Tag: international

Universities and smart cities session at Going Global 2019

A recording of the smart cities session at Going Global 2019 in Berlin is now available online, including my presentation of the report findings, panel discussion and questions from the audience. You can also find my (admittedly minimalist) slides at the above link.

In related news, University World News kindly re-published my summary of my earlier report on universities, cities and internationalisation here. And if you missed it, the full report on universities and smart cities is on the British Council website here.

The future of European internationalisation

The future of internationalisation is in the hands of universities and cities working together

Internationalisation is much more nuanced than international student numbers or foreign direct investment. It is a long-term game where creating an attractive, open, vibrant place to live and work is more important than fluctuations in visitor numbers; where the winners are formerly marginalised communities as well as internationally connected businesses.

BCreportDrawing on interviews I conducted with 25 senior university and city officials in four European cities, a new report funded by the British Council looks in detail at models of collaboration. Mutual influence? Universities, cities and the future of internationalisation is available to read online.

Researching and writing this report was great fun, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

See also: this research was presented at Going Global 2017 in London; I wrote an article for The Conversation and Times Higher Education covered the research.

Internationalisation of universities and cities session at Going Global 2017

New research looks at the internationalisation strategies of cities and universities, and how they intersect

I was fortunate to join Professor Edward Peck, Vice-Chancellor of Nottingham Trent University, and Mihnea Costiou, Rector of Politehnica University of Bucharest, as part of a panel chaired by Bianka Stege, Director of Education and Society (EU Region), British Council at last week’s Going Global conference in London.

The panel focused on the internationalisation of cities, and I presented new research funded by the British Council. You can see the slides and listen to the audio here. A summary of the research is provided as part of the highlights of day three here, and Times Higher Education covered the research here.

The full report is embargoed until the UK general election, but will be published after June 8th.

Update: the report is now available. I also wrote an article for The Conversation and Times Higher Education covered the research.

Rebalancing: a case study of South Korea

Previous governments restricted the expansion of universities in Seoul. In the 2000s, a new government put universities in charge of regional growth

Discussions over ‘rebalancing’ the economy outside of London by strengthening other regions – explored in part one and part two of this miniseries – are not unique to the UK.1 South Korean academic Haknoh Kim writes that:

Balanced development is not a new policy goal in South Korea. Two basic facts – too heavy a concentration in the “Seoul capital region” and a very limited degree of political decentralization – have aggravated the disparities across regions in Korea for a long time… the Seoul capital region, only 11.8% of the South Korea’s total areas, accommodates 46% of the population, 57% of all manufacturing firms, about 70% of enrolled university students, 2/3 of financial activities.

In the mid-2000s the South Korean government prioritised decentralisation and balanced development as a national priority, but, unlike previous governments, saw this ‘as a means to strengthening the competitiveness of the country as a whole’.2 Yong-Sook Lee, an academic at Korea University, explains how balanced national development was encouraged through innovation:

…the PCBND [Presidential Committee on Balanced National Development] set up 14 regional innovation councils with 725 commissioners across the country… These councils were designed to encourage local initiatives in creating and implementing regional policy. To achieve self-sustaining endogenous development, the PCBND pursued a Nuri [New University for Regional Innovation] project that nurtures local talent by supporting local universities. In 2004, the government allocated a five year grant of 1.4 trillion won [about £900m at today’s rate] for cultivating local talent in promoting regional strategic industries. In 2006, a grant of 260 billion won [£170m] was awarded to 109 local universities in non-capital regions… Furthermore, the PCBND placed emphasis on reinforcing networks between local universities and local industries for the purpose of boosting R&D activities in non-capital regions.

Universities seem to play a particularly prominent role in South Korea. Kim expands on the New University for Regional Innovation concept:

NURI promotes “competition” within respective provincial regions by concentrating financial support on excellent projects selected in each region. It is worth noting that local universities form the project headquarters in NURI programs. They should include in their project teams other regional innovation actors such as other interlinked universities, research institutes, local authorities, business firms, or NGOs. This way, the principal universities serve to build and expand innovative networks between business, academia, public authorities, and other related actors.

