Page 19 - U4SSC Simple ways to be smart

2 Why smart matters

While population growth is slowing, it has not yet peaked and it is expected that cities will have to
accommodate many more people. At the same time, we need to preserve or use wisely what is left
of the planet’s resources, to reduce the effects of climate change, and learn to live harmoniously,
while adapting to challenges like the recent global threat to health. It is important to find ways
to turn cities into more sustainable, intelligent, but also inclusive spaces, where people are at the
centre of city development.

The challenge, when it comes to addressing city problems, is that cities are complex systems
with many subsystems. They are “complex systems whose infrastructural, economic and social
components are strongly interrelated and therefore difficult to understand in isolation”. Cities are
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particularly complex because they include “intelligent agents”, in the form of people, who choose
how to live in the city and they each respond to situations in their own way. This makes it difficult to
predict the outcomes of city interventions. It also means that what works in one city may not work
in the next. As a result, there are no “best practices” that can be recommended.

For cities to tackle the new and old challenges they face requires experimentation with new
approaches and technologies. It also requires cities to share their ideas, attempts, successes and
failures. To effectively change complex adaptive systems, including cities, requires many small
interventions with constant feedback loops to detect the impacts. Smaller changes, carefully
observed, make sense because they are easy to adjust; to scale back or ramp up as the impacts
are observed.
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Harnessing simple, smart solutions, taking advantage of technological development such as artificial
intelligence, machine learning, mobile computing, cloud computing and Internet of Things, can
help cities to better understand their problems, to design and test smart interventions, to track in
real-time the impact of those interventions, to scale up the things that work and to quickly put an
end to those that don’t. Finally, developments in communication make it possible for cities to share
what they learn, as they learn it, with other cities and with the people in them.

2.1 What is “smart” depends on the context

While cities face some common challenges, they face different challenges too, and they have
different resources at their disposal. Many cities face a backlog of issues to address, including
growing inequality, climate change impacts, corruption, crime and similar intractable problems.
Solutions to these challenges need to be highly contextual. This does not mean that cities can’t learn
from each other, but that all smart interventions need to be adapted and trialed for effectiveness
in new contexts. Some examples of contextual differences are:

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