The European way of designing smart cities edit

Though often regarded as more advanced in both design and implementation of innovative models, European cities face specific issues that challenge the very notion of “smart city.”

Transportation is an example. Compared to, say, American cities, which have been shaped by and for cars, a typical European street is used by pedestrians, cars, bikes, public transport – a complex network of lanes with a disparity of speed, rhythm, safety needs, not to talk of user behaviors! Making it smarter does not prove easy.

But the challenge also comes from the specific quality of European cities—a urban identity mixing history, density and art of life. Urban planning alone never came close to providing such an experience. This is not to say that these cities were not designed, or that they just grew organically. Most of them were redesigned, actually. Their modern identity was shaped through a tension between a vernacular growth and an effort to rationalize the city. The result is a dynamic balance of rational and irrational, of organized and disorganized. Should a smart European city just be more efficiently organized? Or is it possible that a data-driven city preserve this delicate mix of rational and irrational that seems to define the European urban experience?

These challenges are all the more sensitive as, on subjects usually integrated into the idea of smart cities, European citizens express high expectations, to which local elected representatives are required to respond.

We must consider here the Europeans’ collective preferences and the public policies that derive from their choices, but also, compared to the United States, the most significant items on the political agenda at city level. The issue of economic development and growth is not absent from political discussions at local or metropolitan level. But it is mainly carried to other administrative levels, that of the Länder in Germany, or to the national level in Italy, France, or the UK. A significant part of the cities’ budgets comes from taxes collected at national level and the idea of a bankrupt city is almost unimaginable in Europe. As a result, European mayors tend to focus on other issues, which vary according to their constituents’ sociology and proclivities: social inclusion, urban planning quality, environment. European and national standards often guide some of these choices.

Besides, Europe is without doubt the part of the world where the notion of public services has experienced the greatest historical development, and voters are committed to maintaining and developing this heritage. While delegation to the private sector is common in some areas such as waste or water management, the companies that provide these services integrate—contractually or, more deeply, in their corporate culture—a certain idea of the city as a common good, and not just as a market. This dimension is certainly present in the United States, but especially in small towns, while in Europe it strongly influences service providers. A significant proportion of these services are provided directly by municipalities, or through the agencies they control. This is particularly the case for public transport. In France, paradigmatic developments such as the rise of shared vehicles have been driven both by private actors and by a strong commitment from some pioneering municipalities (Lyon, La Rochelle, then Paris). The close interaction between public will and private actors has sometimes led to failures, but it has also helped to integrate, from the outset, disruptive initiatives into an action framework largely defined by public policies. Finally, the elected representatives could draw electoral arguments from these developments, combining a fidelity to the political heritage of public services and a strategic vision allowing their city to project itself into the future.

European mayors’ approach to smart city initiatives is thus both defined by issues specific to the Old World’s cities, making it urgent to explore innovative solutions, and by a political obligation—or at least a strong incentive—on the part of municipal administrations to address these issues.

Hence a now large experience, with its share of failures. It has gradually shaped a “European way” of designing and implementing smart city solutions.

Engineering the city, 2.0

Without going back to the urban engineering of the Roman Empire or to the utopian architects of the 18th century who imagined perfectly geometric cities, the idea of a rational city has long found its way in the European imagination, all the more so perhaps because most European cities have been founded during the Middle Age and were just, for a long time, muddy, unsafe places. Their history can even be read as successive attempts to free themselves away from the past, to emerge from the old chaos and impose an order upon urban swarming. Venice may be a jewel, but first it was a technical solution to the insalubrious conditions of coastal settlements in lagoons. As in Chicago after the 1871 fire, chaos was sometimes a field of ruins. The reconstruction of Lisbon (Portugal) after the 1759 earthquake, of Le Havre (France) after its complete bombing in 1944, or to a lesser extent of Berlin after the German Reunification (1991), were moments of reinvention that made it possible to forge new paradigms, more functional and more rational than previous ones. Paris takes its current form from the vast urban rationalization operation undertaken in the 1850s by Baron Haussmann with issues of hygiene, traffic, but also military management of revolutions, issues to which the destruction of old districts and the breakthrough of vast boulevards were relevant solutions. The urban planning developed in Torino (northern Italy) by Ascanio Vitozzi at the end of the 16th century is both the spectacle of modern political power and an attempt to rationally manage rainfall and muddy streets (paving did not become widespread until three centuries later), with kilometers of arcades that freed the city from the grip of nature. These paradigmatic cities offered models duplicated over and over—St Petersburg was designed as a northern Venice, Bucharest (Romania) as a Balkan Paris, Nice (France) modeling itself on Torino.