Arguably, business is underrepresented. Here is the composition of the Daegu-Gyeongbuk Regional Innovation Council in 2006, where universities are nearly a quarter of members but business less than 10 percent:

Category Number of councillors
Local/regional authorities (including civil services) 23
Research institutes 7
Civil society (including NGOs) 19
Universities 24
Business 9
Press 6
Innovation supporting agencies 12
Total 100

Kim concludes that ‘the emergence of regions as an autonomous and important actor in the development of the country is quite a remarkable progress in Korean society’. However, ‘Korea is lagging behind in that it lacks “regional experimentalism” found in Europe’, mainly due to a lack of ‘sufficient autonomy and independent resources despite the participatory government’s emphasis on bottom-up approach’.

Whilst universities have been instrumental to South Korean attempts at rebalancing, genuine autonomy, devolved resources and partnership between important local actors are required for regions to be strengthened. It would be valuable to see progress in the ten years since the two academic articles referenced here.

This blog is in three parts. Previously we looked at the future of the Northern Powerhouse, and how universities can help realise the benefits of agglomeration.

Photo: Daegu, Korea on Flickr

  1. My interest in South Korea was piqued by a single reference in the excellent Nations and the Wealth of Cities publication by the two Greg Clarks: ‘the national government has employed a strategy to diversify economic activity from the dominant Seoul capital region by incentivising clusters and universities to scale up in the regional cities. The complementary economic roles of Busan’s seaport and Daegu’s manufacturing expertise have also been significantly supported’. ↩
  2. Previous administrations tried to rebalance the economy by many means, including applying brakes on Seoul’s development by restricting the expansion of universities, factories, shops and other development that might attract migrants. Did we see an echo of this in the UK, albeit under a different policy narrative, in 2015 with the proposed crackdown on satellite university campuses in London, ostensibly to stop exploitation by economic migrants? ↩

Resilient cities, resilient sectors

“How do you keep partnering with cities over an entire generation? Not just to 2020 but 2030, because that’s when we’ll see the kinds of change we’re really looking for.”

Whilst working for UNESCO in Vietnam we hosted a training programme for senior Ministry of Education and Training staff on disaster risk reduction, looking at the role of policy makers in times of crisis. 35 officials were joined by two vice ministers, a crate of imported vodka and the excellent facilitation skills of Moustafa Osman in a countryside resort 50km from Hanoi.

We argued that the education sector should be placed at the centre of national disaster risk reduction initiatives – not only is the maintenance of education during disasters a form of preserving ‘normality’ in times of crisis, but even small lapses in primary education can have long-term detrimental effects on individuals and society. And education itself can reduce a community’s vulnerability to disaster.

Resilience in the education sector meant bringing the right people together, and ensuring they knew their roles and the roles of others in times of emergency. Specifically, that they would know what to do internally within the Ministry and externally with Departments of Education and Training at the local level in the area of disaster preparedness, response and recovery.

Saigon2

Resilient cities

I’ve been following with interest the 100 resilient cities programme, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and ‘dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century’.

Each of the 100 cities appoints a Chief Resilience Officer as part of the programme. Just as the emphasis in the education sector in Vietnam was effective communication and liaison, one of the key tasks of the Chief Resilience Officer will be to work across government departments to help a city improve internal communications, and to bring together a wide array of stakeholders to learn about the city’s challenges.

Universities should be active partners in the work of each of the 100 resilient cities. They often already have a good understanding of the complex systems that make up a city, already work with communities, businesses and other parts of the education system, and provide evidence and analysis on city assets and needs.

Perhaps the greatest reason for universities contributing to resilience planning would be their long-term presence in cities – in some cases universities were founded hundreds of years ago, and they often plan decades ahead. As Michael Berkowitz, the president of the programme, said in an interview with the Guardian:

The ultimate change we’re trying to see in cities – more cohesive communities, better infrastructure, more integrated planning, better mobility – these are things that happen over a generation, not just a couple of years. So one of the questions we’re asking now is how do you keep partnering with cities over an entire generation? Not just to 2020 but 2030, because that’s when we’ll see the kinds of change we’re really looking for.

