Our latest Action Pointer – the 6th in the series considers the prospects for community leadership when the covid-19 pandemic has passed.
Also published this weekend is an Easter message – We rise to play a greater part – an appreciation of FR Scott’s villanelle as sung by Leonard Cohen on his 2004 album Dear Heather.
To all our readers we wish the very best possible Easter and hopes for a better year to come.
The Intelligent Community
Kate Raworth, the ‘renegade’ economist and author of Doughnut Economics, knows only too well that ideas are born when and where they are needed most. Fresh thinking takes time to be accepted. Darwin’s evolutionary insights are still resisted. Climate Change science still denied. Flat Earth advocates still cling to the edges of their world.
It is not enough to gather evidence. Mass acceptance of fresh thinking oft requires a crisis of sufficient scale to overcome complacency. Sufficient scale? Massive impacts for a few may be discounted by those looking at bigger pictures. Responses reflect agency – the ability to make that difference. And therein lies the power of localism – the strength of the place, the community, the neighbourhood. That ability to JFDI.
The emergence of Intelligent Communities – places that are not resigned to some externally-imposed fate – reflects locally perceived priorities. These are communities that really do ‘know their place’ and know it in colours, details, depths of complexity – ‘nuanced knowhow’ that often eludes the averaged ‘higher’ authority.
BUT (and that’s a big but) the vital essence of such communities is difficult to measure and analyse. Qualitative research methods do not easily answer the question: Why do some places succeed whilst others decline? We can, however, spot the signs – the indicators of prosperity, confidence, wellbeing and community spirit. That is why, over two decades of research, the Intelligent Community Forum has assessed hundreds of places and selected a few as exemplars – communities that may serve as beacons for others.
Every year ICF has brought these communities together to share their learning. Until now that global gathering has always been held in North America. 2018 is different. For three days of next week the ICF Global Summit will be held in London. In preparation for that event (and for the benefit of those new to the notion of Intelligent Communities) we started publishing a weekly series of notes covering several of the primary indicators – the signs of local activity that ICF’s researchers have, over the years, seen time and again in the most successful places.
The series was first announced in a brief note ‘Looking Sideways at that Place We call Home’,and closely followed by ‘Local Fabrics?’ to set a framework for the rest of the series. Subsequent episodes were:
All of these themes and their local action programmes (calibrated to match local economic and social priorities) are common indicators of Intelligent Communities.
Next week, ICF’s Top7 communities from around the world, together with an array of top flight speakers, will share their experiences with delegates from near and far.
The full 3-day programme includes details of evening receptions and, on June 6th, at the Summit Dinner, Melbourne Australia will hand over the accolade of Intelligent Community of the Year to one of ICF’s 2018 Top7 Communities.
There’s a moment on any epic journey – a brief moment, maybe of self-doubt – when you pause (mid-sentence, perhaps) to wonder exactly where you’re headed.
This week’s pause, this check, comes just as we approach the midpoint of the KYP series – four done, five to go. Time, then, to check the plan, time to summon energy, time to pull together and push on. Time, maybe, for a small course correction?
KYP – ‘Knowing Your Place’ – was always an unlikely blog series but from the outset it had great structural underpinning. Most of the episodes had been well rehearsed – albeit with different headlines – and needed only an injection of current relevance for a new audience.
With just one exception the planned topics were neatly summarised three years previously in the concluding chapter of Brain Gain – a book that captured more than a decade of learning through the Intelligent Community Forum.
The single exception is a key indicator that has since crept far more clearly onto the community agenda – largely, it should be said, through the work of the Rockefeller Foundation and their 100 Resilient Cities network. It might once have been argued that Resilience was but a subset of a longer-standing ICF Key Indicator – Sustainability. However, headline tones get burdened by baggage – a peaceful green is not on the same wavelength as urgently-flashing red and blue lights of public safety.