However, the penultimate moment in this long history of European urban rationalization, functionalism, is now perceived as a failure, and a major one. It might remind the story of Brazilia and the unexpected development of slums in the interstices of the perfect city imagined by Niemeyer. In Europe, functionalism is associated with the name of Le Corbusier and the Athens Charter (1933). It was the major paradigm of the large urban planning operations undertaken after 1945 in both Western and Eastern Europe, in a context of rapid urbanization and industrial catching up, along with the rise of technocratic management. Engineering or reengineering the city was actually not just a matter of techniques and rationalization, but a promise of happiness. The harder the fall. The areas, districts and cities founded or developed from the 1950s to the 1980s have aged badly, and their failure was a blow to the very idea of a technological and rational vision of the city. While zoning, in the US, is associated with a suburban life that might be challenged but still appears perfectly acceptable to those who live it, zoning in Europe was associated with large buildings populated with poor tenants, severely degraded and quickly abandoned by those who could escape it. Where in the United States urban planning has left problems elsewhere (e.g. in urban ghettos located in city centers), in Europe it is seen as having created or concentrated these problems.

At about the same time as the problems arising from these unsuitable urban solutions became obvious, in the 1980s, the validity of older models was being rediscovered, particularly the performance of vernacular urban planning. A good example is Palermo, Italy, which nowadays is a mix of three juxtaposed cities: the historic city, the 19th century districts and the post-war city developed during the Italian economic boom of the 1960s. The management of the intense Sicilian summer heat is optimal in the oldest districts, far less efficient in the wider streets of the 19th century city and it is a disaster in the most recent areas. The reconstruction of Berlin after 1991 favored, under the architectural audacities, the urban solutions of the 19th century (contiguity of buildings, limited height) over that of the 20th century. In the Berlin case, it is not only the winter conditions that had to be controlled: the challenge was also to reconstitute an experience of the street as a common and civilized space, framed by shops and by the contiguity of the walls, as opposed to the empty spaces of large complexes, open to crime. We see here a notable notion emerging: the intelligent city, in its European version, is not necessarily defined by an increase in technology, but by the intelligence of solutions. Palermo's ancient urban planning is an intelligent response to the climate challenge, the 19th century city is safer than the 20th century.

Of course, coming back to good old times is not on the agenda; medieval urban planning is impermeable to modern transportation and the 19th century city a big pot of traffic jam. Moreover, Europe keeps an intact belief in the possibility of improving and reinventing the city. Paris appears in this respect as an archetype: it is both a piece of history, the standard ideal of a 19th century city whose structure nobody would dare to touch, and a city that in the last twenty years has radically changed in its relationship to vegetation (greening walls, roofs, pavements; environment-friendly gardening), to car traffic, and to the idea of public transport with pioneering experiences in the field of shared mobility. However, Baron Haussmann’s 19th century project to rationalize the city remains a path whose dependence is obvious in the way innovations are managed (centralized), in the importance given to physical structures (bike sharing stations and electric vehicle fleets), in the extended role taken by the city council in decision-making and project management. Engineering culture and political culture go in the same direction, which could be defined as technocratic. This allows the early emergence of innovative solutions like bike sharing, now expanding worldwide. But it also leads to costly choices, sometimes abandoned (the Autolib car sharing system, although widely used and long considered a success, was abandoned this year with a significant debt for which the Paris municipality and the private operator mutually reject responsibility; to say the least, operating costs were underestimated). Hence the question: just as Waze is probably doing better to optimize car traffic management than any mayor’s decision, aren’t agile, light solutions such as free-floating bike sharing systems more efficient and lest costly than the heavy systems designed within technocratic frameworks? Should Haussmann give way to Google and its likes?

