is Senior Researcher International Innovation
at Nesta. His work focuses on helping governments learn from
innovations around the world, with a particular focus on how
cities can use digital technologies to address urban challenges,
principally through collaboration with citizens and community
generated innovations. Tom also leads on Nestas research and
engagement with China and much of Nestas work in South East
Asia, particularly Indonesia. He has advised the UK government on
innovation collaboration with ASEAN countries and the Chinese
government on community generated low carbon innovation and
is coauthor of Chinas Absorptive State: Research, innovation and
the prospects for ChinaUK collaboration.
Peter Baeck is Principal Researcher Public and Social Innovation
at Nesta. He focuses on social innovation and innovation in public
services, with a particular focus on the role digital technologies
play in enabling new types of social innovation and civic
participation. Peter has also led on much of Nestas research into
crowdfunding and P2P lending as an innovative way of financing
products and services, as well as government innovation, and is co
author of iteams: The teams and funds making innovation happen
in governments around the world.
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Endnotes
1. BIS (2013) The smart city market: opportunities for the UK. London: BIS. See: https://www.
gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/249423/bis-13-1217smart-city-market-opportunties-uk.pdf
2. For critiques of the smart city vision see books: Adam Greenfields Against the smart city
and Anthony Townsends Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New
Utopia as well as academic literature such as Goodspeed, R. (2014 ) Smart cities: moving
beyond urban cybernetics to tackle wicked problems. Cambridge Journal of Regions,
Economy and Society. 10.1093/cjres/rsu013; and Hollands, R.G. (2008) Will the real smart
city please stand up? City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. 12:3; and
Shelton, T. (2014) The actually existing smart city. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy
and Society. 10.1093/cjres/rsu026. See: http://cjres.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/1/13.full
3. In this report we use collaborative technology to mean the use of digital technologies and the
internet by citizens to connect with each other, and by government to connect with citizens
to address urban challenges. In the US this field is often referred to as civic technology
however, it doesnt have much currency in the wider world. Other terms include social
technology, but this is very broad and covers much that isnt directly relevant to cities. In
this report we have chosen to use collaborative technology to focus on the idea of building
collaboration between urban communities and between citizens and government. For an
overview of the civic tech space in the US, see: http://www.knightfoundation.org/features/
civictech/; see also the Nominet 100 list of social technology innovators http://socialtech.org.
uk/nominet-trust-100/ and Nestas work on Digital Social Innovation: http://www.nesta.org.
uk/project/digital-social-innovation
4. A note on terminology: We use the term citizens throughout this report to refer to residents
of a particular city not in the narrow legal sense of people who have citizenship of a particular
country.
5. Hollands, R.G. (2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? City: analysis of urban trends,
culture, theory, policy, action. 12:3. Note that the ideas that make up the smart city concept
are much older than this. For example, the idea that computational data analysis can improve
city management is over a hundred years old. See: Shelton, T. (2014) The actually existing
smart city. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. 10.1093/cjres/rsu026. See:
http://cjres.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/1/13.full
6. See: http://www.navigantresearch.com/newsroom/investment-in-smart-city-technologies-isexpected-to-exceed-174-billion-from-2014-to-2023
7. BIS (2013) The smart city market: opportunities for the UK. London: BIS. See: https://
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/249423/bis-131217-smart-city-market-opportunties-uk.pdf
8. See for example: http://www.bsigroup.com/LocalFiles/en-GB/smart-cities/resources/BSIsmart-cities-report-The-Role-of-Standards-in-Smart-Cities-UK-EN.pdf
9. See for example the smart city strategy of one region, Cyberjaya in Malaysia: http://www.
urenio.org/2015/02/09/smart-city-strategy-cyberjaya-malaysia/
10. Based on interviews with city government employees in Beijing and Jakarta.
11. Kingsley, P. (2013) Masdar: the shifting goalposts of Abu Dhabis ambitious eco-city.
Wired. 17 December 2013. See: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/12/
features/reality-hits-masdar
12. Arbes, R. and Bethea, C. (2014) Songdo, South Korea: City of the Future? The Atlantic. 27
September 1014. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/songdosouth-korea-the-city-of-the-future/380849/
13. http://www.burohappold.com/projects/project/planit-valley-164/
14. See: http://www.masdar.ae/en/city/detail/one-of-the-worlds-most-sustainablecommunities-masdar-city-is-an-emerging-g
15. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/songdo-south-korea-the-cityof-the-future/380849/
16. Townsend, A. (2013) Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New
