BOUNCING BACK FASTER & STRONGER

BY JONATHAN REICHENTAL

How can communities elevate their preparedness and not only bounce back faster but return to a state that can be better than before? Being well-prepared and then favorably responding when the challenge comes is a function of great leadership and a high level of planning.

In 2005, I was living in Tampa Bay, Florida, and Hurricane Katrina was heading north, just west of Florida along the coast toward the Panhandle. It was massive, and it crashed into New Orleans in a big way. Everyone thought we had lost the city. It was the flooding that created the most destruction. It was a great tragedy. After the storm passed, many people were standing on their roofs, waiting for helicopters and boats to rescue them.

A day passed, another day, a third, and a fourth. Still nothing.

Being not so far away, I was frustrated watching the disaster unfold on TV and seeing the poor response. I thought, I’ll get in my car, get some water and other supplies, and drive up to help. Although I had good intentions, individuals like myself running into chaos can actually make things worse.

The government eventually came and, with the help of other non-governmental organizations, was able to deliver results. It took a long time because we weren’t ready. We weren’t ready for what would come and how we would react. Eventually, we did. New Orleans came back, and it blossomed.

A few years later, a housing loan crisis caused the Great Recession. We saw it coming, but we didn’t want to believe it. We weren’t ready for the foreclosures or the massive deterioration in not only the U.S. economy but the impact across the world. It took a while for us to recover.

We predicted a pandemic. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a surprise.

These examples, just a few of the many I could have used, demonstrate that our preparedness and ability to bounce back in a number of critical areas are lacking, and a continued absence of action will only mean bigger consequences in the future.

Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail

In responding to the attacks of 9/11, the major conclusion of the tragedy’s report was that we lacked imagination. We lacked the ability to anticipate what might happen.

As we look to the future, are we prepared for all types of eventualities, particularly those that impact our urban areas, those being the most prevalent context?

This is the century of cities. About 3% of the land on the planet is urban. By the end of the century, it’ll grow to 6%. Cities have served us well. I’m the biggest advocate. I’m passionate about cities. Our cities are where, for example, more people have good jobs, more people get access to in-person education and greater availability of health care options. It’s a good story for the last 100 years, but we have lots more work to do, no doubt. We’re doing quite a lot of work to make our cities better. That’s the whole notion of smart cities.

Smart cities must be, by definition, resilient cities with the ability to respond and bounce back to any number of challenges. You don’t do all the work after the event. You do much of the work before the event.

I’ve been doing innovation for most of my 30-year career, and one of the reasons I discovered it’s so hard is: You must build and prepare for a world that doesn’t yet exist.

As urban innovators, we’re doing many things that are making people’s lives easier and improving their quality of life. But is resilience front of mind? In some cases, it is. But it must be all the time. Resilience must be baked into so much of what we do in our smart cities efforts.

Ask yourself: Is the work you’re doing in smart cities making our cities stronger or weaker relative to resilience?

Data Supports Resilience Efforts

Today, we have more data than we thought possible, but we need to understand that data. First, it must be good data because bad data doesn’t help. Secondly, you need to know what to do with the data. We have tons of data, but we don’t know what it says. You must know how to do that. Data can help with city resilience.

We can use some of the best new technology, including collecting data with sensors—the Internet of Things (IoT), visualizations, and mixed realities—to simulate the impact of another pandemic or what happens when the water rises. We can simulate doing something about it right now.

Dr. Jonathan Reichental is a multiple award-winning technology and business leader whose career has spanned both the private and public sectors. He’s been a Senior Software Engineering Manager, a Director of Technology Innovation, and served as Chief Information Officer for O’Reilly Media and the City of Palo Alto. Reichental is currently the founder of advisory, investment, and education firm Human Future and also creates online education for LinkedIn Learning. He has written four books on the future of cities: Smart Cities for Dummies, Data Governance for Dummies, Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids, and Exploring Cities Bedtime Rhymes

For almost a decade, I helped to run a city, and during that time, I discovered the incredible richness of geospatial information systems. In my view, these systems are core to running cities today. These are information systems that can assist in our resilience efforts. We can simulate and anticipate, for example, the impact of a disaster, understand traffic in new ways, and evaluate the damage of a future earthquake. Then we can work to prepare and mitigate.

Resilience Means Prioritization

Anyone who’s worked in a city knows that not everything can be a priority. There’s a lot of scarcity, so regular prioritization is a core function of city leadership. When it comes to resilience, taking a risk-based approach can work. This means working on the things that are most urgent and most important and that have the biggest risk. It doesn’t mean ignoring everything else that is important but not urgent; it means allocating time and skills so that the highest-risk items get the most attention.

Resilience is too often an afterthought, and that assumes it is a thought at all. The evidence of our resilience preparedness is the outcome of recent events. We’ve anticipated disasters but responded poorly. Resilience efforts aren’t the most glamorous efforts, and they usually ride under the radar. When nothing happens, much like insurance, they don’t seem to have much value. When the disaster comes though, a good resilience plan will make that work nothing short of heroic.

Efforts to create more resilient communities must be foundational to your city work. It should include the smart use of data, new technologies such as IoT, and a risk-based approach.

You can’t call yourself a smart city if you’re not prioritizing the right resilience efforts. Bottom line: Smart cities are resilient cities.