In the English Midlands the leader of Birmingham City Council, the wonderfully named Sir Albert Bore, recently suggested a ‘citizens army’ be raised to provide services such as libraries that are being affected by budget cuts.
Bore’s suggestion is a response to his council cutting library services in the face of community anger and legislative obligations, to assuage both pressures it’s hoped local volunteers can continue to run and maintain the threatened facilities.
The bind Albert Bore and the Birmingham City Council find themselves in is a quandary all communities and governments are facing as an aging population causes tax revenues to decline at the very time the demand for government services increases.
Faced with cuts, many groups are going to have to take matters into their own hands to keep services running. Some communities will do this well while others won’t.
It’s also going to be interesting to see how this plays over generations with baby boomers being far more likely to volunteer than their GenX or GenY kids, something probably caused by more precarious job security in the modern job market and the need for younger couples to work harder and longer than their parents to pay their rent or mortgage.
Angry baby boomers demanding the ‘government ought to do something’ may well find the onus is thrown back onto them to provide the services they believe they’re entitled to.
What is the most fascinating part of this predictable situation is how governments around the developed world have blissfully pretended that this wasn’t going to happen as their populations aged.
Perhaps the biggest citizens’ army of all will be the voters asking why the Western world’s governments and political parties ignored obvious and inevitable demographic trends for the last fifty years. That would be a question worth answering.
“We’re not just going to back the big businesses of today, we’re going to back the businesses of tomorrow.” Cameron said. “We are firmly on the side of the high-growth, highly innovative companies of the future.
Three years later London’s tech scene is booming with more than fifty incubators across the city and over three thousand digitally connected businesses in the Shoreditch district.
Building London’s resurgence
Gordon Innes, the CEO of the city’s economic development agency London and Partners, puts this down to a combination of factors including a young and diverse population coupled with being a global media and finance centre.
At the time of Cameron’s speech the cluster of tech startups around Shoreditch’s Silicon Roundabout area was already firmly established and the British government was acknowledging the industry’s successes.
“What we did, what the mayor did, what the government did,” Innes said, was to make sure that we removed as many barriers as possible to let the sector grow as rapidly as possible.”
The value of teamwork
Part of that effort involved business leaders, London & Partners, the mayor’s and Prime Minister’s advisers meeting on a regular basis to thrash out what the tech sector needed for the UK’s tech sector to thrive.
“There were changes to the tax credits for R&D and an important one was the Enterprise Incentive Scheme,” says Innes.
“Linked to that was a recognition of the need to link angels and high net worth individuals to be educated about the sector. It’s not just enough to balance the risk through the tax code.”
Another success for the UK startup sector was the British government introducing an entrepreneur’s visa that makes the country more attractive to foreign founders of startups.
Having built an community of tech startups, the city is now looking at how to grow the sector. “The big priority over the next few years is growing your business in London.” Innes says.
“Making sure you’ve not only have access to angel finance but also to stage one and stage two venture fund capital, you’ve got access to capital markets through new groups on the stock exchange and the AIM market.”
One of London’s big challenges is linking the city’s strong financial sector to the tech industry with a range of organisations like London Angels and City Meets Tech.
Sharing the vision
A notable point about the successes of London & Partners and Tech City UK is the co-operation between the levels of government along with having a shared vision of where the city should sit in the global economy.
Having a unified, strong and consistent vision is probably the best thing governments can offer a growing entrepreneurial or industry hub.
“Government can’t create that but government can certainly support it or, if it’s not careful, can destroy it,” says Innes.
London is showing how to support a growing sector of their business community, other cities need to be taking note how they can compete in a tough global market.
What’s striking about talking with Antoni is how passionate he is about Barcelona’s future and the importance of the city building new industries around the digital economy.
Particularly notable is the administration’s vision for the city which combines Barcelona’s traditional industries, such as the port, with future technologies.
“Barcelona has to become a city of culture, creativity, knowledge but mainly fairness and well being,” says Antoni when asked on where he sees his city as being in ten years time. “I would love to see my city as a place where people live near where they work, I would love to see the city self sufficient in energy and it should be zero emission city.”
“Rather than having a pattern of PITO – ‘Product In, Trash Out’ we should move to what we call the DIDO model – ‘Data In Data Out’.”
It’s a broad view for the future which many other city and state governments will be watching closely.
Spain and Barcelona have faced challenges in recent years as the economy was hit hard by the 2008 crisis. Now the city is looking to the internet for the next wave of prosperity.
This quest for reinvention isn’t new for the city, “Barcelona used to be an industrial city, that was badly hit by the economic crisis of the seventies,” said Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives. “There were some guys in the city at the time that decided that we had to keep on being an important city.”
