Beyond Smart Cities

How Cities Network, Learn and Innovate

Tim Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136489563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

The promise of competitiveness and economic growth in so-called smart cities is widely advertised in Europe and the US. The promise is focussed on global talent and knowledge economies and not on learning and innovation. But to really achieve smart cities – that is to create the conditions of continuous learning and innovation – this book argues that there is a need to understand what is below the surface and to examine the mechanisms which affect the way cities learn and then connect together.

This book draws on quantitative and qualitative data with concrete case studies to show how networks already operating in cities are used to foster and strengthen connections in order to achieve breakthroughs in learning and innovation. Going beyond smart cities means understanding how cities construct, convert and manipulate relationships that grow in urban environments. Cities discussed in this book – Amman, Barcelona, Bilbao, Charlotte, Curitiba, Juarez, Portland, Seattle and Turin – illuminate a blind spot in the literature. Each of these cities has achieved important transformations, and learning has played a key role, one that has been largely ignored in academic circles and practice concerning competitiveness and innovation.

Part I The changing place of cities in the urban age

Overview

DOI: 10.4324/9780203137680-1

“Why did you spend US$25,000 apiece on those two 28-year-olds to come here to visit Shanghai?” I asked the Vice President of Boeing about the youngsters on the study tour from Seattle. The VP didn’t bat an eye. “It’s the best training money can buy. They get to know their customers, the Chinese, and we get to know ourselves, the Seattleites. When we get back to Seattle, we can pick up a phone to call the city or county or Microsoft, and the person on the line is someone we have a relationship with.”

Do cities learn?

The vignette about Seattleites in Shanghai contains an important kernel of truth about urban development. It suggests that learning takes place in the heads of people who care about and take action to affect the cities where they live. This is the essence of city learning. The central concept to be explored extensively in this book is unlike organizational learning where new knowledge is captured, recorded and shared in line with mission goals and often a corporate bottom line. The nature of city learning is more closely akin to collective learning, but, as recognized in the substantial bodies of literature built up over the post-war period in both organizational and collective learning, cities are places that are more open, more loosely organized, and more riven with cross-currents of social, economic and political interests than most firms, knowledge-intensive organizations and even associations with broadly shared goals.

And yet, the most successful of cities, the innovators, reformers and survivors in the competitive race for talent and economic power, exhibit a pattern of deliberate and systematic acquisition of knowledge. Good practices in successful cities offer short-cuts. Cape Town and Buenos Aires drew on the waterfront renewal experience of Baltimore and London. Da Nang took lessons from Japan in conversion and regulation of urban land. Regional centers in Rajasthan in the north of India are following lessons of infrastructure expansion and business readiness that peer cities developed in central and southern India. Amman, Jordan is studying the many experiments in decentralized governance from other parts of the world, even outside the Middle East. These examples arise from direct city exchange.

We shall see that the most active of learning cities also develop mechanisms to store, spread and verify newly acquired ideas and apply them to solve local problems. How do they get into these circumstances? Are all learning cities successful and all successful cities learners? This book explores these and other questions that are now arising as cities emerge in this century more prominent in global trade and national standing.

We cannot go very far either without asking, what is learning? In its simplest form, learning is acquiring new knowledge. This book makes the point that cities learn as part of their governance function, but often learning is informal or technical and sometimes even off the governance radar screen altogether. Learning and knowledge acquisition come about almost as a by-product of running a city. Yet learning is qualitatively different from urban governance.

Learning can be straightforwardly linear and mystifyingly complex. In one recent configuration, MacFarlane’s idea of “assemblages,” groups of like-minded individuals, like slum dweller advocates, share an ethos that is bundled up in one city and transferred elsewhere by dedicated slum advocates working in other cities (MacFarlane, 2010). Practitioners internalize the ethos and apply it to their own city. Janice Perlman’s core idea of mega-cities represents another point on a spectrum of learning where knowledgeable practitioners share and develop ideas of best practice (Perlman, 1987). These are both useful and important kinds of learning, but not the kind explored in this book.

The learning of cities is also to be distinguished from the emerging consensus about cities and urbanization that we receive from such influential thinkers as Geddes, Mumford, Castells, Hall and Glaeser. Our focus is how cities learn, as collective units, not on what is received wisdom about cities and policies that are then synthesized and adopted by a wider community of scholars and practitioners.

Learning cities depend upon clusters of people in close exchange of ideas. This is one of the mechanisms that produced the Triumph of the City (2011) so eloquently articulated by Edward Glaeser. But while Glaeser highlights the chains of innovative entrepreneurs embedded in cities, Beyond Smart Cities focuses on collective learning across public, private and civic networks that function as public goods. Because they provide the context for these networks, cities are the fulcrum upon which policies can help to leverage learning to achieve innovation and change. But most cities have been lethargic about the machinery of learning, merely providing a passive matrix in which exchanges take place. Cities could play a more proactive and productive role in encouraging and expanding networks, filling in key gaps, identifying weak spots, and most of all mobilizing new membership from the ranks of young talent, both native and global.

