How technology could boost the efficiency of future cities

The foundations of the proposition came from a demonstrator run by the TSB ran – a competition (won by Glasgow) between British cities to win £24million in funding to 'demonstrate at scale, and in use, the additional value that can be created by integrating city systems'. The demonstrator was aimed mainly at stimulating the demand side. Cain, who was working on the demonstrator, was concurrently writing a proposal for the Future Cities Catapult. He said: "The idea of the Catapult was always to bring together the demands of the cities and the public agencies, together with the best from the science and the research base, and the best, the most innovative and some of the most disruptive firms from the whole breadth of different sectors that you could describe as being part of the future cities economy." The hypothesis was that, if you joined up a city's systems, you would not only deliver efficiencies, but also unleash new economic activity. These systems could be anything from energy and water to ICT and things like health and education. The risk is that, by optimising one of the systems in isolation, it could can have an impact, detrimental or otherwise, on other systems. Improving the road network, for example, may damage air quality and displace some of the challenges faced by the rail network. Cain observed: "There is a bunch of academic work that underpins this but, at the city scale, it is largely untested and unproven." City leaders believe they must 'innovate or die', according to Cain. But while leading operators, like Siemens, IBM and Cisco, have come up with a host of technology based solutions, the single supplier format does not fit in with constitution of local government. "Cities don't want to sign a 15 year contract," explained Cain. "There is an enormous amount of trust that needs to be built up with one provider. Instead, they want a combination of firms providing different solutions and what they are now looking for is for these different solutions to be able to talk to and work with each other. That's a transformation this Catapult is seeking to make happen." The Catapult has structured its approach around three main capabilities aimed at tackling the perceived barriers faced by cities. City leaders are elected for a relatively short term and face short term economic challenges, so long term planning becomes difficult. To help overcome this, the Catapult is building a 'futures and next practice' function, which enables people to look at long term trends to make evidence based decisions. Secondly is the City Lab – a core data science facility. Cain said: "This helps pull through everything from how you sense the infrastructure and the physical aspects of the city more effectively to how you make models of various forms, land use, transport, air quality – whatever they may be." These models can then react to changing scenarios: for example, using a brown field site in a certain way. Cain continued: "We could find out if and how we can generate the returns we're looking for and then use that to make the evidence based decisions." The third capability looks at financing models and making projects attractive for private funding. Electronics companies can have an important role in creating integrated solutions for cities. For example, one project just getting underway is looking at the viability of a city scale Internet of Things network. Conducted in association with the Connected Digital Economy Catapult, Milton Keynes City Council and the Open University, the core technology inputs will come from BT and Nuel, the Cambridge based 'Internet of Everything' specialist, with a number of other SMEs providing either services or developing different sensor based solutions. The project is looking at using the license free spectrum – whitespace – vacated by the old analogue TV signal to support citywide IoT networks. "Milton Keynes sees itself as a place that has less challenging historical restraints, because it's new," said Cain. "But it is facing many of the challenges being faced by other cities; for example, congestion or finding a parking space or air quality. What Milton Keynes is doing with us – and with the SMEs involved through a wider developer community – is developing solutions that can be run at a citywide level using the free spectrum. It is useful because it reduces the barrier to entry for a company that might want to trial an IoT type solution, but can't afford it." This is seen as one example of how integrating systems and trialling them at a city level could be relevant for electronics companies. Cain continued: "Trialling at the city scale has not been done before. It is an opportunity for people who might use that platform to test their own products and services at a city scale. I think that's relevant for anyone working in sensors and photonics or in the app development world that sits on top of that." An interesting footnote to the Future Cities Catapult's work is that it currently in discussion with Dubai and is, therefore, successfully reaching out to a global marketplace – which is aim of the Catapults. Cain said: "It is important to stress that UK cities are clearly part of our marketplace; in fact, UK firms need to be able to engage and transact and test and develop their solutions in UK cities. We are now meeting with Dubai to discuss how to have a working model of the city on which investment can be based and that is pulling through different UK firms who could help it meet their needs." Case study – Sensing London One of the core objectives of Sensing London is to start show the value in connected cities and connected citizens. Working on the project for Future Cities is Teresa Gonzalez, who said: "Specifically, we are looking at air quality. It is quite a difficult thing to sense and to make sense of the data that comes through. So, technology wise, we are working with sensor manufacturers." London's air quality is currently measured by 130 high resolution sensors, with localised air quality information extracted from a model. The idea behind the project is to move towards high volume sensing to see if reality mirrors the model. The project is taking place in Enfield, which did have three high quality sensors, but is now being blanketed by hundreds of low cost sensing devices. Gonzalez said: " We then compare the picture provided by the more granular data with the existing data. Even if it does provide the same picture, we will have developed low cost sensors." Ultimately, the results can be used to understand air pollution patterns and its effect on residents, then make informed decisions about pollution reduction programmes.