- Almost everything starts with the city…. Very seldom will you have a fairy godmother come over and 'Zing' give you that thing that you want or need. Cities have to fight for and build schools, hospitals, industry, knowledge workers… The community as a whole (not the municipality) is the point of convergence, or the focal point for anything to happen.
- At a very basic level, a community has to ensure 2 things: it has an Infrastructure that is effective, efficient and sustainable; and that its People and Organizations are productive and have access to a good quality of life (which includes health, education, and so forth). These are elements controlled by diverse stakeholders - they are not the responsibility of a single organization. This means that to keep these elements in balance, we need these diverse stakeholders to play well together. We need a collaborative environment that builds, envisions, and fixes things together.
- For any team of local stakeholders to get things done (these include the municipality and other governments and NGOs, industry, health & educational institutions, innovative thinkers and activists, local citizens), they need data and engagement: data to figure out what doesn't work and whether a fix has worked; engagement, because the solutions and access to resources need a variety of stakeholders, including the public. After all, why create an application if no one is willing to use it? This means, again, that we need to share, and make decisions based on a common vision, rather than operate in silos. What more could your city accomplish if it aligned its resources rather than duplicating and wasting them?
- Being smart is only step one toward becoming intelligent. Smart is about using technological tools to become more efficient. Intelligent is about making tough decisions to become more effective. Adding sensors on traffic lights or cameras to control speed through fines may be more efficient (and even add revenues) but does little to solve the growing congestion problem or build quality of life for people. Congestion is solved in intelligent cities through mobility-related initiatives - enlarged pedestrian and bicycle spaces, on-demand public transportation and shared rides, flexible work, and in the future - autonomous vehicles. In my humble opinion, congestion is not an engineering problem, solved by widening streets for cars that continue to be driven 80% of the time by single riders; nor is it solved by building transport infrastructure ever-farther out into suburbs (which we cannot afford long-term). Intelligent cities can plan solutions that are cost-effective, greener, more inclusive, make use of technologies, and enhance quality of life.
- Related to all of the points above, with an economic, socio-cultural, and natural environment in the midst of turbulent change, we need to be able to react appropriately and quickly to change. This may mean that we disrupt the status quo. Since change is difficult, we need courageous leaders at the wider community level to help us implement intelligent city agendas. These leaders need to be able to inspire and work with significant support to guide a transformation. Some may come from the ranks of politics, but let's remember that political terms are short and sometimes constraining. Since many initiatives may be longer term, we should draw from a larger pool of leaders to help guide change.