Smart Cities are Resilient Cities - Miami Smart Cities Expo Keynote

Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Jonathan Reichental. I'm delighted to be here as part of this Miami Smart Cities event in December 2021. I'm going to spend just a few minutes with you today to talk about why I believe that smart cities are resilient cities. And so I'd like to tell you the story of that and actually leave you with some of my thoughts and guidance around the topic. Cities are pretty important. As we know they're growing rapidly. Urbanization is occurring all around the world. About 80% of the cities in the world are growing today. About 20% are declining. We're adding about 3 million people to cities every single week and building infrastructure the size of Manhattan every month. And we'll do that for the next 40 years. Cities are the center of GDP in almost every country now. And they are probably the most complicated and most successful of human inventions, bringing millions and millions of people out of extreme poverty. In fact, between 2008 and 2015, we believe about 200 million people were brought out of extreme poverty in India. They are incredible places. And our future, our future belongs to cities now with all that, of course, we have a lot of challenges. We had a great big party in the 20th century, and now in the 21st century, we have a little bit of a hangover. We have to fix some very urgent issues. We have issues, for example, around transportation. We have had a love affair over the last 100 years with the automobile. But our city infrastructures are now being stretched to the limit and under incredible duress. And also all these cars, they're producing a lot of carbon emissions, which is contributing towards our climate crisis, as is our hyper consumerism within our cities. We have abundance today in many parts of the world and in our urban areas, but it comes at a price. It comes at the price of our air quality and our water quality. This is an immediate challenge for us. The World Health organization says about 8 million people die directly or indirectly every single year because of these issues. And when we use these products in our cities and we create the lifestyles that so many have today, it has a massive byproduct of waste. We love plastic, for example, because plastic is so cheap and so flexible. And I mean, just look around you right now and you probably will see so many things that are made probably entirely of plastic or have a plastic component to it. It's everywhere. But it doesn't biodegrade quickly. In fact, most plastics take thousands of years to, to biodegrade. And so we have to bury them and try to recycle them as best we can. And unfortunately, some of it goes into our lakes and our rivers and our oceans, and that's very bad for the environment. Perhaps the answer there is to create less of it, to create less packaging. And our cities, they serve billions of people. Today. Over half the planet lives in cities, as I've said, and as you know. But not everybody is equally prospering in our city and our environments. We don't have inclusivity for everybody. Not all the economic opportunities present themselves equally among all community members. In reality, if some of us are not equal, then all of us are not equal. And so this becomes a urgent challenge for all of us to improve that. In fact, the work to improve our communities is the right thing to do, and it's the good thing to do. But it's also an opportunity for creating value. And in fact, as you can see right here, the opportunity to innovate and deliver new products and services to our cities, to make them smarter and also resilient, is worth, we think, by 2025, just a few years away now, $2.4 trillion. So we can do the right thing and do well, too, at the same time. And if we look even bigger, our urban innovation activities can create, and may create over the next decade, by 2030, about in excess of $20 trillion of new economic value. So we can do well and do good. And so this is very motivating for so many of us. But the question then also becomes, are cities ready? And are they ready for change, and are they ready for the challenges that are ahead of us? And so that takes us to the topic of resiliency. Right? So what do we mean by that? We all have sort of a sense of it, but in reality, resiliency is the ability to bounce back after some sort of issue. And you can see here with this definition, it is the ability for a city to recover quickly from shocks. And so what will it take for that to happen? Because we know the future is never a straight line. We know that things are going to surprise us, and, you know, we can't think of anything but everything. But we can be more prepared if more people are going to live in cities and more people are going to spend their lives there. We need to ensure that, first of all, to the best extent we can, that big issues don't happen, but when they do happen, that we can recover quickly and bounce back and get back on a positive trajectory. Another way of thinking about resiliency through the lens of urbanization is in these four areas of first of all, we have to resist any type of big shock. That means planning. We have to be able to recover when the shock happens. We should be able to either adapt in advance or adapt after an event. And then we are on a long path to engage in transformation of our societies so they are strengthened and more resilient over time. So what I want to do, I'm going to take us through a few areas, the typical areas that we need to look at the lens by which resiliency emerges and perhaps how we can take steps individually as public agencies, but also as, as providers and academics. In fact, the whole ecosystem engaged in urbanization, which is so many of us now, now one of the biggest areas, and I thought I'd just do this right off the bat, right at the beginning. And it's in fact out of the four, it's separate from the four because it's so big. And that is our ability to be prepared for the eventualities of the climate crisis. Many communities already are experiencing the climate crisis, by the way. About 550 cities are on coastlines in the world which represent about one and a half billion people. And those cities are seeing issues. Many of them are seeing flooding already all year round. They're seeing some coastal storms that are bringing in flooding circumstances. They're seeing sea level rise in areas where it used to be sporadic, but now it's almost every day or every few days. Our coastal cities are particularly at risk. Right now, even where I live here in Northern California, my community is building a barrier to anticipate a sea level rise here in the San Francisco Bay area. So I can just walk outside and walk to the waterfront and see our response to the potential of the climate crisis. But all around the world, with cities being the dominant context for human life, we will see issues with, with droughts. When the droughts happen, they will be longer and drier. When it rains, the rain will be heavier and longer. And when the storms come, they will be more frequent and stronger. So I wanted to get this 800 pound gorilla, you know, up front and center, but also put it to the side as well, because this has to be baked into everything we do in our urban activities. So let's step back a little bit and let me take you through four different sort of ways of looking at resiliency. And the first one I'm going to talk about is economic resiliency. Now one of the things that so many communities experience is the cyclical nature of ease economics, right? We go through periods of growth and this is Great. When we have plenty of commerce and demand for the products we produce, it trickles down into every aspect of life, brings in more taxation, which allows us to make bigger investments. All around our cities, people have work to go to. They bring in incomes that they can then have for more disposable income and more entertainment, and which contributes towards better quality of life. So we see the upside. We also see, of course, the downsides. And we had a pretty major one back in 2007, 2008. That period was the Great Recession, and we saw the entire world economy dip such that it created massive unemployment, massive uncertainty, and all sorts of organizations, including cities, have to let people go and reduce services. What we understand when we look over the last 100 years is that this is cyclical. We do not have a situation where economic growth is continuous without interruption. So the question then becomes, how can our communities be better able to be resilient against those major downturns? And part of it comes down to diversity, the diversity of industries. By investing in industries, economies that are very dependent on one industry or one type of work, or two or three are more vulnerable. They are less resilient, those that are very diverse. For example, here in Silicon Valley, we have built some pretty strong economic resiliency because we've built the ecosystem for millions of people that supports lots of different industries. Now, there's a technology theme, of course, but it ranges from retail to transportation to pharmaceuticals and way beyond. And so that diversity of industry has helped this area continue to grow, as well as, of course, innovation, which is also another important part of economic resiliency is ensuring that communities are continuing to evolve their economic circumstances and opportunities, that there is a collaboration between government and the private sector to ensure that investments are made to catalyze economic opportunity. Now, number two, what is the number two? This is around the area of governance. Now, this can apply, for example, in sort of day to day management of a city and its operations. But it also can relate to the structures that we need in place. In the event of something, we have to respond to something we have to bounce back, like a pandemic or a terrorist attack, or an event related to the climate, climate crisis related event. And so governance asks the kinds of questions like do we have leadership in place that has got a vision for our community and is driving positive change and popular change? And then in terms of organizations set up to be responders, do they have strong leaders, strong trained leaders who have the trust of their communities and the people who work with them? In governance, we also need to have extensive engagement by stakeholders. When I say stakeholders, I'm talking about city leaders, city staff, academia, private sector, other non for profits and people who just live in the community, retired people, students and workers, and even visitors. And to what degree does a city engage and create engagement channels for all sorts of stakeholders to be involved in the leadership of a community and in helping to design, plan and prepare for events that require strengthening against and also reacting to when they, when they do occur? Do we have, do our communities have strong public private partnerships that support these types of engagement? This is, this is very, very core to what we mean by governance. And finally, just as a suggestion, when we think about governance, what about data? What about the data that inform so many things in our society today? Is the city making all the right data sets easily accessible to stakeholders? Is there a progressive open data strategy? And I would encourage if one doesn't exist, it should exist. And if one exists, is it being kept current? That's the big question. Because I know there are thousands and thousands of open data systems all over the world, in all our great cities and all types of communities where. But what I also know is that some of them are not being maintained and that actually decreases their value enormously. Now let's move into the third area of resiliency, which is the topic of society. And so how fragile is your city? How fragile is your city with regard to even infrastructure? Are your bridges protected and strong? Do you have good road systems? Do you have reliable water and reliable energy supply that's providing for the most amount of people? How fragile is it that such that lots of people are not thriving, that you have a large number of unhoused people or people who perhaps need medical care and are not getting the medical care they need. So measuring and understanding fragility. Because if a society of a city is very fragile, in the event of some catastrophe, it's going to be harder to bounce back quickly. The, the damage will be deeper and more extensive and last a lot longer. Now another angle to society is what do your public safety capabilities look like? Do you have a mature, well integrated police force that works deeply within