This presentation is about pioneering urban planning methods
to reformulate and redesign urban land uses in the city.
It is about asking the citizen to know how they satisfy their urban needs
and to learn the urban time uses associated with these needs.
It is also to incentivize public participation during the urban planning approval process,
requesting the citizen for an active participation instead of the current passive role
as mere validators of urban planning proposals, becoming partners in the design of the city.
Lluïsa Marsal is an Architect, doctor in Urban and Regional Planning, professor at Universitat de Girona
She just finalized her second PhD, in Technology. She is the Director of our (UdG) Chair in Smart Cities, sponsored by the City of Girona.
She is also the Director of the Master’s Program in Smart Cities, at UdG. We enjoyed the Inaugural Lesson of the Master’s Program this morning.
She is a prolific researcher; she has participated in many projects, written papers, books and book chapters.
She is actively involved in different research associations and think tanks aligned with smart cities.
Lluïsa, the floor is yours.
Before going into the smart urban Planning principle, I would like to recall
the objectives that smart cities pursuit.
Basically, they are two, one is technological and the other is social.
Basically, they are two, one is technological and the other is social. The technological objective of smart cities is to make them more energetically efficient
and to optimize their consumption of resources with the use of urban technology.
The second objective is social and it is centered in the citizen to design city.
This is why we often tell that the initiative is “citizen-centric”, since it pursues to improve their quality of life with the use of urban technology.
Deepening in the energy efficiency principle and resources optimization: a small gain has a big impact.
In Europe, and in the rest of developed world,
cities account for the 75% of energetic consumption, also for the 75% of Co2 emissions.
Hence, small improvements have big repercussion.
In the social objective, the citizen is at the core of the smart cities initiative.
These smart cities will improve our quality of life in cities and will better meet and cover our urban needs.
And, I would say -with certitude- that is the first time in the urban history that an initiative is so citizen-centered.
But not only this, it is also the first time of an overall implication of all urban stakeholders.
Beginning with the industry,
they are the first to be on board since they are the big producers of urban technology. The industry provides us every day with improved solutions that are being applied in cities.
Secondly, public administrations, as the big consumers of this technology,
but also –as it has been already mentioned in the previous talk of 7Principles for Making Cities Smarter-,
governments are the ones who have to put in place the legal framework in which to build city.
If we have a compelling regulatory basis for smart cities, this will guarantee their successful functioning.
The scientific community is also very involved in this initiative.
People that, like myself, we thinking of methodologies and ways to better achieve the two main objectives that will make cities smarter.
And finally, the citizen. Citizens that, as already mentioned, they are the core of the initiative. And we want them satisfied, happy of living in their city.
But we also expect a return from them. The initiative is giving a lot to the citizen but also wants to receive. What it is expected in return?
Data and information are expected.
If there is no informational return from the citizen, the initiative has little possibility to succeed.
Therefore, we must state that smart cities are built on information. Their grounds and existence is thanks to data.
And, as larger, as wider intelligence it will be possible to gather.
For instance, if we only would have data on mobility, we could only seek for smartness in this area.
But, if we would have data on mobility, lighting, waste, etc., urban intelligence would be wider.
Data, we want it as timely as possible.
This is a very important issue since, in the urban terrain, decisions are continuously taken.
And the initiative is to help on that.
Therefore, if we have timely data at the moment we want to take a decision and, if we have been measuring periodically until the moment we have to take a decision,
that decision will be more oriented to results,
will be more efficient and will truly help us to move forward in the right direction.
Hence, historical data do not help too much when building urban intelligence.
Still in data, it must be as open as possible. Data must be accessible.
Open data not only helps to gain the confidence of the citizen and to promote transparency but to encourage entrepreneurship.
I’m sure that some of you can recall people that, by analyzing a data set,
they have become entrepreneurs because they have found “gaps” in which to create business or,
have noticed that, in certain areas of business, improvements were possible. And from there, they have created a new solution or a product designed for smart cities.
Thus, data give us a lot. Besides being the grounds of the initiative, it can even help to create business.
Said that, and having it in mind, I’ll move forward towards the concept of Smart Urban Planning.
We have to place this concept in the context of a smart city.
The concept Smart Urban Planning is based in the obtainment of data and information needed to plan the city from the citizen.
This approach is very different from traditional urban planning.
Currently, greatly simplifying this difficult issue,
what we architects and urban planners do in the urban planning practice is to use the urban planning standards contained in the legislation to design the different urban land uses.
