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.
We are in a period of flux when it comes to the role of data within our cities.
As we move towards urban spaces being fully enabled by sensing, automating, and intelligent technologies, data becomes ever more valuable and central to the way we operate and govern our municipalities. Cities are facing choices that will determine our direction of travel within the ‘data economy’ for some time to come.
We are still experiencing the biggest global challenge since the 1940s in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its impact will be felt for years to come, but it has also given cities a taste of the future: of a time when frequent rolling crises are the new normal.
So, what can our experience of the pandemic tell us and how can we better prepare?
The pandemic has taken a significant toll on communities, the economy and the way in which our cities work. Yet, in the face of catastrophe, we discovered that we can be more resilient, work at greater pace, and achieve the extraordinary with the innovative use of data when an existential threat afflicts our communities.
The urban response to the pandemic highlighted the need for data to support rapid action across the board. It is data that has helped track the progress of the disease and informed whether - and in which circumstances - defensive measures have been effective.
Much of the information so crucial to our new pandemic armoury did not originate within pre-existing data streams. Instead, an army of tech applications was freshly developed at lightning speed over the course of the emergency, and within a tech and data ecosystem that found its training wheels in the blink of an eye.
The pandemic has taught us that, not only do we need to be able to access more high-quality data in general, but that our capacity as cities to respond must always be agile - pivoting where necessary to new and emerging priorities with relative ease.