Becoming a People-Centered Smart City

All right, TGIF, and welcome to GovTech's In Case You Missed It, our weekly news roundup. The planets have aligned and Joe and I are finally back together. Well, separated by time zones, but at least on the same livestream bridge. Joe, good to see you.

Yeah, the band's back together.

The band is back together and we have an amazing show today. I'm so excited about our guest, but first I know a couple weeks ago the federal government announced some new guidance and actually a new funding grant for cybersecurity. Tell us a little bit about it.

Yeah, I feel like that's all I've been talking about over the last week, week and a half. The much-awaited cybersecurity funding from the infrastructure bill is a reality. So all in, we're talking about at the end of the day, states and localities will have received about $1 billion. This year's funding announcements for $185 million. What we did, we pored over the 100+ pages of documentation and created a document, a little bit of an explainer to tell you what's in there, what matters, the quick approaching deadline of November 15th where states have to apply to get the monies, and what states have to do in that timeframe. And there's some pretty big tasks. They've got to build a cyber committee with representation from local government and public health and state agencies with cyber expertise. They have to, if they don't already, start working on a cyber plan. And this is stuff that they've got to move on immediately. And then they've got to build the apparatus to provide the funds down to the localities, 'Cause 80% of these funds are going down into cities and counties across the country, special districts across the country, education organizations, and perhaps most importantly, 25% of that 80% is going down to rural communities across the US. So what I'm seeing is industry's got questions, government's got questions. So we created an explainer and we made that explainer available to you. We'll make sure that we get a link in the show notes and here up on your screen that'll give you some of the highlights and the resources for the FAQs, the deadlines, all the documentation that's Currently publicly available.

Yeah, so you definitely want to check it out, bit.ly/cyberfunding. We also did an overview video that was less than 10 minutes, so anytime you can regurgitate federal guidance in less than 10 minutes, you're winning. So hopefully you'll, you'll check that out. Now let's move on to the star of our show. So excited about our guest. We're going to bring in Emily Royal, who's the Smart Cities Administrator for the City of San Antonio, Texas. 7th largest city in the US, got a population over 1.5 million. I met Emily outside of a conference and was just blown away by her background and by the work that she's doing and was, you know, really like, where have you been in this market? And she's been in the market doing a lot of amazing things. So Emily, thanks so much for carving some time out to join us.

Thanks, Dustin. It's wonderful to be here. I really appreciate you inviting me on.

So let's start with your background and journey to Smart Cities Administrator in the City of San Antonio. Tell us a little bit about that.

