Our current vision of “smart cities” too often focuses on adding technologies that don’t necessarily make cities better places to live, says Professor Henrietta Moore, founder and director, Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London
There are 7.7 billion people on the planet today, and every year our global population grows by around 1.08% – or around 82 million people. It is estimated that by 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities. The cities we know now will have changed and adapted to accommodate for this. How will we ensure they do so in a way that improves the quality of life its residents?
Cities are engineered to be shaped by, and respond to, different human needs. However changes to the urban landscape can be unpredictable and are not able to meet every challenge that urbanites experience in the everyday. There are many factors that dictate the issues we choose to prioritise and address, but health is one thing we all share that cannot help but be affected by our environment. As more of us live in cities, we are becoming increasingly aware of the elements beyond our immediate control that impact upon our wellbeing: be that air pollution, amount of and access to green space, or transport. The difficulties of being healthy in an urban context are now recognised the world over.
One of our greatest engineering challenges today then is: how do we create an ecological city of the future that is beneficial for us to live in? One that is supported by science and technology, rather than suffers from it? This is not just a matter of cutting emissions, but of recognising that urban sprawl is going to put more pressure on energy, on water, and on agricultural land. It is also going to create more waste and air pollution, the latter of which is already proving deadly to some populations around the world today. We need cities that will be able to cope with these strains.
At the moment, when we think about the cities of the future, we often talk about “smart cities”. For some, this can conjure images of drones in the sky, or self-driving taxis. However, these already familiar scenes are more “technological” than “smart”. Smart cities are cities that are genuinely better places to live. They are cities that are built upon a foundation of sustainable prosperity that actually improves the quality of life for all and their experience of urban living. Designing smart cities is a challenge for engineers, as it forces them to rethink their approach to the urban landscape, and acknowledge and address social elements to greater extent. For example, underpinning the urban situation we currently have is a huge crisis around social inequality. It follows then that any solution attempting to address this needs to take this into account – those created by engineers included. If the cities of the future have to be different, then the engineering that underpins them has to be different too.
In my opinion, the challenges we face in cities today need to be brought to the forefront of the engineering endeavour. While this may already be happening, very often there is still a tendency to want to create immediate technological solutions to urban problems. Even if we have engaged imaginatively with them, we want to quickly move on once we think the challenge has been addressed. Instead, it would serve us well to take more time to consider the major challenges of the day and prioritise which, if tackled now, would be more likely to positively impact upon the broader context of contemporary city life. In order to do this, we need to consider the ethics of engineering to greater extent.
At its heart, engineering should begin with ethics – with equity, quality of life and improvement. It ought to be progressive, but not progressivist. In other words, engineering should aim to offer opportunities to build the capacities and capabilities of infrastructure that matter to people. It should give them new ways of interacting with others and aim to improve the quality of the environment that they live in, but in a way that does not dictate what they want in life. Ultimately, the big challenges we face, and the engineering solutions we are proposing for them, all in some way all revolve around ethics.
Thinking about 10 billion people on the planet and the cities that they will live in means, I think, thinking about the different ways of interacting with people. It means different ways of caring about each other, about our environments, and the quality of life we are all able to enjoy together. At its hear this is an issue of equity and sharing, and that must underpin all discussions we have about future cities, today.
Prof Moore spoke at this week’s Global Grand Challenges Summit in London, hosted by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the US National Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering
I was hoping for more information on her talk – a summary, paper or book.
challenges we face, and the engineering solutions we are proposing for them, all in some way revolve around ethics?
many years ago, I postulated the concept of the measure of any society being based upon a comparison of the assets held in ‘public’ and ‘private’ hands. Fellow bloggers have I am sure become over-faced with my thoughts on many things: and I am grateful for the ‘platform’ that our splendid journal provides: but time and again it is weakness in ‘the ethics’ of so much of our present international society: primarily distressed by the ‘conflict groups’ (*)which I see as the root of all evil. It is we Engineers and STEMs who alone provide ‘them’ with the wherewithal to continue in power . Stop that? (*)Those who still go to work in fancy dress, have elaborate initiation techniques before allowing entry, whose livelihoods depend on the conflict, and its continuation, not its outcome, and who have never created a penny piece of our National wealth. Nice work if you can get it? or perhaps the most soul destroying existence ever?
While it has been an inexorable movement of population to the cities since the industrial revolution, do we have to assume that this trend cannot be stopped and reversed?
As the UK rapidly de-industialises why would people need to converge into central facilities?
France is probably the best European model of opposing the trend (albeit at a high cost).
It is instructive to question why so many businesses that do not need to be in London are there…. e.g. The Engineer, but in simple economic terms Parliament should be moved from London urgently.
As Jack has commented on the possibility of reversal of the (currently) growing urbanisation of life.
There are obviously forces the work for urbanisation (against the growing pressures against – including cost of living etc…)
I think that with the computer technology available today there are plenty of opportunities for having “smarter” cities – which are NOT physically co-located. Such a move COULD widen the workforce, reduce their costs (of travelling) and give more time to them (and reduce the need for city housing and motorway building) – and improve wider and rural networking (by this working and collaborating together).
It might be worth reminding that the industrial revolution started off outside of London for very good reasons – and resisted steps to Londonisation.
The technology is there to support such more accessible and comfortable working – rather than (as some, such as Adonis believe, having all cities become like Londin). However it does require a belief that technology should focus on helping the people/users – rather than keeping big cities going).
The idea of moving the capital out of London has some merit – possibly having more than one regional capital; perhaps the North could revive the ancient kingdom of Northumbria – though using Edwin’s old capital might be an interesting situation (wrt Scotland) and so York might fit?
Cue the Game of Thrones fans shouting “The King in the North!”
Having worked in many of the worlds large cities I am convinced that the policy of sucking people into these is a serious mistake. Cities like Cairo (including several cities that are not separate from Cairo), Jakarta, New York, London and Paris (in my experience) are almost impossible to live-in / afford for the majority of the poor b*s that have to work in them. A policy of relocating jobs that need not be in these cities, especially governmental jobs would be economic and sensible in terms of life quality.
As the west continues it rapid de-industrialisation, the case for living / working in a massive conurbation will become less: that is what we ought to plan for.
This is nicely written, but it reads as an introduction rather than a complete article, and lots of missing data. Or am I missing something with it being the hour after lunch?
Modern industrialization is moving people out of cities to larger affordable out of town sites, not into them?
What proportion currently live in cities? 70% sounds high, but about 30% live in Greater London and Greater Birmingham conurbations already, so maybe the change isn’t actually that Great?
Take a line from Dover to Liverpool -mark off 50/60 miles from this and the vast majority of the UK population live in this diagonal corridor. I once (50 years ago)heard postulated that striking another diagonal (Bristol to Newcastle) was the obvious alternative. I just ask how many politically suspect decisions would be disturbed by this?
This all smacks of “Foresight” thinking. Gazing into a crystal ball and extrapolating curves; this may become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we let it.
The real questions should turn around what are the benefits from having large cities and how else we might achieve them by being smart – thus avoiding the issues (and trying to solve them) of large cities – logistics (supply materials and removal of waste) and the costs (travel cost/time, evermore costly housing and roads).
I believe the communication aspects and much of the collaboration aspects (of cities) could benefit from applying communication technology (that the Romans and the Victorians, those pioneers for freakishly large cities, did not have). Thus make cities smart rather than, as Adonis suggests, make them all like London.
My feeling is that she has decided to follow trends (much as bankers and investors have done since the time of “South Sea Bubble”) rather than consider how to be innovative and engineer the cities for people and prosperity