Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities: A Futures Thinking Model [1st ed.] 9783030490195, 9783030490201

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José A. LugoSantiago

Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities A Futures Thinking Model

Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities “In this book, LugoSantiago reminds us that the challenges our cities face today and tomorrow will not be solved through conventional thinking, but by harnessing the power of human imagination and diverse thinking. This power, he insists, resides in the human’s innate power to foresee, anticipate, and with deliberate strategic action, shape the future. Given this ability, he shows us that the cities of the future will not just be the prodigy of mere technology upgrades but the best of our cities in the future will come through leaders getting smarter about using the Foresight lens to build sustainable human connectivity to one another and across generations.” —Jay Gary, Chair, Association of Professional Futurists “This manuscript is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding Smart City’s and Foresight Cities. José’s research consolidates and classifies Smart Cities. He takes this further and presents the idea and characteristics of Foresight Cities. José’s research and ideas lead to presenting the model he developed for Nine Foresight Leadership Practices and Sustainment Band in Foresight City. Also, of note in this book is the adapted application of the Johari Window as a Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool. He noted, “Remember, the aim is not for futures to be hidden, but for them to be visible, so we can deal with those futures appropriately.” José challenges the reader into not accepting how some are depicting the future, but to engage and be part of questioning and shaping our future.” —Diane M. Wiater, Adjunct Professor, Regent University “Our thinking is shaped by the images we can conjure up. When thinking about the future, our brain uses images available to us today, our memories. MRI studies show that the same brain structures are involved in both remembering and forecasting. Based on that, envisioning the possibilities of the future is limited by our mind’s focus on the present, and that boundary is hard to transcend. Using the foresight thinking approach, leaders can design a strategy that connects the future with today. However, without appropriate frameworks, they may default to limited sets of future scenarios informed by their memories or idealistic futures. Theories like Dr. Lugo Santiago’s equip leaders with a model and practices to create an expanded cultural life script that enables them to envision multiple futures and possibilities they may create.” —Yuliya Cannon, Adjunct Professor, University of Texas at San Antonio

“The concept of a smart city is relatively new and undefined, creating an intriguing space for exploration. In this book, LugoSantiago deftly outlines a thoughtful framework for examining the most critical questions related to the intersection between humanity, urbanity and technology. A focus on the beneficiaries of a smart city and its connected nodes keep us as honest as we are curious. With so much in flux related to the future, this kind of careful and considerate research is essential to define how we collectively will create the connected city landscape.” —Chelsea Collier, Founder, Digi.City

José A. LugoSantiago

Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities A Futures Thinking Model

José A. LugoSantiago Institute for Leadership & Strategic Foresight San Antonio, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-49019-5 ISBN 978-3-030-49020-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To God who has given me all things, and to my family who has given me the opportunity to pursue what God has put in my heart. To the generations that will come after us. I think about you, hoping we somehow influence the world to make uncommon decisions and ensure your future is better than ours.

Preface

Several years ago, I visited an organization to assist them with learning to think differently about their plans for the future. This team was made up of sincere and caring people who wanted to make a difference in their communities. The composition of this team was diverse. There were city officials representing different functional areas that served a city: heads of the fire department, police force, public works, energy and water solution providers, and some elected officials. The members of this team came together for many reasons, some out of curiosity, others desperate to find something new they could try. As we started our session, they were surprised about how different my approach was in regard to what they initially thought was going to be a session about “strategic planning.” The members of the team were ready to go into the typical vision and mission statements workshop, followed by the usual cascading form of strategic goals, objectives, and action items. But we did not do that. We were not going to do strategic planning—at least not yet. Instead, we explored social, technological, economic, environmental, political trends, and forces of change, followed by mapping these forces into their possibilities if we could extend them into the future ten, twenty, or even thirty years into the horizon. Then we briefly discussed how these forces could be disrupted by emerging alternate, and in some cases converging, futures. This team had never been taught to think this way.

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As the team members met such discoveries, they wanted me to come back to meet and speak with other city stakeholders. In preparation for that meeting, I dug a little deeper to prepare a more reflective presentation of the discoveries the team made during the initial workshop. This was designed to better frame what these discoveries meant for them and the cities of the future. As I researched, most of the headlines during that time pointed to the “smart city.” As I increased my level of research activity, I became fascinated by the topic of smart cities. If I think back in time (prior to this research I was doing for this team), I remember some of the discussions about the application of sensors and other information communications technology (ICT) in European cities. The topic would come up at times when I was visiting military bases in Europe to assess the readiness of infrastructure and the readiness of base programs sustaining hundreds of thousands of military members and their families in military bases around the world. (Military bases are just like cities, and most with budgets in the billions of dollars with mandates to support complex military operations and the lives of hundreds of thousands, including military and civilian personnel, and families). After reading headlines, diving into the popular media, and reading a few white papers on the subject, I was in, sold! The smart city is the future, and we need that future now—so I thought. In my mind, if smart cities were being built to improve the quality of life for citizens and our children, I was going to certainly be a proponent. As a matter of fact, I did become a proponent, but then something changed. As I began to attend conferences, talk to leaders in many venues, and was asked to meet with solution providers who wanted to make their technology attractive to cities, I started pondering about what I was seeing. Everywhere I went, and every conversation we had in regard to smart cities was about technology. Sure, one could argue that technology is one of those critical building blocks which may distinguish smart cities from others. But truly, when I first thought about smart cities, I was thinking the reason we were calling them “smart” was because the people in these cities were smart and were producing numerous kinds of innovative ways to solve city problems. But as I dug deeper and went into greater reflection, I noticed the time we were spending talking about people versus talking about technology was disproportional. When we think about the issues happening in our world, many of them existential risks, why are we spending all our time talking only about technology? Will technology solve all our problems? I was so perturbed by this disproportionate, one-sided narrative that I

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wrote a piece specifically addressing the dangers of such blindness. This was later published at the Institute for Leadership and Strategic Foresight. I was trying to see if I could begin to raise awareness about other types of needed thinking in the cities, especially the need to explore the future of cities in all its dimensions. But that was not happening. Is technology the only opportunity in the city? Technology can be a powerful tool, but it cannot be a master. We must think about the opportunities in the city as being more than technological to include social innovation, environmental reform and stewardship, education transformation, and government modernization. One of those big opportunities we must think about, but hear very little of, is citizen involvement. This is the way cities will become smart. As smartness is a human quality, a city not using its citizens to solve problems is not smart. A badge that says “Smart City” is insufficient because technology without human intelligence is not smart. Nevertheless, we see cities racing to be called smart, but without the smartness of its citizens. As I focused my eye on the narratives used by these cities, I noticed the exact same narrative that explains the prospects of technology for their journey to become a smart city. Furthermore, the future consistently looks the same: One future is the only painted possibility, and that is the technology future. So, now we go from smart city 1.0 to 2.0, and 3.0. Still, no one can really define what this means. I wondered, who is leading this one-focused narrative? Why are cities so pressured to become “smart cities?” Who is benefitting from this smart city’s future? Moreover, are there any other futures? Do we have the capability to think about them? If we have the capability to think about those futures, how will we lead ourselves to them? The questions posited above were real questions. I decided to go after the answers because, first, I was unsure that anyone was paying attention. There were many other hundreds of thousands who felt just like me: Hyped by what technology could do to solve our problems, and therefore, convinced the smart city was the way to the future. Maybe there were many other hundreds of thousands that turned out just like me: shocked by the discovery—the smart city was a playbook designed by a set of multinational corporations, and it has taken up a very profitable life of its own; however, the citizens have not been the ultimate beneficiaries. But now, are there any other options? The answer is yes. Now, cities have options to not just be a smart city, but to become a smart city 1.0, 2.0, and/or 3.0! As mentioned above, this is not a choice. It is the same

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PREFACE

sequester narrative intending to keep everyone captive to a compulsory route point. How can we break free? This last question was an especially important one. The answer allows us the space to create our own futures. But we cannot create new futures while we are thinking and are captive of one narrative which intends to hold cities hostage to the same technological paradigm that can lead to dire consequences. We must move to a new way of thinking, and that is Foresight City. This is the space where city leaders and citizens need to operate. Regrettably, no one has been talking about this space. It has been unexplored. The purpose of this book is then to move leaders from all city walks from a place where they were captive to just one path, one narrative, and one future, to a new place where they can be free to think differently, develop their innate human intelligences to grow a sense for the unknown and see the unforeseeable, and create the future they want to have. The future for our cities cannot be just the smart city. The future must grow out of the human intelligence and capabilities to choose and create. That future is infinite in its possibilities and paths. San Antonio, USA

José A. LugoSantiago

Introduction

This book has been delineated to trace a journey from the known to the unknown, so we can become conscious of the reality of the future we have been embracing, one without much thought about who is leading the agenda or the unintended consequences of walking down this smart city path. Truthfully, the cities of the future must be beyond the smart city. We have not been exercising our own human capacities to foresee and make choices. Instead, we have accepted a future that has been handed to us, and we have forfeited the right to ask, are there any other futures? And in anticipation to the question (and as some awake to the reality of what the smart city narrative has been creating), the old narrative has been polished into a new narrative that is virtually the same one (the smart city 1.0, 2.0, or even 3.0), still to keep cities captive to the same bound future. It is certainly time to move to a new citizen-empowered narrative, to the right kind of smart. Therefore, this book is about leadership and foresight, about how to exercise the strategic leadership foresight needed to ensure the future is shaped by people and for the people in the city. Recalling the motivations stated in the preface, we want to be able to answer very specific questions, choose among the infinite number of futures, and create our preferred future, and not blindly follow a future which has been handed down to us without much regard to who is really benefiting from the popular narrative. In other words, we want to make a leap from the Smart City to a new kind, a Foresight City. The right kind of smart is to be in a place where we can image the futures on the

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horizon in all their dimensions and choose for our citizens today and for the generations to come. Therefore, we must ask the following questions: • • • • •

Is the smart city the only future? Who is leading this narrative? Why are cities so pressured to become “smart cities?” Who is benefitting from this smart city’s future? Are there any other futures? And do we have the capability to think about them? • If we can think about those futures, how will we lead ourselves to (or away from) them? • How can we escape from futures that could make us and our children’s children captive? • What should we do persistently today for the future? To help answer the above-stated questions, ignite reflection, and complete the study published in this book, the available literature of the smart city was reviewed. Specifically, research published in peer-reviewed academic journals composed the foundation of the findings for the smart city. Remarkably, there are a lot of articles regarding the smart city, mostly all published in the last ten years. Out of that large pool of articles, only four percent was peer-reviewed. I selected this small portion of articles (about 104 journal articles). These journal articles were preferred over the remaining 96 percent. The peer-review process acts as a mechanism to validate research and confirms that the work of the authors has met research standards endorsing the quality and impact of their work in particular subject areas. Adding this type of scrutiny helps us stay objective and keeps our observations untethered from the popular narrative that has been dominated by influential actors in the smart city space. This book has been divided into three parts. The first part addresses our knowledge about the Smart City. In this first part, we explore the peer-reviewed literature to gain situational awareness. Chapters 1 through 3 make up the first part. Chapter 1, “A Definition Problem,” focuses on unveiling the origins of the term, followed by the myriad evolving historic frameworks and variations that exist even today, and ends with a summary and exploration of the different attempts made to define what a smart city is—the point remains unclear. Chapter 2, “From City to Smart City: Key Drivers of Change,” examines the transition from city to the smart city. In

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essence, it tries to answer why the smart city was the principal future that has towered over all other futures when various possibilities have been stated over the years. The chapter also examines existential risks which are influential factors about the reason it is time to think about city futures. As people begin to think about futures and have become more aware of private commercial interests shaping their world, the smart city discourse has been changing. The citizen is beginning to demand more control, and as this happens, a new shaping of the narrative begins to point to a future that is lined up to the old smart city narrative. This is the smart city 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, covered in Chapter 3. This chapter analyzes that discourse in light of the review of the literature and searches for a better answer for the futures (in plural) of cities. The second part of this book explores the problem of trying to define our future as a smart city future. In turn, we begin to introduce foresight into the discussion of smart cities, to truly see ahead, not just for today but to look across generations in regard to what could be unintended consequences of the current narrative. Here is where we begin our exploration of the future. Chapter 4, “Imaging the Future of Smart Cities,” starts with setting the stage for a discussion about the future of our cities based on the influences that are controlling the narrative and the possible paths. Then, the chapter moves to how the exploration of different futures for our cities would look like, stressing the points of strategic intent, key processes, signposts, and how we can begin to see futures on the horizon. This is meant to change the leader’s thinking paradigms and senses for discovering emerging futures on the horizon. That discussion is paramount to the understanding of how four plausible scenarios of the future were built. Chapters 5 “Techno City”, 6 “Green Spaces”, 7 “Notek City”, and 8 “Ascent City” describe four cities set in the 2050s. Each narrative-scenario bears the name of the city. These are interviews with the mayors of those cities, so we can see what they can tell us about their cities, how did they evolve to where they are, and give us a glimpse of life in their cities. We conclude each narrative-scenario with a brief analysis of what we were able to experience in each of the cities. The last part of this book is the transition. After the exploration of where we have been, the understanding of how futures are formed, and the changing of our own leadership mental frameworks about the future (discussed in Part I and Part II), there is still one more change in thinking we have to make: A leap from Smart City to Foresight City. Chapter 9, “The Transition: From Smart City to Foresight City,” therefore begins

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with questioning what kind of futures should cities have. To answer that question, the chapter explores the process of forming collective images. It explores and analyzes the collective images depicted in popular media to understand the imagined futures of the city already in existence. Then, the chapter questions the validity of these images considering how much change we can expect given small changes already visible in the world and city environments. Chapter 10, “Foresight City,” argues that we can form new images of the future and use these images to create collective futures. The chapter explores the citizen as co-creator and introduces Foresight City. Diving deeper, this chapter identifies four distinct ways of thinking in Foresight City, along with its three dimensions, the principles of interconnectedness, and future awareness acquisition methods that explore four futures (open, unknown, hidden, and blind). Lastly, the chapter culminates with a discussion of the citizen’s leadership foresight process. And lastly, Chapter 11, “Leadership Practices in Foresight City,” delineates a model for strategic foresight in the city. This chapter discusses the nine leadership foresight practices of Foresight City. The nine persistent practices break free the people of the Foresight City from tethered thinking and pull them forward into the image of the future they want to become. These practices are divided into three domains: Understanding, Anticipating, and Shaping the Future. These three domains are also constantly fed and refreshed by a sustainment band that is composed of two elements. Now that we understand the layout of the journey that we are about to embark, let us get started. We will begin with exploring the smart city. Specifically, we will attempt to understand the problem of its definition.

Contents

Part I Knowing the Smart City 3

1

A Definition Problem

2

From City to Smart City: Key Drivers of Change

21

3

Is There Such a Thing as the Smart City 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0?

33

Part II

Imaging the Future

4

Imaging the Future of Smart Cities

45

5

Techno City

63

6

Green Spaces

69

7

Notek City

77

8

Ascent City

85

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CONTENTS

Part III

The Transition 95

9

The Transition: From Smart City to Foresight City

10

Foresight City

109

11

Leadership Practices in Foresight City

127

Index

159

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Smart cities publication activity in academic journals, 1980–2019 (Source Author’s own making by using excel spreadsheet to plot the data. The chart depicts the articles published on “Smart Cities” from 1980–2019 by four academic database search engines—ProQuest, JSTOR, ABI/INFORM, and SAGE Journals. String “Smart Cities” searched on 10 May 2019) United Nations’ world population estimates (Source Author’s chart creation based on data reported by United Nations (2017); World population prospects; DESA Population Division, Custom Data; United Nations (2018); World urbanized prospects 2018: Key facts; DESA Population Division; United Nations) Unites States’ population estimates (Source Author’s chart creation based on data reported by United Nations (2019); Probabilistic Projections based on the World Population Prospects 2019, median prediction interval, 2020–2100)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

Population growth and cities (Source Public Domain. Creative Commons https://www.peakpx.com/66766/ people-walking-on-the-streets License to use Creative Commons Zero—CC0; United Nations (2016). The world cities in 2016. United Nations Economic and Social Affairs; United Nations (2018). World urbanized prospects 2018: Key facts. United Nations DESA Population Division) City types across eras of time (Source Author’s interpretation of the peer-reviewed smart city literature and the plotting of the city types discussed in Chapter 1, along with a description of technological influencers) A linear view of the future (Source Author’s own interpretation of the popular view of the journey into the future. Most people think of the future as a linear event, experiencing and planning the future as a sequence of timed events which happen sequentially, one experience after the other aligned across equally spaced time intervals) A more accurate sense of the future (Source Author’s synthesis of the Three Horizons Framework [Curry & Hodgson, 2008], Alternative Futures [Henchey, 1978], and Futures Cone [Hancock & Bezold, 1994]. Four types of futures [the probable, plausible, possible, and unexpected] cohabitate and compete for existence in three-time horizons [the past, present, and future]. The leader selects and aims for the preferred future at various stages in time, cognitively being fully aware of the conditions and likely existence and emergence of other alternate futures) Depiction of four Smart City scenarios (Source 1 Author’s purchase in DepositPhoto, bought on 26 April 2020, standard license commercial use; 2 Pixabay, free for commercial use; 3 Author’s purchase from DepositPhotos, standard license for commercial use; 4 Author’s purchase from DepositPhotos, standard license for commercial use)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.2