Definitely. So I'm from the city of San Antonio originally. San Antonio, as you mentioned, is about 1.7 million. We're one of the fastest growing cities in the US. We're also one of the most impoverished cities in the US as well. So it's a challenging place to work in, but I think when we talk about people-centered cities and smart cities, and this is really the place and the environment to do that work and do it authentically. for the community that I serve. So I'm from there originally. About 15 years ago when I was perusing colleges, San Antonio very much felt like a city that an 18-year-old would want to leave. And so I did. I left. I did an undergraduate at UT Austin in neuroscience, of all things. Go figure. And after my graduate— or my undergraduate degree, I ended up working for an urban planning firm out of Austin called McCann Adams Studio. And I learned a lot about planning. I learned about architecture and planning. It was something that, you know, really isn't part of like the typical college experience. And it was something that I really, really enjoyed, and it resonated with me quite a bit. And I was taking some of these ideas that I was learning about in neuroscience, you know, complex adaptive systems and the types of tools that I was being taught how to use to manipulate big data and And I was applying that to urban problems and urban issues. And I think the timing was pretty good because I pitched myself to a bunch of graduate school programs and ended up going to MIT in their DUSP, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. And I got a master's from them in city design and development. And I had that privilege, you know, working with MIT to go all over the US and all over the world really, and look at how technology was being used to solve problems in cities in a variety of different contexts. So for example, I worked for a think tank called CityForm Labs, ended up going to Indonesia to try to set up GIS planning labs in informal settlements and informal communities. This was really interesting because the question was, well, how can we equip these communities with tools to analyze their environment and better deliver public services and basic public services like sanitation, trash pickup, transportation. But doing that in an informal context is like a completely different thing than working in an American city. I also worked in Singapore, and I learned a lot about how data can be used to tell stories, and in particular, how data can also be used to perpetuate bias. In how we plan for cities, whether we choose to include certain populations in our urban planning. You know, an authoritarian government like Singapore, that is the kind of challenge that, you know, they are experiencing is, you know, working on using technology tools to essentially plan for people but not necessarily inclusively for everyone. So I got to see that kind of application of tech in urban planning in all these different contexts. And I think my big takeaways were, you know, first, technology is the easy part. People are the hard part. Technology is integrated in cultural systems. And so when we use tech, we're not just using it, you know, to apply a problem, you know, getting us from A to B. We're doing that in a complex environment, a complex adaptive system, if you will, made of cultures and people. And so that's challenging. And then the other thing I think is just looking at, um, you know, how much of a role technology really does play in terms of equity, um, and how important public oversight is when we use technology for government applications. And so, you know, my experience in Singapore definitely taught me that as well. Um, and, you know, tech is not unbiased in and of itself. Um, same thing with data, right? So people plug their biases into how they use technology. And when we think about using tech in public sector settings, you know, we really have to be mindful of all of that. So I brought all of that experience back to San Antonio, and I'm really, really excited to be doing the work that I am now in my current role at the city.

Yeah, that's amazing. Such a, such a great background. And you're the first guest to use the phrase complex adaptive systems, which as a network theory nerd, I love. So we're gonna have to dig into that, you know, offline. But Let's talk a little bit about— so your degree is in neuroscience, your undergrad degree, then you kind of went, you know, and got the urban planning specialization. But I'm curious, you know, as you look at the study of the brain and how, you know, systems develop, you know, from a biological standpoint, do you see parallels with that on the urban planning side with cities and transportation systems?

So for sure, I think this is really something that was like the first bridge that I built into thinking about cities. And there's a very long and storied history around city science and scholarship around thinking about cities as complex adaptive systems. And how do we measure that? How do we collect data about that and analyze that? And that's really part of the sort of city science movement, you know, that emerged in the US in the 1960s. And I think that's really the origin of smart cities. You know, we talk about The origin of smart cities being IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge in the mid-2000s, it's like coining the term smart cities. But I think for a good 50 years before that, almost 100 years before that, there's a really long legacy of scientists and scholars who were already thinking about cities as living organisms, if you will, and studying it like a living organism. And so that's kind of the city science movement. And of course, more recently, there's some very literal parallels that are being drawn. For example, some of you may be familiar with the slime mold experiment in transportation planning. This is like really fun, kitschy, and interesting experiment. Some university researchers out at Kyushu University in western Japan basically took slime mold which is like a living organism, and they put food for the slime mold along a map of major cities in Japan. And turns out the slime mold ended up just directly mimicking the existing transportation network within Japan. And that's really interesting because it's a great illustration about how our technology is not so artificially separated from nature. Right? We make rational decisions as human beings, and we build systems that are efficient to the best degree possible. And I think it's really humbling how at the end of the day, the decisions we make are the same ones that a slime mold would make in terms of, you know, transportation planning, right? So I find that to be really interesting, and there's a ton of intersections in that space and certainly a lot of really great research to back that up.

You know, the smart cities term has been around for a while, and you're right in terms of its genesis in terms of the smart cities challenge. But I think now the definition's evolved to be different based on who you ask, right? It could be someone talking about IoT, but it's embracing a lot of different ideas, and maybe it's a little overused. But how do you personally define a smart city, or perhaps more importantly, what should it really be?

