The dos and don'ts of designing a smart city

Going easy on regulation and building ecosystems where startups can innovate are the two best ways to develop a successful smart project, according to Íñigo de la Serna, former mayor of the Spanish city of Santander.

De la Serna, who pioneered Santander’s renowned smart city project during his tenure between 2007 and 2016, said the city did many things right but also many things wrong, and Latin American governments could learn from both categories.

IOT

Santander’s smart city project was initially mainly based on installing internet of things (IoT) sensors for monitoring public services including available parking spaces and mechanisms to monitor public lighting, water irrigation, noise pollution etc.

Regulating the use of public lighting was one of the main projects for Santander, with the municipality forming a public-private partnership in which a company invested 11mn euros (US$12.3mn), which was paid back over 15 years. The return on investment has already been noticed with savings of 80% in public lighting use over a three-year period.

The water project, which includes identifying and correcting issues such as poor management and losses through leakages, has seen 23% savings in consumption.

Like most cities in Spain, smart garbage bins are deployed that through sensors allow garbage truck drivers to tell whether the bins are full and need emptying or can be left for another day, redirecting the route accordingly and saving time and fuel. This and many similar projects were developed with Japanese company NEC and with telco Telefónica providing the network infrastructure.

Other projects, such as measuring noise, air and light pollution don’t have such a clear return on investment as they provide data whose use is difficult to quantify but are highly useful for future planning. This data was captured through sensors placed on top of hundreds of public buses.

“The economic value of reducing CO2 emissions can be hard to determine. But certainly that data can be monetized in some way by companies or used by the municipality in decision making. It’s an investment in quality of life,” de la Serna told BNamericas on a recent visit to Chilean capital Santiago.

According to the former mayor, Santander’s municipality invested some 160mn euros over 10 years plus related expenses in energy supply upgrades in municipal buildings.

NO ONE SIZE FITS ALL

According to de la Serna, there is no one size that fits all, or ideal model which another city can follow.

But as a general rule of thumb, each city should first identify the main problems it needs to address and then create an ecosystem and conditions in which startups, academia or private companies can innovate and come up with solutions.

“Money should not be an obstacle to introducing technology. Maybe a municipality can receive funding as we did from the European Union in the initial stages but the most interesting stage is that of creating an ecosystem for co-creation,” he said.

“Organizing a hackathon doesn’t cost much. If you organize it with clear goals in mind you can see a couple of smart teenagers come up with three or four amazing apps in 48 hours. All of these can have a business model behind them meaning there’s no cost for the municipality. On the contrary, they can lead to cost savings for the municipality, such as with energy savings.”

What is key is to engage the general public, making them aware of how an app benefits them in their day to day, he said.

“If the average person doesn’t understand it, they won’t use it, and they won’t share it,” de la Serna said, adding that after deploying thousands of sensors, the municipality had to create apps to help citizens understand what they were designed for.

One platform, called City Pulse, allows the general public to report things that need fixing, like a broken park bench or a fallen tree, by uploading a photo and the location. The person can also follow the progress of their report and see if and when it is dealt with.

The municipality is now working on creating a single card through which citizens can pay for public services, or taxes or for sports or public transport. The project, costing an estimated 6mn euros, is due to be implemented over the coming years.

REGULATION

Regulation is often the perceived bad guy in the development of smart cities. It is both necessary to ensure things operate within an established framework but can also be a major hindrance to innovation and co-creation.

According to de la Serna, Europe is falling behind Asia and the Americas when it comes to innovation. On one hand you have China which has highly restrictive regulation, but which at the same time provides government financing for many private initiatives.

On the other hand, the United States goes very light on regulation but does not provide funding to the private sector.

“We’ve chosen the worst of both worlds, we’ve decided to not fund companies because of the fear of being perceived as anti-competitive, but at the same time we also highly regulate everything,” the former mayor said.

“Our data protection regulation is amongst the strictest in the world. We hyper regulate.”

According to de la Serna, the best option is to have open data platforms which everyone can access and use but in an anonymous manner.

Emerging mobility platforms like ride-hailing apps such as Uber, electric scooters and delivery services have been a headache for regulators in Spain, as elsewhere.

Such platforms can bring all sorts of benefits to the user in terms of flexibility, availability and cost, but in Spain are largely outlawed.

Faced with the dilemma of how to regulate Uber on the one hand and the pressure of the taxi lobby on the other, the Spanish government decided to leave it up to each municipality to decide, and many banned such services.

“We need to learn to lose the fear of learning to understand new services and to regulate them enough to make sure they meet basic norms but without strangling them,” de la Serna said.

“These new technologies evolve much faster than we can come up with regulations, but they can contribute a lot, especially in places like Latin America. We can’t leave the gates open, we need to regulate a little, but just enough to protect the privacy and safety of the consumer and let the rest take care of itself.”