Interconnections of four domains (Source Author’s creation; Note A depiction of the interconnection between the man-made, the nature’s creation, the spiritual world, and the physical world. The systems within these domains are constantly interacting. All four of these domains and their interdependencies form one system. The new system is goal-seeking and equilibrium-seeking within other forces which act on this system. See also Image 10.1) Seeing and thinking through the magnifying glass (Source The author’s depiction of the citizen’s foresight process; Note Stimulus awakens the citizen’s sensory systems triggering the processes of consciousness and cognition, leading to deep thinking about what he knows and does not know. The citizen then explores the distance between these two poles to magnify the view of the future and get a sense for the unknown. In turn, the citizen can foresee what is not always foreseeable. When the citizen acts from the outpour of this process, the citizen acts with strategic foresight) Leadership practices in foresight city (Source Author’s creation. Note A generic model for leadership foresight practice. Foresight practice is divided into three main intertwined domains [understanding, anticipating, and shaping the future]. Within the three domains, nine leadership foresight practices exist. The domains are being constantly refreshed by two elements [seek multiple perspectives and scan continuously] acting as the sustainment band of effective foresight practice) Thinking holistically about change (Source Author’s adaptation of Molitor’s multiple-timeline model of change [Molitor, 2018, p. 14]. Note This figure makes use of two perspectives to think about change. The combination of understanding the change roadmap as change travels through Molitor’s three stages is combined with thinking about change in the social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal, and ethical perspectives to create one holistic view of how change happened in the past and how emerging change could happen and travel into the future)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 11.3

Fig. 11.4

Image 1.1

Image 10.1

Dynamics among variables in a system (Source Author’s creation. Note Sketch of the relationships among the variables affecting population migration and the relationship of this system to the environmental system in a city) The issues of city sprawl (Source LugoSantiago, J. A. [2018, November 13]. Note What will the future hold? City sprawl & systems dynamics. LS|EG. Using systems’ thinking, the author depicts the problem and effects of city sprawl. The depiction of the problem facilitates a discussion about how the emphasis on a system that is designed for the car aggravates the effects on the environment, the health of citizens, and promotes more city sprawling) The 11 most salient smart city words (Source Author’s diagram compiling the most used smart city definitions through a word generator. The size of the words depicts the repetition of these words in definitions. The more a word is repeated in definitions, the larger in size the word would be in the word cloud. This depiction gives readers a view of what seems as most seen or said about the smart city) Four domains within universal forces (Source Author’s depiction of universal forces acting on the four domains; Note As the unseen balanced elements that make up Fig. 10.1 exist and are only seen portrayed in this Image, the myriad of unseen forces of the universe are not always obvious, as in the laws of physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, equilibrium, gravity, vibration, inertia, each with their own unique balancing systems of feedback loops, nodes, and time-delay factors act on the four domains. Both the four domains and the universal forces become a system of systems. The interactions depicted and still those unseen create nonlinear responses which cannot always be predicted given the multi-nonlinear relationships, feedback systems, array and natural-forming architecture of nodes, and time delays in the system of systems)

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 9.1 Table 10.1 Table 11.1

Synopsis of scenario content Breakdown of smart city of the future image content Johari Window adapted as a Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool Nine leadership foresight practices and sustainment band in foresight city

61 103 117 131

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PART I

Knowing the Smart City

CHAPTER 1

A Definition Problem

Origins of the Term Smart cities are notably, cities. One cannot lose sight of that. Cities form the spaces where many of us live our lives. It is within cities where we conduct much of our business, meet socially with others, and wonder about the cultural norms sometimes separating us from others. In many respects, cities give us identity and form the economic fulcrum which helps facilitate social structures, quality of life, defining cultures, as well as government and political activism. There is something special about cities. In my years serving, leading, and studying leadership, I have come to visit many cities, mostly in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, the Pacific, and Southwest Asia. Each visit was met with wonder, even if it was not my first time visiting. Each city was painted with distinct colors of culture, geography, mobility mediums, streets, people, and, of course, forms of technology. The mix of those features made each of these cities unique, not one feature, but the mix of all of them. When I think about my experiences in the cities of Tokyo, Doha, Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam, Paris, Nancy, Barcelona, New York, and even my own city, San Antonio (Texas), I can see the aforementioned is true. One should not lose sight of that, especially as many city officials partnered with tech giants to jump into the race to transform their cities from uniqueness to a popular and undefined global type: the “Smart City.” © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_1

3

4

J. A. LUGOSANTIAGO

Although the literature in regard to smart cities is relatively new, the media increasingly has become saturated with news and commentary about the smart city. One prominent visual of this phenomenon is depicted in Fig. 1.1. One can see that the last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the number of published articles about smart cites found within academic journal databases. Yet, there is no universal agreed-upon version of the origin of the smart city term or what a smart city actually is. (The latter will be discussed in more detail in the next section.) What follows is a brief summary of the literature in regard to what several authors note could be seen as the origin of the term, smart city. In researching the literature to understand the origin of the term smart city, I consulted the pool of articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Remarkably, this pool of articles was only 4% of the volume of articles depicted in Fig. 1.1. These journal articles were preferred over the remaining 96% of the literature, which was not peer-reviewed. In the case of hunting for answers on the origin of the term smart city (and later in trying to frame and explore a definition of a smart city),

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9

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1,132

1980-1989

1990-1999

2000-2009

2010-2019

Fig. 1.1 Smart cities publication activity in academic journals, 1980–2019 (Source Author’s own making by using excel spreadsheet to plot the data. The chart depicts the articles published on “Smart Cities” from 1980–2019 by four academic database search engines—ProQuest, JSTOR, ABI/INFORM, and SAGE Journals. String “Smart Cities” searched on 10 May 2019)

1

A DEFINITION PROBLEM

5

the peer-review process was important. The peer-review process acts as a mechanism to validate research and confirms the work of the authors has met research standards, thus endorsing the quality and impact of the work in the particular subject area (Etkin, 2014; Roberts & Shambrook, 2012). Given the relative novelty of the subject area of smart cities and the knowledge generated from it, the prominence given to peer-reviewed articles facilitates the strength of answers to our questions. The literature on smart cities reveals the term, since its first appearance in the early 1990s, may have evolved from the different descriptions which attempted to describe a city’s aspirations through the use of technology. The most pronounced of them are the intelligent city, information city, knowledge city, digital city, and ubiquitous city (Anthopoulos, 2015; Dameri & Ricciardi, 2015; Lee, Hancock, & Hu, 2014). Other notable researchers argue the term was a reflection (and the combination) of the literature addressing “smart growth” and the “intelligent city” (Hollands, 2008; Vanolo, 2014). The term smart growth, for example, was grounded in the United States’ 1980s framework of New Urbanism, which then later dominated the legislative vision of smart growth since the 1990s and aimed at urban design and transportation planning agendas intended to create high-density urban centers (McCarthy, 2017; Vanolo, 2014). In regard to the term intelligent city, it described a framework of a knowledge economy which had human and social capital as its engines of growth; as such, it combined the driving forces of rising knowledge and innovation with the spread and use of the Internet to produce technological innovation which sustained economic development (Hollands, 2008; Komninos, 2011; Lee et al., 2014). In my research of the literature, one could see that the term smart city was defined inconsistently. Although it may have emerged from the terms described previously, once the term “smart city” emerged, it was not adopted uniformly. It was, therefore, used to describe concepts which had connotations of technology, interconnectivity, and/or cyber traits of the city. This was also corroborated by other international researchers of the literature, some claiming that much of the adoption was inconsistent with previous definitions which preserved a role for citizens in the process of a city’s becoming “smart.” The cementing of the term’s adoption seemed to have taken place in 2005 when a number of multinational technology companies began offering complex information systems to integrate urban operations and infrastructure (Klimovski, Pinteric, & Saparniene, 2016; Simonofski, Serral Asensio, De Smedt, & Snoeck, 2018).

6

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The move from several of these multinational companies to the smart city space was a strategic decision which proved profitable, especially as a response to the 2008 recession (Paroutis, Bennett, & Heracleous, 2014). But staying visible in that space, now well-known as the smart city market, was a struggle for many of these multinational companies and in 2009 IBM filed for a trademark which was approved in 2011 as “Smarter Cities” as part of the company’s campaign to position itself well in a market which continued to grow more contested (Söderstrom, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; U.S. Patent No. 79077782, 2011). The adoption of the term not only has grown in popularity for the reasons stated above as well as its underlying syntax assumptions (i.e., smart versus its opposite), but it has also raised a number of debates about what constitutes the framework of a smart city, and therefore, an evolution has occurred.

Evolving Frameworks The previous section briefly summarized how we arrived at the use of the term smart city. This use of the term attempted to designate a brand formed to simply identify cities which focused on the use of Information and communications technology (ICT) to better manage functioning of different aspects of city operations. Use of the term also strove to carve a passage for a city narrative which ended up creating a very lucrative, untapped market for key multinational companies such as IBM, Cisco, and Siemens. This last point merits considerable attention as it opened large economic incentives and a huge, new, and untapped market. And how big was that market? In 2014, for example, the smart city’s market value projection for the year 2016 was $39.5 billion, and for the year 2020, that estimate was projected to be $20.2 billion (Söderstrom et al., 2014). Those projections were not far from the real numbers. In 2018, the International Data Corporation (2019) (IDC) published its market research on spending done on smart city initiatives; the worldwide expenditure in 2018 was $81 billion, surpassing the 2016 projection by over $41 billion, with new projections for the years 2019 and 2022 of $95.8 billion and $158 billion respectively. The above-mentioned ways of thinking (cities’ ways of thinking about how they could employ the use of new technologies to manage city activities), combined with multinational business offerings contributed to a range of evolutionary city frameworks giving way to what many today call smart cities. In other words, a variety of frameworks have appeared

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over the years, although in recent years the smart city framework has been the most visible and aggressively pursued. The potential for lucrative endeavors, scholars point out, has led key multinational businesses to move into public/private partnerships to help fund and employ many of their offerings, while at the same time profit greatly from that large city market (Ferraris, Gabriele, Stefano, & Carayannis, 2018; Scuotto, Ferraris, & Bresciani, 2016; Townsend, 2013). (The reasons and tactics of those pursuits that made the smart city framework the lucrative pursuit will be later discussed.) But the smart city framework is not the only framework which has existed or still does exist today. Following are some examples of the outcomes of evolutionary city frameworks over the years: 1. The Digital City. This term was first noted in the literature in the mid-1990s. It first described virtual community spaces. Hence, these cities were also called, and are also known as, “virtual” cities; experts highlight that both of these terms, more specifically “digital city,” were borrowed from the virtual community experience designed in 1994 in Amsterdam to serve as a communication platform between the municipal council and the citizens of Amsterdam (Aurigi, 2005; Ishida, 2002). Digital cities were not considered an integration of the physical and virtual environments, and therefore, coexisted alongside the physical city; the digital cities integrated information about the city and formed the public spaces on the Internet where citizens, as well as visitors to the city, could share information (Kumar, 2016). The aim of this movement was initially crafted to create regional communities who could share knowledge and/or disseminate information pertaining to their local markets. This aim was a more pronounced characteristic of the early movement in the United States where the American company America Online (AOL) created AOL Digital City in 1995 as a type of social-network-based framework, tailoring content to the specific needs of the communities it served, leading to recognition in 1999 as a pioneer in the local content arena with a network presence of over 60 digital cities (Business Editors/HiTech Writers, 1999; Ishida, 2002). The movement in Europe and other parts of the world was more citizen-centric. Digital City Amsterdam, operated by a non-profit organization, Helsinki Arena, an initiative of the Helsinki telephone company in Finland initiated in 1996, and Digital City Kyoto (Japan) are two instances of such citizen-centric digital cities (Ishida, 2002; Kumar, 2016). Often, digital cities concentrated on the

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following: content services and information dissemination, communication and social services, and business transaction services (Lea, Yu, & Kannan, 2007). 2. The Information City. The literature is not abundant on the subject of the information city, although it is mentioned by several authors who either attempt to carve distinctions between information and knowledge in the newly emerging information economy of the early 1990s, or it is briefly mentioned by authors in their attempt to provide a definition for the term smart city. It seems in the early discussions of the information economy, the resurgence of the city as a producer of information was on par with the technological phenomena of the era, and therefore, those cities heavily invested or committed to that economy were labeled as information cities. The information city is similar to the digital city in that they exist within a technology perspective driven by ICT in order to deliver city services (Chourabi et al., 2012). Others argue the information city’s main purpose was to collect information from localities, arrange it in some kind of order and within material networks of information transmission and exchange, so information could be delivered and consumed by the public via the Internet (Lee et al., 2014; Storper, 1997). Differences between the information city and the digital city (previously discussed) may be hard to ascertain. The main distinction between the two was emphasis given to the information city as becoming the engine which organizes scattered information about the city. Thus, information could be transformed into knowledge, but additionally left “unprocessed” so as to provoke further reformation, transformation, diversification, and referencing to something other than its original state (Senem, 2015). The information city was further critiqued for lacking the social element typical of cities in their physical states, in other words, for concentrating the discourse on just information consumption (Sproull & Patterson, 2004; Storper, 1997). 3. The Knowledge City. Coupled with the advances in ICT, which were already transforming digital cities into places where information was ubiquitous, the appearance of the term “knowledge city” was first noted at the dawn of the twentieth century with the rising discourse about the future transition of work from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. Leaders in cities like Barcelona in Spain, Delft and Eindhoven in the Netherlands, and Melbourne in Australia realized the potential of a knowledge-based economy and published long-term plans between

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1996 and 1999 to execute their economic transitions (Edvardsson, Yigitcanlar, & Pancholi, 2016; Ergazakis, Metaxiotis, & Psarras, 2004). The term became most prominent in the literature after Barcelona’s publishing of its strategic plan in 1999 and subsequent position paper titled “Culture, the Motor of the Knowledge City” to describe the city’s cultural shift and unveiling of its version of the key characteristics of a knowledge city (Dvir & Pasher, 2004). Francisco J. Carrillo (2004), a pioneer with leading published research at that time in the field of knowledge cities, described these cities as the “creations of the new millennium” (p. 33) and further highlighted knowledge cities as the “the most substantial development in human evolution” (p. 41) because of their shift from a material-production era which distinguished all of human history in the past to a knowledge-production era, something which was not yet a reality but was truly developing. The knowledge city also brought in for the first time (at least it is the most prominent example of) a discussion about how its underlying framework needed to be supported by an entire society (not just technology) with an architecture which included smart decisions in at least five key areas: political, strategic, financial, technological, societal, and environmental (Ergazakis et al., 2004; Huston, & Warren, 2013). There was a clear understanding in the literature that the investment in human capital was one of the most important decisions cities could do. All other investments in technology, infrastructure, mobility, private-public partnerships, processes, and connections to the global economy were linked to support the human element (Edvardsson et al. 2016; Ergazakis, Metaxiotis, & Psarras, 2006; Huston, & Warren, 2013). This would be the path for cities to remain competitive in the future and beyond. 4. The Ubiquitous City. This is one of the newest terms used to describe modern cities, and it is most well-known for its association with the development of ubiquitous, or pervasive, city projects, especially those pertaining to the development of new cities in South Korea between 2008 and the present, the most notable and written-about ones being New Songdo and Dongtan. This type of city is heavily invested in the use of ICT and ubiquitous infrastructure. The ubiquitous is city built on the idea that ubiquitous computing and associated technologies, networks, sensors, devices (the device itself and/or the group of interconnected devices) can be integrated with its physical environment at the city level (Schumann & Stock, 2015). This type of interconnectivity, researchers note, works to link wired and wireless devices, sensors and embedded

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invisible computing devices which can perform a multitude of activities like detecting physical properties of runoff water mixed in with potable water, in a manner allowing information to be omnipresent because communication is constantly happening person to object, object to object, or person to person. In this manner, the ubiquitous city is providing an integrated environment where citizens and city managers have the information they need or want anytime and from anywhere (Kshetri, Alcantara, & Park, 2014; Lee, Yigitcanlar, Han, & Leem, 2008). Some authors write about ubiquitous cities as a step past the smart city, claiming that building a smart city is a step toward ubiquitous city development (Rad, Sadeghi-Niaraki, Abbasi, & Choi, 2018). One factor which plays into this association to smart cities is that the ubiquitous city uses technology heavily and toward the benefit of its citizens’ needs. This association can be said to have lost connections to citizens because the most prominent of the cities have been built from scratch with little participation from its citizens and most of the effort has been done as the output of a consortium of private companies, as in the instance of New Songdo (Korea)—one of the most well-known examples of this point. On the other hand, other experts see the ubiquitous city as an extension of the digital or information city (Lee et al., 2014). This association can be said to have its roots in the delivery of information, in making information available to citizens through the interconnectivity of the ICT infrastructure, a key characteristic of both the digital and information city. 5. The Intelligent City. This label was perhaps most known and brought to the popular media stage with Singapore’s anticipation of the role of IT in its new economy back in the 1990s and the subsequent vision to transition the economy from an industrial hub to one grounded on ICT. The government of Singapore invested heavily in ICT, and led policy and infrastructure efforts to diffuse technology in every part of its activities, from filing taxes via electronic medium (introduced in 1998) to other public services and citizens’ lives. Singapore ultimately received the first “Intelligent City of the Year” in 1999 awarded by the World Teleport Association and Telecommunications Magazine in recognition of its use of information technology to grow the economy and improve the welfare of its citizens (Arun & Mui, 2000; Vanolo, 2014). It is worth noting that intelligent city initiatives, as in the example of Singapore, were characterized by their aspiration toward making digital technology part of a citizen’s and government’s way of doing business and every day living. In this sense, the intelligent city is not a mere introduction

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of sensors and other digital technology (characteristically an emphasis of many smart city initiatives as well as digital and ubiquitous cities). But the intelligent city focuses on creating a rich environment for citizens via solutions which are a combination of cognitive and intellectual capital power existent in the cities, while being driven by the potential benefits of ICT. In turn, the intelligent city requires broad acceptance and ICT absorption within constituents and the city’s greater urban environment (Komninos, 2011; Kourtit, 2017). Two other points have been described as crucial for the existence of the intelligent city. One is the existence of an innovation ecosystem connected to global innovation networks, as well as bottom-up innovation through co-creation labs, some known as Living Labs (Komninos, 2011; Komninos & Tsarchopoulos, 2013). The second point is the achievement of intelligence through processing of real-time data produced from the instrumentation, interconnectivity, and open integration layers of infrastructure in the city (Letaifa, 2015; Zygiaris, 2013). The intelligent city is the one described as most aligned with the concept of a smart city in the literature, and it is no coincidence why the intelligent and smart labels are sometimes used interchangeably (Dameri & Ricciardi, 2015; Hollands, 2008; Komninos, 2011). That, of course, creates even more confusion with regard to what we can say a smart city really is.

