UK savvy urban areas present and future: An examination of English brilliant urban communities through current and arising advances and practices

The United Kingdom (UK) has enthusiastically embraced the smart city, with the majority of British cities seeking to integrate these technologies within their existing infrastructures. However, the actual extent of the embeddedness of smart solutions within UK cities remains unclear, particularly with regard to the scale of adoption, positive impact and plans for long-term investment. Overzealous local authorities and enterprises often effuse technological progress and urban development upon the back of announcing technical partnerships and preliminary testing; not necessarily on embedded or fully functional solutions. The ongoing need for private investment and government funding, which is perhaps reliant upon stories (not necessarily evidence) of success, is only one of the reasons for opaqueness in determining the extent of maturity of the smart city phenomenon. The authors do not further speculate on why this might be; however, this research seeks only to find objective data that reveals the landscape of the smart city in 2019 in the UK and its future trajectory towards 2030. This is done by analysing the level of actual progress made in 26 individual locations according to a five-point ranking scale. To accompany this, a policy analysis of 20 locations and their respective roadmaps, policies and strategies concerning the development of smart, digital and sustainable technologies and practices is provided in order to observe progress made and ascertain the future direction. Six of the cities researched were found to have, at the time of writing, insufficient plans and roadmaps set in place for analysis – Leicester, Norwich and the Scottish cities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Inverness, Perth and Stirling who are developing their smart city strategies in alignment with the Scottish Cities Alliance – which explains the shift in analysed cities and locations. It is also of importance to highlight here that the important debates and questions concerning the politics of smart city implementation and data accumulation also fall beyond the scope of this paper. This article pursues the relatively humble task of illustrating the current state of U.K smart city development and thus, seeks to answer the following research questions:

What current technologies are prevalent in the British smart city?

What practices are currently embedded within the smart city?

In what direction is the smart city heading?

What are the emerging technologies and practices most prevalent in the UK smart City?

This paper begins with an overview of the smart city concept, its aims and objectives, which provides a context for the main analysis. Next, the methodological section outlines the process and rationale of analysing each location, which is followed by an analysis of the levels of progress amongst many of the UK’s smart cities, with a comparison of two very different approaches to being ‘smart’. This leads into the analysis of the direction of British smart cities in the near future vis-a-vis the analysis of various roadmaps, strategies and policies, as well as the highlighting of specific examples of smart city technology and practice set to become established. The concluding section highlights five developments within the smart city which are most likely to become components of many cities within the UK.

This paper will be of interest to academics and practitioners who are seeking a holistic overview of the concept and status of smart city initiatives in the UK, including the emergence and ubiquitousness of enabling technologies, in the context of current practice and future strategies.

The Smart City
With the European Union supplying €301,929,322 to 17 ‘lighthouse’ projects and 47 cities1, with its industry being valued at US$1.56 Trillion2 and with the Connected Places Catapu from the UK government3; the smart city is somewhat a financial juggernaut. With this level of investment, the smart city genie is very much out of the bottle. Yet what is a smart city?

The term ‘smart’ has become somewhat of a ubiquitous prefix to numerous technologies within our homes and environs. According to Emine Mine-Thompson “outside academia, the general ‘smart’ concept [has become] a generic term fused with data collection, sensors and various monitoring technologies, big data and internet of things (IoT)”. Yet, to jump scales from the living room to the city, the smart city appears when the use of “ICT [makes] the critical infrastructure components and services of a city – which include city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation, and utilities – more intelligent, interconnected, and efficient”. Smart cities use the same technological entities and principles as the above examples – IoT, big data collection, connectivity, sensors and so on. However, unlike a smart TV or speaker, the smart city is context dependent. An example of this is how Singapore fights Dengue – a viral infection spread by mosquitoes6. One means of combating the disease is through local Another is the use of drones to investigate roof gutters which are “potential mosquito breeding habitats due mainly to a lack of maintenance. These are often located at a considerable height, making them difficult to be checked safely using traditional means […] The drone is also equipped to dispense Bti larvicide and eradicate mosquito breeding habitat”.

Rob Kitchin, Professor of Human Geography at the National University of Ireland, has stated that “a smart city is one whose economy is increasingly driven by technically inspired innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people”. This ‘technically inspired innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship’ is visible in the ‘triple helix’ structure of many smart cities. The “triple helix is the link between the universities, government and industry, and the innovation that is stimulated from this relationship”10. Many smart cities now work within a ‘quadruple helix’, which includes the three sectors above as well as participation from community groups and civil society, with some calling for a ‘penta-helix’ which identifies social entrepreneurs, bricoleurs, activists and assemblers as a distinct group of stakeholders.

This ushers in another element of the smart city, the desire to eradicate so-called silos. The ‘silo effect’ arises from “the immense tubular silos in which grain is stored. Workers in silos communicate poorly with each other”. Silos within a city’s organisational structure relate to different municipal departments working in parallel with each other, but not in unison. An example of a smart city project seeking to dismantle siloisation is observable in London with the city’s Datastore. The city provides open data sets to the public concerning many topics, ranging from demographic and housing data to air quality data, yet according to the Smarter London Together roadmap “providing open data is only the beginning of the journey. The next step is combining that data in meaningful ways to better understand the way the city works”. Through the holistic approach of combining data sets from diffuse departments, the Greater London Authority can grasp a better, granular understanding of the city.

In essence, the smart city is premised upon the sensing of the urban realm in order to extract data from it and apply said data to making the city more efficient and therefore more sustainable. Yet the smart city emerges in many forms, ranging from the harnessing of mobile phone data to using the latest in networking technology, from the tracking of public transport to the internet of things; the smart city is a diffuse and diverse entity and owing to the sheer diversity of different smart city technologies and practices, a set definition does not exist. This, therefore, raises several questions: What does the smart city look like? What form is it taking? What does ‘smart’ actually mean on the ground? Below is an outline of the methods used for this research to try and answer these questions.