Managing for the Soul of the City

• MARCH 17, 2014
• Project on Municipal Innovation

Photo Credit: Dean Ayres via Compfight cc

In June 2013, the first florist in recent memory opened shop in Mogadishu. The image is not perfectly romantic - the flowers are shipped from neighboring Kenya, and are treated with chemicals to preserve them for months – but this florist is attempting to revive the poetic soul of his city.

This image began Anil Menon’s keynote speech before the 11^th convening of the Project on Municipal Innovation Advisory Group in January. At first blush, city officials gathered from across the United States may not have much to learn from a Somalian florist.

But Menon, President, Cisco Smart+Connected Communities, quickly challenged his audience: Why should anyone care about your city? The answer for him, and the reason this Somalian florist is notable, is that cities are great when they have a soul.

The mission of the public official in Mobile is the same as one in Mumbai: to ensure the health and wellbeing of the citizens, to educate them and sustain their aspirations. In short, to tend to the soul of the city.

Manage across boundaries

The problems facing most Americans may not be as drastic as those in Mogadishu, but Menon argued that cities all over the world face the same problems.

Menon illustrated this point with a hypothetical trip on London’s Underground. Heading East from Westminster, every stop on the way to Stratford, in East London, sees a drop in one year of life expectancy. The surrounding neighborhood of East London has an unemployment rate of 48 percent. A far cry from the grandeur of the bustling, tourist-filled downtown, to say the least.

The problems facing cities ignore geographic, political, and other physical boundaries, so why should city management be limited by those same boundaries? Officials facing systemic poverty in East London may have less to learn from their neighbors in the seat of financial power in the City of London than from others further afield.

Given that the problems ignore geographic and political boundaries, Menon implored the gathered leaders to “manage beyond boundaries.” This means thinking about your city management in a global context. There is a global market for expertise in local services, which Menon calls the “urban services industry.”

The urban services industry promises exchanges beyond the import and export of goods. Why can’t Detroit or Charlotte own the global market in gas monitoring? How can we work out public-private partnerships to get teachers in Indiana or Detroit jobs teaching students in South Korea, India, or wherever else people demand this service?

Are you future-proofing your city?

After city leaders had been primed by thinking across physical boundaries, Menon asked them to look across another threshold, to the future.

He began with a thought experiment. If the following conditions are met:

• What if you had access to unlimited computing power at a reasonable price?

• What if you had access to unlimited storage and bandwidth at a reasonable price?

• What if everything was connected to everything else?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Would you still do healthcare the same way? Healthcare? Transit?

• Would you run your city the same way?

• Would you live your life the same way?

The hypotheticals above are not pipe dreams: the prices of computing power and storage are constantly falling. Immersive video conferencing may not now be common outside of C-level offices, but equipping classrooms with them may enable those $150,000 remote English teaching jobs Menon mentioned earlier. Bringing this technology to rural hospitals could alleviate problems brought on by shortages in staffing or expertise.

For the foreseeable future, those prices on computing and storage will continue to fall, and new applications will be increasingly feasible. What other opportunities will they create?

The future of cities and their citizens rests in how public officials respond to questions like these. Sadly, a lack of attention to digital infrastructure is already apparent. In Menon’s formulation, this is akin to getting the best architect to make a beautiful building, but putting off worrying about electricity and water until after construction. Building good digital infrastructure requires as much planning, design, and leadership as a well run traditional utility.

There has long been a strong public discussion about land rights, but who is talking about digital rights? Open data, said Menon, is potentially the next great asset for cities. Privacy concerns are growing, and local governments can fill the role of a trustworthy place to secure private data – but only if they continue to earn that trust.

This vision is not an inevitability. Realizing the promise of these technologies and the urban services industry requires visionary leadership. With a clear definition of the soul of the city, a global perspective, and genuine partnerships across jurisdictions and other boundaries, city leaders can avoid just doing the same old things with new technology.