Attempts to Define What Smart Cities Are The previous discussion served two purposes. First, it presented some twists and turns in the journey to use of the term, smart city, enabling our awareness of the insinuations which come from using the term, while, at the same time, hinting to the underlying invisible forces at play when we use the term loosely. Secondly, the previous discussion presented a surmounting body of knowledge which speaks to an evolution in urbanism tied to advances in technology and thought-processes about what constitutes a future city built for a new form of economy, mainly a knowledge-based economy. Each of those cities previously discussed is part of an evolutionary space which was tied to a set of technologies. As technologies advanced, and the cost was more appropriate, the door opened wider to welcome a new set of players with a new set of ideas about how technology could be embedded in the city to satisfy different purposes. Hence, the different kinds of cities emerged. I would like to note that the discussion of those cities was not all-inclusive. There were other terms used sporadically in the literature, such as the “wired city”,

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the “sustainable city”, and the “innovation city” which were not included in the previous discussion, because the ones discussed represented the majority of the literature and were more closely aligned with what—in most popular language—people have begun to understand as a smart city. One notable aspect in the literature of all the peer-reviewed academic articles studied is that all of them claim there is a lack of consensus about the definition of the smart city. There are many definitions. As a matter of fact, a great number of articles used the word “smart” interchangeably with other adjectives, adding even more confusion to the definition of a smart city. In several cases, the words “intelligent” and “smart” were used in the same article to describe the smart city. Other articles, as highlighted earlier, used the words “ubiquitous” and “smart,” letting us know and highlighting that the ubiquitous city is also a smart city. But one could conclude the same for other types of cities, namely that information, digital, and knowledge cities are also smart cities because they follow similar descriptive forms attributed to all of these types of cities, while at the same time they are also being described as smart, especially from the year 2008 to the present. It would not be difficult to think of them otherwise, especially when different authors in the reviewed literature have agreed no single definition exists. It seems the agreement in the understanding that there is no one definition gives license to accept these cities, and those other cities rushing to become part of the popular movement for branding and marketing purposes, like smart cities. Here are some brief examples of the instances highlighted above where leading scholars and experts in the literature explained the differences, similarities, and confusions. Early researchers studying the rise of smart cities in Europe concluded the term smart city was used to describe anything from an information technology district to a city which underlined the education (or smartness) of its individuals (Giffinger et al., 2007). Hollands (2008), in his classic and most-cited essay titled, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?” wrote about the problematic condition of grouping cities under one label (in this instance, the smart label) when these cities, specifically the digital, information, intelligent, cyber, and even creative cities were conceptualized with technologies arranged to fulfill different purposes. Hollands further goes on to write about the intelligent city as most aligned to the concept of smart city and interchanges the word “smart” with “intelligent” in various places throughout his famous essay.

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Fast forward to the year 2012 at which time we see a progression in the sophistication of the smart city definition. During the 45th International Conference on System Sciences, scholars Chourabi et al. (2012) presented six different working definitions for a smart city, and later concluded the smart city label represented an “instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent city” (p. 2290). This conclusion highlighted, obviously, the intelligent city as a smart city (suggesting the intelligent city as the core of the smart city concept, as Hollands had also done), but also had the elements of instrumental and interconnectedness as part of that definition. These last two elements are also the backbone of the digital, the information, and the ubiquitous city as discussed in the previous section. The important feature of this definition is that it signals an evolution from an emphasis on ICT to an emphasis on the potential of the collective human capital, without losing the technological aspects necessary to provide a wider area of inclusion, farther reach, and deeper insights which are now possible through the advances and integration of technology. Most recently, scientists and scholars began to more formally address smart city definitions in terms of a system of systems. For example, Fernandez-Anez, Fernández-Güell, and Giffinger (2018) offered a conceptual view of the smart city as “an integrated and multi-dimensional system” (p. 6). This idea is not new. Researchers point out the idea of systems thinking had a great influence on urban theory in the 1960s but seemed to have resurged around 2008 with IBM’s effort to create a narrative about how cities are a constitution of urban systems which can be measured and optimized (Söderstrom et al., 2014). Most of us who teach or study system dynamics understand that systems are unique entities. In simple terms, they are a mixture of dynamic feedback loops which embed and integrate a set of components (also called variables or actors). This integration is part of the interaction, interdependencies, and mutual connections of these components. The interactions, interdependencies, and mutual connections create a whole that is self-seeking; it seeks, especially in natural systems, a balance in order to properly thrive and survive. If one takes just one component out of the system, as in the cardiovascular system, one breaks its interdependence and mutual connectivity; the system ceases to exist or ultimately collapses. Use the bicycle as another instance of a system. The system of steel frame, chain, pedals, tires, and steering mechanism, among other components, completes a system we know as a bicycle. We take out a tire or the chain which connects the

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chain-ring-crank-pedal mechanism to the rear tire’s free-wheel mechanism, and the bicycle’s usefulness ceases to exist. In the definition posited by Fernandez-Anez et al. (2018), the system’s variables can be defined as the interaction of multi-stakeholders, partnerships, the role of governance, technology, and the urban challenges faced by these intertwined components. The aim of this system as alluded to by this definition is the tackling of urban challenges to create a condition of balance (economic prosperity and better quality of life for citizens). Even if we cannot furnish a standard definition for a smart city, we can identify a set of common elements. This is similar to the bicycle example used previously to explain systems. The fact that nowadays we cannot settle on a global, standard definition of a bicycle which covers all of its instances (think about all the various types of bicycles which exist today, especially the booming of the electric bicycle, hybrid, and multiple varieties of the traditional), does not mean we don’t know what they are and how they could be used to extend our human capabilities. Although a much more complex organism, the same can be said about the smart city. Some have identified common elements which can help us frame what they are, but one has to be mindful of the deceptive thinking traps embedded in some of these element definitions.

Deceived by Its Definition Elements In reading over 80 peer-reviewed articles in the published literature about smart cities, 21 articles highlighted a set of definitions quoted across most of the existing literature. From those 21 articles, 15 authors had definitions which were a consortium of elements borrowed from one another. Some main influencers were lead researchers including Caragliu, Del Bo, and Nijkamp (2011), Giffinger et al. (2007), Hollands (2008), Komninos, (2011), and Komninos & Tsarchopoulos (2013). The early definitions heavily referenced technological aspects of the cities; technology was the main driver. But as time passed and the discourse began to involve narratives about the information economy and what makes cities intelligent, the definitions began to expand to the notion of cocreation with a multitude of stakeholders which included businesses and the citizenry. The 11 most salient definitions of smart city were placed into a word cloud generator to see what these definitions could reveal regarding the most used elements (see Image 1.1). In the definitions, the following

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Image 1.1 The 11 most salient smart city words (Source Author’s diagram compiling the most used smart city definitions through a word generator. The size of the words depicts the repetition of these words in definitions. The more a word is repeated in definitions, the larger in size the word would be in the word cloud. This depiction gives readers a view of what seems as most seen or said about the smart city)

elements were most prominent: information and communications technology (ICT), city infrastructure to support ICT, instrumentation (to capture and integrate real-world and real-time data via sensors and other smart devices), networks to interconnect technology, people, and information in order to make them truly mobile and ubiquitous, as well as smart governance which seeks co-creation and more involvement from its citizens to create innovation, and furthermore, governance which makes smart living (places to meet and live, parks, cultural facilities, and housing.) and the environment a priority in order to build future city sustainability. The most intriguing part in examining the elements of these smart city definitions and the narratives about smart cities is these elements can be organized into industry clusters: information technology, electronics, mobility, governance, and construction. As a matter of fact, a review of the smart city literature performed by the Technological Education Institute of Thessaly, Greece in 2015 uncovered what appeared to be a prominent meeting of the industries in the smart domain, namely

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the ICT, construction, and electronics industries (Anthopoulos, 2015). These industries have seen a booming market and have taken part in this huge space in great measure. In 2017, for example, physical infrastructure, mobility, energy, and resource efficiency accounted for 76% of all the smart city projects worldwide (IHS, 2017). On the other hand, some things did not clearly stand out in these smart city definitions. Although the word sustainable appeared several times in the definitions (see the relative size of the word “sustainable” in the word cloud for a sense of the proportion of definition usage), the smart city literature reveals a deficiency in long-term planning. Much of the literature and especially the popular media is congested with mobility, broadband, infrastructure, tons of technology applications and software, sensors, and other electronic media solutions. Still very few cities have taken on the serious employment of a long-term strategy. Those which have done so, as in the case of Barcelona and Vienna, have ended up transforming their cities into the envy of others who have self-proclaimed as smart cities. Several scholars have acknowledged strategic planning as the vision of the future, but also have identified in the smart city space this strategic planning as “unexplored” (Angelidou, 2015; Gupta, Chauhan, & Jaiswal, 2019). In thinking about smart cities, there is a greater need to think beyond the silos of the specific industries and begin to draft plans for success. There is no doubt other elements are important. Research has shown that while open data, smart infrastructure, and several types of mobile identifiable apps, a smart city master strategic plan which defines the city’s journey completes minimum requirements for a city to be considered smart (Anthopoulos, 2015). When something as basic as a roadmap is not employed, one is bound to get lost in the friction of the day-to-day battles. Of more consequence is the employment of a roadmap delineating how a city will achieve its smartness. Otherwise, cities will continue to chase the latest fad for the sake of publicity, leading to the profitable enterprise of big multinational corporations with minimum returns for the citizen. That’s certainly not smart. Technology alone cannot compensate for thinking and leadership. Today, we don’t need smart cities, we need smart leaders. And because time is limited, the complexities are vast and accelerated, and the threats continue to rise, we don’t need smart in the city, we need foresight in the city.

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References Angelidou, M. (2015). Smart cities: A conjuncture of four forces. Cities, 47, 95–106. Anthopoulos, L. G. (2015). Understanding the smart city domain: A literature review. In M. Rodríguez-Bolívar (Eds.), Transforming city governments for successful smart cities: Vol 8. Administration and Information technology (pp. 9–21). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03167-5_2. Arun, M., & Mui, T. Y. (2000). Singapore: The development of an intelligent island and social dividends of information technology. Urban Studies, 37 (10), 1749–1756. Aurigi, A. (2005). Competing urban visions and the shaping of the digital city. Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, 18(1), 12–26. Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers. (1999, July 21). AOL’s digital city named best city guide; company receives local internet service award, LISA. Business Wire. Caragliu, A., Del Bo, C., & Nijkamp, P. (2011). Smart cities in Europe. Journal of Urban Technology, 18(2), 65–82. Carrillo, F. J. (2004). Capital cities: A taxonomy of capital accounts for knowledge cities. Journal of Knowledge Management, 8(5), 28–46. Chourabi, H., Nam, T., Walker, S., Gil-Garcia, J. R., Mellouli, S., Nahon, K., & Scholl, H. J. (2012, January). Understanding smart cities: An integrative framework. In System Science (HICSS), 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 2289–2297). IEEE. Dameri, R. P., & Ricciardi, F. (2015). Smart city intellectual capital: An emerging view of territorial systems innovation management. Journal of Intellectual Capital, 16(4), 860–887. Dvir, R., & Pasher, E. (2004). Innovation engines for knowledge cities: An innovation ecology perspective. Journal of Knowledge Management, 8(5), 16–27. Edvardsson, I. R., Yigitcanlar, T., & Pancholi, S. (2016). Knowledge city research and practice under the microscope: A review of empirical findings. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 14(4), 537–564. Ergazakis, K., Metaxiotis, K., & Psarras, J. (2004). Towards knowledge cities: Conceptual analysis and success stories. Journal of Knowledge Management, 8(5), 5–15. Ergazakis, K., Metaxiotis, K., & Psarras, J. (2006). Knowledge cities: The answer to the needs of knowledge-based development: Very informal newsletter on library automation very informal newsletter on library automation. Vine, 36(1), 67–84. Etkin, A. (2014). A new method and metric to evaluate the peer review process of scholarly journals. Publishing Research Quarterly, 30(1), 23–38. Fernandez-Anez, V., Fernández-Güell, J. M., & Giffinger, R. (2018). Smart City implementation and discourses: An integrated conceptual model. The case of Vienna. Cities, 78, 4–16.

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Lee, S., Yigitcanlar, T., Han, J., & Leem, Y. (2008). Ubiquitous urban infrastructure: Infrastructure planning and development in Korea. Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice, 10(2), 282–292. Letaifa, S. B. (2015). How to strategize smart cities: Revealing the SMART model. Journal of Business Research, 68, 1414–1419. McCarthy, W. P. J. (2017). How smart has smart growth been? Real Estate Issues, 53–68. Paroutis, S., Bennett, M., & Heracleous, L. (2014). A strategic view on smart city technology: The case of IBM smarter cities during a recession. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 89, 262. Rad, T. G., Sadeghi-Niaraki, A., Abbasi, A., & Choi, S. (2018). A methodological framework for assessment of ubiquitous cities using ANP and DEMATEL methods. Sustainable Cities and Society, 37, 608–618. Roberts, T. J., & Shambrook, J. (2012). Academic excellence: A commentary and reflections on the inherent value of peer review. Journal of Research Administration, 43(1), 33–38. Schumann, L., & Stock, W. G. (2015). Acceptance and use of ubiquitous cities’ information services. Information Services & Use, 35(3), 191–206. Scuotto, V., Ferraris, A., & Bresciani, S. (2016). Internet of things—Applications and challenges in smart cities: A case study of IBM smart city projects. Business Process Management Journal, 22(2), 357–367. Senem, K. K. (2015). An attempt at conceptualizing the information city, its spaces and their potentials // enformasyon kenti, mekanları ve potansiyelleri üzerine bir kavramsalla¸stırma denemesi. Megaron, 10(1), 1–13. Simonofski, A., Serral Asensio, E., De Smedt, J., & Snoeck, M. (2018). Hearing the voice of citizens in smart city design: The CitiVoice framework. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 61, 1–14. Söderstrom, O., Paasche, T., & Klauser, F. (2014). Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City, 18(3), 307–320. Sproull, L., & Patterson, J. F. (2004). Making information cities livable. Communications of the ACM, 2(47), 33–37. Storper, M. (1997). The city: Centre of economic reflexivity. The Service Industries Journal, 17 (1), 1–27. Townsend, A. M. (2013). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. New York, NY: W. W Norton. Vanolo, A. (2014). Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies, 51(5), 883–898. U.S. Patent No. 79077782. (2011). International Business Machines Corporation. Washington, DC: Patent and Trademark Office. Zygiaris, S. (2013). Smart city reference model: Assisting planners to conceptualize the building of smart city innovation ecosystems. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 4(2), 217–231.

CHAPTER 2

From City to Smart City: Key Drivers of Change

The Smart City Divide The discussion in Chapter 1 began to open our investigative lenses into what really is causing this race toward the smart city. When one compares the previous chapter’s discussion in regard to how we started to use the term “smart city” in addition to the analysis of the points of view of several authors in the peer-reviewed literature, and compares them to what is being represented in the local and global media, one can begin to see the contrasts. It is easy to start asking oneself several questions, mainly: What or who is really driving the change? Is the change a necessary endeavor or a fad of the time? And lastly: Who will benefit the most from such change? I believe the answer to these three questions explores the real story about smart cities. The first question is an interesting one. What or who is really driving the change? As just mentioned, the popular media and the authors in the peer-reviewed literature have different points of view as to the answer to that question. In short, the answer is not clear cut. For example, the popular media has kept a steady narrative and thrust focused on the need to adopt a smart city framework when clear benefits and even clear reasons as to why a city must become “smart” are still not obvious (Bibri & Krogstie, 2017; Söderstrom, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014). In reference to what a smart city framework looks like, the predominant notion is the smart city framework aims at the integration of ICT solutions, sensors, © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_2

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other physical devices, data, and human insights, as well as the IoT (Internet of Things) to improve city services and connect those services with citizens in order to improve life in the city. This idea that the framework for a smart city can improve services and, consequently, the quality of life in the city has been one of the main thrusts of the popular narrative. Of course, it’s a noble pursuit! Another is the popular publication of indexes ranking cities according to their city smartness. Such examples include reputable organizations which repeatedly laud smart cities as cases of what the future should be. One example is the World Economic Forum, which in 2017 depicted the world’s best-run cities as smart cities and proceeded to describe the criteria of what makes a great/smart city using the language mostly employed by big multinational corporations. The “Big Seven” cities described as the best-run cities were all smart cities (Gray, 2017). In another article also published by the World Economic Forum, smart technology was described at the forefront of helping cities fight crime and terrorism (Muggah, 2018). Again, who would not like his or her city to be a safe place to live? One thinks about the second question initially posed: “Is the change a necessary endeavor or is the change a fad of the time?” We could easily be tempted to answer with it is a necessary endeavor—although this is only partially correct. Not only can smart technologies help us be safer in our cities, but they can also help us be wiser stewards of existing infrastructure, the environment, and even our time, especially as these technologies have promised to facilitate better warning of environmental events, make us aware of mobility options, and even help us make better personal decisions ranging from where to park, to where, when, and what to eat. All these are also substantial narratives in the popular smart city space. In addition, others note the investments in infrastructure to move the city to the smart city space contributes to social and economic prosperity because it encourages corporations to relocate and do business in the city, consequently providing economic prosperity for citizens and economic power for the government to further improve the living environment and overall quality of life (Yeh, 2017). While the popular narrative sounds principled, researchers, as well as practitioners, tend to be skeptical about all the promises made by the developers of these technologies. Some highlight most of the research on the usefulness of the technology solutions for smart cities remains highly normative, filled with prescriptions of what could be done, and pilot programs which have not been fully integrated with other smart city solutions, in turn, delaying

