The Built Environment

To study how pioneers introduce a new order of things, we chose to focus on the built environment because of the opportunity it affords for audacious innovation. Long a laggard in the innovation landscape, the built environment today is suddenly again a target for change. Just as Renaissance visionaries like Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Wren combined applied mathematics and philosophy to introduce revolutionary advances that transformed the size, span, and strength of buildings, modern-day visionaries are recognizing the potential to transform what we build—and how we build it—by leveraging advances in materials and information technologies. Buildings and cities, they argue, can be smarter, greener, more efficient, and more livable. And many have begun to believe that there are business opportunities to be exploited in making them that way. Today, as we explain in chapter 2, these activities are called the smart-city industry.

The built environment refers to "the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from buildings and parks or green space to neighborhoods and cities that can often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks." Public health experts define the built environment as "the human-made space in which people live, work, and recreate on a day-to-day basis." The term encompasses places and spaces created or modified by people, including buildings, parks, and transportation systems. In short the built environment comprises the complex systems that we inhabit and depend on in our daily lives.

Cities—collections of buildings, streets, parks, airports, offices, stores, transportation systems, and more—have become the target of future-building innovation across a surprising range of disciplines. Some innovations relate to retrofitting existing cities with smart technologies; others involve creating new cities from scratch.

What is a city? The dividing lines between cities, towns, and non-cities are difficult to draw. Wikipedia defines a city as a relatively large and permanent settlement. But how large? In Shanghai recently, a graduate student told us she was from a small town. Probing further, we learned that her hometown's population was 400,000—a large city in New England. For now we'll have to be content with understanding cities as locations, people, economic activity, and municipal entities combined. Cities today have become critical hotspots for innovation. How cities are built and managed matters far more than ever for the future of humanity.

But why hasn't the innovation happened faster?

This book shows that innovation in the built environment can be stymied by a lack of common language among the essential players. Industry expertise, jargon, values, time frames, and more form silos that make it hard to collaborate. People in real estate have their business models and priorities; people in construction have certain ways of planning and completing projects; mayors and others in city government have their priorities and time lines; and techies, long portrayed as social mavericks, have their expectations and frustrations, too.

Cities have always evolved—but gradually. The earliest cities were powered by human decisions and actions, with human and animal power the only source of energy. People transported water, grew food, built structures, and removed waste products as best they could with the help of their livestock. Later cities developed extensive mechanized supply systems—waterworks, sewer systems, power supplies, streetlights—that took over and managed critical urban inputs and outputs centrally, each with its own specialized workforce. Today more and more essential functions are digital in nature—smart.

Smart cities, as defined by author Anthony Townsend, are "places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems." With novelty comes a proliferation of terms, and this arena is no exception. Whether cities are problems or solutions is a matter of some debate.

Cities as Problems, Cities as Solutions

Historically, cities have gotten a bad rap. Cities are resource hogs. Higher average living standards in cities compared with rural areas translate into greater energy use and higher per capita carbon emissions. Cities are responsible for roughly 70 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions but house only half of the population. The city as physical or moral cesspool is an engrained postindustrial image. Here urbanization and squalor go hand in hand. In part this notion is a true depiction of rapid, unplanned growth. Vast population increases at the edges of so-called megacities give rise to health hazards, desperate places, shantytowns replete with environmental risks, and crime, often in the shadow of affluent suburbs. The favelas of Brazil provide vivid examples.

As many have noted, global urbanization brings a host of challenges. The UN World Economic and Social Survey 2013: Sustainable Development Challenges report calls for a "transformation of the energy system," particularly in cities:

 

To achieve this energy transformation together with food and nutrition security, sustainability of cities, and other development goals after 2015, large-scale investments will be needed. Such investments will require sufficient levels of supply of long-term financing, and they will have to be carried out both by public actors through increased public expenditure and by the private sector, which will depend critically on creating the right incentives for investments in sustainable development.

 

A recent study comparing data from 100 cities in 33 nations showed that cities without well-developed public transportation had dramatically higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Denver, for example, weighed in with twice the greenhouse gas emissions per capita (21.5 tons) of New York City and even Shanghai.

In his popular albeit controversial 2010 book, Green Metropolis, David Owen makes the case that cities are, in fact, an ecological way to live because they boast density, which means less driving compared with suburban communities. Economist Edward Glaeser makes a similar point in Triumph of the City. Both books fairly gush about the social, economic, and environmental virtues of cities.

A growing chorus of voices conjures the city as a sparkling solution to environmental ills, with images of silent transportation gliding along, energy-producing architecture in harmony with the environment, and landscaping both beautiful and edible. Open space, places to walk and play. Café's everywhere. Green parks. Bicycles. The Emerald City.

Interest in smart sustainable cities has grown as people in different sectors investigate pieces of the urban population boom puzzle. The idea that humans are the problem, long a tenet of the environmental movement, has shifted a bit to make room for a vision of people as problem solvers. Despite substantial differences in beliefs, strategies, principles, and methods, most agree that an explosion in the apparent need for cities offers a clear, if challenging, opportunity for getting it right, for building cities that are viable and dynamic, exciting and green, and hotbeds of innovation and efficiency.