When the Intelligent Community Forum gathers in London next June, their 2018 root theme, Humanising Data, will no doubt be coloured by recently raised awareness of data privacy issues and the impacts/consequences of ‘artificial intelligence/ignorance’ – but in our KYP series the blog-prep for Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s input is still two weeks away.
For readers remaining mystified, links to the series so far are listed below. At the outset, the central question, the question that is bringing so many brilliant speakers and community leaders together next June, was deceptively simple: Why do some places thrive whilst others decline?
I’ve checked the waypoints. We seem to be on course, but the next five weeks is a long journey. Still to come in this series are thoughts on local Advocacy (Who do we think are?), Open Data (AI in city infrastructures), Innovation Capacity (Pacemakers for Place-makers), Sustainability Engagement and finally Resilience. Fortunately, ICF is inherently collaborative and, with inputs from summit speakers, the driving can be shared.
By the end of May, homework complete, all delegates – whether from the UK or the other side of world – will be fully prepped and prompted to probe the great gathering of expert speakers and community leaders at the ICF Global Forum.
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Notes:
Brain Gain, Bell, Jung and Zacharilla, Intelligent Community Forum, ISBN: 1499228023
Knowing Your Place – that place you call home.
The series so far:
3 Where Have All Our Flowers Gone?
Part 5 – ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ is scheduled for publication on 2ndMay.
Part 2 of our series posted on the Medium Platform reflected on the theme of Connectivity.
As we approached the deadline for publication of ‘Connected With Success‘ the editing pace quickened. An earlier draft drew great suggestions from the Steering Group for the 2018 Intelligent Community Forum’s Global Summit in June.
Fiber optics
First up our friends in the Northwest shouted for inclusion of the Health and Education impacts of future-proofed networks – particularly for remote rural areas. Then we had late confirmation from Sweden that VXFiber’s Mikael Sandberg would also be speaking at the Summit.
But the FINAL final cut was hugely informed by Bruce Katz – co-author of The New Localism. Bruce gave an inspiring address this last week in the Centre for Cities ‘City Horizons’ programme – so the final cut gave voice to a wider view of networking.
Those of us with a background in telecoms are well at ease with the physical (holes, poles and cables) but pay less attention to the connectivity of ideas – the creative fusion when local leaders us their ‘convening power’ to bring talented minds from all quarters to focus on specific local issues.
Regular readers may recall that we reviewed Bruce’s work last October in ‘The NEW New Localism’ but now, six-months on, the willingness of folk to hear and understand his messages about the innovative power of communities is far more firmly established.
And so, in the nick of time, the final cut for Part 2 of this 9-part series balanced technical takeaways with the creative intellectual impacts. In large part that is why the ICF Summit is so very useful – the components are fascinating but it is in their networking that they become hugely valuable.
Next week we are writing about how communities build and maintain a Knowledge Workforce – Part 3 – ‘Where Have All our Flowers Gone?‘ will appear on April 19th – assuming we survive the edit process!
Programme (also evolving!)
From tomorrow (April 5th) and for the following eight weeks we’ll be publishing a series of reflections on aspects of Intelligent Communities.
These will also appear on the Medium platform (Groupe Intellex) and on LinkedIn.
Full announcement sets the context for the series in the run-up to the Intelligent Community Forum’s Global Summit in London (June 4-6)
Sometimes repetition works. It’s brilliant for children’s stories.
Sometimes – particularly in politics – reinforcement is needed for messages to penetrate.
Sometimes audience boredom blunts the impact.
But then, amazingly, the message arrives on a different train – a fresh perspective – and the audience is shaken from slumber.
That is why this Social Mobility report is required reading.
I have lost track of the number of times I’ve written of the UK’s economic diversity and the inadequacy of over-centralised policy responses. Despite the daily evidence the march of the macros remains the average response.
Teasing apart the policy knots (treating causes rather than symptoms) does not come easily to the average big number addict.