Utopia. New York NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
17. See for example the control centres implemented by Glasgow and Rio.
18. See: http://www.sdpc.gov.cn/gzdt/201408/W020140829409970397055.pdf
19. For smart grids see: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2014/march/tflto-launch-worldleading-trials-of-intelligent-pedestrian-technology-to-make-crossing-theroad-easier-and-safer; For 3D mapping see: http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/
smart_london_plan.pdf
20. See: http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wireless/mobility-servicesengine/city_of_barcelona.pdf
21. Amsterdam: http://amsterdamsmartcity.com/projects/detail/id/62/slug/flexible-streetlighting; Glasgow: http://futurecity.glasgow.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=10253
22. See: http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/industry-matters/traffic-info-serviceproviders/real-time-traffic-information.html; http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/
roads-and-motoring/managing-traffic-and-congestion/intelligent-transport-systems.html
23. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/netinnovation/deliverables/outsmart/outsmart-d63.pdf
24. See: http://www.intelligentbuildingtoday.com/2015/05/15/demand-logic-and-seab-energywin-canary-wharf-cognicity-challenge/
25. Interview with authors 05/02/15
27. Goldsmith, S. and Crawford, S. (2014) The Responsive City: Engaging Communities
Through Data-Smart Governance. New York NY: John Wiley & Sons.
28. Ibid p.26.
29. Mattern, S. (2015) Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard. Places Journal.
March 2015. https://placesjournal.org/article/mission-control-a-history-of-the-urbandashboard/
30. Batty, M. (2013) Smart Cities. See: http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/files/2013/06/
Session-5-Lecture-2.pdf
31. Bartlett, J. and Tkacz, N. (2014) Keeping an eye on the dashboard. Demos Quarterly.
24 October 2014. http://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-4/keeping-an-eye-on-thedashboard/
32. Clark, L. (2013) McLaren boss: were already predicting the future with analytics. Wired. 18
June 2013. See: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/18/ron-dennis-mclaren
33. Ash Center Mayors Challenge Research Team (2014) Chicagos SmartData Platform. See:
http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/chicago-mayors-challenge-367
34. Suh, S. (2004) Promoting Citizen Participation in e-Government. See: http://unpan1.
un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan020076.pdf
35. Ferenstein, G. (2013) Road to Government 2.0. Washington DC: The Aspen Institute. See:
http://csreports.aspeninstitute.org/documents/RoadtoGovrnmt_Final_text.pdf
36. Smith, G. (2005) Beyond the ballot. London: The POWER Inquiry. See: http://core.ac.uk/
download/pdf/30511.pdf
37. Stokes, K., Clarence, E., Anderson, L. and Rinne, A. (2014) Making sense of the
collaborative economy. London: Nesta. See: http://www.nesta.org.uk/event/making-senseuk-collaborative-economy
38. Bates, J. and Leibling, D. (2012) Spaced Out. Perspectives on Parking Policy. London:
RAC Foundation. See: http://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/
downloadables/spaced_out-bates_leibling-jul12.pdf
39. British Parking Association (2013) The size and shape of the UK parking profession.
Haywards Heath: BPA. See: http://www.britishparking.co.uk/write/documents/library/
reports%20and%20research/bpa_uk_parking_sector_report_awweb.pdf
69
70
40. Ministry of National Development (2013) A high quality living environment for all
Singaporeans. Singapore: Ministry of National Development. http://www.mnd.gov.sg/
landuseplan/e-book/#/12/
41. Glotz-Richter, M. Car-Sharing in Bremen. See: http://www.cities-for-mobility.net/
documents/wc11/michael_glotz_richter.pdf
42. See: https://www.spinlister.com/
43. Bicycle Sharing Schemes: Enhancing sustainable mobility in Urban Areas. United Nations,
Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2011) http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/resources/
res_pdfs/csd-19/Background-Paper8-P.Midgley-Bicycle.pdf
44. Sennett, R. (1970) The Uses of Disorder. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
45. Stokes, K., Clarence, E., Anderson, L. and Rinne, A. (2014) Making sense of the
collaborative economy. London: Nesta. See: https://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/
making_sense_of_the_uk_collaborative_economy_14.pdf
46. US sharing cities network: http://www.shareable.net/sharing-cities; Amsterdam sharing
city: http://www.amsterdameconomicboard.com/nieuws/6324/amsterdam-sharing-cityleads-the-european-field-at-ouisharefest-2014; Sharing City Seoul: http://english.sharehub.
kr/; Sharing City Berlin: http://www.sharingcityberlin.org/
47. http://www.shareable.net/blog/sharehub-at-the-heart-of-seouls-sharing-movement
48. http://sharehub.kr/2014/en/
49. P2P Foundation Sharing City Seoul. See: http://p2pfoundation.net/Sharing_City_Seoul
50. See: http://www.sharenl.nl/#sharenl
51. Townsend, A. (2013) Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New
Utopia. New York NY: W.W.Norton & Company.
52. Simon, P. (2014) Potholes and Big Data: Crowdsourcing our way to better government.
Wired. See: http://www.wired.com/2014/03/potholes-big-data-crowdsourcing-waybetter-government/
53. See: http://newurbanmechanics.org/project/3701/
