Big Data and Technology: Elephants in Porcelain Cities

With this suggestive title, Carlos Moreno presents his presentation at the BBVA Innovation Center, where we went hungry for debate on the definition of the Smart City.

Carlos begins his presentation with a quote that deserves to be framed. It is one of those phrases that we all know, but many forget:

“The city of tomorrow is built from today”

Which is like saying “don’t leave for tomorrow what you can do today.” And it is true, if we have in mind an idea of a city with certain characteristics (they may well be different from those of my seatmate next door), we must get to work now, or we will never achieve what we want, or as we want it. In the case at hand, there is another factor that adds extreme complexity and that is that cities are not for just one person or a defined group of people to live in. Thousands or millions of people live in cities, each with different characteristics. And that is why we are here today, to debate how we want those cities that each of us has in mind to be, but sharing it with everyone, in the room and on the internet, all over the world.

But what does Carlos mean by porcelain cities? A porcelain Smart City?

Yes, human life concentrated in surfaces and systems that are not capable of absorbing such a concentration of population is as fragile as porcelain. The challenge of the overpopulation of cities, or the under-urbanization of cities for a number of citizens that is too high, the challenge of balancing these two elements necessary to ensure an acceptable quality of life for the citizen and a viability for the planet. People have traditionally migrated to cities seeking an improvement in their quality of life. Although today, through crisis, we observe that the opposite effect is increasing.

The challenge of the Smart City for Carlos Moreno is threefold:

1. social inclusion
2. technological innovation
3. urban intelligence

And the joint action of these three challenges is necessary to achieve that balance we talked about before. We must understand the city, not as an abstract concept in which to philosophize, but as a real workplace, tangible, where we can specify palpable solutions and achieve measurable transformations aligned with the reality of the life and culture that populates each city.

The city, as a reality that locates everything that happens in it, allows us a real connection between the multiple elements that make it up, not only between inert elements, but to communicate with each other and with objects, to live the city and take advantage of its embedded infrastructures that provide us, for example, with fun, education, fluid networks, health, mobility, work, housing…

But in our search for that idea we have of the Smart City, of that city of tomorrow, we must not allow ourselves to destroy the existing infrastructures. What’s more, it is necessary to start from these existing structures to improve their efficiency or even to create new services.

And we, in Creating Smart Cities are 100% in agreement with this!

The city, in short, is a very complex living being formed by extremely complicated pieces such as us, the citizens. To move towards the city of tomorrow, it is essential that we design urban platforms to respond to the challenges and seek lasting solutions that reinforce the tremendous fragility inherent in us, which puts us in danger, but which also makes us terribly strong.

Here is Carlos Moreno’s presentation on Slideshare:

Here is the video of the event streaming. You can enjoy Carlos Moreno from minute 30 of the footage: