SXSWORLD

T he last place anyone wants to live is a dumb city, so today's most innovative metropolises are taking creative steps to address problems with a level of tech ingenuity usually reserved for Silicon Valley. But when so many cities have trouble even engaging the public on local civic issues, what does it mean to be a smart citizen?  "It could be someone who doesn't own a car anymore, who's using connected vehicle services or autonomous vehicles. It could be someone who is running their home much more efficiently. The two biggest costs that have people have are housing plus transportation," says Sherri Greenberg, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs, adviser to Austin's Mayor Steve Adler, and a SXSW 2017 panelist.  At this year's SXSW, mayors and other rep- resentatives from cities including Phoenix, Long Beach, Louisville and Pittsburgh spoke about their cities' efforts to use technology to improve civic services and evolve the quality of life of their citizens. Yet in many ways, it is Austin that is writing the blueprint for smarter cities, espe- cially through one of the most futuristic ideas to hit the country in a century: driverless cars.  "Austin is the Kitty Hawk of driverless cars. Not only did the first truly driverless trip take place here in 2015, but Austin is hosting the first large-scale experiment with driverless cars," says Austin Mayor Steve Adler. "We're also doing a pilot program with delivery robots in downtown Austin. The potential that driverless vehicles have to transform how we get around could fundamentally change our lives, and sooner than we think."  The dream of a robot chauffeur still sounds like something from The Jetsons cartoon, but unbeknownst to most citizens, even their simple day-to-day commutes actually create data sets that help propel the driverless revolution, and in the meantime, decrease traffic burdens. One of the benefits of understanding these traffic patterns is that their analysis guides zoning decisions, which has led to designing more comprehensive neigh- borhood pockets of offices, residential, retail and entertainment. Once fully realized, these reduce the stress on cross-city traffic arteries.  "From a city point of view, one of the things that's always been considered a holy grail is origin destination graphs," says Ron Baker, IBM Distinguished Engineer for Smarter Cities.  That type of locational information can be used in countless applications. When cross-referenced with 911 and 311 calls, a city can better iden- tify and service hot spots related to crime, street repairs and public disturbances. By analyzing additional data points such as time, weather and day of the week, a smart city can find better ways to solve almost any problem.  The most prominent (and possibly unlikely) hub of data collection is Santander, Spain, a city of 170,000 that's been equipped with 12,000 sen- sors to measure everything from parking trends to park irrigation. The findings are available not only to government agencies, but also to any pro- grammer with a good idea to propose.  Recording this type of data, from traffic pat- terns to accident reports, might seem like it would compromise privacy, but cities takes steps to ensure the raw data is encrypted and never sold. Unlike almost every mobile app that is capable of tracking its users, even including innocuous games like Angry Birds, the analytics produced aren't reverse engineer-able, so companies can't look at the aggregate result and determine details about an individual.  This type of passive data collection is invalu- able to civic improvements, but the idea behind smart cities isn't just to leverage citizen habits. It's also about finding methods to bring more people into the conversation. One way that Austin hopes to spur participation is by adding a virtual component to city council meetings, so that people can log in and have their voices be heard without having to be physically present in a forum that can be far from their homes or requires more time than they have available.  Another important element of smart cities involves the private sector. Ask any business owner their biggest gripes about dealing with local government, and permitting will likely be high on the list. Austin is notoriously cumber- some in this department but hopes to learn from other cities like Boston, which hosted a recent hackathon specifically related to permitting. Goals like better identifying permit requirements, online application management and transparent review systems may not be the sexiest areas of research, but they are crucial to helping busi- nesses grow.  Since so many elements of this new style of city planning draw directly upon data sets gath- ered by new technologies, progress wouldn't be possible without strong private sector support. Austin's solution is the CityUP™ program, a consortium that brings together organizations like the publicly-owned utility company Austin Energy and Capital Metro, the city's public trans- portation provider, with tech players that include IBM and Amazon. The organization counts Greenberg and Baker as board members, and although both stress that this is just the begin- ning of a long road, CityUP is just one of the many forward-thinking partnerships that hopes to transform Austin.  Still, Adler stresses that integrating tech- nology is a tool to achieve a greater goal for the city: "It's easy to get excited about the shiny pen- nies—the driverless shuttle buses, the delivery robots—but what will really make us a Smart City, rather than just a city with smart stuff, is if we use technology to build ladders of opportunity to those communities that have historically been left behind. If we can use technology to expand opportunity, then we will truly be a Smart City." Austin's Smart City Report Card: How the Texas Capital Combines Civics & Tech By Dan Gentile Photo by Todd Arena/Graphic Stock

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