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the clarity around the benefits of these platforms (Lam & Givens, 2018; Visvizi & Lytras, 2018). Likewise, understanding the clear necessity for a move from city to smart city (in order to know the answer to whether the change is a necessary endeavor and/or a fad of the time) is questionable without a systematic strategy integrating all these technology solutions. But smart city strategy has already been identified throughout the literature as deficient and even unexplored (Angelidou, 2015; Gupta, Chauhan, & Jaiswal, 2019). No one can accurately assess whether the move is a necessity without a clear plan, vision, and thought about what needs to change, how it will change, and why. The purposes mentioned previously, those of economic prosperity, sustainable infrastructure, mobility, environmental stewardship, and improved quality of life for citizens are, of course, noble purposes, but they are also a great market of opportunity, and therefore, make us ponder about the third question: Who will benefit (or is benefitting the most) from such change? The market of opportunity just mentioned has been saturated with hundreds of thousands of corporate websites and other popular media channels dedicated exclusively to smart city offerings, on top of the variety of consultancies and technology companies which have sprung up and made millions from the smart city market opportunities. One prominent instance cited in the literature is Rio de Janeiro’s main municipal operations control center. Built by IBM for a cost to the city of $14 million, it began its operations in 2010 integrating 30 agencies, giving the operations center the power to monitor the complete daily life of the city, uninterruptedly, around the clock, seven days a week; the initiative eventually led the city to be recognized with the World Smart City Award in 2013, branding it as the smartest city in the world (Pereira, Macadar, Luciano, & Testa, 2017). The operations center has also been described as having the aesthetics of ‘Minority Report’ combined with the all-powerful deck of Star Trek’s Enterprise spaceship; still, some believe this was considered a corporate business exploitative alliance between the city and IBM, while at the same time, others describe the operations center’s performance over time as an evolution into a full-blown command center with little recognition as a place where serious data analysis was occurring (Graglia, 2017; Scuotto, Ferraris, & Bresciani, 2016). Pondering further about who is benefiting the most (and even the second question— Is the change necessary?), one cannot step away from thinking about the amount of “peer pressure” already built into this smart

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city ecosystem. In other words, cities must follow suit; otherwise, what will they be? (What is the opposite of smart?) The popular media do not allow for many other options. Many of the companies noted before, along with their websites and other consultancies, and the so-called independent agents which claim to maintain a neutral research stance (although their websites are full of ads promoting smart city solutions), create indirect pressure on cities to join the smart city movement. This can be seen in the development and promotion of smart city rankings. These rankings publicize the cities’ doings, comparing them to other smart cities and creating even more intense competition for peer ranking, economic placing, and other types of smart city publicity branding. This situation repetitively rewards those adopters with positive strings of encouraging publicity as innovators and awards (as in the previously discussed example of Rio de Janeiro). As well, it punishes others who are not as further along in their smart city journeys. Some of these rankings are released with the intention to provide lessons learned from cities to cities, as it is noted in the IESE Cities in Motion Index (Berrone, Ricart, Carrasco, & Duch, 2018), but the narratives describing how the top-place contender is followed closely by the next two competitor cities incite visions of gladiators in the arena, fighting for survival of the fittest. As silly as this may sound for some, cities are concerned and pressured to join the movement or risk being seen as substandard places for business and growth opportunities. The city rankings, indexes, publicity noted in the above discussion affects a city’s attractiveness, and as researchers document well, the attractiveness of a city is a key determinant in its ability to attract creative talent, which in turn is correlated to a high potential for innovation and economic growth (Romãoa, Kourtitb, Neutsd, & Nijkampc, 2018).

Collective Concerns and Existential Risks The previous section described some grand motivators which continue to propel and pressure cities into becoming smart cities, but there are other pressures. In other words, the financial business pressures or business agenda is interesting and sometimes troubling, but in addition, we live in a world which is facing pressures intertwined in a web of dynamics leaders every so often disregard. Some call these pressures collective concerns, or real and existential risks which motivate us to think about long-term solutions for our “together” future. The long-term effects of not balancing

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these dynamics can create futures which are undesirable for all of us collectively. Collective concerns and existential risks are discussed both in the popular and peer-reviewed literature as opportunities to get involved in a new way, to shape how we live and conduct business in our cities, irrespective of where one comes from as a leader, i.e., a community, a business, or a government. Below I describe in a general overview some of the prominent concerns and risks, in no particular order, to highlight the complexity of issues which serve as factors driving the need for a new way of thinking about cities as platforms for solutions to key collective and existential risks. These include population and scarcity of population resources, environmental issues, social and political pressures, economics and the smart city market, and the proliferation of technology. The discussion of these topics as a collective concern is not new. The most famous exposition of these topics was published in 1972 by a group of scientists who were commissioned by the Club of Rome to explore questions dealing with sustainability of our future and humanity’s collective economic growth. The Club of Rome, still existing today, is an international think-tank composed of former heads of state, United Nations’ bureaucrats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe (Barker, 2018). The published book, titled The Limits to Growth, shocked the world. Its basic premise was that the consortium of world’s policies would cause global overshoot and collapse of the ecological, economic, and social systems because of the world’s ineffective policy efforts at anticipating and coping with earth’s resource limitations (Meadows, Rangers, & Meadows, 2004). Today, more than 40 years later, we see the effects of human activity weighing on earth’s natural systems and begin to see in a great manner how this is driving change in the balance of natural ecosystems, geographies, population migration, and other critical resources needed to sustain the planet and human life. Let us discuss the five specific areas introduced earlier in this paragraph. 1. Population and Limited Resources. Both the popular and the peerreviewed literature prominently highlighted population growth, migration, and the rapid depletion of limited natural resources like water, land, and the like (as a result of population growth and movement to cities) as conspicuous risks which must be managed. The population growth, for instance, is a concern. Let us revisit some of those numbers briefly. The world population in 1970, as reported

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by the United Nations, was 3.7 billion. (See Fig. 2.1 for the statistical figures and sources.) In the next 30 years, that number almost doubled to a total world population of 6.1 billion in the year 2000. Then, in the year 2015 (the last computed year for this survey), we see a 99.5% increase in population. As you can see, the estimation for the year 2030 is 8.5 billion for a total increase of 131% in population since 1970. Although most estimates speak of Africa and Asia as the major places of population growth, one can see the United States will also see population growth, although at a lesser rate, but about a 67% increase by the year 2030 (Fig. 2.2). Another effect of the population growth is population concentration within cities. According to the United Nations, there were 512 cities in the world which had a population of 1 million people or more in 2016. By 2030, the United Nations estimated the number would be 662 cities (a 29% increase). Another impressive statistic is the growth in the number of megacities. The Economic and

World PopulaƟon in Billions 1970-2030

2030 2015 2000

1970

3,700,577

6,145,006

7,383,008

8,551,198

Fig. 2.1 United Nations’ world population estimates (Source Author’s chart creation based on data reported by United Nations (2017); World population prospects; DESA Population Division, Custom Data; United Nations (2018); World urbanized prospects 2018: Key facts; DESA Population Division; United Nations)

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U.S. PopulaƟon in Millions 1970-2030

2030 2015 2000

1970

209,588

281,711

320,878

349,642

Fig. 2.2 Unites States’ population estimates (Source Author’s chart creation based on data reported by United Nations (2019); Probabilistic Projections based on the World Population Prospects 2019, median prediction interval, 2020–2100)

Social Affairs Forum of the United Nations projected the number of megacities (those cities with a population of at least 10 million) will increase from 31 cities to 41 cities by the same year (Fig. 2.3). 2. Environmental Risks. The massive population concentration also means an increase in pollution from transit, throw-away plastic, and other types of waste, contributing in great measure to the pollution of the environment. As a matter of fact, cities are now considered major centers of waste production, especially major producers of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, therefore contributing to the global warming phenomenon. In a recent study, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (2019) named cities as the key to stopping or to slowing global warming. NASA studied the carbon footprint of cities around the world and highlighted how some cities produced emissions which exceeded 150 million tons. This situation not only affects the health of the inhabitants of the city but also the planet, as seen by rising earth temperatures around the world. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently reported the hottest years in history have all occurred since 2005, with the last five years being

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2030 = 662 CiƟes w/ >1M

2016 = 512 ciƟes with 1M

Mega CiƟes in the World 2016

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41

2030

Fig. 2.3 Population growth and cities (Source Public Domain. Creative Commons https://www.peakpx.com/66766/people-walking-on-the-streets License to use Creative Commons Zero—CC0; United Nations (2016). The world cities in 2016. United Nations Economic and Social Affairs; United Nations (2018). World urbanized prospects 2018: Key facts. United Nations DESA Population Division)

the hottest. The effect of this warmth has been a shrinking of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice to low levels never seen before (NOAA, 2019). Compiling the issue of the atmosphere are many other issues such as the conservation and protection of the water supply; cities, city planners, and business-partnerships believe ICT solutions can quickly detect and respond to those environmental issues to protect citizens (Anttiroiko, 2013). 3. Social and Political Pressures. Political leaders around the world are also feeling the heat. This is best seen in the pressure countries are exerting to get nations of the world to be united in their collective efforts to combat climate change. Formally, on December 12, 2015, over 190 nations from around the world came together in

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Paris under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to agree on common goals to combat and accelerate actions and investments toward a sustainable low carbon future—this agreement is well known as the Paris Agreement, and in 2016, 195 nations became signatory parties in the agreement (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2019). Nations of the world want to lead by example by showing political resolve, and some have seen the promise of smart cities as a good framework to demonstrate their determination and political action. Here are two significant instances. The European Commission has been heavily invested in clean energy and environmental stewardship through a focus on smart cities, transforming European cities into future-proof smart cities and committing over e 100 billion from 2014–2020 for investment in urban areas, from which e18.4 billion was specifically set aside for continued research and innovation in the fields of sustainable energy, urban issues, and smart cities (Šefˇcoviˇc, 2016). In the United States, the Obama Administration responded with an initiative providing over $100 million for smart cities solutions in the areas of energy, climate preparedness, transportation, and health (Office of the Press Secretary, 2015). 4. Economics and the Smart City Market Potential. Economics is no doubt a motivator and key driver in the smart city space. The earlier section, titled “The Smart City Divide,” briefly mentioned some key profitable opportunities the smart city market has created for businesses. Instances noted of key multinational corporations which have benefitted and continue to drive profitable business agendas were mentioned in that section. Since some of those topics and observations from the literature have been discussed (to include the size of the market and future projection estimates), the focus of the rest of this section briefly turns to the effect the smart city framework is believed to have on the city. The literature reviewed attested to the movement of cities into the belief that the ICT framework provides the capability to infuse economic well-being into the cities. This is thought to be true due to the process of innovation, which comes as a by-product of the interaction and sharing of knowledge between public and private sectors in the city region. Especially in knowledge economies the digital, information, and knowledge cities thrive as the process of synchronous and asynchronous interaction of the social network components in the public and private sectors. This interaction, noted the literature, creates a diffusion of innovation which energizes businesses and encourages corporations to invest

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resources, thereby stimulating commerce, job creation and wealth, recruitment and migration of talent into the city, as well as improvements in the standards of living for citizens (Huston & Warren, 2013; Lea, Yu, & Kannan, 2007; Yeh, 2017). 5. Proliferation of Technology. With all those incentives, it would be difficult to see anything other than a flourishing of ICT solution providers. And although multinational corporations held a grip on that market of opportunity, the combination between the affordability of technology, public-private partnerships, and the efforts of many cities to incubate technology start-ups within their own regions to solve problems at the local level created a booming sector of ICT solution providers. This conglomerate of actors has dedicated their resources to addressing and improving life in the city. In 2017, for example, a worldwide survey highlighted the top four smart city projects areas as mobility and transport, physical infrastructure, energy and resources efficiency, and safety and security (IHS, 2017). These findings aligned with what the literature has noted as the main purposes of the application of smart technology in the cities, mainly the efficient utilization of resources, the desired outcome to improve the lives and economic well-being of citizens, the effort to create an ecosystem of collaboration and co-creation, as well as the aspiration to increase the ability of citizens to gain access to city services and participate more fully in society (Aurigi, 2005; Ishida, 2002; Siu, 2016). In the literature, this last point about the aspiration of the city to have citizens who can more fully participate in government can be seen as a desired future that drives (and will continue to drive) the proliferation of technology which has as its intention the creation of immersive experiences merging the offline and online life of citizens, and making citizens part of the computational and sensing system of a city (Neuhofer, Buhalis, & Ladkin, 2015; Vanolo, 2016).

References Angelidou, M. (2015). Smart cities: A conjuncture of four forces. Cities, 47, 95–106. Anttiroiko, A. (2013). U-cities reshaping our future: Reflections on ubiquitous infrastructure as an enabler of smart urban development. AI & SOCIETY, 28(4), 491–507.

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Aurigi, A. (2005). Competing urban visions and the shaping of the digital city. Knowledge, Technology, & Policy, 18(1), 12–26. Barker, J. (2018). The limits to growth 2018 special edition: Learning about the limits to growth. APF Compass, 2–6. Retrieved from https://cdn.ymaws. com. Berrone, P., Ricart, J. E., Carrasco, C., & Duch, A. (2018). New York, London and Paris firmly established as the smartest cities. IESE Insight. Retrieved from https://www.ieseinsight.com. Bibri, S. E., & Krogstie, J. (2017). Smart sustainable cities of the future: An extensive interdisciplinary literature review. Sustainable Cities and Society, 31, 183–212. Graglia, D. (2017). Smart cities getting smarter. Latin Trade, 25(1), 36–38. Gray, A. (2017, November 1). These are the world’s best run cities. World Economic Forum. Retrieved from https://medium.com/world-economicforum/these-are-the-worlds-best-run-cities-22f1fe96215. Gupta, P., Chauhan, S., & Jaiswal, M. P. (2019). Classification of smart city research—A descriptive literature review and future research agenda. Information Systems Frontier, 21, 661–685. Huston, S., & Warren, C. (2013). Knowledge city and urban economic resilience. Journal of Property Investment & Finance, 31(1), 78–88. IHS. (2017, October 24). Share of smart cities projects by type worldwide in 2017 [Graph]. In Statista. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com. Ishida, T. (2002). Digital city Kyoto. Association for computing machinery. Communications of the ACM, 45(7), 76–81. Lam, D., & Givens, J. W. (2018). Small and smart: Why and how smart city solutions can and should be adapted to the unique needs of smaller cities. New Global Studies, 12(1), 21–36. Lea, B., Yu, W., & Kannan, P. (2007). Social network enhanced digital city management and innovation success: A prototype design. Journal of International Technology and Information Management, 16(3), 1–22. Meadows, D., Rangers, J., & Meadows, D. (2004). Limits to growth: The 30-year update. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Muggah, R. (2018, June 18). How smart tech helps cities fight terrorism and crime. World Economic Forum. Retrieved from https://medium.com. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2019). Sizing up the carbon footprint of cities. Earth Observatory. Retrieved from https://earthobserva tory.nasa.gov. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2019, August 15). July 2019 was hottest month on record for the planet: Polar sea ice melted to record lows. U.S. Department of Commerce. Retrieved from https://www.noaa.gov.

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Neuhofer, B., Buhalis, D., & Ladkin, A. (2015). Smart technologies for personalized experiences: A case study in the hospitality domain. Electronic Markets, 25(3), 243–254. Office of the Press Secretary. (2015, September 14). Fact sheet: Administration announces new “Smart Cities” initiative to help communities tackle local challenges and improve city services. The White House. Retrieved from https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. Pereira, G. V., Macadar, M. A., Luciano, E. M., & Testa, M. G. (2017). Delivering public value through open government data initiatives in a smart city context. Information Systems Frontiers, 19(2), 213–229. Romãoa, J., Kourtitb, K., Neutsd, B., & Nijkampc, P. (2018). The smart city as a common place for tourists and residents: A structural analysis of the determinants of urban attractiveness. Cities, 78, 67–75. Scuotto, V., Ferraris, A., & Bresciani, S. (2016). Internet of things. Business Process Management Journal, 22(2), 357–367. Šefˇcoviˇc, M. (2016, May 24). Speech at the General Assembly of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities. Eindhoven, The Netherlands. European Commission. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu. Siu, L. H. (2016). Defining a smart nation: The case of Singapore. Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society, 14(4), 323–333. Söderstrom, O., Paasche, T., & Klauser, F. (2014). Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City, 18(3), 307–320. United Nations. (2016). The world cities in 2016. United Nations Economic and Social Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/. United Nations. (2017). World population prospects. United Nations, DESA Population Division. Custom Data. Retrieved from https://population.un. org/. United Nations. (2018). World urbanized prospects 2018: Key facts. United Nations DESA Population Division. Retrieved from https://population. un.org. United Nations. (2019). Probabilistic population projections based on the world populations prospects 2019. 2019 Revision of world population prospects. United Nations DESA Population Division. Retrieved from https://popula tion.un.org/wpp/. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (2019). What is the Paris Agreement? Process and meetings. United Nations Climate Change. Retrieved from https://unfccc.int. Vanolo, A. (2016). Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities. Futures, 82, 26–36. Visvizi, A., & Lytras, M. D. (2018). Rescaling and refocusing smart cities research: From mega cities to smart villages. Journal of Science and Technology Policy Management, 9(2), 134–145. Yeh, H. (2017). The effects of successful ICT-based smart city services: From citizens’ perspectives. Government Information Quarterly, 34, 556–565.

CHAPTER 3

Is There Such a Thing as the Smart City 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0?

An Interesting Proposition In late 2018, I visited a group of city officials to discuss emergent trends, the evolution of technologies, and what I saw in my research as the future of smart cities. After my presentation, we sat down to discuss their impressions and concerns. We had a great meeting, and I was so energized by the servant-leadership attitude of these great leaders. As our exciting conversation continued, the most senior leader presented to me that their city aspired to become a smart city 3.0. Although the leaders in the room did not feel their city was at the edge of the smart city 1.0 point, they felt they could leap into a smart city 3.0. I have to admit, this was not the first time I had an encounter like this—where a leader describes his or her city as a smart city 2.0 or 3.0 enterprise. A similar encounter happened in early 2019 with another city official, and several months later I met another city official who was telling me how her city had clearly made the 2.0 mark, and how the city was now on a clear path toward becoming a smart city 3.0. This to me was a very interesting proposition. Rationalizing that a city goes from city to smart city, to the smart city 2.0, and then 3.0 suggests there is a singular linear trajectory of growth in the journey to becoming “smart.” This also implies that cities maintaining and/or exceeding some particular index of characteristics are better off than others. Could cities be smart without necessarily passing through what appears to have been an obligatory passage point? In the smart city © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_3

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literature, several authors criticized this herding of cities into a labeling trajectory which has been (intentionally or unintentionally) crafted by what some believe are particular interest groups and carefully warn about the motivations. For example, Söderstrom, Paasche, and Klauser (2014) highlighted IBM’s smarter city campaign as a strategic move “for gaining a dominant position in a huge market … a market creation strategy” (pp. 316–317). In another study, researchers analyzed eight multinational corporations, among them Cisco, Siemens, and Google, to examine the role of ICT as a strategic option for firms. Based on their findings, the research team concluded that a smarter cities’ strategy provides ICT companies with a viable option to meet corporate needs, especially in recession environments (Paroutis, Bennett, & Heracleous, 2014). The reasons just-mentioned should make every leader wary of rapidly enlisting in such linear paths without exploring the landscape for the fitness of such paths for their own city.

