Mayor pens "Smart City Initiatives and Community Engagement in Spokane" article for Meeting of the Minds

Thursday, October 4, 2018

(for original article, see this link)

As Mayor of Spokane, Washington, I spend lots of time talking to people—delivering speeches, facilitating discussions, connecting at receptions, and yes, even chatting it up in the grocery store line.

I find people can connect easily with information about street projects, property crime, and economic development in the form of new businesses and jobs. These are things they can relate to; they are tangible to them in some way.

Smart City initiatives, like our Urbanova initiative in Spokane, however, are difficult to explain. You can tell someone you want to use data to create places that are safer, healthier, and more sustainable, but that doesn’t really resonate. They look at you quizzically, while they remotely close the garage door they accidentally left open or schedule a Facetime visit with the grandkids.

Usually, I have to take them out of the world as they understand it today and ask them, “what if?” What if you had real-time information on your use of electricity; how could that change your behavior? What if we could harness shared data about transportation needs in a given day to dynamically route freight traffic and free up regular commuter routes? What if we could install sensors on our street lights that dim them when traffic drops to near zero in the wee hours of the morning to save energy—and money—without impacting traffic safety? (We’re piloting that, by the way.)

Spokane’s Urbanova encompasses our 770-acre University District and serves as a living laboratory for smart city solutions like our dimming street lights that ultimately could be replicated around the world. This urban campus is home to more than 54,000 residents and daily commuters. Packed with students who are more open to innovative technology and space for trying new things, this is a great location for our smart city project.

Urbanova’s partners include our local power utility provider Avista, Itron, McKinstry, the University District Development Association, and Washington State University. That partnership has led to much of our early success; we are all committed to solutions that are replicable, scalable, and sustainable.

It’s cool, but somehow we haven’t figured out how to talk to regular people about it. If we’re really going to be successful in these efforts, that has to change.  We can’t write press releases that only talk to the people who are immersed in the Internet of Things or advanced analytics.

Consider our recent press release. The headline was “Gallup and Urbanova launch groundbreaking people-centered platform to enhance global smart city initiatives.”

Now, I—and probably you—know we are working on cutting-edge information gathering that is designed to provide a road map to what’s most important to our citizens. The projects we could pursue are almost endless. This will help us define what we should pursue first.  But, my citizens mostly know Gallup as the polling company, not as the advanced analytics company that supports data-driven decision making, and “people-centered platform” means nothing at all.

In August, though, we got a bit of a reprieve. Avista Development, which is related to our local power utility, broke ground on the “Catalyst” building. It will be the first net zero energy and zero carbon building in Eastern Washington and will include all the latest energy and environmental bells and whistles. The building will feature cross-laminated timber construction, solar panels, and a way to store excess energy for later use.

And it will house all kinds of smart people—students and professors from Eastern Washington University in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, and visual communication design; employees of Katerra, the CLT folks; and offices for McKinstry, known for its environmentally friendly building design.

Now, this building will be a physical place that we can use not just to talk about smart cities but to see some of these concepts in action. It will be located at the landing of new iconic arch bridge for pedestrians and bicyclists that will physically connect two sides of our Urbanova living lab. Today, that area is divided by a railroad viaduct, much as our communication is divided between those who studied computer science and those who didn’t.

I expect all of this to help us bridge the communication divide and lead to greater understanding.

Public acceptance, of course, is critically important for smart city implementation. More and more, our expenditures on public infrastructure will need to include technology investments in fiber, sensors, and other equipment. Our citizens also need to get comfortable with what information will be collected and what will be shared and how.

We have to stop talking about clouds—things that can’t be touched—and start talking about homes and work places and families and how our efforts can make things better or easier or less expensive. You know, things that actually mean something to people. We have to show them the future—and let them touch it.