In the final of a trilogy on Barcelona’s past, present and future, we look ahead to how the urban landscape is now incorporating technology to make things easier for the people who live here.
I cycle to and from work everyday on a bright red Bicing bicycle, and I don’t really think much of it. A quick nip down Balmes, scoot through a couple of side streets, onto the Enric Granados cycle lane, plonk the bike in a dock and I’m at work in 15 minutes or less. The way down is much nicer than the way back up of course, unless I manage to nab one of the new electric bikes (which I often do, just a tad guiltily). As I said, I don’t really think much of it: it’s cheap, practical and means I don’t have to worry about lugging a bike up and down stairs everyday.
A bike is a pretty rudimentary piece of kit—two wheels, handles, a seat. It’s old-fashioned technology that has lasted, all gears and cogs and chains and oil. But Barcelona’s Bicing bicicletas are actually part of a much grander, high-tech plan than their looks betray, as their scarlet coloring makes them probably the most visible manifestation of Barcelona as a smart city.
Barcelona’s Bicing bike rental system is probably the most visible manifestation of Barcelona's smart city plan. Photo by Tara Shain.
A What?
Glad you asked. A smart city is a city, or part of one, that harnesses both low and high technologies to manage things like infrastructure with the aim of making life a little easier and more efficient for its citizens. Do think: a network of thousands of sensors giving the public real-time information about the city. Don’t think: your new TV that is linked up to Wi-Fi and lets you binge-watch Netflix every evening. When we hear the word “smart” today, we invariably jump to things like Amazon’s Alexa and fridges that can tell us our weekly shopping list, but the smart city isn’t just related to singular things, and neither is it solely reliant on cutting-edge tech.
“At the beginning the smart city meant technological city, in that you put sensors and cameras everywhere, all this kind of stuff,” says Oscar Chamat, a senior consultant in urban innovation with the Barcelona City Council, focusing on extending and improving the city’s bike lane network (I also highly recommend his Spanish language podcast on smart city innovations across the globe, CiudadHub). He explained to me what a smart city really is when I spoke to him earlier this year. “But with time, it started to mean putting people into the middle of the decision-making process. It is now as much a city that knows what the best technology is for itself, a city that can choose the best technology to help its people have a better quality of life. In all senses: social, economical, environmental. The smartest city is not the one that uses the most advanced things, but the one who chooses the most suitable technology.”
The misconception that a smart city has to be entirely futuristic is easy to make. But, as Chamat points out, it is as much about harnessing relatively low-tech solutions that are right for specific cities as it is the implementation of complex innovations. In fact, proper integration is the key, inputting appropriate technology to the city’s infrastructure ecosystem as part of a large, connected network with people as the nucleus. “I always give the example of Medellin,” Chamat continues. “They decided to put escalators in the mountain in the poorest neighborhoods. That is a stupid, old fashioned technology, but it was very intelligent to put them there.”
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Medellin’s now famous escalators allow vulnerable people from the poorest neighborhoods of the city to access jobs outside their neighborhoods, making the area less isolated and therefore less at risk of the narco crime which once made Medellin so infamous. Photo by Nigel Burgher (CC BY 2.0).
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Medellin’s now famous escalators allow vulnerable people from the poorest neighborhoods of the city to access jobs outside their neighborhoods, making the area less isolated and therefore less at risk of the narco crime which once made Medellin so infamous. Photo by Young Shanahan (CC BY 2.0).
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Medellin’s now famous escalators allow vulnerable people from the poorest neighborhoods of the city to access jobs outside their neighborhoods, making the area less isolated and therefore less at risk of the narco crime which once made Medellin so infamous. Photo by Nigel Burgher (CC BY 2.0).
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Medellin’s now famous escalators allow vulnerable people from the poorest neighborhoods of the city to access jobs outside their neighborhoods, making the area less isolated and therefore less at risk of the narco crime which once made Medellin so infamous. Photo by Nigel Burgher (CC BY 2.0).
I recently saw the newly-elected mayor of Medellin, Daniel Quintero, speak at Barcelona’s Smart City Expo World Congress, a world-leading event which is helping to put Barcelona on the smart-city map. The expo has grown exponentially since its inception in 2011, in line with Barcelona’s own smart-city evolution. Quintero spoke at length about the transformative nature of Medellin’s now famous escalators, which allow vulnerable people from the poorest neighborhoods of the city to access jobs outside their barrios, making the area less isolated and therefore less at risk of the narco crime which once made Medellin so infamous. Colombia’s second city is now a thriving, cosmopolitan place, with Pablo Escobar a tourist attraction rather than the genuine threat to life he once was. By becoming one of the world’s first cities to harness the power of the low-tech solutions to urban planning, it has become a petri dish for smart-city initiatives and a model that many other cities have followed.
While Barcelona’s escalators are not as famous as Medellin’s, the ajuntament here is also using low-tech solutions to help its most vulnerable citizens.