Yeah, so I love this question. As I was previously mentioning, you know, city science is this sort of long movement with— we've got researchers like Jay Forrester and Michael Batty who kind of like invented this idea about studying cities like living organisms, building science around that, and collecting data about that to study and analyze. But the technology we use to do that, the technology we use to build cities, and the data we use to describe cities all in of itself is fairly agnostic. But the data that we collected and that, you know, a lot of city science stuff ended up studying really justified a lot of problematic decisions in the 1950s and '60s around urban planning. So, for example, eliminating urban blight, right, or planning highway systems to cut through communities of color and neighborhoods of color. And we had another generation of urban planners after that really reacted to some of those decisions that were backed by city science. So Jane Jacobs is a wonderful example of an urban planner who basically said, hey, wait a minute, we're trying to use technology to solve these really big problems, but there are a lot of non-technology solutions that already exist in the neighborhood. So for example, her famous eyes on the street example, which is rather than installing a security system If you have a block full of abuelitas or grandmothers, you know, in the North End in Boston, you might realize that those women who are staying at home and who are retired are watching the street and they communicate with each other organically about what's going on on the street. And so there is an organic built-in security system in that neighborhood, and you may not necessarily need a technology to solve that problem. This is the kind of thinking that Jane Jacobs was doing. So all of that sort of folds into my personal take on what smart cities is. It doesn't really matter to me what you call it, if you call it smart cities or connected cities, because we've seen these kinds of challenges over and over. What matters is how you evaluate emerging technology and whether that's data or artificial intelligence. you really need to be thinking about how to leverage that tool for the good of everybody, and also assessing whether or not it can actually solve the problem at hand. So I think that's why I like some emerging phrases like people-centered smart cities, because it's really challenging you to think outside of the box of what can technology do or not do, and more around how the use of technology can improve public services and impact people's daily lives. And I think As I work in local government, like, there are a ton of examples of this that I'm just learning every day, you know, interacting with city departments. So digital services and thinking about, you know, how are people really accessing services online? Are they connected to the internet first and foremost and able to actually access that service? Is that equitable? Automated decision-making, right? And all of the different applications that cities use to make decisions, which are increasingly backed by artificial intelligence platforms and software, and really unpacking, you know, how can we look under the hood of that and, and really assess potential biases in the algorithms we're using to make decisions on a daily basis about where to invest our infrastructure, for example. And of course, you know, digital equity and thinking about digital inclusion and making sure that, you know, all of our community has— is equipped with the skills, devices, and infrastructure to be able to participate in digital societies. So to me, you know, smart city really encompasses all of those things. It's about thinking and assessing about the application of technology in terms of outcomes for people.

Okay, I appreciate that. I think it's— I mean, And I think you're right. I think I've read those books about, you know, we don't have a lot of smart cities, we have a lot of clever cities, and you don't want to get, you know, the journey is just as important as the destination. So as you look forward, what are some of the problems that you think this smart cities vision will help solve, but, and what obstacles exist that are preventing cities from just getting a little bit smarter?