These urban planning standards are fix values. In Catalonia, we find these urban planning standards in the Catalan Urban Planning Act.
Urban Planning standards are systematically applied to all cities and tell us –for instance, when we design a new residential area-
the amounts of private and public lands (parks, facilities, roads, etc) to be planned.
These amounts, these proportions between public and private lands are established by law and are the so called urban planning standards.
Myself and the rest of architects and urban planners, we have to use these values.
Nowadays, or even before, these standards are in doubt (to not say that they do not work).
These standards were conceived during the 70s,
in our pre-democratic era, in a context of a society very different from today’s one.
That society had very different needs.
Moreover, these standards were conceived by the legislator, uniquely based on his experience, without any kind of objective information
and, they have never been reviewed.
Hence, we can state that today we are making city with values dating back to the 70s.
This is, at least, a little bit doubtful.
It seems that, this context of smart cities, is the right time and place to review
the issue of urban planning standards since, for the first time,
we can have lots of information provided by the citizen.
Urban planning must be citizen-centric, focused in meeting citizens’ urban needs, since the citizen is the main user of the city.
Therefore, the Smart Urban Planning concept is concerned about asking citizens about their city
instead of systematically applying existing urban planning standards contained in legal texts.
We ask the citizen about the design of the city and about the proportion between public and private lands.
Obviously the question can’t be as open, it would be impossible to process the answers
as surveyed people would wrote literature and even provide opinion according to very particular personal interests.
The question must be addressed differently and have a quantitative
nature to be easily processed with artificial intelligence techniques.
We decided to conduct a two-folded question:
tell us, citizen, how do you use the city in a 24-hour time distribution
and tell us, as well, which would be your activities in your city in an ideal future scenario.
By contrasting these two scenarios, present and future, from the answers of this two-folded question,
we’ll discover the uncovered needs.
This way, we know what it is important to know, the urban needs currently not meet by the actual urban planning.
Now we have to transform the results of this exercise of discovering unmeet needs
in new urban planning standards to design urban land uses.
To that end, we create a rule of correspondence.
It precisely on that where the full force of the concept resides:
TO CORRELATE URBAN TIME USE WITH URBAN LAND USE.
This correlation implies an algorithm to connects this two functions,
urban time uses and urban land uses.
With this, it will be possible to design city from the use of time citizens do in their city,
understanding that, land will be needed to allocate desired activities.
It is by considering how the citizen wants to use the city that we obtain satisfactory urban land uses,
from where to obtain the new urban planning standards.
However, it is not to compete with current legal urban planning standards with the purpose to modify them
(this would be more difficult than to modify Spain’s Main Text)
but to provide the legislator and the planner with citizen-centered tools and information.
Maybe some of you answered the survey of the pilot we conducted in Girona,
maybe people in this room participated.
The results for Girona showed that reality is not that far from ideality.
What it is currently being proposed by master plans it is not opposed to what the citizen wants but it is true that certain adjustments within land uses would be required.
I can recall on Girona results, the citizen was more than satisfied with the amounts of outdoor public areas
(even mentioning that not such an amount of parks were needed in the city)
but was claiming for more facilities.
Thus, is that easy as to consider this valuable information and translate it into the city.
The Smart Urban Planning, as a tool, wants to be a companion
and help decision-makers in exercising urban planning.
Finally to mention that, we must not have to stop us here,
we can be smarter if we include real-time data.
Therefore,
ideally, we would like to ask citizens periodically
how they are using the city to be able to have more frequent updates
of master plans and not only every ten years,
as happens today, or even every twenty years.
Therefore, a continuous feedback from the citizen would permit
adjustments to urban planning to better cover our urban needs.
Thank you Lluisa, I’ve really enjoyed your presentation.
I have a question for you:
Which will be the impact of mobile technologies in the Smart Urban Planning concept?
Will impact the surveys and the way these are conducted?
The pilot we developed in Girona was web-based.
What I mentioned at the end of my presentation, the benefits of using real-time data, this, practically, would happen trough the smart phone
as this gadget allows to capture the essence of the moment, and this is what real time data is about.
Now I’m think of the utilization of Four-Square to show that here and now we are 150 people,
or days before the Catalan Way towards Independence, or a football match, etc.,
these are mobile technologies that allow to get instant data, always respecting privacy.
Indeed, I see the importance of the real time data.