the community, across the community, with all sorts of different types of community members? Do you have good ambulance service and good fire services? So focusing on robust public safety capabilities is core to building great cities and using innovative techniques to deliver public safety must be a consideration. Now finally, I want to talk about the environment. Now I've mentioned this a little bit already in my words around the climate crisis. I mean, you can't separate the environment from this climate crisis that everyone in the world is subject to? Pretty much. But let's go a bit broader on the environment. Let's look outside. Is the air clean? Is the water clean and healthy? Are the water systems? Is the plumbing made from contemporary materials? And is it such that the majority of water comes from the source and reaches the destination? Or is it full of leaks? What about parks? Does your city have parks and open spaces? Does it have place making? Or is so much of the landscape of the city dedicated to cars and parking lots and all sorts of transportation? So by having clean air, clean water, parks and other sort of what one might argue are basic needs for our communities, we're building a healthier community, a healthier city. And a healthier city is able to withstand punches more than a city that isn't that well prepared. An already fragile and ill city will only suffer worse in the event of some catastrophe in your environment. How good is the electrical grid and is it very carbon intensive? Or is your community moving towards the non carbon like solar and wind and perhaps nuclear and geothermal and tidal, other forms? Now most cities in the world will be adopting solar and wind and it looks like solar may be the big, the big winner. So is your community looking at the supporting and incentivizing and, and providing subsidies for migrations towards a non carbon future? One where again, if there are big disruptions to the electrical power grid that we're able to absorb those big punches? It could be a cyber attack, by the way, that brings us down, or it could be a climate event, or there could be just something as simple as a fire or a plane or transportation item crashes into a substation. So we don't want that. And when it happens, we want to be able to have redundancy built in and respond quickly. And finally, when we talk about environment, what does the transportation system look like? Do you have sufficient alternatives for people who either don't have cars or don't want cars? And that's an increasing number of people who want a more environmentally friendly, non carbon version of transportation. Are you providing public transport and is that public transport clean and efficient? And does this go everywhere? You know, if we can, all these areas I've been talking about, there's a connection, right? For, for example, if you have jobs in one area of your community, but there's no transportation for people to get to those jobs from the places where they live. Well, you have a bigger challenge there. So thinking about environment is also about our transportation needs and also finally the communication needs do you have a robust communications network that is also strongly built such that it can bounce back quickly? Is there good Internet access? We need good Internet access. We've seen how important Internet access is during the pandemic and forevermore it will be core to the success of every city. That Internet access needs to be accessible to everybody, but it also needs to be fast. We need fast broadband for people. We can't create societal issues. One of the other resilient areas, if some people have very slow access or no access and some people are fast, that creates new types of digital divides that are quite corrosive and don't help us become more resilient as we think about the cities of the future. These four areas and more, well, five, if you include climate change as its own area, need to be baked into how we build the cities of the future. These can't be an afterthought, right? We have to build from the ground up with resiliency in mind. We see some great new ideas around building sustainability into every part of a new city. From the materials that are used to the transportation systems, to the energy and all non carbon, to big green spaces and use of plants and urban forests for better air and cleaner air. Just ensuring that all these things are part of the DNA of our urban systems. We are going to build a lot of new cities over the next few decades and we're going to retrofit our existing cities. So I'm here to to encourage us to think about these four and five or four plus one dimensions of resiliency as we think about the future of our cities. As you can imagine, with any one of these things, our cities aren't as smart as they can be. So it's my very strong contention that smart cities are resilient cities. These go hand in hand in hand. So thank you very much for bearing with me today. It's been such a pleasure to be with you. Whether you're watching this live in the event or later on on YouTube or Vimeo or some other platform, I'm very happy that you spent this short amount of time with me. I write and talk about these topics a lot, as so many of you know, and I've written, at least up until now, a few books and I have several more in the works coming soon. But right now, if you want to learn more about topics like resiliency, you can buy my bestseller Smart Cities for Dummies at Smart City book dot com. You see the URL right there? Let's get our children into the topic. Let's educate our children about our cities. It's such an important topic. So I've written a book with my great colleague, Brett Hofstad. We've written a book with activities and fun activities, both on paper and activities that kids can engage within the real world. And some fun and often hilarious rhymes, too. And that's my Exploring Smart Cities activity book for kids that you can also get@smartcitybook.com or smartcitybook.com kids. You can get these books also on Amazon and other places where you buy books. Finally, I just wanted to say a very big thank you. Once again, thank you to the organizers of the Miami Smart City event. And I wish all of you the best of luck in the other activities in this event. And I hope that each of you will discover what your role can be in building smarter and more resilient cities.