Photos: ‘Vietnam // Việt Nam’ by lab604

Is connectivity important for universities?

Just as isolated cities will struggle to attract skilled workers and international businesses, universities that aren’t connected will struggle to become conduits of knowledge

The central paradox of the modern metropolis is that ‘proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distance has fallen’, writes Ed Glaeser in Triumph of the City. Proximity means people, businesses and universities are packed closely together, enabling new ideas to grow, knowledge to spread and innovation to flourish. Although video conferencing may be free, ideas spread better face-to-face. The growth of knowledge allows the city to triumph.

This thinking isn’t new. In 1890 Alfred Marshall wrote:

When an industry has thus chosen a locality for itself, it is likely to stay there long: so great are the advantages which people following the same skilled trade get from near neighbourhood to one another. The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously. Good work is rightly appreciated, inventions and improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of the business have their merits promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up by others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it becomes the source of further new ideas.

However, this is not to say that connectivity isn’t important: connectivity is vital for cities.1 Dense, local knowledge economies need to be connected to global markets; they need to be, returning to Gleaser’s analysis, ‘conduits for knowledge’. For example, Bangalore is an ‘urban education hub’, a concentration of IT firms and thousands of skilled workers, and a conduit for knowledge through the co-location of local and international businesses. In a virtuous cycle, the proximity of skilled workers and knowledge firms in turn increases the city’s attractiveness to international businesses and its connectivity.

Connected universities

Higher education underpins these knowledge economies through research, education and training, and providing a space for innovation and creativity. But how important is it for universities themselves to be connected?

Universities can help improve their locality, but also transcend it

Universities are ideally positioned to bridge local, national and international. With their local roots (and many universities were founded to serve their community) and their wider institutional, research and alumni networks, universities can help improve their locality, but also transcend it to help connect their locality to the wider world. And just as isolated cities will struggle to attract skilled workers and international businesses and find it difficult to develop a knowledge-based economy, those universities that aren’t connected will struggle to become conduits of knowledge.2

Bangalore2

Measuring connectivity

I was interested to read that the two largest falls in the 2016 Universitas 21 ranking of national higher education systems were Canada, down three places to ninth, and Bulgaria, down five places to 48th, due mainly to a ‘fall in ranking on connectivity’. The methodology defines connectivity as ‘the two-way flow of information between the higher education sector and the rest of society’. A closer look shows that Canada actually performed quite well on this measure (top ranked for connectivity are Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, the United Kingdom and Belgium) but Sweden and Hungary fell. There are six measures for connectivity:

  1. Proportion of international students in tertiary education, 2013.
  2. Proportion of articles co-authored with international collaborators, 2013.
  3. Number of open access full text files on the web, per head of population, July 2015.
  4. External links that university web domains receive from third parties, per head of population, 2015.
  5. Responses to question ‘Knowledge transfer is highly developed between companies and universities’, asked of business executives in the annual survey by IMD World Development Centre, Switzerland, 2015.
  6. Percentage of university research publications that are co-authored with industry researchers, 2011-13.

In a future post I will brainstorm a wider range of possible connectivity measures. For example, these measures don’t capture connections between city governments and universities. These don’t necessarily need to be international; good connectivity means smaller cities are well linked to their larger neighbours. UN Habitat’s 2016 World Cities Report notes that:

The only certainty about the next few decades is that… uncertainty and risk will become permanent features of society and governance, and this Report argues in favour of “a city that plans,” as opposed to a planned city. Consequently, institutions must also be endowed with the capacity to learn and adapt on a continuous basis. This requires pro-active investment in dynamic regional innovation systems, ideally buttressed by effective metropolitan authorities. If they are, as required, to promote resource-efficient built environments and underlying infrastructures, local governments must support regional innovation systems that connect “green” businesses, universities, think-tanks, social movements, social entrepreneurs and State-owned enterprises. Where these are in short supply locally, agreements can be made with larger urban centres in the country or in other parts of the world. (p.119)

Often universities are at the centre of knowledge economies, or innovation districts. Their exact location is important, yet so are their wider connections. Well-connected cities will often have well-connected universities at their core, and a well-connected university will support – and be supported by – a connected city.