At the heart of the Social Mobility Commission’s report the challenge of reconciling the National with the Local is exposed. Umpteen flavours of economic and demographic analysis may have said all this before but now . . .
‘There is enough evidence from around the world, in our country’s own history and, contemporaneously, in local areas to know that, with the right approach, the transmission of disadvantage from one generation to the next can be broken.
‘There is, however, a mind-blowing inconsistency of practice. It is the breeding ground for the local lottery in life chances that exists today. It is, of course, a matter for local decision-makers to attune their policies and priorities to the needs of their local communities. In a heavily resource-constrained climate, local councils are continually having to make difficult choices about where to allocate resources and focus efforts in order to get the biggest bang for their buck. But all too often schemes start up and then wither away. Initiatives often lack scale. Experience is usually not pooled. Most worryingly of all, evidence about what works to improve social mobility is, at best, not properly embedded in local policies and programmes. At worst, it is ignored. When that happens, precious public resources are wasted and the potential for social progress is lost.’
Despite the pleas for consistency – the outrage against ‘postcode lotteries’ – there is also recognition of the need for local leaders ‘to attune their policies and priorities to the needs of their local communities’. That required flexibility is certainly not lost on the recently appointed Metro Mayors and has been a consistent refrain from many city leaders. But after years of denigration (and austerity budgets) Local Governments have lost much of their authority. It’s a rare and brave soul who has leadership strength to develop local economic and community development policies that really meet the needs of their people.
And yet, despite constraints (real or imagined), it does happen. The report cites evidence of places where fortune has changed through dint of local effort. But the report also highlights how those flashes of brilliance are rarely shared.
Perhaps more than the myriad metrics around economic performance and evolving demographics, this Social Mobility study underscores that need for local collaboration and inspired leadership.
This is precisely the agenda planned for a unique 3-day conference in June 2018.
‘Intelligent Communities’ are places that may have the benefit of smart technology and future-proofed infrastructure, but they also prosper under the guidance of gifted local leadership.
This is not new – they’ve been studied in depth by the Intelligent Community Forum for the best part of two decades.
Next June such places from around the world will send their delegates to meet and mingle with local leaders from the UK, share their ideas and successes, form new bonds, learn of new opportunities and celebrate their delight in a renaissance of the places they call ‘home’.
Seven years ago the NextGen Digital Challenge Awards programme was designed to highlight the need for much stronger investment in digital access infrastructures.
The awards were very different from the usual run of industry accolades for people and products.
It took a while but eventually contenders understood that the winners produced brilliant and succinct project case-studies explaining their challenges, solutions and achievements.
Seven years on the rules remain but the field has evolved. Every year the awards categories have changed to include new frontiers.
From the early, narrow, focus on Urban and Rural broadband deployments, the glittering trophies now also recognise innovative endeavours in the use of these utiities. That doesn’t mean any let-up in the push for better digital infrastructures but it does provide great inspiration for project teams grappling with the challenges of making all this connectivity stuff really useful.
We started again this year with the Open Call – to see what sorts of projects would be nominated. Only then were the contenders sorted, shortlisted and invited to submit their project stories for the 2017 selection of awards.
This process keeps the programme relevant – and, whilst some themes continue, others come into focus. Projects that might once have fitted a general ‘Digital Inclusion’ category may now find they are contenders for the Digital Skills Award.
Right now the Finalists for each of seven trophies are just one week away from hearing if their projects have convinced our independent judging panel. The 2017 awards will be presented at a dinner in Westminster on October 23rd.
What is certain is the Digital Challenge Awards programme has once again served up a rich selection of project examples that will inspire and inform – not least because many of these stories will be used in schools, colleges and universities to stretch young imaginations.
The presentation dinner will not only bring these UK project champions together but will also raise the curtain on an even bigger gathering next year when mayors, CIOs and community leaders from around the world assemble in London for a three-day focus on the making (and sustaining) of Intelligent Communities – the purposeful outcomes enabled by ‘smart’ technologies.