54. Waeshani, D.A. (2014) Jakarta, Waze to cooperate in traffic monitoring. The Jarkata Post.
12 November 2014. See: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/11/12/jakarta-wazecooperate-traffic-monitoring.html
55. Tolentino, F.N. (2014) Speech: People-Centric Intelligent Cities. Manilla Bulletin. 10 June
2014. See: http://www.mb.com.ph/speech-people-centric-intelligent-cities/
56. Malay Mail Online (2013) Jakarta hopes to lift fortunes with Smart City online platform.
Malay Mail Online. 21 December 2014. See: https://staff.blog.ui.ac.id/jp/2014/12/18/sistemsmart-city-jakarta/; http://www.themalaymailonline.com/tech-gadgets/article/jakartahopes-to-lift-fortunes-with-smart-city-online-platform
57. Speed, B. (2014) Which city tweets the most? City Metric. 20 August 2014. See: http://
www.citymetric.com/which-city-tweets-most
58. Holderness, T. et al., (2014) Enabling civic co-management through GeoSocial
Intelligence. See: https://tomholderness.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/holderness_foss4g_
petajakarta_release.pdf
59. Dew, S.W. (2015) Peta Jakarta gets netizens to report floods. The Jarkata Post. See:
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/02/04/peta-jakarta-gets-netizens-reportfloods.html
61. http://enjoy.caixin.com/2014-04-18/100667015.html
62. See for example Kate Crawfords comments on crowdsourcing data from smartphones:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/10/think-again-big-data/; and My Societys report on
who uses its technology: https://www.mysociety.org/files/2014/12/manchester.pdf
63. Enyedi, G. (2004) Public participation in socially sustainable urban development. Paris:
UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001355/135555eo.pdf
64. Zhang, Q. (2014) Crowdsourcing in community participatory planning in China: case
studies in four communities in Shenzhen. DSpace@MIT. See:
65. Amos, G., Warburton, D. et al., (Eds.) (2007) Community engagement in planning:
exploring the way forward. London: APaNGO. See: http://www.tcpa.org.uk/data/files/
apango__summary.pdf
66. See for example Sheffields statement, which is representative of many local authorities
in the UK. See: https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/planning-and-city-development/planningdocuments/local-plan/statement-of-community-involvement.html
67. Although as the process was run by a private company and didnt have buy-in from the
city government, the suggestions appear not to have been acted on. See: http://www.
archdaily.com/455983/winka-dubbeldam-my-ideal-city-of-the-future/
68. See: http://carticipe.net/
69. See: http://www.psfk.com/2013/05/united-nations-urban-planning-game.html
70. See: http://openplans.org/
71. See: http://www.mod.org.in/mod/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MOD-Nextbengaluru-.PEOPLES-VISION-ON-FUTURE-SHANTHINAGAR-Booklet-_-web.pdf
72. See: http://gatishil.nextbangalore.com/#about, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/
bengaluru/Crowdsourcing-ideas-to-build-a-better-Bengaluru/articleshow/45365818.cms
73. Canannes, Y. (2014) Contribution of Participatory Budgeting to provision and
management of basic services. London: IIED. http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/10713IIED.pdf
74. Krenjova, J. and Reinsalu, K. (2015) Participatory Budgeting at the Local Level:the case
study of Tartu, Estonia. Paper prepared for IRSPM Conference, Shaping the future. Reinvention or Revolution? See: http://www.irspm2015.com/index.php/irspm/IRSPM2015/
paper/viewFile/1185/543
75. Veron, P. (2015) Why Paris is Building the Worlds Biggest Participatory Budget. Blog
post. See: http://www.newcitiesfoundation.org/why-paris-is-building-the-worlds-biggestparticipatory-budget/
76. Napolitano, A. (2015) Lessons from Paris, Home to Europes Largest Participatory Budget.
See: http://techpresident.com/news/25441/paris-experiments-participatory-budgetcodesign
77. See: http://www.milanosmartcity.org/joomla/sharing-economy/7-notizie/45-crowdfundigcivico-al-via-la-sperimentazione-con-un-stanziamento-di-oltre-400-mila-euro
78. Nelimarkka, M. et al., Comparing Thre Online Civic Engagement Platforms using the
Spectrum of Public Participation Framework. See: http://ipp.oii.ox.ac.uk/sites/ipp/files/
documents/IPP2014_Nelimarkka.pdf
79. See: http://yle.fi/uutiset/all_six_citizens_initiatives_have_failed__activists_accuse_
parliament_of_intentionally_slowing_the_process/7525779
80. See: http://www.nesta.org.uk/project/d-cent
83. See: https://waag.org/sites/waag/files/public/media/publicaties/eindrapportage-sck-asd.pdf
85. See: http://www.mentalmunition.com/2013/05/dustduino-plan-to-crowdsource.html
86. Austen, K. (2015) Environmental science: Pollution patrol. Nature. Vol. 517, Issue 7533. See:
http://www.nature.com/news/environmental-science-pollution-patrol-1.16654
87. Watts, J. (2010) Twitter gaffe: US embassy announces crazy bad Beijing air pollution. The
Guardian. 19 November 2010. See: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/
nov/19/crazy-bad-beijing-air-pollution
88. See: http://thelongandshort.org/issues/season-two/chinese-makerspaces.html
89. See: http://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2013/08/14/spc-index-float-beijing-vignette.cnn
90. See: http://socialtech.org.uk/projects/wheelmap/
91. See: http://wheelmap.org/about/presse/
92. See: http://www.dotzoo.net/walkability/
93. See http://www.spacehive.com/ProjectSearch
71
72
94. See: http://www.pluspool.org/

