Moving forward: 3 key factors

It’s easy in hindsight to identify what went right or wrong about our response to the pandemic, but as we re-tune our cities increasingly towards being more resilient, our capacity to respond to any fresh crisis in the future is impacted by a range of additional factors:

• The relative size of municipalities: small towns are not in the same position as larger towns or even small cities in terms of investing in the infrastructure needed to work effectively with city data.

• Demand for data: as the desire for more insight grows, all cities will be increasingly challenged by the impending data crunch. Indeed, as emerging challenges become ever more urgent and severe, our cities have an increasing thirst to match problems to solutions when it comes to technology and the data it can produce.

• The complexity of challenges: there is increased demand for insights to be integrated and cross-cutting. From immediate, highly localised concerns to longer-term global challenges, we are facing interrelated and sometimes competing priorities.

Can we be more on top of how money is spent and the investment value it brings to the local economy? Do we really have a proper handle on how our local roads are used and what could be done to improve them for those living in their vicinity? Are we truly across what our investment in social care delivers and the ways in which we can improve quality of life for people in our care within existing budgets?

Longer-term challenges are beginning to emerge as priorities: how, for example, can we better understand and manage the urban heat island effect, or extreme weather events in the context of nature-based solutions and new biophilic design principles? How do we work more effectively with smart technology to drive down carbon emissions while elevating healthy mobility? What can we do to better support smart, healthy ageing while also managing our parks, rivers and air quality? What does our net zero strategy need to make it truly smart? Can we understand how our city systems are working and interacting - and what does this tell us about the big interventions we want to make?

As the size, innovation and complexity of challenges continues to press down on the capacity of cities to respond in a flexible way, the urgency of finding pathways to support open and agile decision-making has never been greater. Urban managers need to be able to pick up solutions and try them on for size, adapt, implement or, ultimately, move on to a new innovation that suits your city better: something which cloud-based solutions, within an effective decision-making framework, can offer.

This guide has been devised, drawing from the wisdom across our city and partner networks, to help city managers find the right route to being more open and agile in how cities own, manage and control data in the context of data and tech-driven innovation.