Searching for the Answer Is there such a thing as a smart city 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0? A glance in any web search engine can tell us there is much written in the popular media about this subject. For example, in late August 2019, I typed the string set “smart city 1.0, 2.0, 3.0” and the results showed on my computer screen over 25 million instances in the popular media. When I typed the string “smart city from 1.0 to 3.0” the search results returned over 28 million instances. When there is so much written about this topic in the popular media, one could expect that the smart city peer-reviewed literature would also be replete with this topic. In the review of 109 journal articles in the smart city peer-reviewed literature, seven articles had noted some resemblance or mention of the term smart city 1.0 and 2.0. The literature does not quite categorize cities as 1.0 or 2.0, at least not until the writing of this book in mid-2019. From the literature reviewed, two journal articles made clear mention of smart cities as 1.0 and 2.0 (Appioa, Limab, & Paroutisc, 2019; Trencher, 2019). Instead, much of the literature is abounding with instances, descriptions, and categorization of cities as digital, wired, information, knowledge, intelligent, and ubiquitous. (Since those city types were covered in Chapter 1, we will not cover them in detail here.) This just-mentioned description of cities in different states, i.e., wired, intelligent, and/or ubiquitous, may signal a type of evolution. A review of the literature from the early 1990s to the present indeed indicated a shift in philosophical thought and technical purposes in the design and application of technology. One can see how this shift in

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thought was beginning to accommodate the newly-appearing popular discourse of cities as having paths to smartness which could begin as smart city 1.0 to smart city 3.0. As previously explored in Chapter 1, the initial adopters of smart-city technologies were European cities in the early 1990s. The first European Digital Cities Conference took place in 1994 (Ishida, 2002). During the early to mid-1990s, the Digital City of Amsterdam and Helsinki Digital City represented mainly virtual platforms for community information sharing. However, Helsinki and Digital City Kyoto also made 3D representations of their entire cities with Digital City Kyoto advancing the concept to digital avatars and offering other environmental data in the city such as traffic, weather, parking, and sightseeing (Ishida, 2002; Komninos, Pallot, & Schaffers, 2013). The digital city and later the information city were based on technology, and some argue whenever these were presented in the literature as transformational forces, these cities’ core focus was mainly confined to collecting and sharing information about the city and its offerings for its citizens and visitors (Chourabi et al., 2012; Van den Bergha & Viaenea, 2016). Next, advances in the Internet and the integration of ICT in city infrastructure began to shape the philosophical thoughts about the cities of the future and what the technical purposes of technology would be. In the early 2000s, the knowledge city and the ubiquitous city began to represent advancement and integration of technology into the city, as they began to permeate every facet of life in the city. For example, the city of Barcelona (Spain) started its smart city journey in the late 1990s (see Chapter 1 for more details), but as technology matured, the city began to think differently about the feel of the city regardless of speculative advances in technology. The city’s vision became one where technology would help achieve efficiency targets, as well as advance its human capital through the development of a knowledge economy; in this sense, technology was going to be dominated by the human element (Angelidou, 2015; Bakici, Almirall, & Warham, 2012). Other countries, given the advancements in ICT, approached the development of smart cities in diverse ways. Although heavily criticized as an artificial city which failed to live up to its utopian vision, New Songdo (South Korea) is an example of such technological advancements applied to the city space. It became the first smart city (and the first smart city built from scratch) which made computing will (ubiquitous computing) pervasive in every physical infrastructure (Anthopoulos & Fitsilis, 2013; Anttiroiko, 2013).

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Now, we see another shift. Perhaps this is the beginning of an awakening. In a little over a decade, technology has been abundantly promoted, companies have been selling integrative solutions, and the proliferation of technology now integrates the citizen as part of that city’s ecosystem. As technology proliferates and the holders of the technology begin to know more about the citizen, the physical boundaries which created a separation between the private citizen and the state become blurred. Some citizens have begun to worry about how their information is exploited to produce massive profits, and therefore, the balance of trust delineates a path toward co-creation in the city. Leadership in the city must be shared in order to create innovation which benefits citizens and the local economy. This has been the advent of the intelligent city. Researchers highlight that the new paradigm for city planning is the “intelligent city” approach, no longer a top-down planning approach but both top-down as well as bottom-up (Komninos & Tsarchopoulos, 2013). This kind of approach lauds that “a city is smarter by enhancing its citizens’ inventiveness and creativity” (Capdevila & Zarlenga, 2015, p. 268). This approach uses the citizen, the wide range of electronics, and the digital technologies to transform the environment of the city. Amsterdam (Netherlands), Helsinki (Finland), and Singapore are predominant examples in the smart city literature of this citizen-centric approach to governance and life in the city. Despite the observations noted above in regard to the classification of cities by the philosophical term and technological intention or the smart city label, other authors define the generation of cities in other terms. For example, Hoe (2016) saw smart cities as three generations of improvements. These were technology-driven, technology-enabled but city-led, and citizen co-created (p. 324). Hoe’s description aligns with the preceding discussion summarizing the evolutionary changes which have already been described, mainly that the first generation of cities was technology-focused, characterized by a commercial sector which pushed for the adoption of its own commercial technologies in the cities. The second generation was driven by the city government themselves who now understood the potential of ICT and sought solutions from the commercial sector to implement and supply better services to citizens (a top-down approach to technology adoption). And lastly, the third generation is one where the ICT solution is co-created between the citizen, private-public partnerships, and the city government, with the aim to spur creativity and innovation—this is an open government approach where

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the government and the citizen collaborate in open data environments to produce solutions. Examples of this instance are predominant in the Living Labs data-driven structure of Amsterdam and Helsinki’s smart city innovation ecosystems (Abella, Ortiz de Urbina Criado, & De Pablos Heredero, 2017; Zygiaris, 2013). Another author described the recent development in the generation of cities in the smart city space as the result of two forces: technology push and demand pull (Angelidou, 2015, pp. 99–100). This paradigm can also be said to correlate with the three generations which Hoe (2016) wrote about. For example, the technology push produces the first generation of smart cities. In other words, the technology push can be said to be the same behavior as the technologydriven generation, where companies work with great effort to have cities adopt their technologies. In the instance of demand pull, the effect can be said to correlate with a second and third generation of smart cities. In this case, solutions are developed as a response to the needs or demands of society in the city. The local government and/or the citizen is involved in the research, development, and designing of the solution. The solution is the product of innovation, tailor-matched to the needs of the city. Lastly, there were two instances (as previously mentioned) noted in the peer-reviewed literature where the authors made a classification of smart cities as either 1.0 or 2.0. It is worth noting both instances were recent publications (within the year 2019 when this book was written). The authors referenced five other publications, the oldest dated in the year 2016. Those publications were not listed as peer-reviewed in the literature and were not cataloged in the four academic research databases explored, and therefore, they were not considered as instances for this study. In the first journal article (Trencher, 2019), the author made a comparison of attributes for both the smart city 1.0 and 2.0 in the four areas of vision, role of citizens, objective of technology, and city approach. The differences between these two smart cities are very similar in concept and behavior to the technology push and demand pull model of Angelidou (2015). In short, the smart city 1.0 describes a place where technology and economics are chief agents and central to the functioning of the city; leadership decisions accommodate technology which has already been developed. In the smart city 2.0 realm, the citizen takes the central role; governance and policy decisions are made to enhance the well-being and quality of life of citizens in the city. The development of solutions is tailored to the specific needs of the city and its citizens. In the other instance of the categorization of a city as smart city 1.0 or 2.0, the

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authors (Appioa et al., 2019) portray Trencher’s (2019) framework as one instance in the understanding of the technological and societal challenges of smart cities. The authors describe the framework and briefly note how Trencher (2019) applied the framework in the Japanese city of Aizuwakamatsu to tackle critical social challenges the city was undergoing.

A Better Answer Whenever someone comes to describe a city as smart city 1.0, 2.0, or even 3.0, the person is most likely describing one of the six cities depicted on the right side of Fig. 3.1. The cities were described in Chapter 1, but in this section, I have placed the cities across a time continuum to illustrate several points. A point of clarification is important at this time. The cities’ start and stop dates were not meant to be represented to scale but rather to be stretched over the time period when they first appeared in the literature and again when their appearance in the literature began to fade. There are no concrete start or stop dates expressed in the reviewed literature. Specifically, all the start dates are noted as estimates since the different authors in the literature note the appearance of each of these cities as estimates, using language as in “the mid 1990s” or tied to events, as in WWII, the creation of a city, or the advent of the knowledge economy. With those points of clarification out of the way, let us dive deeper into this discussion. Perhaps the best way to express the type of city one wants to talk about, or the aspiration of a city, is by using the description of one of these city types, along with the evolution noted by the concentric red circles. (The descriptions for the cities were stated in Chapter 1, so for the sake of the discussion flow, we will not repeat that information in this section but highlight just a few points which relate to the portrait of the city type in Fig. 3.1.) The earlier discussion highlighted how the philosophical term and the technological intention shaped the discourse of the time. The discussion also noted cities seemed to go through a series of evolutions, mainly the three evolutions cited by Hoe (2016). Others cited two evolutions (Angelidou, 2015; Trencher, 2019), but those evolutions were closely linked to those Hoe (2016) had depicted as technologydriven, technology-enabled but city-led, and citizen co-created (Hoe, 2016, p. 324). Indeed, the early discourse in regard to cities focuses on the technological component. This is the reason the Digital City, the Information City, and in part, the Knowledge City take center stage. They

Fig. 3.1 City types across eras of time (Source Author’s interpretation of the peer-reviewed smart city literature and the plotting of the city types discussed in Chapter 1, along with a description of technological influencers)

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are depicted inside the first concentric red circle to indicate the philosophical term and technological intention of this group of cities within the pertinent era. The second group of cities is depicted in the second concentric red circle to mark the evolution from a technology-driven city to one that is now, not necessarily technology-driven, but technologyenabled. Here is where a shift begins to happen. Using Angelidou’s (2015) evolutionary explanation, we see the cities begin to move from a technology-push to a demand-pull leadership style. Moreover, those cities which begin to move into the third concentric red circle adopt a citizen co-creation leadership style. One can see those cities known in the literature as ubiquitous, intelligent, and smart have all gone through an evolution which points to a citizen co-creation leadership style. There are several reasons for that, especially for those labeled as smart cities. Most authors in the literature noted the transition to a more “technologydriven but city-led” or “citizen co-creation” between 2011 and 2014, when more of the smart city literature began to criticize the behavior of multinational corporations creating and dominating the smart city market, leaving little space for citizen involvement (Gupta, Chauhan, & Jaiswal, 2019; Kitchin, 2014; Söderstrom et al., 2014). Another area of philosophical thought portrayed in Fig. 3.1 is the representation of ideas and how those ideas tend to shape the future, producing events many decades after those ideas have been exposed. Although many people would see the idea of smart cities as innovative thought, the truth is the idea has been in existence for a very long time. For example, the construction of intelligent cities has been cited in the literature dating back to 1939, with the buildup and mission of Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom during World War II. This mission of this community was to decrypt the ciphers contained in messages of German opponents. The assembly of highly-trained and skilled personnel, scientists, and mathematicians grew to over 10,000, creating for the first time an ecosystem of collaboration in which people, knowledge, and machines were intertwined to produce innovation and solve problems (Komninos, 2011). The instances of intelligent cities begin to appear in the literature, as today it promises competitiveness and economic viability through innovation. Moreover, two other ideas depicted in Fig. 3.1 closely assimilate the themes and discourse in regard to smart cities. These are the ideas of electronic urbanism and ubiquitous computing. The idea of electronic urbanism dates to 1964 and has at its roots a city which embraces networked technology in order to promote the well-being and creativity

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of its citizens (Angelidou, 2015). On the other hand, the idea of ubiquitous computing in the early 1990s gave way to the concept of what we know today as the ubiquitous city (Anttiroiko, 2013; Rotondo, 2012). In short, this is the idea that technology can be fully embedded into the physical environment, departing from the usual paradigm of personal or mainframe computing (Anttiroiko, 2013; Weiser, 1993).

Moving Forward There are several perspectives as to how to describe a city. Additionally, one can see there are similar themes which interweave the perspectives into a framework of understanding. One can also see there may be such thing as a smart city 1.0, 2.0, or even 3.0 if one considers that which has been labeled as the smart city has been going through three phases of evolutions. Nevertheless, other descriptions of cities have very similar phases, descriptions, philosophical thoughts, and technological functions. Perhaps, it is best to see the smart city as an ambition, rather than a designated “badge” to be displayed. The discussion in this section was meant for the leaders of the city, so they can open their eyes to the real world of the city and opt to lead, rather than being led blindly. Leaders must lead, but must lead with foresight.

References Abella, A., Ortiz de Urbina Criado, M., & De Pablos Heredero, C. (2017). A model for the analysis of data-driven innovation and value generation in smart cities’ ecosystems. Cities, 64, 47–53. Angelidou, M. (2015). Smart cities: A conjuncture of four forces. Cities, 47, 95–106. Anthopoulos, L., & Fitsilis, P. (2013). Using classification and roadmapping techniques for smart city viability’s realization: EJEG. Electronic Journal of E-Government, 11(1), 326–336. Anttiroiko, A. (2013). U-cities reshaping our future: Reflections on ubiquitous infrastructure as an enabler of smart urban development. AI & Society, 28(4), 491–507. Appioa, F. P., Limab, M., & Paroutisc, S. (2019). Understanding smart cities: Innovation ecosystems, technological advancements, and societal challenges. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 142, 1–14. Bakici, T., Almirall, E., & Warham, J. (2012). A smart city initiative: The case of Barcelona. Journal of Knowledge Economy, 4(2), 135–148. Capdevila, I., & Zarlenga, M. I. (2015). Smart city or smart citizens? The Barcelona case. Journal of Strategy and Management, 8(3), 266–282.

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Chourabi, H., Nam, T., Walker, S., Gil-Garcia, J. R., Mellouli, S., Nahon, K., & Scholl, H. J. (2012, January). Understanding smart cities: An integrative framework. In System Science (HICSS), 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 2289–2297). IEEE. Gupta, P., Chauhan, S., & Jaiswal, M. P. (2019). Classification of smart city research—A descriptive literature review and future research agenda. Information Systems Frontier, 21, 661–685. Hoe, S. L. (2016). Defining a smart nation: The case of Singapore. Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society, 14(4), 323–333. Ishida, T. (2002). Digital city Kyoto. Association for computing machinery. Communications of the ACM , 45(7), 76–81. Kitchin, R. (2014). The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), 1–14. Komninos, N. (2011). Intelligent cities: Variable geometries of spatial intelligence. Intelligent Buildings International, 3(3), 172–188. Komninos, N., Pallot, M., & Schaffers, H. (2013). Special issue on smart cities and the future internet in Europe. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 4(2), 119–134. Komninos, N., & Tsarchopoulos, P. (2013). Toward intelligent Thessaloniki: From an agglomeration of apps to smart districts. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 4(2), 149–168. Paroutis, S., Bennett, M., & Heracleous, L. (2014). A strategic view on smart city technology: The case of IBM smarter cities during a recession. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 89, 262. Rotondo, F. (2012). The U-city paradigm: Opportunities and risks for edemocracy in collaborative planning. Future Internet, 2012(4), 563–574. Söderstrom, O., Paasche, T., & Klauser, F. (2014). Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City, 18(3), 307–320. Trencher, G. (2019). Towards the smart city 2.0: Empirical evidence of using smartness as a tool for tackling social challenges. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 142, 117–128. Van den Bergha, J., & Viaenea, S. (2016). Unveiling smart city implementation challenges: The case of Ghent. Information Polity, 21, 5–19. Weiser, M. (1993, October). Hot topics: Ubiquitous computing. IEEE Computer, 26(10), 71–72. Zygiaris, S. (2013). Smart city reference model: Assisting planners to conceptualize the building of smart city innovation ecosystems. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 4(2), 217–231.

