Miasto to emocje, relacje i codzienne historie – rozmowa Waldemara Olbryka z Jonathanem Reichentalem

Today I would like to dive a little bit because each city was a little bit different. Warsaw, woods, et cetera. And we talked many times that actually smart city is not really about the gadgets. It's not about, you know, technology. And I would like to ask you how to come from smart to wise city, I would say. And the wise means also with people included and seeing Warsaw, seeing how you would define and meaning what's globally thinking about smart and why city and what have you learned about Poland?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, great. Well, I also had a fabulous visit. I mean, I really have to say on reflection, every part of it, the, the talks, spending time with you, with your team, everything was, just went so smooth. I really, you know, couldn't ask for anything better. So, so I have to say this was my first visit to all the thanks is mine is my first visit to Poland. And you know, I think I had a sense of what it might be like. You know, I know Europe, I've been everywhere in Europe. Actually Poland is one of the last countries for me to visit, really have been to everyone and all the major cities. So Poland was like the big country that was missing from my, if you like. So I, I know about Poland a little bit through family and, and you know, one of the ways in which we, a lot of us understand Poland is unfortunately through, through the lens of the, of World War II and much of the bad stuff plus then the, the sort of post war II communist age. So there's a, there's kind of a, A, a tainted if you like, view of the modern Poland because of the, the 20th century. But what I think, what I think happened to me was I didn't see an old Poland. I didn't see a, a country and cities that were completely held back and, and defined today by their past. I, I found both Warsaw and uch to be defined more by the future. And that was very enlightening. And now Krakow of course was different, but Krakow was more of a tourist. Right. And I only spent a day there. But I think I'll tell you quick, quick reflections on, on Warsaw and then a few things. I mean, it's amazing to me that 80 years later, after Warsaw was flattened, it's still being rebuilt. You know, that was kind of a revelation to me.

But this kind of events is also part of our story, how we create the DNA of being the entrepreneur.

I can see that my father had said to me, you'll be surprised by Warsaw because of the high rises and you know, it's, it's much More modern than you think. And maybe he had a much. Being from Slovakia, my father being from, from Slack, he had a bit of much older. He had a more. A view of Poland that maybe was a little bit more historical. He was kind of imagining a more modest country, modest city. So when he went, he was, he was overwhelmed. And then he told me, I, he said to me, you'll be overwhelmed. And so I, A little bit, I was prepared for that. And, and so, you know, it turns out to be a modern city, you know, generally well designed. I, I got to walk, you know, a lot around, you know, the, the, the kind of, you know, from the old city down to where my hotel was and the large, the big park and the grave of the unknown soldier, that sort of like section. So, you know, probably one of the more modern European cities and better functioning. Certainly visually. I didn't see a lot of traffic, although I know traffic exists, but I think more so certainly benefited from new construction as opposed to you're retrofitting a modern world into some old cities like Rome, you know, or Strasbourg or something. I mean, in terms of your construction, your things you're working on very. I mean, I don't say this to flatter you. I say it because I believe it. I really loved what you're building and how you're refurbishing, you know, renovating old areas and construction and you're doing it, it seems really well. Go ahead.

It's always a challenge how you balance the past with the future. Back thinking because at the end of the day you are preparing something that will serve for the future. So from one side, the heritage is a great value, but you need to play it in a way that city develops by definition. And you need to integrate both human digital and the new social behaviors into the structure of the concrete and steel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so true. Well, I'm still at Warsaw before I go to uch, I'll tell you because in Ooch, I got to see more of that, more of the renovation, you know, like the manufacturer. Yeah, exactly. And also the area. Yeah, Fugio. Yeah. So I think Warsaw was. Look, it's a capital, it's a modern city, it's a financial center. You get that impression? I, I think the, the fact that that Stalinist, you know, structure is right in the center actually is good and I hope it's not. I, I see they're, they're actually renovating that as well brings character and, and it's a, it's a, it's a central Point I have to you know, I don't know if you probably saw my Instagram some of my pictures. I when I was walking myself and I walked into some of the parks, I think I was so lucky because it was you know, autumn and the, and the trees were yellow and brown and green and it was just gorgeous you know to, to, to. To see that.

So let's come back to, let's come back to Poland. We talked a little bit about Warsaw. We talked about your feelings. What about watch then how you would how to say think about which in the sense of regeneration identity because you had the possibility to touch the city as such the mayor, this discussion with the mayor also see the project but also hear the questions people who actually will be living in the cities that we are creating.

