Translator: Livnat Ben-Nun Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
As the son of academics,
by the age of 10, I lived in four different continents,
five different countries and seven different cities.
I went through eight different education systems.
And just my first grade I did in four different countries
spanning from New Zealand to California.
And so it's no surprise to you
that I have developed a real passion for cities,
an exceptional passion for cities.
Four years ago I left the corporate sector
and set up my own strategy consulting firm with my partner
who's somewhere out here.
We started working with cities literally all around the world.
We particularly worked with cities
that were looking at doing stuff beyond their infrastructure,
beyond their systems.
Cities that were looking to impact their residents,
to touch their residents,
in a small, sometimes, but an exceptional way.
Because, you see, cities are basically all the same,
cities are fundamentally very, very similar.
This is one of the tricky things when you're advising cities:
they all have the same infrastructure, the same roads, the same parks,
the same basic infrastructure.
So what is it that makes some cities special?
What is it that drives loyalty to some cities,
that drives a sense of a connection
and a sense of belongingness to a certain city?
And what is it that makes some mayors greater than others?
In order to describe this, we decided, for you here today,
to develop a simple model.
In fact, this is probably the world's simplest smart city model.
We made it simple for a simple reason,
because it needs to answer one, and one only, question:
what makes a city exceptional?
Originally people came to cities for the safety
and the security of city walls.
Infrastructure then evolved:
roads, public buildings, energy infrastructure.
It all became more and more complicated.
Eventually cities required some systems to manage them,
and a second layer was formed.
This is our social infrastructure.
Our social infrastructure is our health system, our education system,
our transportation system,
it's our trading system.
And these two layers, all of this was done in order to support us, the residents,
to provide services to us, the residents.
But, in fact, we are not really part of the process.
We are not really part of making decisions in our cities
because cities are fundamentally about the infrastructure.
They are fundamentally infrastructure up.
Build it, and they will come, right? That's what they say.
So, when we were traveling around the world,
talking to cities in many different places,
we noticed that some cities do something different.
Exceptional cities do something different.
Exceptional cities break this norm.
Let me give you an example.
Paris, August.
Now, August is a really rough month for Parisians:
temperatures are soaring, businesses are shutting down,
and residents are leaving for the coast.
Now, the Mayor of Paris, he knew this,
and he also knew
that the residents that stayed in town, they suffered from something
that we call, we've coined, "Parisian Depression."
Now, mayors are really good with changing infrastructure stuff,
but they're not really capable of dealing with things
like mood swings of their communities.
This was a challenge for him.
But he had a brilliant insight.
And his insight was that if people from his community left for the coast,
they went to the beach,
then maybe if he'd bring the coast to the city,
maybe if he'd bring the beach to the city,
it would fix this problem.
In fact, he did exactly this.
He brought 5,000 tonnes of sand from the Riviera to the center of Paris
and 100 palm trees,
and he created a virtual beach in the middle of the city.
Now, I thought this was a great story, and I told my daughter this story.
When I told her the story she looked me straight in the eye,
and she said to me, "Dad, this guy is a great mayor."
Now, I don't know how many of you have 12-year-old children,
but I can tell you that 12-year-old children
don't usually get excited by policy decisions. Right?
(Laughter)
So, what made his decision exceptional? What made it great?
In fact, what made it great was that he asked the right question:
How do you change the mood of my community?
It was a good question.
By asking this question he shifted his focus
from the normal focus of dealing with infrastructure
to a resident-centric focus.
He was thinking about the residents instead of about the infrastructure.
By making this simple switch,
he made his decision exceptional, he made the project exceptional,
and, to my daughter, he made himself a great mayor.
OK, so, Parisian are laying on their fake beach enjoying the sun,
but what about some of the really big issues?
What about big issues like pollution, for example?
Do the same rules apply for pollution?
As someone who's dealt with public policy for many years,
when I think about changing pollution
I think about things like 20-20-20 by 2020,
meaning 20% decrease in CO₂ emissions, 20% increase in renewables,
and 20% increase in energy efficiency by 2020.
But, fundamentally, 20-20-20 by 2020 is an infrastructure decision,
a bottom up decision.
It's great for state governments, great for federal governments,
for the US, for the EU, for China.
But what does the mayor of this city need to do for his residents?
This is Louisville in Kentucky.
When I sent this image to the designer that I'd been working with,
she said to me, "No way is this image going into the presentation:
resolution's not good enough, the image is not good enough."
And I said to her, "The problem isn't with the quality of the image;
the problem's with the quality of the air."
Because Louisville is one of the most polluted cities in its area.
In fact, it's one of the top 20 most challenging cities
to live in with asthma,
and the Mayor of Louisville knew this.
And when he knew this, he asked a brilliant question:
How do I improve the quality of life
for people in my community living with asthma?
Now, just by asking this question he was well on his way to success.
But he also knew that he needed more information.
So he decided to deploy sensor equipped inhalers
across his community with asthma suffers.
He deployed them in order to capture lots of data,
lots of data about the location, about the time of attacks,
about the severity of attacks based on the number of pumps.
The data they started getting was extraordinary.
They got 1.2 million environmental data points.
They added an additional 5.4 million data points of other information
in order to correlate with it.
They started learning about what asthma looks like in the community.
The correlations were interesting
because they realized
that when temperature rose, people were getting more attacks.
They realized that along main transportation corridors
people were getting more attacks.
And you can imagine that on hot days along transportation corridors,
those were the red zones,
that's when people got bad attacks.
So here they started making decisions.
They said, "Along these routes, these brown routes,
where asthma risk is highest,
we're diverting all the trucks away,
we're rezoning industrial sites away from these areas,
because we have the information."
They looked at the data more and they realized
that the worst hit areas of asthma didn't have any trees in them.
They started deploying trees in these areas.
This data is amazing, but the results are even more amazing.
They managed to reduce 82% of asthma rescue inhaler use
amongst other benefits to their community.
It was an exceptional result.
Let's think about these two examples:
because we think about Paris and we think about Louisville.
In Paris, the mayor looked at the emotional needs of his residents,
in Louisville about the physical needs.
These are the new building blocks of our smart cities.
These are the new building blocks of our society.
Because if we start asking the right questions,
we start looking at our cities,
we start looking at our journeys, at our wellbeing, at our knowledge,
we start personalizing our cities,
because currently our journeys are exhausted,
our infrastructure is exhausted.
As a mayor, what do you do here? What are your options?
How do you create bike lanes? How do you create pedestrian access?
How do you fix parking?
These are the wrong questions.
We should ask different questions.
Why is everyone going to the center of town at the same time?
And what about our wellbeing?
Our social infrastructure is also exhausted.
In fact, we know that adding beds to hospitals,
we know that adding hospital wings,
won't help.
Look at what they did in Louisville.
Look at who fixed the wellbeing of Louisville.
It was the parks department,
the transportation and zoning departments
working together with health and private companies.
If we ask the right questions, we can get our city working together
in order to solve our problems.
Albert Einstein once said,
"Any fool can give you answers,
but it takes a genius to ask the right questions."
I believe, if we ask the right questions, the right answers will arise
and we might just turn the exceptional into our everyday normal.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)