For universities, as with cities, proximity does count, but so does connectivity.

Photo Credit: Bangalore Junctions by Scalino via Compfight cc

  1. And growing in importance. In a book about connected cities, Parag Khanna writes that ‘connectivity is destiny’. ‘Diplomacy among cities is the return of an ancient pattern. But it also dis-intermediates state structures. Cities building physical and institutional connectivity among each other, as well as growing demographic and economic power, is how they become the drivers of this new system’. (See also, ‘are interregional relations the new international relations?’) ↩
  2. I would stress that a connected university does not necessarily equal a research-intensive university. Many business-facing institutions or those focussed on opening opportunities to disadvantaged local communities excel in their mission because they are able to lever wider connections in their work. ↩

Are interregional relations the new international relations?

Universities can link important second-tier cities that are often growing faster and are more innovative

Relations between regions will be the new international relations. The diplomats of the future will represent cities. That, at least, is my hypothesis based on two trends:

  1. The focus on cities as emerging units of governance, taking on the problem-solving responsibilities traditionally held by nations. I’ve written about this before (for example here). The focus on cities is due to more than population growth and new buildings, which we often associate with the term urbanisation. Yes, cities are growing. But they are also political actors and centres of ideas and innovation.

  2. The need for these cities to work with each other. I’ve written about this here. Agglomeration economics are not new – the northeast megalopolis in the US is a prime example – but relations also need to stretch beyond individual clusters.

Similarly, there has been quite a lot of attention paid recently to universities and place, but not so much on how universities work with other universities and partners across and between places, and the connecting role they have between local, national and international. The focus on cities and their connections magnifies the importance of universities in cities, and the connections they can help broker.

Two recent articles in Times Higher Education mirror this. The first frames universities as problem solvers. Michael Crow writes:

…universities should take responsibility for the betterment of society; that we can and should be measured by the impact that we have on the public good… Education should move beyond singular academic disciplines as the point of focus and towards multidisciplinary programmes and schools capable of understanding and solving complicated real-world problems.

Second, Clare Melhuish references historian Thomas Bender, who

has compared urban universities to immigrant neighbourhoods in US cities, where residents live in both local place and in a trans-local, diasporic culture at the same time – grounded, while globally connected. From this perspective, universities need to develop a long-term view of how they nurture and evolve those everyday interactions.

In a recent post I asked what might happen if we were to frame development in terms of cities (and the towns in their orbit and the spaces that separate them) rather than nations. Here are four initial thoughts:

  1. Networks of cities (such as this one or this one) will greatly increase in importance. Most people would struggle to name a group that brings together city or regional leaders, but there are countless well-known examples of gatherings for heads of state. I think international networks of cities are in their infancy and will greatly grow in profile and influence.

  2. Similarly, bilateral relationships between cities and regions become more significant. There is growing evidence of this. To take an example of relationships between British and Chinese cities: earlier this month a Confucius Institute opened at Coventry University, a new collaboration between the university and a longstanding partner – Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics (JUFE) in Nanchang. And there are already smart city collaborations between Bristol and Guangzhou, and between Manchester and Wuhan.

  3. Freed from the constraints of nations, we start to think about groups of people. For example, the pioneering work of Andy Sumner found that 72% of the world’s poorest people live in middle income rather than low income countries (in particular India). In part this work helped increase the focus on inequality and highlighted that poverty is often a distribution problem between regions in countries rather than an international distribution problem.

