Learning in the Smart-City Trenches

When we started our research for this book in early 2009, smart cities were just starting to generate interest and excitement. We began by gathering primary and secondary data on several smart-city initiatives. We conducted interviews with architects, engineers, executives from technology companies, and government officials working on smart-city projects around the world. We gathered reports on smart cities from companies and think tanks, including McKinsey, Siemens, IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Forrester. We tracked articles about smart cities, which appeared in such sources as The Economist, the Financial Times, and Fast Company. This background research revealed that, from 2009 onward, a growing number of stakeholders were talking about a "smart-city industry."

As our interest deepened, we wanted a firsthand look at some of the people trying to build the future. Knowing our interest, Andrew Comer, a partner and director at the global engineering firm BuroHappold, introduced us to Steve Lewis, CEO of Living PlanIT, and to his cofounder, Malcolm Hutchinson. Lewis and Hutchinson gave us full access to their startup, then in the late-night, back-of-the-envelope, vision-hatching stage. Diving into the trenches with the growing team gave us enormous insight into the interpersonal dynamics of future-building.

The more time we spent at Living PlanIT, the more we realized the scope of the challenge. We were especially struck by the difficulty of finding a common language, a common understanding of goals and opportunities, especially between Living PlanIT and its partners. In contrast to prior treatments of smart cities (high-level views of the landscape), this book focuses on the psychological and managerial factors that can make or break the realization of audacious innovation. How people work together, particularly across disciplinary boundaries, emerged in our research as critically important to the ability of future-builders to realize their dreams of innovation, to execute, and to make sure shovels hit dirt and routers meet microprocessors in real, physical ways—not just on paper and in keynote speeches.

Our background research made it clear that smart-city initiatives were complicated cross-industry collaborations. We identified a set of primary domains that had to work together to envision, design, manage, and build innovative urban spaces—notably information technology (both startups and corporate giants), real estate development, local government, and architecture and construction.

Each domain comprised its own set of ideas, values, skills, time frames, and business models. Each would be integral to building, retrofitting, and managing the smart cities of the twenty-first century. Real estate, architecture, construction, and government have always played a role in urban development. But IT is a relative newcomer to the discussion.

To study this interplay of domains, we spent time with members of the Living PlanIT team. We shadowed them in meetings as they built a partner ecosystem. We visited them in London and Portugal. We ate plates of baked cod and Portuguese pork and drank glasses of Vinho Verde. We conducted dozens of interviews with company employees and with executives in other organizations working with them—including in other technology companies, real estate developers, engineers, builders, and government offices—to better understand Living PlanIT's unlikely journey forward in its quest to become a leading company in the emerging smart-city industry. It was not long before we noticed that individuals from these various domains didn't always see eye to eye.