A New Vision

After leaving the rally, Lewis returned to London and thought deeply for a few weeks about the mobility project and the opportunities in Portugal. It was then that he had the idea of building a "technology city" with the capacity to develop the elements he had previously advocated in New York and elsewhere—while still contributing to the economic development of northern Portugal. "Over the next month," Lewis recalled, "Celso and I met frequently to figure out what that might look like. It was a back-of-the-envelope proposition."

Lewis believed that Rodrigues's mobility concepts for urban environments like Porto's would not work without the new, efficient infrastructure that he and Hutchinson had contemplated. A new city, he thought, would achieve the critical mass to make the intelligent technology effective. Lewis and his growing team spent the next two or three months talking to some big companies. It was apparent that they had an interesting proposition. But, as Lewis put it, "We realized we didn't have enough land, so we went back and said that we needed more."

And they got more—much more. The municipal government, led by Ferreira, granted Living PlanIT the exclusive rights to purchase 1,670 hectares (4,125 acres) in 2008 at prerezoning values. Lewis started thinking about building PlanIT Valley according to the highest standards of efficiency and sustainability—offering an intelligent building system designed to minimize waste and increase the use of sustainable, renewable materials. He lost no time pulling together a team to form the new company.

Glimpsing the Emerald City

And the dream took shape. Soon PowerPoint decks were multiplying, capturing extensive plans—oddly detailed in some places and just as oddly vague in others—for how PlanIT Valley would generate and rely on sustainable, renewable sources of energy.

The vision encompassed a mix of centralized and distributed systems to produce, manage, and store several sources of renewable energy, including solar, wind, plasma, and biofuels. According to its energy strategy, captured in several large and growing PowerPoint decks produced in the Hotel Central Parque lounge, PlanIT Valley would produce 150 percent of the energy it needed and sell the excess energy to the surrounding region. Under the direction of Nuno Silva, Living PlanIT's chief scientist, the team also had a strategy for waste. The new city would minimize the creation of waste but convert the waste it did produce into energy in a regeneration plant. A water strategy similarly managed all aspects of the water cycle through harvesting, recycling, and integrated treatment of all water resources.

The team now described PlanIT Valley as a research city, where Living PlanIT and partner company employees would work collaboratively to develop intellectual property (IP) related to designing, testing, and selling "solutions" for cities of the future. Solutions meant innovations in IT, transportation (often called "mobility" by the team), construction, and energy that could improve how cities, or various components of cities, were built and managed. Living PlanIT's corporate partners would agree to set up offices in the city and to participate in the design, integration, and deployment of technology platforms in its physical operations. PlanIT Valley would thus become a "living laboratory," where high-tech companies would locate research and development (R&D) efforts focused on future cities. Ferreira was a believer, telling us in June 2011, three years after he'd first met Lewis, "PlanIT Valley will draw 250,000 people. Phase 1 is 37 hectares, 10,000 people. We don't expect 200,000 will come in 10 years. Maybe 20. We need to be practical and honest about our projections. The first phase is fundamental. This will happen within five to seven years."

While the details of the vision were not entirely clear to van Manen, he was impressed with Lewis's and Hutchinson's experiences in New York with DestiNY and especially with their ideas for using sensors to revolutionize the construction industry. "The nature of innovation," van Manen explained, is that "sometimes you have to break things or fail in order to know what to look out for next time so that you can make a whole set of new problems for yourself. As we went into 2009, the bigger picture of what could be done started to take shape."

The vision gathered momentum: Lewis and Hutchinson soon could be found explaining far and wide that PlanIT Valley would showcase technology solutions created by Living PlanIT and its partners, including intelligent buildings, "smart walls," and transport innovations such as autonomous and guided commuter and residential transportation. Connected by a software platform called the PlanIT Urban Operating System (UOS), PlanIT Valley would generate and store massive amounts of data in a large data center.

In fact, because the potential of sensors and data analytics was not yet widely understood, more and more of Lewis and Hutchinson's time seemed to be spent explaining it to potential partners or funders—influencing. In this way they were trying to give birth to a new industry, not just a new company, with their big and compelling vision. Listening, we conjured visions of wall-to-wall servers whirring away, of green parkways and stress-free living.