The focus on individuals and its blind spots

Seen from California, the answer to these questions may seem obvious. Not in Europe, and not only because of cultural habits, administrative powers, or because mayors would not want to relinquish their power. One of the reasons for this reluctance is the complexity of European cities and the difficulties it still poses for one-size-fits-all technology solutions. The interpenetration of problems often leads to a solution that creates new problems, and the “smart” solutions available today are often monothematic. European cities are the very example of places where a decision on one theme has side-effects on other themes. Let’s come back to the issues of transportation. Taken the lack of available space, even a clever decision on one transport mode may have unexpected consequences on others. Take Barbusse street in 2000 (90 cars can park in the street, it takes 20 seconds to find a parking place) and in 2018 (50% of the parking space is now dedicated to public bikes, electric cars, deliveries, and disabled person’s vehicles; it takes 15 minutes to park a regular car). Most of the decisions leading to this situation have been made in order to fight against pollution through the implementation of smart systems. It’s not just about technology, as illustrated by another Parisian example: the introduction of articulated buses offering 60% extra seats (a clever move and a good incentive for using public transportation) led to these buses blocking other cars and then themselves in roundabouts, like the proverbial snake biting its own tail.

The point is that city councils have learned the hard way that urban solutions, be they technological or not, have lots of blind spots, and that smartness is expected not from the solution itself but from the analysis leading to the choice of a solution.

When smart solutions are just out of the scope of public decision, they might have unexpected and undesirable effects. Waze, an amazing app that changed many drivers’ life, also changed the life of people living in little streets. The city traffic is undeniably more fluid and better managed this way. But it can also infuriate citizens, destroy some economic value (that of real estate, of local businesses) and unsettle the urban balance of an entire neighborhood.

No doubt that in twenty years, completely integrated AI solutions will be able to deal with most of issues of “monothematic” solutions. But meanwhile there is a suspicion that a new solution will bring a new problem.

Beyond the question of technological maturity, data based solutions pose another problem, to which European leaders as well as European citizens are sensitive. It’s not just about privacy, as one might expect. It’s about the implicit idea of an efficient, performant city, and the people who experience it. The technological sophistication of data based solutions allows them to manage data with a very fine granularity, that of the individual. But human flows, and more broadly the city itself, cannot be understood simply in terms of individual choices, or optimization. The city is a quantum reality, it mobilizes groups as well as individuals, and solutions set up for individual uses cannot manage groups in the same way.

Besides, city citizens are not – and don’t see themselves as – just rational calculators. Just as a tourist will like to get lost for a few tens of minutes in a foreign city (and then find their way back), the city experience is not just about efficiency or performance. The art of living in the city is also made up of surprises, encounters, detours, changes of mind. And the horizon of the fluid, passing city draws the image of a city where we do not stop. Quite the opposite of the European idea of a city.

Finally, the ideal fluidity of the data-managed world is often based on the mobilization of a workforce and in a European context this adds a dimension to the problem. In Paris, the Velib bike sharing system is only effective thanks to the employees who remove bicycles from some saturated stations and hand them over to other empty stations. Data can help to refine the management of activity, but work experience (or regulations) imposes its constraints and the technological solution must adapt to them, at the risk of being sub-optimal.