Judging by this year’s crop of project endeavours, we will have many great examples to share with high-powered visiting delegations to the Intelligent Community Forum’s 18th Global Summit. And it’ll be the Finalists in the 2017 NextGen Digital Challenge Awards who will be able to say ‘We heard it here, first, on this channel’!
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Notes:
The 2017 NextGen Digital Challenge Awards dinner will be held at 1 Great George Street, Westminster, starting at 19:00. Former MP Derek Wyatt will introduce plans for the June 2018 events. The after-dinner speaker is Iain Stewart MP – Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smart Cities.
The seven 2017 Awards Categories are for exemplars in: Public Service Transformation, Digital Health, Digital Skills, Place-Making, Innovative Projects, Connected Britain and Networking Innovations. The brilliant hand-crafted glass trophies are the work of artist Helen Thomson (Fantasia Glass).
Dinner capacity is limited but requests for any late availability places should be routed to mailto:awards@nextgenevents.co.uk before 20th October.
For earlier commentary on the 2017 Awards Categories see: https://groupeintellex.com/2017/05/30/the-real-digital-trends-revealed-in-the-2017-digital-challenge-awards-programme/
We all know – or think we know – that Smart Cities are driven by Smart Technologies, but what about the people?
In much the same way as industries hype their products (Broadband, Superfast Broadband, Ultrafast . . .) so it is with entire cities.
Beyond Smart Cities we have Social Smart Cities (tackling poverty), Green Cities (very Circular), Resilient Cities (prepared for the unexpected) and even Compassionate Cities – caring about digital inequity and boosting Inclusion. And whilst the ‘smart tech’ systems and infrastructures are key to enabling all these variants there is still the human element – the citizens and their business that must live work and play in these communities.
All the place-based systems in the world still need to serve the citizen – not the other way around.
So enter, stage left, the ‘Intelligent Community’ with its fabric woven from all the usual economic sector metrics and demographics plus the threads of social wellbeing policies.
The question is: Is your city ready? You may be contemplating an impressive array of investment proposals to deal with Transport, Air Quality, Housing, Social Care – the list goes on – but will all those plans knit together to match your citizens’ and community needs?
One way of finding out – free of charge – is to nominate your community for assessment by the Intelligent Community Forum. Who knows, you may even be selected as one of the world’s Top 21 or Top 7 Intelligent Communities. Melbourne, Australia, went on this year to be acclaimed as the Intelligent City of the Year.
That achievement was announced in New York at the ICF Global Summit last June. Next year’s great event (with mayors, civic leaders and community developers from across the world) will be in June, in London – the first time in two decades that this very special occasion will be held outside of North America.
You could be there – and your community could find its place on the global stage.
Nominations before 13th 21st September via http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/nominations
DEADLINE FOR NOMINATION EXTENDED – now 21st September
For more information please contact David Brunnen or call 07714 325 657
What do Belfast, Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester and London have in common?
They may have very different needs and priorities but they share a common interest in resilience – a determination to be prepared for whatever. They are all members of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Network – 100RC.
Today marks the start of the 2017 Urban Resilience Summit – a major gathering of Urban Resilience experts in New York. Local leaders in the UK – even if not attending in New York – will listen to the proceedings with keen interest.
We didn’t need this year’s terrorist incidents, floods and a tower fire to highlight the need for enhanced response-abilities but local Chief Resilience Officers know that proficient planning pays dividends.
100RC is just 4 years old but in that short time the network has made great strides – fuelled by Judith Rodin’s ‘Resilience Dividend’ and financed in large part by 100 ‘Platform Partners’.
Resilience is a hugely important theme for local leaders and sits alongside a series of programmes that have a huge influence on local economic growth and community wellbeing. With cities growing fast the challenges of local management demand ever-greater empowerment to develop local responses to local priorities.