Well, I'll tell you, in my role I'm thinking of smart cities as a service. So I'm thinking about it as a service that my team provides to city departments. And to do that, we're going and talking to every one of the 43 departments that we have at the City of San Antonio. And we're understanding, we're trying to understand from them and learn from them. Okay, you're at the front lines of service delivery. What are the problems you're trying to solve? And there's a ton of them and they're all different. And I think that plays into sort of this challenge that, you know, the term smart cities has with like being all-encompassing. It means so many things and yet nothing, right? I think every community has to like go in internally and assess for itself, what does smart cities mean for us? So right now my team's doing this listening tour in a way, and we are going to all cities departments and we're hearing things like, Well, we have 13 different case management systems for individuals to assess or to apply for really basic services, right? Whether that's homeless shelter, SNAP benefits, right? COVID vaccines. We have one different platform for all of those different things. And that becomes an interesting smart city question of like, well, Can we streamline that? Can we apply an algorithm to predict need? If somebody is using a service or a group of people that share demographic are using a service and we learn, hey, in 6 months they're going to need this service, can that help us plan better for the types of services that we deliver, right? That's one example. Another example is thinking about how do we invest or how do we make decisions decisions about how we invest in physical infrastructure. So improving roads and bridges, for example, if we look around our city, our city is almost 500 square miles, right? We need technology to help assist in evaluating the state of our infrastructure. Is it crumbling? Is it in this neighborhood? Is it good, right? So, you know, creating indices for how we do that and Using AI potentially to help us make those automated decisions, but also evaluating that for potential bias. If I do apply an algorithm to create an index of where I should invest in infrastructure and improving our roads, how do I check that to make sure I'm not overinvesting or the algorithm is making assumptions that are causing me to overinvest in one neighborhood versus another? Right? These are the kinds of, I think, real-world applications that a lot of, like, big tech sometimes fails to respond to or is not aware of. And as a smart cities team, we're talking to the people who are trying to solve these problems on a regular basis and thereby learning what those use cases really are. And I'm hoping that's going to make for a really, really good public-private partnership opportunity in the near future for San Antonio, because I get a lot of vendors knocking on my door saying, I have a really cool technology, what's a problem that it can be applied to? And I'm kind of like, well, I think it should be the other way around. Let me do the legwork to, like, truly understand across service areas at the city what our problems really, really are. Where are our significant pain points? Let me talk to residents and understand what they're feeling about the future of their neighborhoods and what their challenges are on a regular basis, and put that into a list of requirements that you can understand and ask you or challenge you as a vendor or a researcher or a startup to build a solution that solves our problem, right? I think this is the kind of smart city discussion that is really needed and often missing because I feel That too often cities are being asked to go apply or find problems for existing, pre-existing technology solutions, and it should just be the other way around.

Yeah, I totally agree. And, you know, you're definitely taking a people-centric approach in the work that you're doing, but I'd love to dig into, you know, the work that San Antonio has done and you and team have done to kind of realize that smart city vision for San Antonio. So tell me a little bit about that journey and, you know, what's left on your kind of runway and roadmap for the future?

Absolutely. So I'd say we have a long runway ahead of us. Like a lot of smart cities teams across the US, when we were established, we kind of functioned as almost like a special project management office. So there wasn't a lot of strategy, but there was a lot of really shiny, cool tech projects for us to deliver and explore. So things like autonomous vehicles or smart streetlights, But the question is like, you know, how do we genuinely integrate that into a strategy? COVID-19 changed a lot of the priorities for the city, as I think it did for all cities. And what we learned from that were 2 things. First, we were really scared that we would be on the chopping block during COVID because it was like, okay, what, you know, our city has to like streamline its services. Is it going to keep a smart cities team? Is it going to keep an innovation office? Right. And we learned that we actually added a lot of strategic value in 2 places in particular. One is data governance, because we saw that in times of urgency, we had to deliver public services efficiently and effectively, and it required coordination of data assets externally and within the organization at an unprecedented scale for our city. And so that required some pretty quick turnaround times on some major data infrastructure projects and architecture projects. And so doing that really established or gave us the mandate to help establish a data governance program within the City of San Antonio. And that's called our Data-Informed Government Program. We use the word informed very intentionally because we don't want to say we're data-driven. We've seen other cities make big mistakes in the past about solely relying on data to make decisions, but we say we're data-informed. And in that program, we essentially are working across 43 departments to streamline our policies around how they analyze data, how they access data, how they share data, and build them the enterprise architecture to be able to actually do all of those things, right? The other area that really, really emerged as an important hot topic for San Antonio and cities around the US as well is digital inclusion. And in order to respond to that quickly, we set up a nonprofit called SA Digital Connects. And that project coordinates massive groups of nonprofits that are all devoted in different ways to solving this problem for our community. We have about 20% of our residents don't have broadband internet access at home. So that's a big gap, and that's something that we have to solve with infrastructure. So we did establish a program called Connected Beyond the Classroom that during the pandemic focused exclusively on getting students access to the internet. And now we have just released an RFP that is challenging our service providers, our telecommunications providers, to provide internet connectivity in those underserved neighborhoods that make up that 20% that don't have that last-mile access. So those 2 things really emerge as, like, major areas for smart cities in the Office of Innovation. And that gave us the opportunity, since we're kind of in the spotlight, to reset and sort of say to our city leadership, hey, we need to have a coordinated strategy for smart cities across the board. So this— yeah, go ahead.