So I think inouch I, I got a much deeper impression of the, the renovation rejuvenation excuse me of the city and why. I mean the, the, the history of textile, you know and, and the sort of post industrial challenges. And so. Again manufacturer I think is sort of the poster child for what's possible you know to take something that could have been a derelict site that you know, just attracted you know, the worst of the worst and, and really turning it around into a very attractive place with retail and, and homes and offices and and restore keeping the, the look and the feel including those entrance gates and the home of the original founders and stuff. Very very, very thoughtful and, and that cost money. You know I know that some city leaders and, and builders would cut corners because of just cost. So it's nice to see that uch made that you know, the, the saw the long term and felt it was worth investing in that. Again, your project particularly, particularly Fuja was very impressive. You know that, that major, that hu. Large room, you know that kind of community room with that real incredible industrial feel but still maintained, you know, beautifully done and thoughtful. Keeping the paintwork, you know the old paintwork, you know, tastefully done. Yeah. So very nice.

What would you expect from the how to say future thinking or future back thinking leaders? Both the city makers like politicians but maybe also from the developers where they should look at how how to build their competences. Where is the core value for, for those who are making those decisions to create the, the better cities?

Yeah yeah yeah. What do you think? You know, I, I always say that cities need to figure out what they're good at. What, what is their central sort of strength. And every city has a, has some sort of strength and, and, and double down on that Interesting that it could be considered a suburb of Warsaw. You know, the whole story about the building, the fast train, you know, and connecting it to, to, to Warsaw so it becomes like a, maybe not a suburb of Warsaw, but a, but it

was, it was named of the project some time ago. I don't know whether it will come back or not. Duopolis.

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Duopolis. I need to make a note of that. I've heard that term before, but that's why I do apologize. Australia did an interesting thing a few years ago. They started, they remapped their cities into sort of clusters for, for taxation, for governance. I mean it was, that was a multi year project. You know, it would be interesting to look at that and, and how that's what the results of that look like right now. So the other thing I'll say, which I need to be really clear about is I didn't spend enough time to really have a lot of thoughts right when I left. And I knew we would have this conversation. I know we'll have many conversations like this. I was thinking, you know, what did I learn? What do I know? I know a little bit, not a lot, you know, because you know, I have a good memory and you, and you bombarded me with some amazing information and I got to see it and experience it, but I also, you know, didn't immerse myself in over any period of time. Yeah, I remember. Now I'm thinking about that, you know that, that science museum we went to, that, that was really impressive, you know, and, and the work being done there and, and the new area that you're going to build just opposite it. That's going to be incredible. So when I went to the university, for example, first of all, great turnout. I really loved that, that lecture and, but we only had time, I think, for one question which was fairly light and you know, because we didn't have enough, a lot of time when I was teaching in, in. I'm not sure if I maybe I shared this with you. I'll tell you briefly. When I was in Singapore and I was teaching at the nus, the top university in Asia and the students never asked any questions and they, they sat quiet and at the end I'm like, you need to ask, you know, and they're like, no, no, in this university the professor asks us. We don't ask the professor. I said no, not in my class. And anyway, I was there for, you know, the fall semester for eight. By the end of the semester they were much more comfortable Because I gave them permission to ask questions, to have discussions, to realize that, yes, their views matter.

I would like to ask you one thing about. Because you are also with the data learning, you are with the AI, with the many things which are related with really the postmodern technology in the time of AI that can simulate anything. I would like to ask you, because in. In our group we are doing the mentoring program supported by AI and I would like to ask you for the leaders, irrespectively for the city wherever, what can still be the advantage of the human being compared to algorithm? Is there anything that you can support, recommend? Because the data is one thing, but what about the human empathy? For example?

Maybe the biggest question today, right? This may be the biggest question. I think part of answering it is to recognize that AI isn't that good today, right? It does some. It does a couple of things really well. I really, I mean, it's got a fabulous memory. You know, it's very fast. You know, people say, is AI when will AI be smarter than humans? And the answer is it's much smarter than humans. I mean, what Human can speak 200 languages, you know, perfectly AI can do that. Yeah, but that's not a real comparison. Just by. Just the fact that AI can, can translate 200 languages immediately and humans can't, doesn't say that AI is better than a human. You have to take the whole rather than the part. So, you know, generative AI, very impressive. Has incredible role right now doing really, you know, whether it's text or graphics and audio, et cetera, doing incredible work. But it's not doing, it's not thinking. You know, we're not at the sentient. There's no creativity. You know, AI doesn't process and say, this drawing is better than this drawing. You know, it. There's no that space. We're not even close to even imagining how we might solve that problem. And I think we want to. But part of the, you know, I've done quite a lot of work on this myself. Part of it is in order to be like a human, you have to know how. What a human is. And in order to know how human thinks, you need to understand, in order to replicate our human things, you need to understand how human thinks. And the truth is we don't know how we do that.