95. See: http://www.archdaily.com/276433/bd-bacata-the-worlds-first-crowdfundedskyscraper/
96. Author calculations based on Spacehives own listed projects www.spacehive. See also:
http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/civic_crowdfunding_a_new_way_of_spending_down
97. (2014) Homegrown Cities. See: http://www.urbanlab.org/HomegrownCitiesProgressReport-June2014.pdf; http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/opinion/boom-andbust-at-the-same-time.html?ref=global-home&_r=0
98. See: https://www.ioby.org/about
99. See: http://nyc.changeby.us/
100. See: http://www.socialcops.org/2014/10/21/clean-india/
RETHINKING
SMART CITIES
FROM THE
GROUND UP
Nesta
1 Plough Place
London EC4A 1DE
[email protected]
Tom Saunders and Peter Baeck
@nesta_uk
June 2015
www.facebook.com/nesta.uk
www.nesta.org.uk
Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales with company number 7706036
and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SCO42833.
Registered office: 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE.

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What are some of the challenges cities face today?

What are some of the challenges cities face today?

How can collaborative technologies help address urban challenges?

How can collaborative technologies help address urban challenges?

RETHINKING

Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to help people and

RETHINKING SMART CITIES

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLECENTRED SMART CITIES

PART 2 SMART CITIES PAST AND PRESENT

2.1 A brief history of the smart city

2.2 How are cities piloting smart city technologies today?

PART 3 USING COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

3.1 Smarter ways to use city resources: the collaborative economy

3.2 Smarter ways to collect data: crowdsourcing

3.3 Smarter ways to make decisions: collective intelligence

PART 4 HOW COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGIES ARE HELPING 53

PART 5 A VISION FOR PEOPLECENTRED SMART CITIES

What else is Nesta doing to make cities smarter?

About the authors

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

Our work at Nesta touches on many aspects of the smart city

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

THE CASE FOR PEOPLECENTRED

s cities bring people together to live, work and play, they

As a result, many smart city ideas have failed to deliver on their

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

Mapping urban flooding and air pollution

Connecting urban communities to improve sustainability

In Beijing residents can use

Tapping into the

Smart Citizen Kit

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

of information to the map including opening times, new markets and

Opening up decision making

Bringing people into the planning process

Rethinking smart cities from the ground up

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

move beyond both to recognise the huge potential for digital

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

Image by Snoeziesterre. Licence CC BY 2.0.

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

on: smarter use of resources, smarter ways of collecting data

How to run a peoplecentred smart city pilot

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

2. Use open data and open platforms to mobilise collective

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP

PART 1 THE CASE FOR PEOPLE-CENTRED SMART CITIES

Similarly, unsustainable patterns of living such as the heavy

RETHINKING SMART CITIES FROM THE GROUND UP