  4. Development issues don’t conform to nation states. Simon Maxwell, the former director of the UK-based Overseas Development Institute, recently gave a speech exploring development agency choices in a new landscape. Reflecting on the shrinking number of low-income countries, he talks about development agencies focusing less on specific ‘target’ countries (except, perhaps, the small group of ‘fragile’ states) and more on the ‘essential building blocks’ of global public goods. These include preventing the emergence and spread of infectious disease, tackling climate change, enhancing international financial stability, strengthening the international trading system, achieving peace and security, and generating knowledge – all challenges that cross borders and require extensive cooperation. He concludes:

the emphasis on global public goods suggests turning an old mantra on its head: not ‘think global, act local’, but ‘think local, act global’.

Universities already have strong links across regions, and in particular international links that aren’t solely between one capital city and another. They link between the important second-tier cities that are often growing faster and are more innovative, but have a lower profile. They draw on alumni, research, staff and institutional relationships. They think local and act global. They can play an important role in facilitating new regional connections.

Photo Credit: Shenzhen cityscape by BBC World Service on Flickr

Brain drain and mobile talent: where international development and higher education overlap

Efforts to improve retention or to attract skilled people will fail if the place itself isn’t an attractive destination to live and work

Development practitioners call it brain drain. In higher education it’s called graduate retention. In the UK difficulties in retaining graduates in most cities outside of London is an obstacle to rebalancing the economy – a recent study found 15 graduates leave Yorkshire for London for every one moving the other way. In development-speak, brain drain from one country to another is traditionally seen as leading to a ‘human capital’ deficit in the migrant’s home country.

In some cases, an exodus of skilled workers has been encouraged. Devash Kapur explains how Zimbabwe, under the leadership of Robert Mugabe, has encouraged migration of ‘disgruntled groups’ to maintain authoritarian rule. Much of the Zimbabwean middle class, having the financial means to migrate, has fled to South Africa. Such migration benefits Mugabe, who maintains power and minimises opposition, whilst Zimbabwe receives remittances from the diaspora in South Africa, and South Africa benefits from skilled workers (in particular demand as many highly trained South Africans in turn have emigrated elsewhere).

Others such as Easterly and Nyarko argue that there could be some upsides to brain drain. A few examples:

The migrants themselves are better off, by revealed preference since migration is voluntary.

The migrants may send remittances back to boost the incomes of those left behind.

The migrants may have a positive effect on politics or institutions from abroad.

The migrants may facilitate trading networks that increase source-country exports to the destination country.

I admire work that challenges conventional thinking, and I think most of this analysis holds up at both the level of the individual, and at a macro or national level. What’s missing is the gap in-between: the impact on those places beyond the capital city, the ‘second tier’ cities, the towns and rural areas who lose their skilled workers and human capital. The retention of skilled workers in towns and cities outside the capital allows these places to become sustainable generators of their own human capital, training and educating the next generation who will work and study there, and in turn help that place to grow and to prosper. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Another argument worth exploring from Easterly and Nyarko is this one:

The migrants may return home permanently or temporarily, bringing back technology.

If we substitute ‘technology’ for ‘skills’ (and other assets like networks and experience of other systems and cultures), similar arguments are made for higher education in the UK. Graduates move to London for their first job after graduating, but return to their home town – perhaps to start a family, or buy a house – for their second, third or fourth job. The graduates return more ‘valuable’ than they left, and the town benefits. Similarly, students studying abroad will return to opportunities at home, as seen in Asia. There is a ‘boomerang’ effect, with short-term investments giving medium-term returns.

There’s been some recent work on the role universities can play in retaining skilled graduates, and to help areas retain the skills and knowledge that are needed locally. About 18 months ago the City Growth Commission looked at the role of universities in ‘metro areas’. One recommendation proposed ‘golden handcuffs’ to retain graduates through monetary or other incentives. Another – and I think more promising – recommendation was to establish a graduate clearing scheme to funnel good-but-unsuccessful job applications to large graduate recruiters towards small enterprises. And last month, the Government Office for Science looked at graduate mobility, drawing on five case studies of excellent work by universities fostering entrepreneurship, matching supply and demand, working with SMEs, and using data to improve retention.