PART II

Imaging the Future

CHAPTER 4

Imaging the Future of Smart Cities

Setting the Stage What would the future be for smart cities? The answer to that question starts at the reflection of what we have already discovered. To start, we know there exists a cloudy, unclear concept which the commercial industry has created as the smart city narrative, and that this narrative has been unclear since early 2008 until the date of this writing in 2019; in addition, that smart city concept makes use of the technological and social evolution of other types of city labels which have been appearing since the end of the industrial revolution (see Chapters 1 and 3). Moreover, the forces which continue to drive the so-called smart city movement are numerous (see Chapter 2). Some of those forces are shaped by an aggregate of multinational corporations which possess more economic power than some entire countries. As well, other forces are real and represent existential risks which make us think differently about the urgent need to employ innovative technological solutions to detect and slow down the damage the human activities have been causing to our planet. Lastly, as discussed in Chapter 3, as we move forward into the future, a new emerging realization grapples with what has been an overabundance of technology-driven initiatives, and therefore, a transition begins to happen where cities and their citizens expect solutions for the future to be citizenand sustainability-driven. Yet, this transition is being shaped and trapped within the same obligatory passage point already built (the smart city © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_4

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narrative); the transition is now being termed as a smart city evolution of 1.0, 2.0 and even 3.0. This effort to herd the new narrative (the transition from technology-driven to city and citizen-driven) into this smart city evolution of 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 passage, creates the illusion that the city’s evolution is one predicted to be linear and born from no other place but the already-established smart city narrative. As discussed in Chapter 3, this is not necessarily the truth. Leadership in all its forms may be the best predictor of what the future would be for the smart cities. Each future may be different, just as it has been until this point. For example, the literature on smart cities highlighted a demarcation line between those cities which began or continued a technology-driven, top-down approach to the planning and shaping of their city’s journey and those cities which chose a more citizencentric approach. The results were mixed in each case with successes and areas of opportunities on both sides of that particular demarcation line. Some of the most notable and successful examples of cities highlighted as using technology-centric, top-down approaches were Rio de Janeiro, London, Barcelona, and Santander, while examples of successful cities using citizen-centric approaches were Amsterdam, Helsinki, Milan, and Manchester (Appioa, Limab, & Paroutisc, 2019; Van den Bergha & Viaenea, 2016). The earlier group of cities, to include New York City and Santa Barbara in the United States, have also been criticized in the literature for their all-seeing (panoptic) approaches to surveillance and “dataveillance,” raising concerns about a growing trend and culture of predictive policing and societal monitoring which leads citizens to a place where every aspect of their lives is controlled, recorded, and never forgotten (Kitchin, 2014; Vanolo, 2016). On the other hand, although the role of citizens in the smart city journey has not been well documented (Simonofski, Serral Asensio, De Smedt, & Snoeck, 2018), the latter group of cities have been distinguished for their increased innovation and co-creation as the result of an integrated smart city strategy which involved citizens and public-private partnerships (Angelidou, 2015; Van den Bergha & Viaenea, 2016). Regardless of the approach they used, all the just-mentioned cities are leading smart cities in Europe, with the cities of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Helsinki, and Vienna considered to be the top leading smart cities in Europe (Appioa et al., 2019; Zygiaris, 2013). Based on the experience of these cities, as well as the results of those experiences on both sides of the demarcation line, the observations begin to point to a plausible number of futures we can expect for smart cities.

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Our brief exploration of the future in regard to the smart city must be framed within the context of four important points. First, this thing about creating plausible futures for smart cities can be a complicated process, and therefore, this discussion must clarify the intent of what we want to do with the diving into this important discussion. Secondly, since this future exploration is a process, not designed to entertain but rather to inform the leader, it is worth clarifying in general terms (without getting too technical) the key processes and signposts which lead us to the awareness of the possible imaging of four scenarios for smart cities we will soon discuss. The third area requiring discussion is the clarification of what we mean by futures on the horizon, and what kind of futures we desire to explore. Lastly, we want to explain the basis for these futures based on the observations of what seems notable in the research conducted about the smart city literature reviewed; this is a discussion about what can be seen in the literature as a predominant axis of uncertainties which are in a constant tug-of-war and can fast-track change in one direction or another to either accelerate or slow down the realities of particular scenarios. Let us begin by addressing the first point.

Imaging the Future: Strategic Intent The exploration of the smart cities’ future through the discussion of four plausible scenarios is intended to help leaders trigger their own process of strategic thinking. In other words, this process is not intended to predict what the future will be but to explore what the futures (in plural) could be. The process is intended as a disciplined approach of exploration where the leader thinks about the city in an expansive manner, deciphering among many things, the connections of the city to the time spectrums, the myriad of stakeholders (their interests and power plays), the pervasive forces of change, the health and aspirations of society, and the existential risks encountered along the city’s and the citizens’ journey into the future. Once the leader understands these connections, then there must be a process of understanding how these connections act together as a whole, as a system. The sample and previously-mentioned connections to the city offer the leader the space to explore how these connections are energized by events or actions which initiate an interplay of forces. This exploration leads to an examination of how the energy of these events activates a set of actors, who in turn, produce an unnumbered amount of interconnected actions generating the forces striving to either balance

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or reinforce conditions in that system, so the system can achieve a level of general integrity and order. It is worth noticing the order does not necessarily mean adherence to civil law. The order that is referred to here is a natural order of things as depicted by the acting forces of the system, and this does not necessarily mean that order will conform to a predetermined, dictated state. There is, however, the possibility that actors in the system exert the necessary pressure to move the system from one state to a predetermined state, but this action will be met with the tendency which exists in all natural systems to pull itself to a state of equilibrium while the system is transitioning to its new state. Nonetheless, the leader must be able to examine the phenomena because this examination is part of the understanding of how futures are formed. In addition, through this exploration, the leader becomes aware of his own thinking about the future. The exploration intrigues the leader to think beyond those mental frameworks which very often limit our own thinking and end up guiding us to the same used futures and repeated popular conclusions dominating the present narratives. Famous futurist, Adam Gordon (2009), in his book Future Savvy, termed one of the conditions which limits our thinking about the future as “Zeitgeist” (the German word which intends to mean the incorporation and sense of the spirit of the times), to emphasize the problem of making forecasts about the future heavily biased by the current conditions, the current issues, and the current state of the world (p. 94). The point here is that leaders must engage in strategic thinking, and this thinking is triggered more holistically through the exercise and exploration of scenarios in order to avoid the mental gaps and traps which naturally arise as the result of our own unchallenged assumptions and popular, dominant narratives of our environment. Now that we have considered the first point in framing the exploration of smart city futures, let us now consider the second point.

Imaging the Future: Key Processes and Signposts It is important to understand the imaging of smart city futures, using the four scenarios we will soon discuss, comes from observing key processes and signposts. These processes and signposts become the mechanisms which open our understanding of what could be possible and avoid having us be at the mercy of mere imagination. We can begin our discussion with an overview of some of those processes. Let me interject at this point to stress the goal of the next sets of lines in this text is not to make the leader

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an expert in the foresight methods we are discussing by just reading, but to offer a general overview of the work which must be performed in order to prepare a foundation for the construction of future scenarios. In the instance of the four scenarios we will soon discuss, the review of the literature was one initial process. In essence, there was a deliberate examination of what the literature was telling us about the so-called smart city. This was in addition to an examination of the surrounding themes which have been used in the composition of a narrative that would end up being described as the smart city. That examination was detailed in Chapter 1. More specifically, the process started with a review of the available pool of articles, and next, the choosing of a standard from which sorting could be done to separate the trivial many from the significant few (making a clear distinction between articles which were credible and offered significant contributions to the research question and all others). This is the reason why 104 peer-reviewed papers were the source of the research body to get to the discoveries found in Chapters 1, 2, and 3. The understanding of that literature was crucial in order to define the topic, assess the boundaries (past and current conditions), locate the topic within its content, begin an analysis of its discontinuities, and identify stakeholders and power brokers. In the field of foresight, this is what is termed by practitioners as exercising the foresight’s core competency of “framing” (Hines, Gary, Daheim, & van der Laan, 2017). Moving beyond this framing of the issue comes the process which dovetails into the discussion of power brokers. In other words, can we see what is affecting change? What forces are accelerating or slowing change, and in what direction this change seems to be going? What is changing and what is staying the same? Can we observe continuity or discontinuity in the change? Another question to be examined is: Who or what is controlling the direction of change? And finally, is there utility in the change? Gordon (2009) noted, “Utility is by far our most reliable guide to the future” (p. 128). This is the sum of all the positive gains the adopters perceive they will reap from embracing the change. When utility is high, the adoption rate is high, and therefore, change achieves critical mass quickly. When this critical mass is sustained, organizations, societies, cities, and ways of life are disrupted and transformed in such ways that the old forms of doing business are replaced by the new forms. The questions posed are important, but more so are the discoveries. The answers to these questions are not meant to be collected as part of a sense of what the truth could be (taking a guess). On the contrary, tangible facts

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and observations must guide the answers. This process is called Horizon Scanning. Here is where we begin to systematically see, annotate, and examine the signposts of the future. Edward Cornish (2004), founder and past president of the World Future Society, defined scanning as the ongoing effort to identify significant changes in the world through a focus on trends, but not events, which are temporary in nature (p. 78). This does not mean events are not significant, but they become significant by their accumulation; that accumulation is termed a trend. Recollecting our journey, in Chapter 2 we discussed the key trends and drivers of change. These are the trends which have been occurring throughout time. These trends have resulted in many descriptions and movements in the city, to include the identification of digital cities, intelligent cities, smart cities, etc. The chapter also identified stakeholders, and within them, major power brokers, plus the chapter analyzed other emerging issues. In Chapter 3, the discussion about the emerging evolution of the city, and the effort of some actors to herd the emerging evolution within a smart city path of 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 points to another signpost of change, one in which the current system begins to fight against in order to maintain equilibrium. The idea for this paragraph and the one before (both discussing the second point in imaging the future) is that the processes of framing and horizon scanning are critical in the development of scenarios which challenge leadership assumptions and open strategic thinking. Let us now turn our attention to the third point: the clarification of what we mean by futures on the horizon.

Imaging the Future: Futures in the Horizon When people talk or think about the future, most times the conversation proceeds in the singular case as if there was only one possible option. This usually happens for several reasons. In the situation of optimistic and proactive people, they have set in their minds the accomplishment of a goal, and there is no other future but the one and only—the preferred future. This future was the one the person has set out to achieve, and the one which was planned for. Perhaps the person thought that given his or her circumstances, resources available, and motivations, this was not only probable but a worthy, attainable goal. This thought process sounds logical. I call this form of thinking unwavering optimism, and when combined with personal vision and action, it can be life-changing. Leaders in our era and throughout history are admired for displaying this sort of

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unwavering optimism because it has been said this thought managed into action galvanizes the energy of an organization and its ability to achieve the set future. Authors Kouzes and Posner (2012), for example, in their book The Leadership Challenge, cited a series of studies which underlined how leaders who focused on the future attracted more followers, induced more commitment, and produced more individual and collective achievements (p. 112). Other scholars described the same process in the transformational leader, who is able to translate values into a collective vision inspiring action toward a future (Maranga & Sampayo, 2015; Stone, Russell, & Patterson, 2004). Obviously, as mentioned previously, it makes sense to think and be accustomed to seeing the future as singular (one vision). Another reason we think about the future as a singular entity is because modern-day training and education have conditioned leaders to think about the future in the singular form. Take for example the process of strategic planning. In that process, the vision is the core element. It is referred to as the future state which does not yet exist; it is the target from where all the strategic goal systems derive their power, and therefore, it lays the fundamental path for all strategy processes within the organization (Kantabutra & Saratun, 2011; Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 1998). Is this thought process mistaken? It is not. The opportunity here is to expand the thought process, so the leader can begin to think about the different qualities of the future, not just one possible future, but several of them, and not just about the linearity of time (as seen in Fig. 4.1) but about its multi-linear and multidimensional existence (discussed next). If the leader is truly to image the future, and in the instance of our topic, the future of smart cities, the leader must have a different paradigm about the future. Figure 4.1 shows the typical paradigm of the future. In essence, leaders see themselves in the present and project themselves into the future. They plan for a future they envisioned five years from now. Others plan 10 and 20 years into the future. A few would plan 30 years into the future. Some would not plan at all. If they have been proactive, as they move in time, they experience in the present time the future they envisioned in the past. Others will realize the experience they are having in the present (the future that is now the present) is quite different than the future they expected to have. More often than not, the latter experience is likely because of the accelerated pace of change. Perhaps, this type of planning (where leaders used to think and act sequentially through time expecting events to stay semi-static) worked two and three decades ago, but as most of us experience in our businesses

10 years

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Fig. 4.1 A linear view of the future (Source Author’s own interpretation of the popular view of the journey into the future. Most people think of the future as a linear event, experiencing and planning the future as a sequence of timed events which happen sequentially, one experience after the other aligned across equally spaced time intervals)

Today

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and in the world, the last 15 years have come to us with a multiplicity of forces exerting multi-faceted pressures on our lives. Business models have changed, technologies have transformed how we do business and live our lives, information is now accessible everywhere, and the number of possibilities about almost anything we can think of has grown exponentially. The future is, therefore, no longer a static point, and is full of opportunities. Hence, in this modern time, a better model of the future looks more like the picture shown in Fig. 4.2. Imagine how much more we could see of the future if we could think and imagine the whole of the interactions of time, events, and opportunity? The depiction in Fig. 4.2 represents the interactions between

Fig. 4.2 A more accurate sense of the future (Source Author’s synthesis of the Three Horizons Framework [Curry & Hodgson, 2008], Alternative Futures [Henchey, 1978], and Futures Cone [Hancock & Bezold, 1994]. Four types of futures [the probable, plausible, possible, and unexpected] cohabitate and compete for existence in three-time horizons [the past, present, and future]. The leader selects and aims for the preferred future at various stages in time, cognitively being fully aware of the conditions and likely existence and emergence of other alternate futures)

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the qualities of time (past, present, and future), the accumulation and collision of events which shape or begin to shape our realities, and the opportunities that the blend of time and events form which create four types of futures we can encounter (the probable, plausible, possible, and unexpected). Let us break down these concepts and then put them together in more detail. Futurists, Curry and Hodgson (2008), developed a framework called “Time Horizons” where three lines (time horizons) cross to promote several desired futures. In their work, the first line represents the way we do business today (the present) and slopes downward with the passage of time, signifying how present solutions lose their appeal to time as time passes. The second line is the state where we aspire to be (the future); it slopes upward with the passage of time, signifying how the future finds its appeal and relevance to the new age as time passes. A third line exists between (and intersecting) the present and the future representing an emergent state, the transition or movement from the current to the future state. The strength of actors or events can influence this transition line which exists in the operational space. These actors or events stimulate the present and the future, by either extending the present (the ways of doing business today) into the future or shortening the existence of the present and giving way to a rising future in such way that its new emerging ways replace the present or old ways of doing business. This framework is powerful in the sense that it is a particularly useful image in the strategic thinking and innovation process by allowing us to see time, not as chronological but as qualitative. In short, one can see the qualities of time (past, present, emerging, and future) acting at once. The framework breaks the time paradigms by helping us understand we can see elements of the past and the future simultaneously in the present time. In other words, the future is no longer confined to the almanac, but it is omnipresent. Armed with this knowledge, we can then see a vast array of strategic options, assess risks, and make future-informed decisions. The works of Canadian futurist, Norman Henchey (1978), and American futurists, Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold (1994), are good general outlines to begin dissecting those activities. Henchey (1978) proposed there are four kinds of futures: what will likely happen (probable), what seems to make sense and could happen given what we know today (plausible), anything we can imagine but may not be yet likely (possible), and the future we want (preferable) (pp. 26–27). Hancock and Bezold (1994) proposed there was a relationship between these futures and arranged

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them into a cone-like shape (also known as the futures cone) to explain their relationships with probable futures being the narrowest point in the cone (closest to us as if we would be looking inside the cone) to the farthest away and widest opening of the cone (possible futures). Another future which is latent but was not mentioned in the works of these three authors is the unexpected future. This is the future we cannot see given what we know today, and perhaps the future we cannot yet imagine; some may call this phenomenon a “wild card,” as Hancock and Bezold (1994) did—they positioned the wild card inside the possible future’s domain. In the model displayed in Fig. 4.2, this event has been termed the unexpected future and has been positioned outside the domain of the possible future to highlight the unexpected future as a separate domain. This separation into its own domain rationalizes the thought that humans are limited by their own mental frameworks. This limitation hinders their ability to see inside the unexpected domain. Another departure from the works of these three scholars seen in Fig. 4.2 is the absence of the preferred future as a domain. Preferred futures are depicted in Fig. 4.2 as points of choosing. This means inside each of the domains (specifically the probable, plausible, and possible future domains) there are opportunities we can pursue, and these opportunities are leadership choices known as the preferred futures. Those preferred futures are depicted with darker black figures which are encircled. Having learned the components and the background which formed the context of Fig. 4.2, let us turn our attention to it. The figure can be used as a metaphor. In searching and aiming for the future, we look through the telescopic sight (marked by the crosshairs in the figure). This telescopic sight offers the advantage of magnifying objects, so we can understand what objects (our futures) exist across multiple distances (the time horizons—the past, the present, and the future) and how far these objects are from us in the time continuum (days, years, etc.). The fact that the object exists, regardless of size but especially the tiniest objects, is a sign that the future has borrowed elements from the past, and it now exist in the future in some form. The larger the objects, the closer they are to us. For example, the larger picture of the couple signifies our future, and we see it as the representation of the closest time proximity (marked as today). We can look down the telescopic sight to see a landscape of futures 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and even 30 years from now. All those futures display a type characteristic: they are either probable, plausible, or possible. There is also the possibility of futures we cannot see; these are of

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the type “unexpected” and they are outside the telescopic sight’s range. The decision as to how a future is affixed with a type characteristic of probable, plausible, or possible is a process. We affixed the characteristic based on our assessment of what is likely to happen, what is imaginable, and what makes sense based on what we know today. If the future is likely to happen because the conditions are present, i.e., the technology exists and the resources are available, then this future is probable. Among those futures we envisioned with this characteristic of probable, we can make a choice: to choose or not to choose that future as our preferred future (a darker, more visible black silhouette). Take for example the two 10year bubbles in the upper left corner of the figure. In the upper bubble, we see four futures, but only one was preferred. This chosen, preferred future is inside the probable space. Although two foreseen futures were inside the probable space, we chose one. The other two futures are closer to the plausible space. In other words, we can see these futures as opportunities which could happen (they make sense that we can imagine these futures), but they are not yet likely. There is one more decision (and caveat) to make. Take a look at the lower left part of the figure (marked as 30 years) and the upper right part of the figure (marked as 20 years). In both instances, we see several futures, but we understand they exist in the plausible space (we can see how these futures can be imagined; they could happen, but they are not yet likely to happen) and the possible space (everything we can imagine but we may not yet have the knowledge or technology to make this happen). Notice that some of these have been chosen as preferred futures in timelines far from today. Again, that is our leadership decision to choose or not choose those futures. The indication that we are choosing those futures signifies we will be investing in research and development (or partnerships) to make those futures probable in the years and decades from today. Let us now turn our attention to the last point in our discussion about imaging the future. And that is to be able to understand the axis of uncertainty.