So I would put it like this, that the relationship before tools, wisdom before speed. Yeah, I would call it like this. And let's come back, let's bridge this conversation with technology about the cities. I don't believe it's really about the cities that should be smarter, that should be wiser, connected, or just simply deeply human. I'm coming back to the quote from your Smart Cities for Dummies. What the city buy, but the people. And what I'm trying to say by this, I'm really happy that being in the city business, you can create the places where people interact, because this is where people can really feel the quality of a job to city makers, that they create the pretext for people to cross, to meet, to meet someone new. That actually technology is not that. How to say nice or welcoming. Because I think one of the biggest challenges, even the bigger or smaller cities, is the loneliness.

Mm. That's huge. It's a growing epidemic, actually. The loneliness issue. It's as bad as smoking. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's a disease. It's going to be, it's creating disease. But the, you know, when I think of. I'm writing a lot, I'm, I'm doing a lot of thinking and research and writing right now about cognitive cities or, you know, thinking cities. And what, what, what, what am I actually doing? What are we actually doing when we do that? We're, we're not trying to make cities be human. We're trying to make cities run such that they're smarter. And you think, for example, I gave the example in the lecture. I think I did. Why do traffic signals still have red lights even in the middle of the night? That's not very smart. That's a dumb city. Or if I get on a train and then I get in a car and then I get a, I get a bicycle, whatever. Why do I need five or six apps? I. It should be seamless, you know, and, and, and all integrated technology does that really well. You know, I'll give you one other quick example. Just because we're talking. In the US when you submit your taxes every year, individuals and companies have to do it themselves. You know, you basically have to get all your invoices and all your, you know, and do your taxes. And as an individual, you have to do that too. In the Netherlands, in Holland, they figured out, you know, what, the government pretty much knows 95% of what we need about each person. So we'll actually do it for you and then send you. And you can then just check it. Right. They reversed it. And I think that's, that's, to me, a cognitive city. That's cognitive government is. Yeah, humans can do it, but we're not very good at It. And why are we spending our time doing nonsense work like that when computers can do it much better? Right, okay, okay.

Many, many of those things are really so much dependent on the culture, on the capacity of really going into somebody else shoes here in citizens shoes just to maybe close certain part of our discussion.

Yeah.

Uh, what would be your best advice for those who are dealing with the city creation? Seeing technology, seeing what you have learned in Poland. What are the best examples from all your visits all around the world? And what would be, I don't know, kind of a Jonathan Rischanthal set. What would be that?

Very good, very good. I don't know how you're going to use this information.

I will disseminate anyway to certain people because we discuss mentoring, AI, extending the human's capacities. At the same time we touch the leaders, we touch the cultures, we touch different cities. I think there's no universal wisdom, but still you've got certain beliefs or values that you would like to share. Something to start with.

Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a lot and it's complex. But anyway, I'll give you, I give you some answers. One way I look at this issue or this question is I'm approached by startups all the time who want to create solutions for cities. And because they say, you know, I'm just annoyed at this thing, you know, I live in a city and I can't believe that this is so complicated, whatever, I'm going to create a solution. So they think they're really clever. They can write software and they can even use sensors or some hardware and they build it and it crashes, it doesn't work. They don't get. Cities don't really respond where they respond. It's sort of like piecemeal. And one of the reasons, there's a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is you overestimate the sophistication of cities. Most cities in the world, when you look at their leadership and you work with them, they're dealing with some often very basic things like still fundamentals, you know, things like economics or homelessness, traffic, you know, sustainability, important big issues that you're trying to just get their heads wrapped around, like wrapped around scope and possibilities. And so there's this mismatch between where technology is and where cities have the ability to respond. There's a, there's a few, there's a handful in the world who are really good at it. But the, you know, there's, there's 10,000 cities in the world, you know, notable cities and, and you Know if I could, I always say if you asked me to list smart cities, I could probably list 50. But 50 out of 10,000, it's not really a global movement. It's not really a, you know, the majority. There's that. Okay, second is, and I'll give an example, I actually have given this example a couple of times in the last couple of weeks. I was advising a company who, a startup, they do an innovation system for cities. They build sort of a cloud based tool where you put in an idea and the idea is processed such that you can do a pilot, you can experiment and maybe make a decision or get more informed about it. And it's a very good idea. And you know, the private sector, it's quite this, this notion of what they call innovation management systems are quite popular. So you know, they build a good tool and they're very smart people. One of the founders is a senior guy from Facebook. They're good guys and they do sell it to a few cities in, in the first couple of years. I'm, I'm pretty impressed. But you know, it's a cloud based solution so there's a, it's subscription and there's a renewal annually and eventually after the second year, you know, half the cities didn't renew and then you know, third year, most of them did not renew. So the company failed and they were like so, so frustrated, whatever. And part of it was they were not taking my advice. And the advice was, you're selling a system to Citi, they're very excited. They think if I buy this software I'll solve the problem. And that couldn't be further from the truth. You don't solve any problems really by buying software. You solve the problem by acquiring a tool like software but also training your staff, putting in place processes, making it a leadership priority, you know, having metrics. You've got to put in a much bigger set of characteristics in order for success. The software won't get you there. So what this company.