City Life

It wasn't all about technology. Besides serving as a laboratory and showcase, the new city would be welcoming and diverse, explained Bernd Herbert, vice president in charge of "PlanIT Life" who had worked with Simas at SmartCar. According to Living PlanIT's marketing materials, it would be a place to "live, work, play, and learn, a place that you would be happy to call home." The design specified a mix of homes—ranging from single family to apartment buildings—that would someday house 100,000 to 130,000 residents. Corporate partners would locate research groups and operate retail establishments there. A bustling downtown area would have a mix of offices, retailers, hotels, and restaurants. Parks and entertainment centers were also planned. Simas was talking with a local international private school and Lewis with the University of Porto to locate branches of their institutions in the valley.

In 2009 Living PlanIT projected 115,000 jobs in PlanIT Valley within five years of the start of construction. Jobs included those in large partner companies, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), construction and maintenance, schools, stores, and more. Because Portugal's prestigious universities graduated thousands of software engineering students each year, there was a deep pool of local talent to fill positions and keep graduates in the region. In late 2009 Lewis said that Living PlanIT would begin construction of the data center in 2010. Subsequent phases, representing a total investment of 15 billion euros, would start soon after. Before building began, the team would develop an Experience Center in a beautiful historic building in Paredes to educate the public about the technologies, methodologies, and companies located in the new city.

To plan the design of streets and buildings, the team turned to Pedro Balonas, a prominent Portuguese architect with offices on the riverfront in Porto. When we caught up with him on a sunny day in June 2012, he explained that he believed in the future. He saw no reason why a "rich cyberlife" could not function like a neighborhood. One day, he argued over lunch in Porto, we will all be global citizens: "No more guy-next-door. . . . Airports will be the office spaces of the future. Touch tables and intelligent surfaces will keep people connected." It was clear that he enjoyed brainstorming with the Living PlanIT team, in part, he explained, because they were so different from his traditional clients. "Our clients are normally developers who want fast profits without risk," he lamented.

When building the future, timing is everything. Living PlanIT, according to Lewis and Hutchinson, was founded on an idea whose time had come. As they saw it, a small group of people came together in an unlikely way at a moment in time and hatched a dream. But as van Manen noted, making that dream a reality required a level of collaboration on a scale that none had previously experienced—a scale in which multiple professions, companies, industries, and sectors worked together to innovate—Big Teaming. That would mean developing a shared language that everyone could understand. Sharing a vision right from the start was a crucial part of this process. As we will see, vision and charisma drew many into Lewis's orbit, but city building takes more than vision.

Engineering the Future

The civil and structural engineers understood the complexity of the undertaking. Some were busy studying other companies to find products they could use to build PlanIT Valley—the latest LED lights, for example, or the best concrete in which to embed sensors. Nuno Silva, whose Portuguese heritage includes his family's celebrated port wine, was in charge of an energy and innovation team that researched solutions for smart cities in energy, waste, water, transportation, urban farming, and anything to do with new uses of technology to enhance efficiency and livability.

At 18, Silva (in his late thirties when we met him) had entered the university to study production engineering while also working in R&D for the Portuguese military. At school his unusual technical skill did not go unnoticed; in his second year, he was asked to teach courses in artificial intelligence, computer-integrated manufacturing, and more. Graduating with honors, Silva continued working in technical design for the military; then he switched to the agro-industrial sector. There he worked on product innovations that integrated sensors and advanced analytics.

During that time the Portuguese government invited a few talented engineers to join a two-year program in Italy, and Silva found himself working on the design team of Pininfarina on customized vehicles, including a special project for the sultan of Bahrain. Returning home, he was hired to work on infrastructure innovation and served on a commission reviewing new technology for the Portuguese government. The living-lab aspect of Living PlanIT's work appealed to Silva, who tends to express his rare enthusiasms in a deliberate, understated way. "The Portuguese are naturally critical," he explained, "but we always find solutions. We solve problems." Silva was interested enough to make the leap to join Living PlanIT. "I wanted," he said, "the opportunity to build the future."