UCL professor Michael Batty – Collaborative leadership for resilient cities of future
Cities are becoming smart not only in terms of the way we can automate routine functions serving individual persons, buildings, traffic systems, but in ways that enable us to monitor, understand, analyze and plan the city to improve the efficiency, equity, and quality of life for its citizens in real time. This is changing the way we are able to plan across multiple time scales, raising the prospect that cities can be made smarter in the long term by continuous reflection in the short term.
We talked with Michael Batty, a British urban planner, geographer, and spatial data scientist. He is the Bartlett Professor of Planning in The Bartlett at University College London and Chairman of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, which he helped set up in 1995. Batty has received numerous awards for his research on computer models of city systems, including two William Alonso Prizes, the University Consortium GIS Research Award, the Lauréat Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Gold Medal of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), and the Senior Scholar Award of the Complex Systems Society.
Professor Batty, in your fruitful academic work, back in 2012 you wrote about Smart cities of the future. A decade after, can you reflect and tell us how do you see the topic of smart cities today?
Well smart cities is a very loaded term. By this I mean that there is no generic definition other than saying that the term is used to describe applications of information technology to the contemporary city. A decade on from my paper 2012 I don’t think the term has been clarified much but it still resonates in describing new digital technologies that are influencing cities. We now don’t really believe that the ‘smart’ city is any smarter than cities of the pre-digital age. We are no smarter than we were in this sense. The other feature is that there is now a tendency to talk of smart citizens rather than smart cities.
When we are speaking about cities’ transformation towards smart cities, how much do the size, resources, and budgets actually matter? Do small cities have equal chances?
In fact, big cities have more resources and new technologies are likely to be more widely deployed than in small cities. But big cities are more likely to need IT rather than small cities. You don’t need much technology to live in a village, whereas if you are in a metropolis, you need IT to move around, to function.
Do you have some examples of the cities you would say are most progressive on the path of becoming smart cities? Can cities learn from each other in order to advance faster and smarter?
I think the idea of some city being smarter than others is a red herring, as we say, meaning that it is impossible to say one city is any smarter than another. Some have more IT than others but we all have access now to the global net and in this sense every city is linked to IT and in this sense is smart.
What are you currently working on?
I am working on building computer models of the entire UK so we can test out impacts of new infrastructure such as new settlements, new transport routes, the quest to reach net zero, and the ideas that our cities might be designed to be more sustainable.
Do you think academia and science are currently heard and included enough in the process of designing the cities of the future?
No, we need much more considered thinking about the future city. We need to recognize how complex they are and how difficult it is to intervene in their development to reach sustainable goals.
Do you see collaborative leadership and coalitions of academia, science, private sector, and policy decision makers fostering faster advancement towards carbon-neutral cities?
Yes, I am quite hopeful about the move to net zero. It may be too little too late, but better late than never, and I tend to think people are beginning to vote with their feet. Collaborative efforts involving academia, science, the private sector, and policy decision-makers are crucial in fostering faster advancement towards carbon-neutral cities. By working together and sharing knowledge and resources, these diverse stakeholders can help design and implement sustainable solutions, making our cities more environmentally friendly and resilient for the future.
For a better view of the urban developments of tomorrow, we have also included an excerpt from Batty’s Inventing Future Cities (MIT Press, 2018), with the author’s permission:
In short, the coming century will see a great transition from a world where most do not live in cities, which was the case some 200 or more years ago, to a world where everyone lives in cities: not from “City 1.0” to “City 2.0” but from “no city” to “city.”
If we are all to live in cities by the end of this century, then the very concept of a city becomes problematic, and a more generic descriptor would be what we would call “urban.” The great transition might thus be pictured as one from “nonurban” (even rural) to “urban.” As we will never know the future, the prospect of there being massive decentralization in terms of the way we organize urban society isa possibility too. In fact, George Gilder suggests, “cities are the leftover baggage trom the industrial era… largely due to the fact that new information technologies are continually breaking down cities and all other concentrations of power implying that small, cheap, distributed organizations and technologies will prevail.”
His vision of the future is one in which the electronic cottage is writ large. Such is our uncertainty about how we will invent this future that these speculations are as significant as any other.
In a global world where everything affects everything else, cities will merge into one another as well as relate to each other across vast distances in space and time. Moreover, their definition, certainly in physical terms, is ever more problematic, Where they begin and where they end is increasingly uncertain. This dilemma is writ large in the many estimates of the population of the biggest cities – but it goes for cities of whatever size. This problem has become severe since cities lost their hard edge-their city walls-over 250 years ago, beginning in Europe, as part of the move to the nation-state.
Technological change has accelerated this blurring, as well as the fusion of originally free-standing towns and citles as they have grown together. In characterizing cities, we will invoke the idea that cities are clusters where the cement that binds their components together into networks provides a useful model for their definition. Cities exist as part of a hierarchy of settlements, and this provides us with a way of examining the range of city types, from the hamlet and the village up to the metropolis and megalopolis.