Oh no, keep going.

Oh, okay. So this year, we're taking the better part of this year to do stakeholder engagement. With a variety of different groups, residents. We manage a partnership called SmartSA, which is pretty cool. It includes our major utilities like our transportation authority, our energy utility, etc., as well as city employees. And I think this is often kind of overlooked, is, you know, how, how do you consider, or should you consider city employees to be a stakeholder in smart city development? And I think absolutely, we got to be talking to our employees, right? So all 3 of those groups, we're working really, really hard to interact with and learn from right now. And we're going to bake everything we learn into a roadmap that we're going to release next January 2023. And I'm excited about this because it's going to articulate sort of our vision for San Antonio. And, you know, as I mentioned before, it's really going to articulate that challenge set, that problem set that we want to solve and that we want to build effective partnerships to solve. And then in addition to that, there's 2 other features I'm excited about for our journey. One is thinking about smart cities truly as a service and identifying how our team almost operates like a consulting arm within the City of San Antonio to work with city departments on things that they need. departments are always gonna tell you, there's 2 things I don't have, money and capacity. So how can I help you with that, right? One way is to connect you to grant opportunities, and certainly there's a ton right now, as you mentioned at the start of the program. But secondly, there's little things like, can we consult with you on your RFP language, right? You release this RFP, it's for emerging technology. Can we help ensure a couple key items like data ownership, ensuring that, you know, in procurement you're using the right language that we can maintain autonomy over emerging tech procurements, um, and services like that. So we really want to quantify that and just sort of look at our shop as almost like a business within the organization that is providing services internally. And then the last thing, and I'll be quiet after this, is like so much stuff You know, I gave you a lot of examples about the role that AI plays in public services, and there's so much interesting research and institutions doing research on this right now. So they're all looking for real-world applications. I get researchers coming, knocking on my door like vendors, you know, always saying like, hey, I do amazing research on natural language processing or machine learning, what problem can I solve for you at the city? And I think increasingly there's quite a few. And so we're interested in opening up San Antonio to be a testbed for ethical applications of AI. And if you have questions about that, I can get into exactly what that means and what we think it means as well.

Well, I love that you're breaking all these, you know, news on our show in terms of forthcoming plans and what you have on the horizon. So That's pretty awesome. You know, but you've also said a bunch of things that I think are worth revisiting throughout the interview so far. You've mentioned inclusivity and equity and people-centered, even so much to even looking into the internal staff to your last comment. So how does a city remain, you know, people-centered and balancing inclusion and equity as far as it relates to access to government services?

It's really, really messy, nearly impossible work. I think it's hard, and I think that, you know, one of the ways that cities can do that is to have a presence in the community and meet people where they are, understand from, you know, 2 standpoints who is underserved in your community and who is underserved in your organization and elevating those voices. We have at the city a really cool tool called the Equity Atlas. It's created by our Office of Equity. Previously it was Office of Equity, now they're DEI, Diversity, Inclusion, Equity. And what it shows is by census tract, it gives you an index that is at the intersection of multiple issues. So low income, significant or higher population of minority groups, all of that is kind of put together into an index that will show you by census tract where are those communities that are truly underserved in our city. And we use that to prioritize where we put services, but also where we have conversations to really offset the kind of typical dialogue that we have with residents who are the ones who can show up to the town hall meetings, so the ones who can come, you know, during work or after work even, who don't need childcare necessarily to be able to show up to an event. And we try to really focus our conversation in those areas of our community so we're capturing as many voices as possible. in San Antonio. Likewise, inside of the city, there are a lot of people working on the front lines who are not typically the people you might hear from if you do a city employee survey, for example. Our office has a pretty cool program called Innovation Academy, and we invite city staff to basically take a course on how to do what we do. It's sort of a teach a man to fish type model. And, and in that course where they learn about, you know, our data governance policies and all those things that we have to check the box on, but they also learn about agile. They learn skill sets for thinking outside the box and, and innovation. And that is really, really valuable, a very valuable tool inside the city to invest in the employees we already have. So that when a smart cities team shows up and starts talking all this you know, cool emerging technology stuff, city employees are trained to think, yeah, you know, we might be able to do something with that. That's an interesting application, rather than shutting down and saying, I don't have the bandwidth, I don't have the resources, you know, I'm going to shut down this innovative opportunity. And I think doing that work on both sides of the coin is how you build an inclusive and people-centered smart city.

Yeah, that's That's amazing. So, you know, you're also, you know, one of the other, you know, roles that you have is a UN People-Centered Smart Cities Advisor, which I think is really fascinating. So I'm curious, as you kind of look to international smart cities projects, is there an opportunity for US smart cities or, you know, the work that you're doing in San Antonio to glean insights or, you know, be informed by some of these international smart cities testbeds?

Absolutely. So yeah, so I'm a huge nerd. I like to say I have my 9 to 5 and I have my 5 to 9. And yeah, Dustin, I advise UN-Habitat's People-Centered Smart Cities program. And in that program, you know, they're really thinking about the global context. How is a city in the Middle East tackling smart cities? How is a city in Russia tackling smart cities? And the challenge— there's some challenges that are the same across the board. You know, basic things like I mentioned before, capacity building, digital skills for city employees, digital inclusion and connectivity. These are global challenges. inclusivity, right? And ensuring everybody's voice is heard as part of a participatory process for building a smart city. But then there's also unique things that are, you know, unique to different regions as well. And the UN-Habitat work, I think, is really exciting. We launched a series of playbooks. There's 6 of them, and they cover each piece of a smart city. So digital equity, we talk about digital infrastructure, security, capacity building, and public participation or community building. And all of that sort of inclusively is kind of the people-centered smart city strategy that UN-Habitat is putting forward in alignment with the SDGs. And as part of that work, you know, they are interested in building communities of practice. Around that to really sort of streamline and open up dialogue with cities across the world that are encountering similar challenges. Likewise, there are coalitions that are emerging for cities to do this as well and really compare notes, you know, across the world. The Cities Coalition for Digital Rights is a great example of that, and that is a consortium of local governments primarily in Europe and the US, but there's a few from Latin America and some from Asia as well. And they're contributing to a set of frameworks and guidelines for cities that are encountering emerging tech like AI and how to procure AI effectively with a lens towards equity and inclusion. Things like, you know, digital infrastructure and data governance, all of these issues that are challenging cities globally at the same time. I think there's a lot of opportunities out there for local governments to connect. with each other to understand, you know, some of those challenges and what the opportunities are too.

Well, that's a great segue in terms of connecting and learning about new opportunities. Where should our guests go to learn more about your current work?

Sure. So there's 2 main websites. You got one down there, santonio.gov/smartsa. That is my smart city program, SmartSA. And in addition to that, we have the UN-Habitat site for people-centered smart cities. You can find those playbooks there, as well as a bunch of other resources for city governments globally.

Well, Emily, thanks so much for joining us and sharing with us a ton of insight on smart cities. So we greatly appreciate it. For those of you that tuned in, you'll see us next week. We'll be joined by Doug Rogers from Passport talking about transit, mobility, and GovTech. So until then, have a wonderful weekend and we'll see you again in October.

Thanks.