Digital technologies have the potential to unlock major social and economic change for the World’s rapidly growing urban populations, creating value through more liveable, healthy and environmentally sustainable cities.
Building on the systems thinking and coproduction approach developed in Urban ID, this study investigated how to enhance the benefits of ‘smart’ digitally enabled infrastructure and other built assets for the benefit of urban populations in UK towns and Cities. It looked at the challenges and barriers faced when seeking to lead and manage the adoption of rapidly developing digital technologies in cities.
The learning was used to develop a prototype framework that can be deployed by other cities and towns to develop their own digitalisation strategy. This can support leaders in regions, cities, and towns to plan the integration of smart technologies into the urban environment more efficiently and effectively.
Key Findings from the Study:
- A conceptual framework for a city-scale digital transformation: characterising digitalisation in which layers comprising digital sensors, AI and data analytics, digital platforms, and digital governance, are incrementally integrated with historical ‘analogue’ city systems. Opportunities to create value and manage risks arise at the interfaces between these layers.
- Maturity model and organisational readiness for digital transformation: recognises there is a significant variation in the capacity and readiness of cities, towns and combined authorities to lead and shape digitalisation and a hence need for a maturity model to chart readiness levels for digital transformation.
- Benefits of Co-created strategies: arise where digital strategies are developed collaboratively through local public-private partnerships and community groups. Evidence shows that this focuses and strengthens the local networks needed to deliver desired outcomes.
- Long-term, spatial transformation of UK cities and towns through digitalisation: As ‘smart’ technologies scale up and extend beyond demonstrator projects into large-scale use of connected vehicles and 5g-based services, digitalisation of infrastructure has the potential to transform the social and physical organisation of towns, cities and rural areas.
- Public acceptance, citizen trust and the issues of value, privacy and security: Data privacy and security are more than issues of regulatory compliance. They present a strategic challenge as to how service levels, privacy, accessibility/digital inclusion, and power should be configured across different communities. A key challenge is to manage ‘socially responsible’ digital innovation in cities and towns so that public trust and acceptance does not become a latent and tacit drag on implementation.
- Sharing in the gains from digitalisation: Historically local authorities in the UK have been able to facilitate the transfer a share of land value gains due to physical planning in an agreed systematic way to provide resources for physical public goods such as local infrastructure. A new ‘digital social contract’ could similarly be developed that balances the rights of businesses to develop technologies and profit from digitalisation, with the need to resource public goods, e.g. open data portals, new institutions for governance of digitalisation, community-accessible maker labs, and wifi, 5g and sensor networks. This would see sharing of the value gained in the private sector from access to data and provision of digital services, with those communities in cities and towns accepting of increased digitalisation.
See presentation of the findings, the full report and the supporting workshop reports for more details:
Bristol City’s Future and the Role of Digital: Workshop Report
Digital Strategies Forum for Smarter UK Cities and Towns: Workshop Report