Imaging the Future: Axis of Uncertainty Increasingly, the business world describes its environment as VUCA (volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous). The term is very familiar to those of us who have served in the military. It was the acronym we used to describe the increasingly dense environments in which our modern military forces had to operate. It was also the platform emphasis

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we injected into the preparation of campaign plans, as well as the preparation and planning of exercise scenarios built to test response capabilities for strategic, operational, and tactical forces. Our main objective? To win decisively! But today, this VUCA environment is not just typical of the business sector or the operational military environment, it is also typical of the world we live in, and the city is no exception. Just reading the key themes discussed in Chapter 2 about key drivers of change, existential risks, and their transitions help us gain an appreciation of the multi-linear, multi-dimensional task ahead of us: How do we cope with the uncertain and win? Leaders at all levels in the city ecosystem have a responsibility to ensure the right thought process takes place, so we can collectively see and explore the number of futures options, assess the risks and plausibility of each, select our preferred future, and intelligently put into execution the implementation of solutions which are holistically sound given what we know today about the future. A key part of that progression is understanding critical uncertainties. Critical uncertainties are the set of unknown factors about the future which can drive the biggest change, and therefore, cause the biggest impact. To find these uncertainties, we must study the key drivers of change to recognize and distinguish between predetermined elements of the major issue in the study and its critical uncertainties (Chermack, 2011; Mack, 2013). Predetermined elements are characterized by slow-changing, fairly stable, constrained, and predictable patterns of the elements which are independent of a particular chain of events (Chermack, 2011, p. 128). For simplicity, some of us call these “the given” because they are predictable. Some examples are the population of boys and girls 10 years from now (if one knows the birth rates, this population can be fairly stable and predicted with some level of accuracy), a country’s dependence on oil (an element which posits a constrained situation), and the Friday 6 pm open-air concert (also predictable and happening on a set day and time). Once we have sorted through the predetermined elements, we can now begin to see the uncertainties. Take for example the line of subjects we posited previously to compare and contrast between predetermined elements and critical uncertainties. In the instance of population growth, we understand the predictability of this growth in that country. The uncertainty (unknown) in this example is the migration patterns which can exist because of war or natural disaster in another country, causing the unexpected rise of population in the country. In the instance of a country’s dependence on oil, we can comprehend the country needs

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the oil supply to feed its industrial economy. The uncertainty is the price of oil in relation to supply reserves. And finally, in regard to the openair concert, we can understand the concert will happen on that particular Friday. What we do not understand and failed to accurately predict is how the weather will affect the success of the concert. The examples of the uncertainties also point to another important consideration. Although the term uncertainty can bring a sense of discomfort, scholars agree (and we can see) not all uncertainties are created equal; however, they all must be evaluated against our assumptions, as well as the degrees and levels of strength (Ghezzi, 2013; Gordon, 2009). In this manner, we can determine which uncertainties are most impacting and use them to build our scenarios. In the case of our subject of study, we discussed in Chapter 2 the key drivers of change to select two critical uncertainties from where we could draw four scenarios to explore plausible smart city futures. Recapping some of the discussion from that chapter, we analyzed among the many elements, the popular media, business corporate economic interests, local and government interests, quality of life concerns (local government and citizen alike), citizens’ level of involvement, environmental stewardship, social and political pressures, proliferation and accessibility of technology, other stakeholder groups (peer-pressure groups and key cities of the world), population and limited resources, smart city market potential, and environmental risks. After the analysis of the predetermined elements and listings of all the uncertainties, the critical uncertainties selected as having the most effect on the future of the smart cities were technology adoption and level of human input. Technology has ever been present, but its accelerated proliferation and subsequent adoption have created new forms of government, a new economy, re-engineering of city services to citizens, as well as other unintended consequences such as the preoccupation with excess surveillance and loss of control in the operation of local government. What is uncertain here is how the continued pace of technology will continue to change the city, and at what point will this technological advancement become such a driving force that the need for human input for the operation of the government is replaced by technology. In regard to citizens’ involvement, one can comprehend citizens have been involved in the running of local governments for centuries. Yet, the economic interests of multinational corporations offer a diminished opportunity for citizens to decide how technological adoptions are made. Hence, the level of involvement in building the cities of the future within the smart city

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framework has not been fully documented, studied, or published in the literature. What is uncertain is the effect the diminished role of the citizen will have on the future of the city. Given the two uncertainties listed, the intersection between these two uncertainties produces the four quadrants, four scenarios seen in Fig. 4.3. Let us explain the figure point by point for clarity. The horizontal axis represents the human engagement. On the left side of the horizontal scale, one can find a low level of human engagement. The highest level of human engagement is found on the right side of the scale. The vertical axis represents the technology adoption scale. The bottom of the scale represents its minimum use/adoption and the highest technology use/adoption is represented by the top of the scale. The top left quadrant, therefore, represents a high use of technology with low use of human engagement. We will call this scenario, “The Techno City.” The bottom right corner of the quadrant represents a high level of citizen engagement but low use of technology. We will call this scenario, “The Green Spaces City.” Next, we move to the bottom left corner of Fig. 4.3. This quadrant represents a place where technology has subsided (low use of technology), and citizen engagement has diminished (low citizen engagement). We will call this scenario, “The Notek City.” Lastly, we move to the last quadrant, the top right corner. This corner represents a state where there is a high use of technology, and a highly engaged citizenry as well. We will call this scenario, “The Ascent City.” Table 4.1 contains the synopsis of each of the scenarios. The scenarios will be explained in more detail in the next chapters.

Fig. 4.3 Depiction of four Smart City scenarios (Source 1 Author’s purchase in DepositPhoto, bought on 26 April 2020, standard license commercial use; 2 Pixabay, free for commercial use; 3 Author’s purchase from DepositPhotos, standard license for commercial use; 4 Author’s purchase from DepositPhotos, standard license for commercial use)

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Table 4.1 Synopsis of scenario content Scenario

Summary

Techno City

The more we focus on technology as the driver of solutions, the more we allow technology to control every aspect of human existence—for example, what we should like, what should we be, where should we go, who should our friends be, what should we think about, etc. The more we focus on human creation and are less dependent on technology, the more we see futures which are green, where humans tend to cohabitate, be social, and form partnerships. These futures point toward sustainability This scenario expresses the intersection between the two critical uncertainties, and it is also inspired by a very short story written in 1909, where author E. M. Foster (1909) describes a world where humans have lost their ability to act. This scenario presents an adaptation of this story and the truths in the close future This is the age of the empowered citizen, who is taking charge of the technology, and after co-creation, uses technology to create what s/he wants to see or stops what s/he doesn’t want to see, to include the will of the government in order to make decisions jointly

Green Spaces City

Notek City

Ascent City

Source Author’s summary of four plausible scenarios for the Smart City

References Angelidou, M. (2015). Smart cities: A conjuncture of four forces. Cities, 47, 95–106. Appioa, F. P., Limab, M., & Paroutisc, S. (2019). Understanding smart cities: Innovation ecosystems, technological advancements, and societal challenges. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 142, 1–14. Chermack, T. J. (2011). Scenario planning in organizations: How to create, use, and assess scenarios. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Kohler Publishers. Cornish, E. (2004). Futuring: The exploration of the future. Bethesda, MD: World Future Society. Curry, A., & Hodgson, A. (2008). Seeing in multiple horizons. Journal of Futures Studies, 13(1), 1–20. Foster, E. M. (1909). When the machine stops. Gutenberg Project [Public Domain]. Retrieved from http://self.gutenberg.org/. Ghezzi, A. (2013). Revisiting business strategy under discontinuity. Management Decision, 51(7), 1326–1358.

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Gordon, A. (2009). Future savvy: Identifying trends to make better decisions, manage uncertainty, and profit from change. New York, NY: American Management Association. Hancock, T., & Bezold, C. (1994). Possible future, preferable futures. The Healthcare Forum Journal, 37 (2), 23–29. Henchey, N. (1978). Making sense of future studies. Alternatives, 7 (2), 24–27. Hines, A., Gary, J., Daheim, C., & van der Laan, L. (2017). Building foresight capacity: Toward a foresight competency model. World Futures Review, 9(3), 123–141. Kantabutra, S., & Saratun, M. (2011). Identifying vision realization factors at a Thai state enterprise. Management Research Review, 34(9), 996–1017. Kitchin, R. (2014). The real-time city? big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), 1–14. Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (2012). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Wiley. Mack, T. C. (2013). Foresight as dialogue. The Futurist, 47, 46–50. Maranga, K., & Sampayo, J. (2015). Management and leadership in a global environment. Journal of Management Policy and Practice, 16(1), 83–88. Mintzberg, H., Ahlstrand, B., & Lampel, J. (1998). Safari strategy: A guided tour through the wilds of strategic management. New York, NY: Free Press. Simonofski, A., Serral Asensio, E., De Smedt, J., & Snoeck, M. (2018). Hearing the voice of citizens in smart city design: The CitiVoice framework. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 1–14. Stone, A. G., Russell, R. F., & Patterson, K. (2004). Transformational versus servant leadership: A difference in leader focus. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 25(3), 349–361. Van den Bergha, J., & Viaenea, S. (2016). Unveiling smart city implementation challenges: The case of Ghent. Information Polity, 21, 5–19. Vanolo, A. (2016). Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities. Futures, 82, 26–36. Zygiaris, S. (2013). Smart city reference model: Assisting planners to conceptualize the building of smart city innovation ecosystems. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 4(2), 217–231.

CHAPTER 5

Techno City

Subject: Date: Place: Time: Length of Interview:

Summary of Interview with Techno City Mayor, Alva Mateo Rivera Diaz October 14, 2052 Techno City 1800 CST 1 hour

Question 1. In a Nutshell, What Is Techno City for You? Techno City is the place where technology formed the platform for a new kind of city. Dating back to the origins of ingenious forms of partnerships between government and business solution providers, Techno City emerged into the hub of advanced solutions to solve society’s most pressing concerns. Chief among these concerns was the existential threats to human life due to climate change, the scarcity of natural resources, and the safety and security of our massive population. In this era of intense economic competitiveness, population migration, and wars over scarcity of natural resources, technology provided the intelligence system the city needed to redefine, optimize and then synchronize all sorts of human activity, for example, connectedness to each other, mobility, distribution © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_5

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of resources, urban safety, utilization of space, on and on. In short, technology created Techno City and brought discipline through efficiency, so we could become cognizant of our actions. Our people and our city are much better now, and we all can agree on this, as we continue to reap the benefits of technology.

Question 2. Tell Us: How Did We Evolve and Get Here? As for me, seeing the prospects and acceptance of technology as part of my life started in the late 1990s. Yes, we had computers long before that. As a matter of fact, my introduction to the world of computers happened in the late 1970s when my dad took me to the computer mainframe room of a company he used to work for called Smith Kline Beecham. This was a noisy room with large, bulky machines which stored all kinds of information about the company’s operations on big reels of tape, similar to the cassette tapes we used to have in the cars, but much larger. Being the innovator and early adopter, my dad started experimenting with a new kind of computer, much smaller; we could settle it on the living room desk. Our first computer was a Commodore 64 with a RAM storage capacity of 64 KB! This was such a phenomenon, we used to invite friends to see it. After experimenting with it, my dad was hooked! He was amazed at the kinds of things he could do with it. After one or two years of experimentation, he now had to have the latest, so when the Apple Macintosh came out in 1984 with an impressive 128 KB of RAM storage and a floppy drive for data storage, he mustered all the money he could put together and bought it. So impressed he was, he could not resist sharing it with the entire world (if he could back then), so he took it to his workplace. He tried to convince his boss, “How much easier life would be if we could use this computer to make the computations our team needs to do! And the printings of reports are so much neater than anything else we have in this department—much better than using the typewriter, for sure.” This was the first mini-computer in his work area, and after his boss allowed him to use it as a test-run for almost six months, no one could deny the benefits of having one. My dad was certainly the most efficient. His work was neat, accurate, and the graphics in his reports were excellent. Soon enough, everyone wanted one of those, and the company filled the department with computer power.

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We, humans, are so fascinated by technology. From that computer on our desk, we aimed to go much smaller. We went to the Palm Pilot, to the iPod, and to the smartphone, amassing unthinkable computation power. But that was certainly not enough. We migrated to communication and information technology. This was much better than just using our phones. There were dangers we did not know about, for example, the dangers existing in aging infrastructure, mother nature’s mood swings, and even mankind’s own unexpected and erratic evils. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could sense what the dangers could be, warn everyone in those paths, respond accurately with the right tools and capability to the right time and place to fix the situation? Best of all, wouldn’t it be nice if we could do all of that even before anything could happen? Besides dungeons and dragons in the city, how about being able to enjoy life to the fullest? We imagined a technology which could help us deal with the little things, so we would not have to think about things like where to eat, how to get there, where to park, who to marry, what is happening in the city, and even who should be our next government official. We could just focus on enjoying the precious moments of our life. (This was particularly important when we used to live short lives; I’m thinking about those days when people could live until about 100 years.) We were sure we could become that society, a much better place to live and thrive. The prerequisites, of course, would be connectivity, instrumentation, information, intelligence warning systems, and everything connected to everything. We envisioned it, and we embraced it. Not only were we able to make computing and information ubiquitous, but we were also able to be part of that world, connected every day, 24 hours a day. Advances in nanotechnology, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, biotechnology, and physical sciences were key in giving us the boost we needed. These fields provided us with the opportunity to get rid of the devices we had to carry. Instead, we could be the device, with the environment feeding us the information we needed, so we could act based on the most appropriate decision given to us by our trusted city’s collective intelligence system. Yes, there were some people who refused to embed these microsystems in their personas, but slowly this began to be the minority. A transition was not too difficult. As tattoos were fashionable but had no functionality, we began to transition to electronic tattoos—something that started around the late part of the second decade in the twenty-first century as a health monitoring sensory device. The same could be said about clothing: it was

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fashionable, but not functional; that, of course, has changed. And most recently, embedded microsystems seem to be the most effective, as their capabilities and durability go much further than the ones we can affix. The registered microdevices in tattoos, clothing (for now), or humanembedded assigned to each member of our population allowed us to live worry-free. Sensory devices permit us to go into the stores, take what we need, and walk out without necessitating the situation one used to see in classical movies where people would line up at a cashier (the place where people used to trade currency in exchange for an item they desired to take with them). It’s true. There were laws in some countries and states in the early 2000s that enforced a level of currency exchange, but that was long abandoned. The extra benefits of integrated, embedded sensory systems (integrating the physical and what used to be the virtual worlds), even at the point of sale, provided the capacity to see everything, detect anything, and predict consequences and the behavior of bad actors in the city; that is a huge benefit to the city. Authorities can easily track who goes in and out of stores, what kinds of transactions take place, and are able to effectively sense exceeding thresholds of transactions that can be traced to people, who can be traced to specific locations and activities, surely discouraging illegal activities and making the city a more secure place to live and enjoy life. What would we do without such a system? Certainly, one would need an unimaginably large police force (at least as big as our Cyber Defense Force) to keep law and order in such a state without integrated, embedded sensory systems.

Question 3. How Is Life in Techno City? Although I covered part of this question in the earlier session, I would like to add in this session that even though our lives are significantly better, not everything is perfect. As you may remember from the latest Happiness Index City Report, some people have been thinking thoughts which doubt the legitimacy of our system of government. This, of course, is nothing new; it has been going on for over 100 years. But our collective intelligence system has given us optimum alternatives we will pursue to educate and help our citizens ease their views. For example, the analysis of these citizens’ thoughts allowed our collective intelligence system to reason through possible scenarios which could happen if we act according to the faulty logic of some of these citizens’ thoughts. As we all know, the human brain can only process so much information, but our collective

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intelligence system can think about an unnumbered case of possibilities and create factual stories about what will happen. Everyone must hear them, so we can get citizens to act in unison toward our sustainable future and avert the catastrophes of the 2040s. And talking about the system of government, think about how much trust there is now compared to other eras. There was a time when we knew very little about the people who acted as citizen representatives in government. Can you imagine living in those days? Well, today we are connected; we know each other, understand each other, and our collective intelligence system has helped us identify those who would be best fit to govern and serve in key positions in Techno City. We can have predictability and with great accuracy see how these particular people would govern, for how long should they govern, and all for the benefit of the city. The citizen can then input their thoughts, and based on the integration of their thoughts, the collective intelligence system can export a narrative about each of the candidates. The council of elected officials is then voted on directly by the citizens, plus we can see who voted and who did not base on the citizen’s number. Well, of course, everyone has a duty to vote and everyone does. I just mentioned the process here as a comparison of what used to be and what it is now—certainly a much better system. Okay, can I move on to another subject? Thank you. I would like to talk briefly about issues which continue to concern all of us, specifically energy and sustainability. Now that approximately 75% of the population of the world lives in cities, and although the cities of the world have grown to about 48 megacities (those cities with a population of at least 10 million), cities are crowded. Techno City is no exception. This overcrowdedness produces byproducts. Pollution is one of them. Pollution due to excess CO2 continues to be a problem, but we have mitigated the risk to our citizens through the improved manufacturing of trees which can do a better job at collecting CO2 emissions, while producing cleaner oxygen now and in the years ahead. Additionally, many have complained about the scarcity of water. We are protecting our water supply. We effectively predict the byproducts of human and autonomous machine activities, and through sensor actuators, divert contaminated water to the right place to be treated and reused. Another issue was the digital grid’s ability to distribute energy to sectors of the city. As you know, solar power is the preferred basic infrastructure for Techno City, but we’re not there yet, it has been a very slow process. Therefore, Techno City’s digital

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infrastructure remains the main way to power the city, but the force of mother nature has not always been on our side and at times has caused major damage to this infrastructure. Although natural phenomena do not occur often, when phenomena do occur, its devastating power seems to increase in strength year by year, so any investments we can make on other sources of renewable energy are really extremely limited. Our intelligence systems have warned us, but we are also limited as to the amount of area we can protect. Nevertheless, we are grateful for all the good that happens here in Techno City. There is so much good happening in this city, more than anywhere else, and we’ll continue to take this to the next level as our intelligence systems begin to mature super-intelligent autonomous systems which cohabitate and work with humans to facilitate an even better and more vibrant city experience in Techno City.