Some put their faith in technology – enhancing the scope for knowing what is going on across all aspects of urban life – traffic, weather, crime, health, air quality, river levels and a host of environmental factors.
Conventional sector-based economic analysis in this context provides few useful clues. Far more importantly, the themes that cut across sector silos provide a rich agenda for Urban Resilience Officers.
These are just a few of the themes that mark out the differences between ‘smart cities’ and those who could claim to be developing intelligent communities.
Investing in resilience is far more than assurance against unexpected disasters – for some shifts might be better-described as lost opportunities. The key lies with mayors and local leaders who are enabled to develop a holistic view of local needs – not just for economic growth but for wider societal wellbeing.
That is why, in June 2018, the Global Summit for the Intelligent Community Forum will be hosted in London to bring together mayors and civic leaders from around the world. Resilient Place-Making – a local priority – has become central to survival.
[Why I took Doughnut Economics[1] to the 2017 ICF Global Summit]
The time for tolerance of misguided creeds is over. That’s an existential issue for politicians searching for economic growth. The relentless pursuit of progress has not suddenly vapourised but its measurement is, at last, being sidelined.
Economists and politicians have known since the 1930’s that GDP is a poor proxy for progress. The conventional metrics do not come anywhere near measuring the value of real activities. But even if GPD was better formulated it misses the point. The purpose of policy should not be some slavish devotion to a metric and particularly not to one so unfit. But arguing for some higher purpose begs the question: without growth are we doomed to decline? Nobody surely votes for making things worse?
Dissatisfaction with GDP growth addiction is deeply rooted. For decades economists have tried different rationales. Could we, please, have Green Growth (more sustainable) or Inclusive Growth (more equitable) or even Humanistic Growth – presumably less inhuman? The rationales for policies to be regenerative (less wasteful) and redistributive (fairer) are well argued and sometimes non-contentious – leastways, perhaps, at some future ‘transitional’ time if not inconveniently right now. These growth-variants may not immediately upset the supposedly free market dogma. But they are still argued in the context of never-ending growth that will somehow ease the pain of eventual readjustment – really?
Take away that prop – declare that we need not overly care about economic growth – and the well-established response is that the sky will fall down. This growth detox is one of the central tenets of Kate Raworth’s unexpected best-seller ‘Doughnut Economics’. Kate is the latest in a long and fine tradition of economic re-thinkers starting in the 1930’s with Simon Kuznets who first defined what was then called Gross National Product. He well understood its shortcomings and mourned its excessively ill-informed but widespread application.
Being Growth Agnostic, as much as it may offend all right thinking dogma-driven hard-liners, is not some denial of economic variability – the course of life rarely runs smooth (in sickness and in health) – but is simply a matter of therapy for the growth-addicted and a reminder that true leadership should aim for some deeper (or higher) purpose like societal safety and wellbeing. And whilst we are in brain reboot mode, can you please stop calling all those investments that happen not to be to your liking, by the derogatory label ‘subsidies’?
There are many reasons for reading Kate Raworth and her illustrious forbears such as Donella Meadows and Manfred Max-Neef (and more recently Lorenzo Fioramonti) but expecting her book to somehow magically reprogramme the deeply embedded dinosaurs of national politics is not one of them; far better to take her inspiration and apply it locally within your own community.
Mayors and civic leaders are desperate for direction every bit as much as they are constrained by top-down austerity. In the search for ‘taking back control’ these community champions can use the doughnut (and other frames) to spark imaginative and enterprising routes to greater public, private and environmental wellbeing. Low flying demands great skill and is risky but it gets stuff done under the radar of the high flyers.
Enough is enough. It really is time to shake off our tolerance of dented and dodgy rulers. We must not rest until we’ve rebuilt our local communities. If that reconstruction of better places turns out to be Growth Agnostic, well so be it.
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[1] Kate Raworth, ‘Doughnut Economics‘: ISBN 9 781847 941374
Groupe Intellex 