Peter Calthorpe, a founder of the Congress of New Urbanism, an organization promoting sustainable, walkable, mixed-use urban communities, and the author of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, has written that "urbanism is the foundation for a low-carbon future," and the most cost-effective solution to climate change, even more so than renewable energy. Urbanism allows us to do more with less. Calthorpe's eponymous urban design firm, Calthorpe Associates, was named one of the 25 "innovators on the cutting edge" by Newsweek for its work redefining models of growth in America. "Good urbanism," Calthorpe maintains, is defined by "three basic principles":

 

One is human scale, which has to do with designing public spaces around the pedestrian rather than the car. Ironically, human scale can exist in incredibly dense places, like Manhattan, or in relatively low density places, like the historic centers of our rural towns. . . . Diversity is another key ingredient of urbanism . . . you have to have a range of uses mixed together, you can't isolate housing and shopping and employment into separate zones. . . . You [also] need a diverse population—you can't isolate age groups, income groups, and family types. . . . The third principle, which wasn't historically part of urbanism, is conservation and restoration.

 

These principles—human scale, diversity, and conservation—are not at odds with smart technologies but rather are complementary strategies for improving urban livability and resource use.

Meanwhile cities are widely recognized as engines for economic growth and innovation. Today only 600 urban centers generate about 60 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). Tokyo, with its 35 million people and nearly $1.2 trillion in economic output, ranks among the world's top 15 economies, larger than the nations of India and Mexico. Cities encompass the largest and fastest-growing concentration of natural resource consumption and are, consequently, a logical place to focus sustainability efforts.

Taken together these perspectives—viewing cities as solutions that foster livability, sustainability, and innovation—have laid a foundation for smart-city innovation.

Smart Cities, Smart Buildings

The late William J. Mitchell, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a leading thinker in the field of digital technology and urban studies, believed in the possibility of smart cities. Technologically networked urban environments could be superbly responsive to the needs of their inhabitants, he argued. Through information and communication technology (ICT), combining hardware (embedded sensors in buildings and infrastructure that can detect activity of various types) and software (that stores and uses data), cities could provide customized services to inhabitants on demand, enhancing efficiency and livability. In Mitchell's vision networked smart cities would generate collective intelligence in communities. It would be easy to make better decisions—without ever having to sit around a table to debate them.

This vision may slowly be turning into reality. ICT systems are starting to be used in managing energy, transportation, and waste. Smart-city advocates conceive of vast systems for collecting and analyzing big data on human behavior patterns—using networks of sensors and microcontrollers (tiny computer systems that combine processing, memory, and input/output devices)—to make cities more sustainable and more livable. Sensors detect activity, and microcontrollers analyze the data against targets and deliver output to users (through some linked device, like a smartphone) to influence their behavior. For example, consider how today's access to traffic data may lead you to choose a different route home. More-sophisticated systems could eventually control the car itself, leaving driver decisions out of it.

A target for innovation far less ambitious than driverless cars is the building itself. The use of sensors for operating and maintaining buildings is a strategy to minimize environmental harm and enrich the user experience. A 2011 McKinsey study on resource productivity placed improved building energy efficiency first of 130 opportunities. The report identified potential savings of almost $700 billion by 2030, if we took advantage of new, improved, energy-efficient buildings. According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, buildings have been responsible for 38 percent of carbon emissions. Leading experts around the world maintain that the potential to build environmentally sustainable buildings is vastly underrealized.

At nearly 3.4 percent of the US GDP, construction, already a large industry, is growing to accommodate urban growth around the world. The industry, however, is fraught with waste and inefficiency. Buildings are thus not only the largest opportunity for emission reductions but also the most cost-effective. In fact, of the cost-neutral reduction opportunities across all sectors identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 90 percent come from reduction measures in the building sector. The potential to build and retrofit green buildings and infrastructure is thus enormous. Funding mechanisms, however, remain underdeveloped despite the promise of significant economic returns over time.

In sum the need for innovation in the built environment is widely felt, and cities are a primary domain for that innovation. The Internet has already transformed many businesses, and today it seems only a matter of time before the physical landscape catches up.

Companies large and small have been developing technologies—including sensors, software, and data analytics—to make cities more environmentally sustainable, livable, and functional. For example, some explore systems to reduce energy consumption or manage traffic flows on city streets. Others develop integrated solutions to help city governments, like IBM Smarter Cities and Cisco Smart+Connected Communities. According to a 2011 Cisco news release, the aim was to "transform physical communities"; a smart-city approach encapsulated "a new way of thinking about how communities are designed, built, managed, and renewed to achieve social, economic, and environmental sustainability." Large companies have the advantage of resources to fund the needed research and the pilot projects, but startups have the advantage of believing anything is possible. We talked to executives in both arenas and decided to focus on a startup to see how this might play out.

As we did so, every day it seemed a new innovation would enter the smart-city arena, some more outlandish than others. "The Smartest Cities Will Use People as Their Sensors: By networking individuals and their gadgets, urban apps will tell inhabitants what is happening all around them, in real time," ran a headline in Scientific American. Many had potential. For example, Trash Track, a Seattle-based innovation, reveals how garbage flows through and out of the city's waste management system, identifying items traveling around the United States to legal and illegal dumps. The results uncovered ways to improve compliance and minimize carbon dioxide emissions by transporting waste more efficiently. Real-Time Copenhagen generates data about shifting traffic and pollution patterns, as well as where nightlife is unfolding. "As Sea Levels Rise, Dutch See Floating Cities" ran the headline to a New York Times story about Dutch architects investigating the possibility of a floating Holland. There seemed to be no end to human inventiveness.

Sobering realities and exciting possibilities co-exist in an uneasy partnership in this space, but there is no question that assessing the earth's resources against humanity's growing needs poses an immense opportunity for audacious innovation.