TEDxBrum: From concrete to telepathy: how to build future cities as if people matter
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My presentation from TEDxBrum 2014, bringing together examples from my work for IBM in Smarter Cities with examples of great, innovative projects in Birmingham and around the world. A transcript of the accompanying talk is here: http://theurbantechnologist.com/2014/11/11/from-concrete-to-telepathy-how-to-build-future-cities-as-if-people-mattered/
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TEDxBrum: From concrete to telepathy: how to build future cities as if people matter
- 6. Photo of Masshouse Circus, Birmingham, before its redevelopment, by Birmingham City Council http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=Planning-Management%2FPageLayout&cid=1223092740947&pagename=BCC%2FCommon%2FWrapper%2FWrapper
- 8. Smart Hack Birmingham 2012 Coders taking part in “Smart Hack” at Birmingham Science Park Aston in 2012 by Sebastian Lenton: https://twitter.com/sebastianlenton
- 9. Birmingham Smart City Alliance http://birminghamsmartcityalliance.wordpress.com/
Editor's Notes
- The theme is this conference is DIY: how can all of us act to make Birmingham, and our lives in this great city, the best that we can? But what’s a relatively old guy like me doing telling Europe’s youngest city how to re-create itself? Well in the age of the information economy, perhaps I’m one of the oldest people around who could try to claim to be a digital native. I’m the product of what happens when a father who works for a technology company buys his 10 year old son one of the world’s first personal computers.
- But a couple of years ago, whilst walking through London to give a talk similar to this one, I was reminded of just how much the world has changed since those days. I found myself walking along Wardour St. in Soho, just off Oxford St., and past a small alley called St. Anne’s Court, which brought back enormous memories for me. In the 1980s I spent all the money I earned washing pots in a local restaurant in Winchester catching the train to London every weekend to visit a small shop in the basement of the building you see in the photo on the right. Now I wonder if anyone in this room knows the significance of this particular “hyper-local” place in London to the music scene in Britain in the 1980s?
- It was the only place in the country you could buy really cutting-edge European thrash metal. The process by which bands like Celtic Frost – who at the time were three 17 year olds practicing in an old military bunker outside Zurich – managed to connect to the very few people like me around the world who were willing to pay money for their music sounds like ancient history now. It was a world of hand-printed “fanzines”, and demo tapes painstakingly copied one at a time. Our world has been utterly transformed in the relatively short time between now and then by the phenomenal ease with which we can exchange information.
- The true digital natives are very young children like my 6-year old son, who taught himself at the age of 2 to use a touchscreen to access the information that interested him before anyone else taught him to read or write, and can now use programming tools like Scratch to control computers vastly more powerful than the one I used as a child.
- What does this mean for cities? Internet of things means Cities are full of data. This Data from Dublin is about queues at traffic junctions, social media sentiment about transport in the city, and water usage across the city. Unlocks secrets that we didn’t know about The healthiest walking route to school The local company who create wonderful oven-ready curries from local recipes and fresh ingredients Predict traffic in advance, prevent traffic jams, multi-modal traffic planners … As technology advances, every road, electricity substation, University building, supermarket supply chain creates all of this data. It should be an enormous resource for us to use. From Birmingham to Dublin to Montpellier to Madrid and around the world we’re helping cities build 21st century infrastructure that harnesses this data My friend the architect tim stonor calls this data porn. But how can we be sure that we’ll apply this technology well? This data will only bring the greatest benefit when it’s made openly available; when it can be relied on, when we can trust it. If its inaccessible, then this data might operate city infrastructures operate efficiently, but it won’t help people and community and businesses adapt those infrastructures to work for them.
- They will be like the concrete roads we built in the past that cut through cities and communities, and didn’t nurture and support them We can learn from the past. When concrete and cars were our new toys, this is what we did to Birmingham Town planners have learned from this – Kelvin Campbell’s “Massive / Small” smart urbanism – ref his role in Birmingham
- LIST SPECIFIC THINGS FROM 12 SIMPLE TECHNOLOGIES … Birmingham City Council asked an extremely insightful question last year. What do advances in digital technology mean for our planning strategy? This was my answer. Part of this was about putting people first; and engaging with them in the planning process. Local authorities, property developers etc. should all be required to use tools like social media that are increasingly available to everyone as smartphones become cheaper and families help each other to consult and engage. Almere in Holland use advanced technology to plan and predict the future development of the city; but they also engage in dialogue with their citizens about the future the city wants. Montpellier in France use advanced technology to measure the performance of public services; but they also engage online with their citizens in a dialogue about those services and the outcomes they are trying to achieve. But we shouldn’t just be asking people what they want; we should be investing in infrastructure that helps people to build what they want. Planning policy; procurements … etc. etc. should all promote open data, open standards, accessibility. That way the enormous amounts of money that both public and private sector spend on infrastructure, services and property in cities can contribute to making this vast array of data available to all of us … … including 6 year olds who learned to use touchscreens.
- This is what happens when you give city data to people with the skills and passion to do something about it. These people spent a weekend together in 2012 asking themselves: in what way should Birmingham be better? And what can we do about it? They wrote an app that connected spare food in professional kitchens with soup kitchens in need of more food. So what came of this?
- This is where I need to tell you about my argument with Boris Johnson’s brother. Bottom up vs. top down – the other side of “massive / small” The Smart City Alliance came together to promote “massive / small” innovation by creating a network of networks so that great ideas from one place can find great support from another We convened a set of “unusual suspects” …
- … and Two years later, it led to the Harborne Food School.
- So I’ve talked a bit about concrete; and a bit about building better cities. What does any of this have to do with telepathy? The extent of the disruptions we’ve seen in the past have been down to bandwidth; and our ability to access it. The touchscreen is the great democratiser of bandwidth – it means anyone has the skills to access it. But in a relatively short period of time it will look very clunky.
- So I’ve talked a bit about concrete; and a bit about building better cities. What does any of this have to do with telepathy? The extent of the disruptions we’ve seen in the past have been down to bandwidth; and our ability to access it. The touchscreen is the great democratiser of bandwidth – it means anyone has the skills to access it. But in a relatively short period of time it will look very clunky.
- I can’t tell you what Birmingham should be like. You and the million other people who live here are the only ones who can do that. What I can tell you is that these technologies will continue to transform our world in ever more unexpected ways. If we harness them for the collective vision we want, they’ll give all of us an incredible ability to build Birmingham and the world to be what we want it to be; especially if the city’s institutions adopt “massive / small” thinking as we’re trying to encourage them through the Alliance. If you are a child or a student, learn, and learn broadly. You could have a life of learning ahead of you, and its incredibly exciting. If you are a parent teach broadly, don't cede your child's development to technology. If you want to, start a business, and make it an exciting, responsible one. If you work for government, engage with the community around you and think carefully how to create open policies, institutions and infrastructures that enable people, communities and businesses to do the best for themselves. If you work for a company, help these amoral organisations take good, long-term choices that are good for business because they are good for the society that the business operates in. We can take for granted that all of us, whatever we do, will encounter more and more incredible technologies as time passes. But more importantly, if all of us do these very simple things, and remember them in the hundreds of choices we make every day, then we will build a better Birmingham, and better cities and communities everywhere.