This article is written by Mathew Yarger, head of smart cities, social impact & regulatory affairs department at the IOTA Foundation

The city of tomorrow! Smart cities are the future! Technology can make everything better! Data is the new gold! There’s little doubt that headlines like these have graced the front page of your local media.

It has become common for many industries to focus on enabling the “smart city of tomorrow”, motivated by the prospects of large-scale investment and economic growth.

We’re also seeing a normalisation of widespread collection of private and public data by various private companies in order to accomplish the development of “Smart City Solutions”.  This is extremely evident when we look at the leading companies by market cap today. Often referred to as FAANG, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google and Microsoft all have multibillion and even trillion-dollar valuations.

They got this way through their shift from technology providers to data aggregators.

In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff points out a harsh yet revealing perspective when she speaks of the consumers saying: “You are not the product … You are the abandoned carcass” Enlightening readers to the scale of data consumption that happens via their devices and how the access is being abused.

Data for good

This doesn’t have to be the case though.

Data can be used for good, and should be. The same level of growth can occur in our cities, if we can bring the companies together with the cities they work in, and with the views of the residents they employ. Enabling cascading growth for the benefit of all stakeholders.

There’s a good explanation for this. Jim Collins, an author who carries out in-depth research on business management and company sustainability, has written many insightful books, and they all outline an underlying theme that typically leads to exponential growth and transformation: the power of using empirical evidence to enable informed decision-making.

Making smart use of evidence is one of the key characteristics of effective leaders

Making smart use of evidence is one of the key characteristics of effective leaders. It enables them to make informed decisions quickly — but not carelessly — and to guide innovation based on the evidence that one can gather in order to better inform the developments of said innovation.

It’s also a key characteristic of companies that eventually outpace their competitors. They make important decisions based on empirical evidence, not their gut feelings and short-term gain. This is something the technological giants of today are now intimately familiar with and it sets the leaders in the industry apart from those trying to catch up. This is what is enabling companies to reach trillion-dollar market caps. Shouldn’t our cities be integrating the same practices to evolve as dynamically and efficiently as those leading companies do?

When we talk about evidence, the focus of the conversation always falls back on one thing: data. Where should it be stored? How can it be secured? Who owns it and who are the stakeholders? Data can change everything, for better or for worse. This is especially true in the context of Smart Cities, where data is everything.

What users want

However, there is a common stakeholder that is often left out of the conversation — the citizen. While public servants often hope to enable solutions that serve citizens interest, solutions providers often build things focused on the technical requirements as they understand them. We can look at the transition to Gov.uk, where they transitioned more than 300 different UK government websites to the central Gov.uk site.

Kathy Settle, director for local resilience capability and stakeholder engagement in the UK government, recalls that during the digital transition, “things were built on the basis of what people thought the user needs were. Some of it turned out to be wrong.” Or as Edouard Geffray, director general of education in France, explained in his 2017 interview with David Ménascé for Field Actions Science Reports:

“Data can indeed objectify the urban system, but only political will can point it in the direction of the general interest … The operator has the economic and technical intelligence of the data, but the community also has its social intelligence. That’s where there is something to be invented. It will be by bringing together all the city’s stakeholders — citizens, public authorities and economic stakeholders — that the city will really be able to be smart. Otherwise, it will only be mechanical or economic.”

However, there is hope. There are currently many technological revolutions occurring simultaneously with respect to data, many of which are converging to offer unprecedented trust in digital systems.

We as people have the innate ability to speak to one another and develop a sense of social trust. We don’t all share the same capabilities with the systems that we interact with on a daily basis, or even with the organisations that attempt to develop them for our benefit. However, there have been major advancements in cryptography, distributed systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence, as well as the emergence of new connection capabilities reaching out into the most underserved populations around the world.

Through their convergence, we now have the capacity to solve many of the problems associated with globalisation and inequality, offering a rebalancing of the benefits for the major stakeholders in the context of smart cities.

Know your stakeholders

This can’t be done with decisions and advancements by any one key stakeholder, or even two.

It requires the involvement of all three major sets of social stakeholders: the cities themselves (public authorities), private and public companies helping satisfy the requirements of the city (economic stakeholders), and the citizens who, ultimately, will be the ones to receive the benefit as the predominant users.

The barriers to gathering data and involving all the stakeholders in the conversation are dropping with advancements in distributed technology and connected systems

Working together, each must begin to communicate with others in order to make fully informed decisions about regulation and policy making, private economic growth and social inclusion from those whom it will affect the most.

The barriers to gathering data and involving all the stakeholders in the conversation are dropping with advancements in distributed technology and connected systems, and with them also the barriers to understanding what’s needed most to address key problems due to the new wealth of information available.

Making these decisions in an informed way and involving the three major stakeholders requires the use of publicly developed standards that regulators can build on and take advantage of to make decisions using data gathered from their cities, while also helping the local residents to trust that their data is protected, allowing for stable economic growth that contributes to the social good rather than hindering it.

Evening the playing field

That can be done, for example, by using new technologies such as the protocol that we have developed at the IOTA Foundation.

In our model, the three distinct stakeholder groups have access to a common platform that’s working towards standardisation. Cities become smart by taking multiple types of data and interlacing them for smarter solutions that create an impact on residents, visitors, businesses and local government. The IOTA permissionless technology can connect systems in Mobility, Energy, Infrastructure and more.

Allowing a common, trusted, standardised platform for sharing and securing data openly. Whether that be by integrating open data portals for gathering and relaying public safety data and public works progress, enabling secure communications and survey systems with stakeholder groups for new digital city initiatives, or even gathering live traffic data to help understand the demands of transportation systems. All of this can be enabled in an open, frictionless and trusted platform using new permissionless and distributed technologies for infrastructure and data sharing.

It allows for all parties to come together on an even playing field and ensure that decisions aren’t being made in a bubble, making certain that the ones who need to be there the most are not left out of the conversation and decision-making process

IOTA has been developed with transparency in mind through complete open-source frameworks and is built to connect key infrastructure areas such as mobility, energy, and telecommunications with a common platform, enabling a digital trust, akin to the social trust we foster between each other every day.

It allows for all parties to come together on an even playing field and ensure that decisions aren’t being made in a bubble, making certain that the ones who need to be there the most are not left out of the conversation and decision-making process. It’s designed for integration in devices as small as the sensors in your mobile device, allowing the data to be secured, compartmentalised, and permissioned from the source.

Importantly, IOTA enables systems that were not traditionally interoperable to share data autonomously, with trust as the core requirement, connecting different sectors of government seamlessly and allowing all participants to be equal with respect to data, who owns it, and who needs to access it. — Mathew Yarger

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)

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