Making the move from rural to urban - the genius of city planners

It is estimated that by 2050, seven out of 10 people will live in cities. Planners recognise something clever is required, writes Richard Fitzpatrick.

Making the move from rural to urban - the genius of city planners

THE mayor of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is a guy called Arturas Zuokas. He’s a cycling enthusiast and hates it when cars get in his way when he’s biking around his city. In August 2011, he decided to take some corrective action.

He wanted to send out a message to the city’s errant motorcar drivers, particularly those ones who park on cycling lanes, so he got in a tank, took it down one of the city’s streets and drove over an illegally parked Mercedes car.

He was sitting on top of the tank — dressed in a tieless suit — while the manoeuvre was carried out. He had a smile on him like Hannibal from the A-Team that said: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

The recent explosion of cycling in many western world cities is one of the key features of “smart cities”. According to the definition of a “smart city”, it uses progressive policies, new technology and clever urban design to solve age-old urban problems such as crime, pollution and, of course, traffic and congestion.

The Lithuanian mayor’s stunt was an extreme example of the contrarian thinking beloved of “smart city” thinkers. Getting people back on their bicycles to pedal to work like it was the 1950s is — counter-intuitively — a progressive policy.

It helps to unclog a city’s streets and it improves its citizens’ health, although cycling is such a common practice in Copenhagen that the Danes there don’t even think of it as exercise.

More than one third of the city’s population — which owns 5.2 bicycles to every car — cycles to work, school or university. They commute around the city along a spaghetti junction of bike superhighways, including cycle bridges over the harbour. The city’s old industrial harbour — planners in Cork and Dublin will note — has been cleaned up, and now has three public baths incorporated, amongst its waterways.

One of the most pressing problems for a city’s planners is the fuel gobbled up by buildings — they consume 75% of the world’s energy.

Amsterdam has some enlightened policies in this area. The city is home to Ajax, one of the aristocrats of European club football. Ajax has paid a nearby hospital to put solar panels on its roof, which the club uses to generate electricity when it has matches and its stadium, the Amsterdam ArenA, is full of fans.

“The city works with Ajax to share energy information with the whole neighbourhood,” says Ger Baron, chief technology officer for Amsterdam. “They put solar panels on their own roof but also on a hospital’s roof close by because they discovered that their use of energy is pretty complementary. The Amsterdam ArenA uses lots of energy when there is a match going on, on Saturday or Sunday most of the time. The hospital uses more energy from Monday to Friday.

“We’re trying to find smart collaborations between institutions. We have 43 ‘smart city’ projects in operation at the moment. The ones to do with sharing are very interesting. We have an app that you can borrow stuff — like household tools — from your neighbours. You go to an online portal and say, for example, that ‘I need a chainsaw’ and people in the neighbourhood read the message and can offer to lend it to you.

“We do car sharing through a company called We Go. They enable you to rent your car to neighbours or, for example, friends on Facebook. We Go create the platform. People offer their car to We Go users. We Go also decide the price to ask for renting. If someone wanted to rent a car for, say, four hours to go to shopping to Ikea, it might cost them about €20.

“The idea of communities in cities is becoming more important, and the idea of a sharing economy is becoming more important. We will start to share offices more. People will work longer at home so companies need less office space. There will be more peer-to-peer banking. Google, for example, has started a bank.”

This notion of sharing at a citywide level happened in New York after the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. In order to house people who had been made homeless, the city’s authorities clubbed together with Airbnb to find them temporary digs, as Airbnb is a website which allows people to turn their dwellings into bed and breakfast establishments.

Part of the philosophy of “smart cities” is borne out of the need to make cities more inhabitable as the number of urban dwellers continues to mushroom. In 2010, for the first time, more than 50% of the world’s population were living in cities, according to the World Health Organisation. This figure is set to rise. Estimates suggest that by 2050, seven out of 10 people will live in cities, with the majority of these in Asia.

Cities such as Kolkata (India) and Karachi (Pakistan), along with Dhaka in Bangladesh, will be on our lips by the next decade as some of the world’s 10 most populous cities. Even today, Dhaka is already so short of space that people have filled in rivers to make room for new housing.

Lagos, Africa’s largest city, offers a useful test case for how people might live in some of these cities, as biblical floods — such as the one that followed when Hurricane Sandy hit New York — may become a regular occurrence.

Lagos is built around lagoons, creeks, and the Atlantic Ocean. Every year, thousands of its houses are washed away, which have forced urban planners to look at building waterborne communities — wooden, triangular structures that capture solar energy and rain water.

One of interesting realities that Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, highlights is that cities are a hot-house for inventiveness. Studies show that a city of 5m people will be, per capita, three times more creative — in, for example, the number of patents it registers — than an average residential town of 100,000.

This helps explain, for instance, why Northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries — a Mecca for architects, artists and merchants — was once the most densely populated part of the world. Cities, as we are discovering, also provide us with a greener way to live on this earth.

“It’s interesting,” says Johnson, “the two phenomena are related. The way cities use energy and information both benefit from density. The argument with energy is that by crowding people together they use the same amount of energy more efficiently. When you have everyone together in an apartment building, you have an optimal cooling and heating of the space versus a giant McMansion in the suburbs which is only heating and cooling space for a family. By crowding people together, you can share mass transport, public space like the sidewalk, and so on.

“The same phenomenon is at work with the creative powers of cities in that by crowding everybody together, you share ideas more efficiently.

“Somebody comes up with a good idea and you have what economists call the ‘information spill-over’ where that idea trickles into a neighbour’s mind and they borrow it and end up doing something interesting with it.”

