BUILDING A GREEN DIGITAL DEAL FOR OUR CITIES

BY BAS BOORSMA

Cities across the globe are under intense pressure to deliver on innovation strategies that will help mitigate the impact of climate change while fast-tracking the energy transition. How do climate change mitigation, digitalization, circular economy, energy transition, and social innovation come together, cross-fertilize, and strengthen each other?

Iwork with counterparts in cities around the world, and I always hear the same thing: We want more livable, greener cities. We want pedestrianization. We want it to be more equitable. We want places we can hand over to our children. We understand that we need to make a more sustainable design shift. We must reinvent. It’s time for the smart city movement to enter the next chapter, where we bring all the ideas together to make our cities more livable. How will we do this?

1. Know Thyself

The first thing is very philosophical. Understand who you are, where you came from, and where you’re going. Don’t try to copy the city next door. There is no one-sizefits-all. Be original and authentic. Talk to your citizens. Understanding the past provides you with identity. Your people, companies, and dynamism provide you with all you need to do and can do in the present.

2. Craft a Shared Language

To prepare for your city’s future, you need to go into the city, talk to people, and ensure you have a shared language. Not everyone understands the UN Sustainable Development Goals. You must arrive at the language people get. Be honest and prepared to run with what you harvest. Too many workshops are organized where you get input from citizens, but nothing is done with the information.

3. Get Your Analog Fundamentals Right

Start with analog fundamentals like psychological health, sleep quality, and green spaces. Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogota who served in the late ’90s and again 2016-2019, had some out-of-the-box ideas. He confronted the interest of private developers. He saw 40-50 people died daily due to traffic, so he introduced carless days where everyone rode their bikes. People pushed back, but it became more popular, and every day he did it, the fatality count was zero. He did not send in the army to maintain order. He brought a new design with green, pleasant buildings. Buildings reflect our values, but as we create new buildings, they also create values.

In Miami, how many developers have conversations with other city stakeholders to understand their values? That should be a multiple-stakeholder affair, not just an affair of private developers.

4. Get Your Digital Fundamentals Right

We’ve had industrial revolutions that introduced highly centralized designs: from centralized production to time zones, inoculation programs, retirement programs, and energy grids. That has been the design for the past 200 years. Now we have a new technology that is changing how we’re organized. This time, we’ve moved to a distributed network.

Think of how place- and time-independent work accelerated through COVID. Think of how we learn, how we befriend. Think of smart energy grids. With a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant, 40% of the energy is lost by the time it gets to your door. That’s centralized design. With smart energy grids and solar panels, that unused energy is rerouted to the closest point of demand. That’s the internet of energy—totally distributed.

Two dimensions have always underpinned how we view and experience the city: the built environment and the social-economic dimension where we trade, interact, learn, and enjoy. Now we are getting the third dimension, the digital dimension, which changes how we think of cities and urban services because they go beyond the physical parameters. We will see much progress in the next few years in the metaverse or the multiverse—3D environments in which you experience the city.

Rotterdam is building a digital twin powered by an open urban data platform. This is not just a gadget for developers or gamers; this is an environment where you can invite residents into the virtual city and have them co-decide on critical things. Say you are renovating a neighborhood, you can seek citizens’ input. People can go in and give their opinions.

The next thing you need to do is build a digital reference architecture. It surprises me that most cities don’t have one. If you open a Lego set, a manual tells you what brick goes where. This is what we need for cities.

That starts with great broadband infrastructure, and, generally, there has to be fiber. Some people think digitalization is moving too fast. I think it’s moving too slowly. We should be careful, mindful, and more resilient, but we can’t stop. We must prepare for the future because the future will not stop. We also must ensure we will be more secure and make the network more distributed.

5. Redensification of Our Cities

Redensification is the opposite of sprawl, ensuring we’re creating a renewed convergence of functions. Every square foot in a building can be multifunctional. It can be a workplace in the morning, an entertainment place in the afternoon, and a yoga place in the evening. We see 15-minute neighborhoods emerging, but at the same time, this is not purely analog. Through digital, we understand we can live, work, and play in a uniquely conversed way. The place where I work can also be where I live or have entertainment.

6. Innovation Leadership

As government, we need to reinvent ourselves. We can’t think the private sector will do everything. Without government, there would not have been a man on the moon; we would not have the predecessors to the internet or an mRNA vaccine. That was all indirect government money and government stepping up as an innovator. We need to reconsider that role. That doesn’t mean government will sit on the seat of the private sector or overregulate. It means government sometimes can do things the private sector can’t.

Einstein was right when he said, “When I have 60 minutes to solve the problem, I’m going to spend 55 minutes to understand the problem and five minutes to build a solution.”

We must ensure we have this practice under our belt: more scenario thinking, back-casting, design thinking, mobilized stakeholders, and not acting alone. Ensure we have an ecosystem of players around us. It surprises me that people in the energy transition, digital, mobility, and circular economy worlds don’t talk to each other. We need to repair this.

Startups are another issue we need to address. Founders spend 68% of their time chasing the next round of investment capital. All that time, they’re not building your solution. We must ensure we have a long-term methodology in place and marry the capital to the greatest prospects in that structure.

7. Education

When you live in a system shift, and we do, the past stops guiding the present and future. It’s not just the young people at school. It’s us. We need to go back to school whenever relevant.

Singapore is a shiny example. At one point, they said, “We’re sending 50% of the public sector workforce back to school to learn data analytics.” Not for them to become data analytic experts but to return to their jobs and understand them through the lens of data. We need to bring those young folks into the room. It needs to be intergenerational. We need to marry the young and the old: the expertise and the networks of the seniors but the complex thinkers of the young educators.

I have commenced building a global urban innovators cooperative, Venturerock Urban, that will touch on all these components and instruments. We’re reaching out to all of you to ensure we can take this to the next stage and help build a world still there for our children and their children.

Bas Boorsma is a leading urban innovation and digitalization specialist and executive with over 20 years of experience in the smart city space. He is the former chief digital officer of the City of Rotterdam, where he was the lead orchestrator, facilitator, and ambassador to the city and its innovation ecosystem. Boorsma also serves as professor of practice at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. He is the author of the acclaimed book A New Digital Deal