But these are much less spectacular things, these are the boring things. But they are absolutely needed to be, you know, in the spotlight at the end of the day, day. So I, I, I, I, I, I heard one sentence that 98% of the 2% success is really boring. So you need to do the studious work in behind the scenes to, to, to be successful because it's not about selling the, the app is really about seeing the whole picture.

Yeah, that's a good way to summarize it. Maybe the last point on this is, and I know you said, you know, we talked about data just there briefly. I do come back to data because in a hyperconnected digital world, data is the raw material. It is the fuel, is the connective tissue. It all comes down. All good solutions today have a basis in data. And if I was to go to Ooch and spend a week and sort of, let's figure out your data maturity, you know, level. Do you know, do you have a catalog of data? Do you know, are your data sets good quality? Can people access them? Are you, you know, do the full audit? I wonder where the number would be. What I find is when I. And this, by the way, even with the best CIOs, they, they're, they're scrambling, you know, and they're, they're not so often solving that, that root, that, that core. To have a data warehouse and have integration and have knowledge and have data literacy, for example, across staff, you know,

you go into system systematics and comparability. Because also this is the question how you store it and you compare it period to period, for example.

Yeah, I always go back to my, you know, so two things. So data needs to be a central focus if we're going to innovate and make our cities better. We got to have, we got to prioritize that. And here's my, you know, being a leader of a city for almost a decade, what I found was people were not qualified to do the things that we've been asked to do. So, you know, I had a project manager who'd never been. He was a senior project manager when I arrived at the city, and his projects were terrible. Every, everybody.

For those who don't know you, the city was quite spectacular, wasn't. Was Palo Alto?

Well, at the beginning, I mean, yeah, they, they eventually it became the city it should be. You know, eventually it reached its potential. But in the beginning, when I arrived, it was so bad. I mean, no data, no security.

So there, so there is a hope even for those cities who are not Palo Alto?

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. No, no, I mean, it was leadership. It was just, it was intelligence. It was being very aggressive. But I remember just with this project manager, you're failing. And then I wouldn't, you know, and I would, I would be very tough on him. And, and I kind of, I am, I'm trying to figure out, I tell him, you know, you're not delivering on time. You know, every single task that you are tasked with, you are late on, you know, this kind of thing. And eventually, I don't know, it dawned on me. I said, I don't even know if this guy knows how to do his work. So I, you know, he was older, quite a lot older than me at the time. And I said to him in a meeting with his manager, with three of us, and I said, have you ever had proper training? And he said, no, never. I said, how do you know what to do? He said, I just kind of made it up. He says, I sort of figured it out. I said, and I'll tell you, I don't know if I, I said, you're not going to do anything else. You're stopping work night now. You're going to spend the next month in training or the next three months, I think it was, I don't want you to do any more work. And for the next three months, he, he became certified as a project manager. And then he came back and then he was great. And I, and I found, you know, as I worked with that with other people and worked with other cities, they didn't have the talents to do the things. If uch wants to become a leading smart city or, you know, leading across the board, it's got to have high quality data, data literacy and the right talents to make it happen. And often those three things are missing.

Thank you. Because we touched the philosophical approach about what smartwise City is. We touched people and we touch also. I would call it the boring small things that actually the foundation of the big success. Thank you very much for sharing your perspective. I would call it with the friendship too, after your first visit in Poland. Thank you very much, Jonathan.

You're very kind. I feel like I'm on a TV show.