Barcelona, for example, has a string of interesting initiatives on the go. Its sleek, metal garbage bins automatically alert workers by electronic messaging when they have to be emptied. The city recently opened a biomass plant that recycles garbage from its city parks to generate heat and electricity. Its park wardens can be seen at work in their luminous jackets with iPads in hand, which they use for “smart” watering. The parks’ irrigation systems check for soil moisture so they only turn on when needed. Experts expect the newly installed sensors will cut the water bill by 25% this year, or the equivalent of €50m annually.

New advances in technology have been proven to help with crime prevention. Police in Memphis, Tennessee, in the US have used predictive analytics software — which identifies the time robberies are most likely to happen, what impact weather conditions will have, etc — to cut serious crime rates by 30%, and violent crime by 15% during the years 2006-2010. These kinds of figures can be misleading, however, cautions futurologist Ian Pearson.

“Politicians are always very keen to show how good they are on dealing with crime [at election time],” says Pearson. “Their answer to everything is more surveillance and more police. I’m one of the people who worries about the Nineteen Eighty-Four side of things and the loss of privacy. I’m not sure that’s the way to go. There are lots of other ways of dealing with crime rather than having more police with more powers. I don’t want to live in a world of blanket policing.

“The other side of this coin is that online criminals are getting more savvy. The quality of the phishing you get on your email, for example, gets better and better.

“The more we concentrate our lives online, the more it becomes cyber criminals as the problem rather than the old-fashioned muggers and house thieves. If people are not using cash, they’re obviously going to get mugged less. What’s the point in stealing your wallet, if there’s no cash in it? We’re seeing a drop in violent crime, but an increase in electronic crime.

“Politicians brag about how wonderful they are doing at controlling crime because the incidence of violent crime is dropping, but that’s probably nothing to do with their improvement in policing, it’s just that the criminals are moving from mugging pensioners on the high street to conning them by getting them to click on links that reveal their bank account details and passwords.”

As well as the loss of privacy, there are other shortcomings to the brave new world of “smart city” initiatives. A world that becomes more reliant on technology solutions (that are expensive and can be complicated to use) further excludes the poor, the less educated, the non-tech literate, and, often, elderly people. They are also refashioning the way people relate to each other.

“The whole range of mobile social apps — things like Foursquare, dating apps like Tinder — allow people to interact with things around them, and the people around them, discover things that they might not discover. Those are really having transformative impacts on the way people live in cities,” says Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia.

“Tinder is an app that launched in the United States a few years ago.

“There’s another one for gay men called Grinder. They’re like cruising apps. People look at pictures of each other. They chat and they decide to meet and they take it from there.

“What both of them do is take a crowd of people who are distributed across a neighbourhood and turn it into a giant singles’ bar by allowing them to browse and look at the profiles on their smartphone of the people who are nearby rather than doing it face-to-face and then they choose whether to meet or not.

“A smartphone in a modern city has basically become a giant remote control for getting whatever it is that you want — whether it’s a taxi cab [see panel] or a food delivery or a date.”

Townsend touches on an interesting vista, one that is explored in intriguing detail in Spike Jonze’s recent movie, entitled Her, in which a man falls in love with his operating system (or the female voice of his computer).

The literary critic Declan Kiberd, author of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, laments the demise of the chance encounter, which is a less frequent occurrence in a “smart city”. It was something that was celebrated by James Joyce on his fictional day of rambling around Dublin at the turn of the last century.

“Sociologists talk about horizontal bonding, which is not likely to happen as much today,” says Kiberd. “There are fewer people going to pubs. There are a lot more people drinking with other people like themselves at home, but in so far as they would go to a social setting, they would only mix with people exactly like themselves.

“The thing in Joyce is that the main characters are always moving through lots of different bits of the city over an hour or two, seeing many different kinds of life. People are now fleeing into very intensified versions of community, but it’s slightly artificial because it’s very controlled and choreographed. It’s really just meeting other people like themselves.

“Whereas what Joyce really liked and celebrated was the notion of accident, of happenstance, of meeting exactly who you don’t expect. I think it’s linked to the notion of circulation — that if bodies circulate freely in a city, it’s almost like the blood in the human form, that the healthy body is the one in which the circulation is working really well and the healthy city is one in which lots of people are bumping into people they mightn’t have expected to meet.

“I think all these things like reading groups and virtual communities are a concerned reaction to a fear of a loss of community and people trying to organise around very genuine interests, like reading a book a month, but also there’s a possibly necessary predetermination and choreography about it, that stuff like this might have happened more instinctively 80 or a 100 years ago. Now we almost have to make it happen.”

Smart parking in Barcelona

Juame Mayor got the idea for WeSmartPark, a service that helps drivers to find parking spots in Barcelona, in 2012.

“I saw that in private car parks here in Barcelona there were a lot of advertisements — 10 or 15 ads in every private car park — looking for people to rent their parking spots,” says Mayor. “Because of the financial crisis, people weren’t using their cars anymore, and they were trying to rent their parking spots. Then I thought it’s very complicated to park in Barcelona yet there are a lot of void parking spots that could be used for those people to park.”

WeSmartPark enables people to rent out their unused parking spots by installing (for free) a sensor that flags to car drivers on the street when their space is available.

Drivers can book their parking spots in advance via the web or pick up one on the go.

It provides a flat rate of €1.45 an hour, which is 60% cheaper than any other parking offer in Barcelona. It has attracted 6% of the drivers in Barcelona, and has extended its service in Madrid and Berne, Switzerland.

Smart moves in crowd control

David Heard, President of communications and test measurement with US firm JDSU, played a video for conference delegates at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in which he simulated the movement of people following a match at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin.

He illustrated how “location intelligence” can be used to help city planners monitor and cater for large crowds.

Buildings, streets, and neighbourhoods around Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, were highlighted in colour, according to traffic volume.

“I won’t tell you that most of the red spots are pubs!” he said.

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