Massive increases in population can put immense pressure on city systems and the traditional response of just building more hard infrastructure is no longer tenable.
Innovation and the use of “smarter” technologies are invaluable, but these must be made relevant to a city’s specific challenges and the needs of its citizens and businesses.
Peterborough is a medieval city, with a fine cathedral and historic market square. Until the middle of the 20th century, it had grown and evolved like any other UK city, with expansion through the Industrial Revolution and the advent of railways in the 19th century.
However, in the 1960s, the UK government ordained Peterborough a “New Town” and between 1967 and 1984 its population doubled from 84,000 to 166,000.
At the start of the 21st century, its population was around 200,000. It is possible to reach London from Peterborough in about 50 minutes, it is easily accessible from the rest of the UK by road and rail and it is within easy reach of airports and Felixstowe sea port.
This creates a vibrant city for business and commerce and a beacon for investment. It has also made the city an attractive destination for immigration and more than 140 different languages are spoken in the city.
Its growing economy has major global companies and representation in almost every business sector: advanced manufacturing, financial services, technology and environment, yet the citizens of the city have relatively low skill levels and it has no university of its own.
This complex environment of competing challenges and growing pressure on infrastructure — both hard and soft — make Peterborough a unique test case for the variety of challenges that other cities will face.
When Peterborough was awarded ￡3 million (US$3.73 million) in 2013 by the UK government agency InnovateUK to explore ways of providing better, smarter services and technologies, it could have taken the decision to invest in straightforward “tech solutions” (integrated closed-circuit television and traffic control, proprietary “black box” city control systems), but none of these would have addressed the city’s real challenges.
So it took the brave — and at the time pioneering — decision to make its “smart city” citizen and business-centric: Exploring and developing projects that improved the lives and skills of its local citizens and provided local companies with the opportunities for innovation and business efficiency.
Digital empowerment was important, but not the end goal.
The program integrated the human, digital and physical worlds as no other city was doing at that time: An innovation portal was established to enable new business solutions to be developed, business and environmental efficiency was generated through the establishment of the city’s Circular Economy framework, skills programs were implemented that enabled young people to access new learning.
What were some of the highlights?
The digital platform “Brainwave Innovations” introduced business challenges with practical solutions.
A local coffee-roasting company was sending 3,000 hessian sacks to the landfill every month and posted the challenge that they felt this was a waste of a material.
Local entrepreneur Pav Patel spotted the challenge and also a new niche market. He now takes the sacks and turns them into everything from shopping bags to highway protection sacks — and has built a new business from it: Peterborough Re-Use.
Young people in schools were invited to find solutions to city challenges and present them to local business people. Winning teams received funding to develop their idea — from apps encouraging use of public transport to recycling building material to create urban parks.
Weather stations were installed in 25 local schools. Plugged into an “Internet of School Things,” real-time data on weather conditions and patterns provided a major resource for teachers and city officers to plan responses to climatic situations.
By installing “Instant Atlas” into the city council’s data framework, city officers are able to collate and plot data like never before — overlaying up to 400 data sets to identify correlating issues and opportunities.
This tool has already enabled initiatives to build community cohesion by partnering local community groups around specific issues.
Sensors have been deployed in homes to help people in need stay in their homes for longer, ensuring that they are safe and that any incidents are quickly managed by social services.
Fundamentally, a city is not just buildings, traffic and utilities. Any city — from Taipei to San Francisco — is a series of interactions: human-to-human, human-to-machine, machine-to-machine.
A smart city is one that makes all of those interactions happen more effectively, improving their quality. It might not be digitally led, it might be digitally empowered, or it might just be about taking a new and innovative approach to how cities function.
However, digital and technological capacity does provide a powerful new tool. With the city installing a fiber network of more than 90km across the city, establishing Peterborough as the UK’s first truly “gigabit city,” more work is being done to exploit the connection opportunities this presents.
By plugging into this high-speed fiber connection, businesses, offices and schools are able to access some of the world’s fastest broadband speeds — meaning that commercial activity, information management and communications are fast, reliable and fit for the 21st century.
This new technological capacity is giving the city confidence to maximize its digital capabilities.
Data sets are opening up to local digital companies to develop new apps and city solutions. New technology is being installed into the city’s streets to enable those with visual impairments to move about the city more easily and safely.
Major work is under way to introduce IT systems to the city’s highway infrastructure, to tackle congestion and poor air quality.
This brings us full circle. Like many other cities, Peterborough’s success in the 20th century was based on the automobile and great road capacity. This is now untenable as roads become congested and the commute to work unbearable.
At the start of the 21st century, the same solutions of just building new roads can no longer be appled. New technology means traffic can flow better and smarter — enabling businesses to continue to grow, and citizens to continue to find employment — making cities smarter for citizens and businesses.
Steve Bowyer is chief executive of Opportunity Peterborough.
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