Barcelona's APROP houses are constructed from “last trip” shipping containers. Designed as temporary residencies for people who are having problems accessing housing, they can be constructed in three to five months on vacant sites throughout Barcelona, allowing tenants to stay in their local area while they find a new, permanent place to live. Photo courtesy of the Ajuntament de Barcelona (CC BY-ND 2.0).
High-Tech Good, Low-Tech Better
Barcelona’s stand took pride of place at the SCEWC19, alongside stalls from China and the USA, Huawei and Microsoft. Low-tech solutions were a big part of their manifesto, which focused on a humanizing model for how technology should be applied to the city. One section talked about how technology should be “put at the service of people to preserve their fundamental social rights and the main challenges facing the city today,” while another showed how they were creating “architecture oriented towards service for citizens.” This humanistic approach served as a fine counterpoint to the flashing lights and shimmering corporate dazzle of the event itself, proving tech events don’t have to be overly ostentatious.
The Barcelona Ajuntament presented one of its flagship programs in a talk on the new APROP accommodation scheme that creates temporary social housing across the city. The APROP houses are constructed from “last trip” shipping containers, with community facilities on the ground floor, one- to two-bed apartments on the upper floors and a green terrace on top. They are designed as temporary residencies for people who are having problems accessing housing, and can be constructed in three to five months on vacant sites throughout Barcelona’s ten city districts, allowing tenants to stay in their local area while they find a new, permanent place to live. They’re efficient, practical, cheap at €80,000 per structure and green too, using recycled materials and with a garden roof space. The first buildings are currently in construction in El Gotic, with a 186,43m2 site located next to Les Rambles on the way soon.
There is no Wi-Fi enabled interconnectivity, blinking censors or huge amount of data whizzing around within the APROP scheme, but the buildings function as a core part of Barcelona’s smart city innovations. These low-tech solutions to the city’s problems do exactly what Chamat referred to—they put people at the heart of the decision making process, ensuring that new programs and plans react to real social issues and are put into the places where they are most needed.
This particular program’s focus on development is something at the heart of many other smart-city projects across the globe. Diego Fernández, Buenos Aires’ Secretary of Social and Urban Integration, talked about the projects being undertaken to regenerate his city’s once infamous Barrio 31. The informal settlements—slums, favelas or shanty towns to you and I—made the barrio a place synonymous with narcotraficantes, violence and poverty, but with development schemes that arrived in conjunction with the smart city, Fernández and his team have managed to counter this. There has been investment in the area of some $320 million from the World Bank and other international organizations to build proper sewage systems, storm drains and improve its looks, too. One of the most interesting projects has been the creation of an “Alto Parque” in the style of New York’s famous “High Line.” It shows that making cities more aesthetically welcoming for its citizens is as important as practicality and technology when it comes to urban regeneration and development.
Barcelona doesn’t have any barris with the kind of poverty seen in Buenos Aires, but development is still at the heart of its low-tech solutions, responding to the needs of its people to drive the city forward. But high-tech smart solutions are at work in Barcelona too, and were given pride of place at the SCEWC. When looking around the stalls on futuristic smart bins, and AI powered autonomous driving vehicles, and after speaking to the people involved, I noticed that the same three letters kept coming up: IoT.
IoT is about making things easier by connecting everything together, and it’s not just confined to the house. Smart cities also rely on IoT in order to function effectively.
The Internet of Things
IoT stands for Internet of Things, a classic tongue-in-cheek Silicon Valley term which is now at the forefront of interconnective technology. IoT basically connects devices together, sharing their data so they can work in harmony. It’s something I spoke to Andreu Sanchez about earlier this year. He’s a part of the IoT Strategy and Product Development at Cellnex Telecom, Europe's leading independent operator of wireless telecommunications infrastructure. “Things are everything, and everything is a thing.” Sanchez begins, rather cryptically. “So when we talk about the Internet of Things, we are talking about the ability to connect things together. With IoT you have the ability to connect things like a chair. A chair doesn't have any type of connectivity on its own, but with an IoT device that you put on the chair, you can then see if it is moving, or if someone is sitting on it or not.”
A classic example of IoT working today would be the “Smart Thermostats” which have become ubiquitous in the modern home. Install one of these and you’ll be able to monitor your energy usage from your phone, turning things off an on when you’re out and about. IoT, then, is about making things easier by connecting everything up together, and it’s not just confined to the house. Smart cities also rely on IoT in order to function effectively.
“The Internet of Things on the scale of a city works in things like parking sensors,” Sanchez continues. “You can put sensors on the street, for instance, just working with batteries, and they will last for a long time, so it's not necessary to be there to modify or change them frequently. From those sensors you can get all the information you need to manage all the areas, so you can find out the occupancy, decide if there are too few spaces, or if you need to have more.”
Chamat says that IoT sensors are a big part of how the city's bike lanes function too: “What we are doing now is that in every bike lane in the city, we have one sensor on the street to collect data. How we decide where to put the sensors is based on connecting people with where they want to go, and to make sure that at least 300m from the door of everyone’s house there is a bike lane. The criteria is not technology, it is people.”