This book sees city learning as a collective process, which always starts with discovery by individuals. The critical distinction is that individuals begin to learn together. The collective process involves subjective exchanges of values and perceptions, leading to validation and eventual adoption of new ideas by wider groups, such as NGOs, neighborhoods, business communities, public officials, and many more. In contrast to MacFarlane’s packaged ethos, learning cities create a common understanding rooted in widely shared values. Thus learning takes place on several levels. On one level is the superficial acquisition of new ideas by a businessman, a city official, a neighborhood activist, picked up by observing the way something works in a city. At another level, learning involves the willing sharing of values that get internalized on the basis of trust. Later in the book, the idea of a milieu of trust will be used to describe environments where this learning takes place.

We shall see also that transmission of ideas, and the values behind them, occurs close to or nearly simultaneously with innovation. The acceptance of the idea itself in learning is a form of innovation. When this is accomplished at city level—in the way taxation is applied, or commercial interests are incorporated into development plans, or a parking meter system is adopted, or neighborhood preferences are heard—breakthroughs are made in policy or in the innovative application of a practice or technology.

Smart cities and learning

The popular literature and current trends in Europe and the US about global talent and knowledge economies advertise the promise of competitiveness and economic growth in so-called smart cities. Yet some smart cities succeed better than others; some cities low down on the IQ list achieve great things. Building up a knowledge economy of highly educated talent, high-tech industries and pervasive electronic connections are only the trappings of smartness and cannot guarantee the outcomes that policy makers hope to achieve. Though global talent and seamless connections are important, they can also amount only to the dressing of a pauper in prince’s clothing.

To achieve the real promise of smart cities—that is, to create the conditions of continuous learning and innovation that has led cities like Seattle, Barcelona, Bilbao and Curitiba to keep pace with economic change—cities need something more. This book aims to understand what is below the surface in these places, to examine the mechanisms which are effective in the way open institutions like cities learn, to identify different levels (I will call them “orders”) of learning, and to explore ways to connect knowledge communities together to accelerate change.

Learning far and near

In a recent presentation about New York’s PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg stated that his team

drew on the experiences of Berlin for our renewable energy and green-roof policies: from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Delhi for our transit improvements; from Copenhagen for our pedestrian and cycling upgrades; from Bogota for our plans for Bus Rapid Transit; and from Los Angeles and Chicago for our plan to plant one million trees.

(, United Cities and Local Governments, 2010: 1)

New York is not alone. Seattle has been visiting other cities every year since 1993 to benchmark, build relationships, and capture best practice. Seattle’s Trade Development Alliance, born out of the Chamber of Commerce, is a dedicated agency to keep Seattle at the cutting edge. But the real secret of Seattle’s learning is not just finding new ideas. The productive secret, as the Boeing executive recounted, is forming relationships that are conducive to collective learning.

Though Seattle is a recognized leader in learning, hundreds of cities around the world are now engaged in the learning process. Large cities everywhere stand astride the most critical arenas in this century. On a global plane, cities are a platform where the fortunes of nations are decided in a globally competitive environment. More and more, the products of city economies are tradeable, meaning that back-office services like hospital accounts in Manchester or design coding for Texas Instruments are handled on the other side of the globe.

These examples represent shifts in the locus of production and a sharp increase everywhere in the stakes for cities to win a race for investments and global talent. These shifts also mean that cities know they must understand their competitors and outperform them in order to move ahead. The exchange of knowledge between cities is part of this understanding and is now taking off in leaps and bounds. Cities can get new knowledge in dozens of ways. Some of the most important are commercial, internal development and exchange with other cities.

Buy it

Some cities, like Bogota, San Salvador and Amman, have turned to a commercial source of knowledge that is developed from international practice, complemented with local data, adapted to local circumstances and packaged for city customers, often the chamber of commerce or more specialized business group. The Monitor Group, McKinsey, Bearing Point, and many other consulting firms offer these services. The analytical work is useful and often of high quality. Some firms aim to be inclusive in the process, taking pains to expose clients to the assumptions and analytical exercise. But often the process is divorced from the day–to-day business of the intended beneficiaries. Key players who must understand and implement the many parts of a typical plan are not involved in working through the strategy.

Worse still, many parts of what must become a functioning whole—that is, the core leadership of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword—Dr Joan Clos
• Foreword—Wim Elfrink
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Part I The changing place of cities in the urban age
• Part II Framing a view
• Part III Crucibles of learning: proactive learner-reformers
• Part IV Secrets of a knowing and accelerating change
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Appendix 4
• Appendix 5
• Index