Working Futures for Future Cities: for sustainable and inclusive smart cities:

Ahead of the Smart Cities Development Conference on the 6th February 2019 we hear exclusively from one of the speakers – Dave Carter of University of Manchester – on working futures for future cities…

Manchester was a founder member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) in 2006, building upon a series of European wide initiatives in which the city and its partners participated, including as founders of the Telecities network in 1993 and the Inter Regional Information Society Initiative (IRISI) in 1994. A common theme in all of these activities was that research and innovation should be more open and user driven and that there was, at least, a tripartite approach to achieving this through new forms of collaboration between the public sector, business and research.
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This laid the foundations for the embryonic network of Living Labs, established by the City of Helsinki in 2002, which became one of the practical expressions of what today is seen as the triple, or quadruple, helix approach to engaging with user driven open innovation and with civil society. Concepts of ‘smart cities’ and ‘future cities’ are merging and more human-centric objectives are being proposed, with ideas such as ‘liveable cities’. In particular the future of work and skills needs to be explored in this context particularly in relation to concerns that consequent job losses will occur at a faster rate than new technology related jobs will be created.

Manchester set up its own Living Lab network more than 10 years ago, connecting the City, the three universities (UoM, MMU and Salford), local creative spaces, such as the Manchester Digital Lab (MadLab) and creative networks, such as Future Everything – the “Festival as Living Lab”. During the last two years Manchester has been Innovate UK’s Future Cities Internet of Things (ioT) national demonstrator project – “CityVerve” – and continues to promote the idea that smart cities need smart people and that digital technologies need to be made more sustainable and inclusive, with a specific focus on health and wellbeing and civic engagement.

 

The Manchester Living Lab network is concerned with promoting practical initiatives that bring together innovative technologies with public engagement to ensure that people are at the centre of smart cities development. Central to this is a new vision that:

  1. a) Smart Cities will have smart citizens at their heart, enabling them to have the capacity and confidence to use state-of-the-art future internet technologies to transform the way they live and work and their quality of life.
  2. b) Future internet-enabled smart citizens will collaborate in new and dynamic ways, co-owning new ways of planning and delivering services and co-producing services both for themselves and for those that they live with, care for and work with.
  3. c) Smart citizens in smart cities will be part of new cross-border collaborations across Europe and globally, using future-internet technologies to create new economic and social opportunities for working and for living.
  4. d) Smart cities will enable smart citizens to make their environments greener, cleaner and healthier as well as more open and inclusive.
  5. e) Smart citizens will enable smart cities to be more democratic, resilient and attractive, using future internet-enabled services to generate and celebrate creativity, innovation and diversity.

 

The University of Manchester, in partnership with other local stakeholders, including Manchester City Council, is involved in a wide range of contemporary research on the theme of sustainable and inclusive ‘smart cities’. This builds on more than 25 years of participation in research and innovation programmes focusing on urban change in a digital world, including major European programmes on “information cities”, “intelligent cities” and “digital cities”. Cities require new approaches to building urban environments and quality of life in order to make them sustainable, resilient and inclusive. Research, technology and data can play a critical role through developing effective services, engaging citizens, and enhancing decision-making.

The challenge is to develop approaches that work in practice, on the ground, in very different kinds of cities across the world, in ways that are fair and promote social cohesion. Through the Manchester Urban Institute (http://www.mui.manchester.ac.uk/), launched in Feb. 2017, and the earlier work of the Centre for Urban Policy Studies (CUPS), the theme of “Smart Cities and Smart Citizens” is a key priority for research.

The “Working Futures for Future Cities” project is exploring the future of work in cities in the context of technological change, where the Internet of Things and a new wave of automation within both production and services, will be reducing employment at a faster rate than new technology related jobs will be created. This project aims to build upon Manchester’s experience of economic change over the last 30 years and the use of new digital technologies within its urban regeneration programmes to promote economic growth and social inclusion. It is reflecting upon Manchester’s re-invention of itself as a connected and creative ‘smart city’, building on the strengths of its “original, modern” economic and cultural heritage as well as its current strategic position as part of the “Northern Powerhouse” initiative.

This work is also exploring how the dominance of ‘tech push’ solutions, referred to as ‘smart-cities-in-a-box’, are being subjected to further scrutiny and critique, and how new forms of digital production are revolutionising the world of work. In particular the availability and accessibility of digital production, including 3D printing, self-build electronics and rapid prototyping, offers new opportunities to re-localise production and create new opportunities for developing globally relevant employment and skills opportunities at a local level. This includes new grass roots development through social enterprises, such as Living Labs, “hackspaces”, makerspaces and start-up accelerators, which focus on making production more open and accessible based around open-source hardware as well as software. A key challenge is to assess how much this can begin to compensate for the projected reductions in employment being brought about by increasing uses of robots, AI and all other forms of automation.

Consequently discussions about the role of “smart cities”, especially in terms of the development of the built environment, need to look at the wider picture of the way people interact with the built environment in the current period, the challenges they will face in the future and how can we best retro-fit our cities with the benefits of people centric digital technologies to make them not only “smarter” but also more sustainable and inclusive.

 

You can hear more from Dave Carter and other leading Universities on the future development plans and how Smart innovation will feed into them, at the Smart Cities Development Conference.

Register for tickets on the event page > click here

 

Dave Carter, Honorary Knowledge Exchange Fellow, Planning and Environmental Management, School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED), University of Manchester. Co-Lead, Smart and Sustainable Cities Theme. Manchester Urban Institute.

Contact: dave.carter@manchester.ac.uk
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