Sensors like Chamat and Sanchez described seem relatively rudimentary, but the information they give and the data they share can be used in ways which is anything but. Chamat showed me the nerve center of the ajuntament offices where he works, a room abuzz with screens and flickering lights that would not have looked out of place in the Pentagon. By using a series of interconnected sensors and cameras they are able to see what is going on in every street in Barcelona, while in other similar offices they are able to check the occupancy of every Bicing dock and the bike lanes too.
These innovations are revolutionizing the way urban planning works, and, Sanchez says, it’s in many ways down to the cost. “IoT at the end is the capability to connect things that until now were very expensive to connect and collect the data from. With IoT, this democratization of data, you can get it more easily.”
Smart Cities run on data, and it’s our data they use.
Hands off My Data!
The way Sanchez and Chamat have characterized these new technologies—data as “democratized,” smart cities as a “revolution”—makes them seem entirely utopian. But the invasive nature of these new technologies means they come at a cost. Smart Cities run on data, and it’s our data they use. The data that we give when we say yes to cookies for the 40th time each day, and the data that we don’t even realize we are handing over. There’s an argument to made for that not mattering: “Who cares if the ajuntament can see my route home everyday? I’ve got nothing to hide.” But the murky world of data privacy and the ways in which governments and big business are using them to influence our online activity and even the way we vote is extremely pernicious.
“We are very careful about what kind of data we are collecting and putting on our websites.” Chamat tells me, when I challenge him on the subject. “There is a kind of paradox, because we have an amazing amount of data which would be really useful for people, but for privacy reasons we cannot share all the information. For example, in 2018 we had a contest called “30 Días en Bici”, where you have an app and through it you voluntarily share the data of your rides around the city. From that we had all this data—your sex, your age, the time that you leave from work and where you go to—and it was amazing. But we always cut it so we don’t actually know who the person is. We never have the information of the names or anything, we are very careful with data privacy.”
Being careful with people’s privacy is all well and good, but how do people even know their data is being collected? How do governments and big tech manage online consent? “Well,” Chamat responds, “every day you do that. Every time you open a website, if you accept cookies, you have consented. If you Google what is behind that it is very interesting. There are some privacy rules that are longer than Hamlet! Who is going to read that? It’s impossible. This is a personal opinion—you are open to sharing your personal information with Facebook, with Google, with Twitter and you don’t care. But if public government does that, which is in theory going to direct you beneficially, giving an added value to sharing your data, people immediately say, “Hey! Why are you asking that?” Because it says public, it’s the government asking, but if it says private, people think it is fine.”
People’s mistrust of governmental data harvesting stems from perfectly reasonable sources. The terrifying scoops made by journalists like Carole Cadwalladr show how controversial elections like Trump’s and the Brexit referendum were directly influenced by Facebook and online advertising, all stemming from the sometimes illegally and frequently unethical procurement of data. At a city level, however, things are a bit less dramatic. From what I heard at the SCEWC, the data collection done at this level sounds less CIA and more a force for good (or at least that’s what they want us to think!).
I went to a talk on data ethics at the SCEWC19, assuming I would leave it making a b-line straight for a bunker, tin foil hat pulled down over my eyes. I left, however, surprisingly reassured. Theo Blackwell, London City Hall’s Chief Digital Officer, and Onyeka Onyekwelu, the lead engagement officer at the London Office of Technology and Innovation, both spoke at length about why smart cities are so reliant on citizens’ data, and the amazing things they can do with it. Their priorities were less about electioneering and more to do with stopping violent crime and speeding up the efficiency of the tube. It was about personal data being used to answer civic questions, to save people time from bureaucracy through intelligent, online processes. It was by no means tech for tech’s sake and it did not have a whiff of the kind of amoral practices that Facebook and their ilk have become stuck with.
While it would be naive to dismiss all worries about governmental data collection, for the smart city to run effectively, they need it. So, at this level, giving a little bit of trust is probably the smartest option.
A smart city is a city, or part of one, that harnesses both low and high technologies to manage things like infrastructure with the aim of making life a little easier and more efficient for its citizens. Plaça del Sol, Barcelona, photo by Oh-Barcelona.com (CC BY 2.0).
Barcelona Future
The smartest smart cities, then, are those which use technology as a tool, not as a goal. Jeff Merrit, head of IoT, robotics and smart cities at the World Economic Forum, said at the SCEWC that the dumbest cities are the ones who roll out technology without an awareness of what they are actually doing. That using technology for technology’s sake can be counterproductive, even dangerous.
Barcelona’s use of smart city technologies isn’t a story of things being rushed out for the sake of it and by any means. Humanizing tech may as well be their motto, with, as Chamat repeated so often, people at its center. It’s about city magnetism as much as it is about cold efficiency; about intelligent architecture and attractiveness as much as number crunching and data harvesting. That’s why Barcelona’s future is a smart one.
Harry Stott.
Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.