Ultimately, efforts to improve retention or to attract skilled people from elsewhere will fail if the place itself isn’t an attractive destination to live and work. Universities clearly play a role here too. Work by KPMG describes ‘Magnet Cities’ that attract the young wealth creators of tomorrow, and in turn create an air of energy and excitement about a place. Several of the examples highlight the role of universities. The Government Office for Science report above talks about the importance of ‘place attractiveness’. A recent book, ‘The Smartest Places on Earth’, argues that depleted industrial centres in the US and Europe are reinventing themselves, with the help of universities, as innovation centres that can solve the problems of the future.

Migration is, of course, highly complex, with large cities also suffering from talent deficits in particular areas, masked by overall trends in movement. In London, creative experts are leaving for more affordable cities. Some commentators encourage the term ‘brain circulation’ to reflect this. Perhaps, above all else, mobility should be prioritised – it shouldn’t matter whether a graduate remains in his or her town after graduating, but rather that the town attracts those people with the skills needed for its development, regardless of where they are from.

Anchor tenants

It may not always be enough to be within a particular city. Sometimes it matters exactly where you are

When the Grand Central shopping centre in Birmingham opened alongside a redeveloped New Street Station in September 2015, a fair amount of the fanfare was directed towards John Lewis, the ‘anchor tenant’ in the development. The Birmingham Mail described 2015 as the year that changed Birmingham forever and highlighted the arrival of the store. And John Lewis themselves were quick to capitalise on the attention focused on the city’s regeneration, commissioning ‘the largest panoramic photograph ever taken of the city’s changing skyline’ (it’s worth a look).

Anchor tenants are highly prized in retail – they bring prestige and draw in crowds, who often spend money in other shops and restaurants in the area. They encourage other shops and businesses to move in to the area. They invest heavily, are large employers and are there for the long-term. In return they may pay lower rent than surrounding shops.

There are strong parallels between anchor tenants in retail and the role of universities as anchor institutions in cities. Here, I pick out a few examples of universities who closely resemble ‘anchor tenants’ – investing heavily in the area and becoming a core part of the identity of the city, and in turn shape its character. They are all significant economic actors, employing large numbers of people and tying their future to that of the area and the people that will visit, study and live in it. There are two key themes: the long-term nature of the anchor role, and the immediate co-location with either government, the public sector, or significant transport and infrastructure hubs.

1. Dublin, Ireland

Dublin

Trinity College Dublin (red) sits next to the Irish Houses of Parliament (blue). On the other side of the campus sit the National Library and the National Gallery. For a member of parliament to speak to an academic, or a student to sit in on a debate, they simply need to cross College Green.

2. Helsinki, Finland

Helsinki

The main university building (red) sits to one side of Senate Square. Opposite is the Prime Minister’s Office (blue), and overlooking the square and visible from sea is Helsinki Cathedral (yellow). The university departments and facilities are scattered in an arc behind the square, but this is the symbolic heart of the city.

3. Accra, Ghana

Accra

Although the University of Ghana has its main campus at Legon, 12km north of the city centre, it also has a smaller campus in the city centre (red), near to several government ministries (blue), the African Development Bank, the National Theatre and the International Conference Centre (yellow).

4. Birmingham, England

Birmingham

You don’t need to be built as part of the original city centre development to be an anchor tenant. We return to Birmingham, but this time to a different station – Curzon Street. Birmingham City University (BCU) is investing heavily in Birmingham’s Eastside (red), near the proposed site of the High Speed 2 railway terminal (blue). BCU is anticipating the future, and actively shaping it – in this case by helping establish a college for rail engineering.

There are thousands more examples throughout the world, including universities who are anchor institutions in smaller towns and cities. Some have been deliberately placed by city planners hundreds of years ago next to government buildings. Others are pre-empting new hearts of cities. Some have a central presence that links to external sites (we can also see this with university satellite campuses in London, for example). Whether the buildings themselves are new or old, the planning is long term.