A city is not just a set of individual “users.” While the constraints and rigidities of collective urban reality can degrade the performance of solutions based on individual consumer data, this collective reality can also offer new resources. In the field of electrical energy, Nice (southern France) offers a good example. The city is only connected to the French electricity grid by a single high-voltage line. During a very cold winter, or (more often) a very hot summer, this can push the system to the limit. Two options have been explored: the first, smart meters, makes it possible to optimize household consumption, by playing on incentives (and, later, on the erasure of consumption with remotely managed power cuts of a few minutes on some equipment). This “smart” solution has its limits: it only makes it possible to erase a few percents, and citizens are reluctant to let go their command of electricity consumption. The second solution is to develop local production. In the world of Tesla and Jeremy Rifkin, decentralized production at the household level would be required. This makes no sense in a European city where housing is mostly collective and already old. It is at the scale of the district or city that solutions must be elaborated, with balances to be built between buildings with positive energy, others optimized, others in which it would not make economic sense to develop electricity production. Intelligence here is not only technical, it is necessarily collective.

The representation challenge

This brings us precisely to the questions that European public decision-makers are facing today when they deliberate on the digital solutions that can make the city smarter. Sensitive as they are to the “hidden dimensions” of collective experience, to the multiple constraints that weigh on any change in the delicate balance of the existing city (as messy as it might be), to the unexpected impact that even the best decision can have, they are wary of any “off-the-shelf” solution. Their request is less about customizing systems, than about the possibility of integrating them into a systemic approach.

Such an approach has been successfully developed in some ecodistricts, notably in Denmark (with the Christiania district in Copenhagen) and Sweden (in Malmö). The issues addressed covered all kind of flows and networks: energy, water, waste, but also flows of people and vehicles. The smart solutions that have been developed were elaborated through a well-conducted public debate, leading to a co-construction of decisions with the inhabitants and various stakeholders. These solutions included high-level technical solutions (in particular on waste, managed mainly by pneumatic pressure in underground networks and not by the usual truck collection). The optimization of energy consumption and CO2 emissions, for example, was not achieved through a single solution (like a smart grid), but by integrating considerations on mobility, residential uses and locally available resources (geothermal and not only solar) into the discussion. In short, a three-dimensional thinking.

In such an approach, which is becoming mainstream in Europe, digital data and systems have their place, but fit within a framework that is defined through the collective discussion of problems between stakeholders, rather than by the range of solutions available.

The question is not here that citizens want to have their word. It is to develop a reflection (and possibly solutions), whose value will lie in their ability to grasp the complexity of the issues at stake, as well as their entanglement. Collective intelligence then becomes the condition for hoping to rise to the level of this complexity. City councils retain the responsibility to decide, but the intellectual and political construction of problems benefits from integrating, beyond voters, a variety of stakeholders who take the subject seriously, and sometimes at heart. Europeans strongly rejected the functionalist and technocratic vision of the city, with its top-down decisions and limited intelligence on problems. European mayors have learned their lesson. The way they approach digital solutions to make their cities smarter draws from this lesson. They ensure that they offer their citizens solutions that give them the power to act (to choose a mode of transportation, to know precisely when your bus will arrive or how long it will take you to drive to this spot), or, on less familiar subjects such as energy or waste, the power to understand. The most favored digital systems in this context are limited to information (on traffic conditions or electricity consumption), or promote the collection of data to inform public debate – a debate in which decision-makers, experts and citizens first and foremost share an awareness of the limits of their intelligence, and of the need to discuss in order to imagine a smarter city.

This European approach of smart cities doesn’t give up civil engineering, urban planning, or decision making. But it articulates them to the notion of civil society, just as it tries to articulate expertize (both legal and technological) with experience. Smartness, in this culture, is a collective activity. Be you mayor or a simple citizen, you can’t buy it. As a mayor, you can, not without your lot of failures and disarray, learn to build it.

This article was first published as a chapter in Smart Cities: A Toolkit for Leaders, Special Report, Philadelphie, Knowledge@Wharton & Tata Consultancy Services, 2019, pp. 40-46.