“There’s a new generation of politicians, civil servants, of thinkers and people committed to the city that ten years ago started to work on a new phase of what the city was to become.”
Antoni Vives – Deputy Mayor of Barcelona
“We decided that Barcelona had to become the edgiest city in the world related to the new revolution and the new revolution was this one — the technology related to mobility, devices and mainly the internet.”
That vision resulted in Barcelona starting to rewire the city which was one of the reasons for Cisco choosing the city as the venue for its inaugural Internet of Things World Forum.
As part of the event, the City took delegates on tours of some of the connected infrastructure the city has installed. Here’s what we learned on the press tour.
The digital bus stop
Digital bus stop
The digital bus stop is one of the prides of Barcelona, not only does it display digital advertising and real time bus schedules it also offers tourist information, USB charging sockets and acts as a free WiFi base station.
One of the barriers Barcelona has encountered has been the Spanish telecoms regulators objection to the city providing municipal WiFi so services are restricted to the city’s property, which happens to include bus stops.
The bus stops themselves are connected to the city’s fibre network that runs most of the backhaul and connects many of the fixed devices.
Smart parking spots
Smart parking space
Connected to the city’s WiFi network are these smart parking spaces that detect the presence of cars through a combination of light and metal detectors.
The city’s plan is that payment and monitoring of the smart parking spots will happen online and with smartphone apps.
Powering the dot, which is a fairly dumb device, is a battery with an expected five to seven year lifespan. Interestingly, the dots don’t work with motorcycles.
One of the reporters on the tour questioned the durability of these devices given Barcelona doesn’t get extreme temperatures, the response from the Cisco and city staff indicates that ice or hot weather may shorten the lifespan of these devices.
Smart lighting and monitoring
Smart lights and monitors
In the square outside the Born Cultural Centre, the city has installed a row of streetlights with multiple features including CCTV, air monitoring and Wifi. All of these lights are connected to the city’s 500Km long undeground fibre network.
The fibre network itself is being installed progressively as the city carries out routine maintenance to roads and other underground services. By co-ordinating the work with other trades it reduces the installation cost dramatically.
Smart censors in the street lights
Smart rubbish bins
Smart rubbish bins in Barcelona
The connected garbage bins are one of the showpieces of the city’s services. By monitoring trash levels, the council’s sanitation team can plot the optimal routes for collection services.
Smart rubbish bins sensor
Again the sensors on the bins are fairly dumb devices that connect wirelessly to a base station, shown on the pole above the bins in the earlier photo, these track rubbish levels and later versions are expected to detect the presence of obnoxious or hazardous materials that might be dumped in the bin.
Single person operation of the connected garbage truck
Operators of the garbage trucks get real time updates to their routes which optimises their productivity. It’s cost savings in the city’s operations which is one of the key drivers for the city’s investment in these technologies.
Power savings
Smart lighting systems
One of the major cost savings identified by the Barcelona Council is in energy costs. Along with the expense of running garbage trucks unnecessarily are power bills.
Part of the smart lighting system is that it will dim when there’s no motion detected in the streets and lighten when pedestrians are around. This is intended to save money and help the city meet it’s zero carbon emission targets.
Barcelona and the future
Every single one of the technologies being shown today in Barcelona will be commonplace in most developed cities in the near future.
The problem for adopting these systems is going to be connectivity, in places where there aren’t the fibre optic services or easily deployed WiFi it will be difficult to install smart devices and monitor them.
Every major city is going to be facing the question of how they deploy these devices over the next decade as their residents expect better and more efficient service. Barcelona has taken the first steps that most others will follow.
In many ways this parallels the original Special Economic Zones set up by the People’s Republic of China at the beginning of the 1980s – these areas’ separate legal, immigration and economic status attracted foreign investment and trigged the economic boom that’s seen China become one of the world’s biggest economic powers.
Just as manufactured goods were the key to the nation’s development 30 years ago, today it’s information as the PRC leadership works on moving China up the global value chain.
For a nation of knowledge workers to succeed, the workers have to have access to knowledge.
It’s claimed the humble fax machine was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, how true that is open to debate but an open flow of information is never good for those who rule without the support of their citizens.
With the explosion of Chinese social networking sites, it’s become harder for the government to control the flow of information between citizens and the opening of the internet in parts of Shanghai is another small change.
How the Chinese Communist Party manages to keep the support of its increasingly affluent and better informed citizens will define the course of 21st Century history.
As China shifts from being a low cost manufactured goods supplier to a more sophisticated, diverse and expensive economy the government has no choice to face these challenges.
Beijing’s cadres would be hoping our children aren’t talking about Facebook in 2012 Shanghai in the same way that we talk of fax machines in 1982 Leningrad.