My initial impression is that ‘micro-location’ counts. That is, it may not always be enough to be within a particular city. Sometimes it matters exactly where you are – if you are across the road from parliament, you are likely to be consulted ahead of institutions further out. And if you take the initiative and build in an area of potential strategic importance, and invest heavily, and have room for expansion, business and industry will co-locate with you.

How universities can help ‘smart cities’ become transformative (and why leapfrogging is difficult)

Cities are constantly in states of flow, and can easily be locked into patterns of behaviour that over time can have serious consequences

We are some way from realising the transformative effects of smart cities,1 and further still from these effects benefiting the poorest in society. I have a couple of thoughts on their potential:

  1. Can smart cities be to cities what smartphones are to ‘dumb’ phones? A button (non-smart) phone today seems closed and antiquated compared to the limitless panoply of apps and the functionality of touchscreen phones. Or will the ‘wide experiential gulf’ between the top-end smartphones and generic low-end smartphone handsets be replicated in tomorrow’s smart cities? I suspect there will be wide variations in effective implementation, and I suspect the impact will be far less dramatic and sudden than the shift from ‘dumb’ to smart phones. Cities have been developing for thousands of years and smart infrastructure needs to be embedded and layered upon existing foundations. But a transformative, positive wave of impact is possible.
  2. Can this wave of possible impact enable some cities to ‘leapfrog’ their development? Comparing cities again to phones, think of a country with limited phone networks skipping the installation of telegraph poles and landlines and instead building a fast mobile network. Kenya, for example, has excellent mobile phone reception in remote areas but limited landlines. So could a smart city allow urban areas with poor healthcare, high crime, limited access to, for example, banks and bus routes, and areas of general deprivation to leapfrog some of the traditional, slower means of development? Unfortunately, smart cities are no shortcut, and mobile phones are an unusually effective leapfrogger. Instead, you usually need to have gone ‘medium tech’ before you can go ‘high tech’.

So what is needed? Cities will need to be both adaptable and smart. Underpinning both is social capital. The World Economic Forum has developed a four part taxonomy of city competitiveness, with ‘soft connectivity’, a city’s social capital, a critical factor. Education is the ‘ultimate soft connectivity’, and cities can specialise in knowledge intensive niches by capitalising on education. Education and soft connectivity make investments in hard infrastructure and new technology more productive.

Cities are constantly in states of flow, and can easily be locked into patterns of behaviour that over time can have serious consequences. A city with a highly skilled workforce, with access to continuous education and training opportunities, is also a highly adaptive one.

An adaptive city is a resilient city. Work by Nesta has shown that 87 percent of highly creative workers are at low or no risk of automation compared with 40 percent of jobs in the UK as a whole. You can complete an online survey to determine whether your job is at risk of being taken by a robot. Whilst automation is likely to solve many more problems than it creates, a successful city in future years will adapt to these changes, attracting creative industries and highly skilled jobs.

The objectives of ‘smart’ and ‘adaptable’ cities are mutually reinforcing, with a smart city a more responsive one, and an adaptable city more likely to benefit from the insights delivered through data and technology. Universities play an important role in developing and testing new technologies, curating and understanding data (and the infrastructure behind it), and conceptualising and operationalising the ‘Internet of Things’ – a network of physical objects that collect and exchange information.

City leaders and universities will need to work together to harness the benefits of smart cities. The UK Future Cities Catapult is a good example of this, bringing together businesses, universities and city leaders to turn ideas into prototypes, including developing sensor networks and unlocking urban data. There is particular focus on smart cities in emerging economies. The Catapult has just signed an MOU with the China Center for Urban Development, building on smart city collaboration two years ago between Bristol and Guangzhou, and last year between Manchester and Wuhan. And in 2015 India set a target of 100 smart cities, focussing on satellite towns of larger cities and modernising existing mid-sized cities. It will be interesting to see whether any ‘leapfrogging’ takes place within these cities, and how inclusive the benefits are.

  1. There are many definitions of smart cities, but I like the European Commission one: ‘a place where the traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies, for the benefit of its inhabitants and businesses’. ↩