Brief Analysis of Scenario Narrative Key Themes: Technology is the solution to the city’s complications. Citizens accept that a technological future is a better future. The safety and security of the citizen are tied to the government’s implementation and accounting of all human activity. Artificial intelligence creates the decision-making for humans to follow because it is trusted as the one process of decision-making which considers all options. Technology is indispensable for the smooth operations of the government, the people, and the city. Investments in digital infrastructure outweigh those of sustainability, i.e., renewable sources of energy. Preoccupations: The overcrowded city depletes natural resources. Increased government foresight must lead big business partnerships. Technology is not enough to cope with existential risks, i.e., natural phenomena, pollution, and even happiness. Increasing the use of technology does not necessarily mean acceptance, but if it does, high digital utility accelerates technology adoption. Tradeoffs always exist—big tech which reduces the police force may increase the level of surveillance, decreasing the level of citizen privacy. Major stakeholders: Citizens of the city, government officials, business corporations, autonomous systems, mother nature.

CHAPTER 6

Green Spaces

Subject: Date: Place: Time: Length of Interview:

Summary of Interview with Mayor Sophia König, Green Spaces City November 10, 2052 Green Spaces City 1400 CET 1 hour

Question 1. What Does Green Spaces Mean to You? Green Spaces City is a city designed for people. We understand that people are social beings, and they are powered by the atmosphere around them. People are happier, more creative, thriving, and more connected when the space surrounding them is designed to enhance their identities and culture, foster social interactions, and connect them to the beauty of natural systems. This has been the emphasis on building our city. Many generations have been involved in the effort to discover the secret which ignites innovation, and therefore, they have leaned on everything that has been located outside the realm of the human inner core. We remember the efforts of previous generations who primitively sought the ends of technology. The gains were short-lived and left us with a world

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which was empty. Why repeat failed histories? To me, that’s absurd. Longlasting happiness and the next steps in the progress of humanity cannot be achieved when we depend on things which end up being gone with the passage of time. Real happiness and prosperity come from investing in those things that last the tests of time. Yes, it’s the principle of that ancient adage which called us to live a life of purpose. And as the sideeffect of living such a life, we unintendedly leave a legacy. Truthfully, the real power to innovate, be creative, and live a happy and rich life stands in the inner-most chambers of the minds and hearts of people. All we need to do as leaders is to create an environment which unlocks the waterfalls of creativity. This is done by designing for people, those present and those coming. And that’s what Green Spaces City means to me: A city meant for people who are connected, thriving, and creative, and who are also the stewards of natural resources for generations to come.

Question 2. Tell Us: How Did We Evolve and Get Here? When I think about your question, I have to say that although we had our struggles, especially with the climate collapse of the late 2030s and the new beginnings of the 2040s, I am not surprised we have built this city, designed for people and focused on long-term sustainability. Think about it for a second. Do you remember back in the day when we used to work with computers which had monitor-type displays? Yes, I’m dating myself. Well, I can recall the pictures which would sometimes appear: beautiful forests, waterfalls, and mountainous landscapes. Although I was at my workplace, I liked them. It gave me a feeling of renewal, sort of a boost of psychological freedom, an energy lift at that moment, in the middle of my office. Okay, that was back in the day when people used to go to work. (Remind me, if I forget, to come back to this point, because I think it’s important in our evolution.) I also used to look forward to vacation time (what today we call retreats, but back then vacation was the term because you had to “vacate” work to go away for a short period of time). I used to take the kids to the beach, and we had such a wonderful time feeling the waves and walking on the beach. By the way, these were long walks; we could do that back then. When we would come back, we felt so refreshed. It seems as if nature had a way of washing away our worries. Yes, it was sort of spiritual. Anyway, the point of this short illustration is that we, humans, have always longed to be in contact with our environment. We

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are not the type of species which can be separated or isolated. We need our environment; people and nature are also part of that environment. I believe society began to decay when it forgot about this principle. Slowly we began to extinguish the world around us. Profit became the central theme of life. Business, technology, what people did or did not do, and even relationships—all of it was focused on profit generation, and we began to extinguish, not only our environment but also ourselves, slowly, not noticing. Here’s an example. When I was a young child, my mother used to take me to this bay. When it existed, it used to be called the “Fluorescent Bay.” This was in the late 1970s. When we cruised the bay with our small canoe on a new moon day, we could see how the water would sparkle, just as if we would be scattering magic, sparkling dust. Of course, this was no magic dust, it was just the consequence of the force of the canoe moving the bioluminescent plankton in the water. Twenty-five years later, I went with my kids to the same place, so they could experience it. Once we were on the small boat, traveling on the bay, we really had to stir the water to see anything. And back then, there were only three of those bays in the world. They don’t exist anymore, as well as the rainforests; they all have disappeared. One last example is the climate catastrophe of 2036. We saw the signs, illustrated in the classic Limits to Growth, the first of the publications which shocked the world when it was first published in the 1970s, and in other works later published by governmental agencies as in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency and NASA in the United States, as well as the United Nations. Still, the changes we were experiencing were happening too slowly to notice or care. I don’t mean to make this a sad story. We all know how this story ends, so we’re quite pleased with where we are. We had to take some serious actions to reverse the trend of what we thought was going to be an irreversible existential threat. The structures of government and business in the city had to change. First, the old assumption that representative government was the best way to govern a city was not the solution; we had to evolve. That system served well in the more primitive stage but failed to keep up with the future. The biggest flaw of that system was its inability to do what it was supposed to do: represent the voices and will of people. Well, there were voices we did not represent (or protect) because of their inability to express their concerns. One of those voices was the voice of the unborn, future generation; another one was the voice of the natural systems around us which ultimately allow our existence. Decisions about everything were

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made without the input of these voices. Moreover, solutions which were implemented without a dedicated trans-disciplinary council of citizens were also proven to benefit just specific power-groups which, without the consent of our citizens (past, present, and future), left the pre2030 cities depleted of their ability to be self-sustaining. Who was then being represented? Previously, I also mentioned the old paradigm of profit-making; it was also wrong. The assumption was that business profitmaking establishes economic prosperity because of its great potential for economic redistribution. There are some truths and fallacies here, but our past generations experienced something different. Instead, history asserts, an income inequality gap kept growing larger, consequently nursing inequality gaps in other areas of our city, as in the opportunity of citizens of the future to have affordable housing, access to food, water, and other basic city services. We live differently now. In Green Spaces City, sustainability has been the proven fact that humans (those past, those living, and those not yet born) and nature can cohabitate, and their relationships are symbiotic. What one does to one, it does to the other. Therefore, all voices are represented, and all thinking about decisions is transdisciplinary with a systems-based approach at the core of critical discussions. For example, eco-industrial parks connect businesses, citizens, and government organizations to work together to improve the economics of the city, while at the same time to improve the environment. Additionally, all citizens must take part in the decisions of the government—no decision is carried out without the vote of the prime minister for future generations and natural systems. Citizens decide what areas of government are the most suitable to their experiences and subject-matter expertise. And in all that activity, a dedicated transdisciplinary council of citizens helps guide us toward the future. In this way, we host the consent of the people in the direction of the city. This is one way we have continued the appeal of this city as one designed with people and for people; our citizens own the city. Other ways which led us to this aim deal with how we constructed the city. There are plenty of green spaces in this city (pun intended), and buildings blend businesses, housing, markets, and nature while the city is mapped with narrow roads designed for and owned by pedestrians. This structure promotes the walkability of the city everywhere and through every medium. Rapid mobility is available all around the city with accessibility to mass transit outlets. All our machinery and consumable needs are powered by clean renewable energy systems—75% of our power sources come from renewable

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energy. Some may see the city as dense living. The city was built this way deliberately with buildings which provide the infrastructure to reduce the heat and dependency on cooling systems and resources stationed closer together to improve people and energy efficiency. Green Spaces City spared no area to create the effect of a welcoming city by what one could see as green areas on the rooftops, the green parks, the light colors of the city, and its clear landscape due to pollution levels which are at the lowest in more than 120 years.

Question 3. How Is Life in Green Spaces City? In Green Spaces City, citizens enjoy the richness of their cultural traditions and innovating endeavors, making the city an attractive place for individuals and families to live. Culture gives the city identity. The citizens celebrate the diversity of its people through events, parades, musicals, and the display of other forms of artistic expression. It’s not uncommon to walk through the city and see people gathering to paint or meditate in the early part of the morning or late part of the evening. Nor is it uncommon to see large numbers of people in the plazas and parks dining outdoors. There is always something happening in the city, and you can bet there will be many people involved. These gatherings are so important because here is where people meet with one another, make contacts, and talk about their ideas. These ideas have led to the success we have had, as previously mentioned, to reach a goal where every machine which moves is powered by renewable energy. Heck, our nights are powered by the sun we can’t see. We can say that we have harnessed the power of nature to help us to get where we are today. Although not everything runs on clean energy, most of it does (as previously mentioned 75% of all the energy used in the city). The citizens are still working on other projects that, although we may not be able to resolve, we are confident the future generations will be able to take what we’re doing and continue our work. Yes, I also mentioned this thing about going to work (I did not forget), and I think this is a good place to talk about that. Work is a necessary human activity. Humans were not made to sit idle but to create miracles through the passion of their hearts, the creativity of their minds, and the action of their hands. What past generations could not do was align people’s native gifts to something they would do for a period of time. Green Spaces City has taken a different approach than past generations.

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Citizens understand they are part of a collective whole. In our society, one person is connected to everyone, and everyone is connected to the environment. As they grow, the city grows. We also realize that as both grow, their needs may also change. Therefore, citizens in Green Spaces City learn throughout their lives while growing, changing, and adapting. Education helps our citizens discover their gifts, explore the possibilities and opportunities of the future; education also helps align the citizens with the where and how they can serve. Citizens can dedicate themselves to science, business, healthcare, public service, select a craft, or work on special city projects. Citizens and specialized mentors devised the means for the transition through life’s learning-and-service journey. In other words, the citizens learn about themselves, and they pour themselves into an activity which serves the people, but also serves themselves, as they fulfill a greater meaning of purpose during their periods of service in their life’s journey. Going to work is really a thing of the past. People go into their journey to discover and collaborate with others. There are a myriad of ways about how people do that, which does not mean “go to work,” as people don’t really do that anymore; technology has helped with this aspect as people can participate in meet-ups, telework, hologram, or look for other ways to collaborate. This system also helps us avoid the traps of the past where everyone would leave their homes at the same time, eat at the same time, and go back to their homes at the same time. All of that, as history has shown, created the environmental, health, and mobility catastrophes we do not want to repeat in the 2050s. As this city is built on an innovation ecosystem powered by people, it’s increasingly important the citizens have the means and space to think creatively. Hence, the city’s people have been able to create a basic universal income for its citizens, managed by the local government, but audited by the transdisciplinary council of citizens. This council helps us guide this enterprise toward the future, so our children and our children’s children will have the means to subsist and have a standard of living which creates prosperity and renewed innovation in Green Spaces City. And talking about generations, let’s talk about this one (since we have already mentioned the actions we are taking to protect the next generation). Although many thought the level of population was going to overcrowd life in the city, Green Spaces reached this peak back in the late 2030s, but climate crisis and heat stress conditions began affecting the growth of that population, as well as the number of people being born. The population is not growing, although we saw an increase in population

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due to migrations, and the scarcity of food and water in other areas of the world. Our population is just now getting older. Sustaining this population is not a simple problem. Urban farming has helped us in many ways. One is producing for our citizens. Another is taking advantage of proximities, enabling clean transport to be the prime vehicle to move food within and to the city. We have also used bio-fortification with great success to enrich our food supply. The food is show-cased in our very popular farm markets, centrally located where people from all walks within the city have access. Moreover, we know large city populations produce a lot of waste. We have devised bio-processes to turn that waste into energy which can go back to the grid to power our city. In that regard, we continue to be good stewards of the people and nature all around, especially when that nature provides us the capacity to live on this earth.

Brief Analysis of Scenario Narrative Key Themes: People and environment must cohabitate. Human activity is directly connected to its effects on nature and vice versa (to hurt one is to hurt another). Citizens take responsibility for the well-being of the city, which in turn defines their well-being. Smart decisions come from a system’s approach which involves citizens knowing their government, their future, their past, and the basic resources the environment can provide for them. Innovation, economic prosperity, and social cohesion come with “green” stewardship. Preoccupations: The overcrowded city depletes natural resources and can lead to scarcity of food, water, and other necessities. An aging population can be costlier than that with a diversity of ages. Food supplies of the future may lack the necessary nutrients to keep a population healthy. In step with the previous point, places to grow food may not be plentiful, limiting the supply. Climate change is a slow effect; its effects are devastating if not acted proactively. Dense development is essential to ease the heat-island effect. Major stakeholders: Citizens of the city (present generation), citizens of the city (future generation), government officials, business corporations, mother nature.

CHAPTER 7

Notek City

Subject: Date: Place: Time: Length of Interview:

Summary of Interview with Mayor Alcald D. Levant, Notek City August 27, 2049 Notek City 1030 CMT 1 hour

Question 1. What Does Notek City Mean to You? Notek City is an interesting place. This is a city under reconstruction. We honor our past as a time where great figures in history created an amazing world for our citizens. Great thinkers lived in this city. Many of them are long gone, but we remember how they dreamed about a better future, and they constructed it. Unfortunately, there were things they did not foresee, and for the past 10 years, we have been dealing with the unintended consequences of those decisions. About 950,000 people lived in Notek City in the early 2030s. This number began to shrink quickly. In other words, we began to get smaller, and now our estimation is that we are a little over 300,000 people. I used to think a lot about this phenomenon, especially at the time when we experienced so much turmoil exacerbated by the late 2030s and early 2040s when the city © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_7

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experienced economic collapse, an inability to deal with climate changes, a great number of citizen uprisings and protests, and diminishing returns on our efforts to sustain our population. It was a terrible time: without jobs, without a real economy, with poverty sinking in, and a series illnesses quickly spreading across the population of the city. We were simply caught offguard and not ready. We are now reaching a point of equilibrium, but we’re not there yet. At least, we would like to think that those things I just mentioned are a glimpse of the past. Nevertheless, we take the time to ponder what happened. I guess it happens to all civilizations. And history is replete with those examples when civilizations were majestic, but little by little, the decisions of their leaders began to erode the civilization’s system of government, and then their inability to sustain their citizens, until one day, the civilization disappeared. In no manner, I am saying that we will disappear. We are a city born from innovation and great thinkers, and so we will find a way back to our former splendor. We have started that journey, but there’s so much to think about, reflect, and do in order to help our citizens gain the confidence in us as a collective set of citizens and government which we will rebound and will become a new Notek City, vibrant, full of the intellect of our people, and powered by technology. We have certainly learned our lessons. And we will not repeat them.

Question 2. Tell Us: How Did We Evolve and Get Here? I was born and raised here, so I can tell you the story very well from my youth when I wander about the city to my now older days when I govern the city with a team of professionals who want to build a new future. Notek City started as a small town. The city leaders in the mid-1990s worked hard to convert this city into an economic Battlestar. Notek City’s primary industry was initially agriculture. The town was replete with many resources, including plenty of land, forests, and bodies of water everywhere. Living in the town, I remember taking long drives with my family to go from Notek to the nearest city. All we could see in between was forest and colorful fields as we drove by. During the night, I liked to take night walks. They were my favorite. We did not need television; the sky was our entertainment. I bet you have never seen a sky like the one we had back then: full of bright stars and clear constellations which adorned the night sky. Living here was simple, but it started to change. During the late

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1990s and early 2000s, the town of Notek began a big economic expansion. Our city leaders pushed for modernization and their prowess was met with results. The population was increasing by hundreds each month. The town of Notek turned into the Notek City. That change was also part of the city branding that kept the city growing, and within 10 years, Notek City’s economy was no longer agricultural but had become industrial manufacturing. As industry moved in, the economic expansion led to city sprawling. We really did not have enough housing to accommodate the thousands of people arriving to the city every year. The growth was enormous. Construction was everywhere. Dust was also everywhere. I believe everything was being displaced. The forests, animals, farms, landfills, and even people were beginning to feel displaced. Everything was up for sale. I don’t believe there was anyone thinking about what was happening. Yes, there was talk among the citizens about how fast the natural ecosystem was changing, about how fast housing prices were skyrocketing, and how much pollution was being generated. But I don’t think anyone was paying attention; we hoped someone else was. Now, millions lived in the city. Some lived very well and others not so well. Slums began to appear and grow, as people were looking for just a small piece of property to live in. Shortly, big tech companies began to be thought of as the way to the future. Of course, Notek City wanted to amass a piece of that heaven. In late 2015 to 2022, the city officials abandoned their efforts in the industrialized sectors to dedicate and open the city to technology companies, so the city could establish a tech economy. This new branding was chased with such fervor, I wondered if the culture of the city could find even a tiny space in all that discussion about the description of this city. There was so much splendor in this city, so much culture, so much happiness, but we began to lose all this in favor of a new “tech” culture because we wanted to be known as a “technology” city. Well, the big tech companies started arriving, and we were all happy because this meant more jobs and better economic viability. It was great. But also, more construction everywhere began to take away what little we had of the forest. I also believe this was the time when we began to lose our star lights at night. With so much pollution during the day and light pollution at night, we no longer saw the sky as we once did. And again, citizens talked among each other about what they were experiencing, and everyone wondered if anyone was watching. As we branded, we also implemented technology everywhere. The tech companies had solutions which could now help

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us with the issues we were experiencing. We now had technology which could tell us when pollution was too heavy to be outside, so we would stay inside. We also had technology which could track what we would eat, how much energy we would use in our homes, the music we would hear, and mobility. In just a short while, we did not have to make those decisions any longer because our technological systems could make those decisions for us. Certainly, algorithms and super-intelligent systems could forecast, predict, and produce better choices for us than we could do ourselves. As a matter of fact, making those decisions about our daily life began to be more difficult. Many began to ask themselves: Why should we have to make those decisions when super-intelligent systems knew what was best for us? After all, these systems were able to solve the problems we had with water scarcity, food distribution, nutrients in our food, farming, pollution in our atmosphere, and even aging. And did I ever mention that those problems (especially water, food, and pollution) began to happen once we started to see our forests disappear and increasing temperatures reaching record highs? Anyway, it seemed as if these super-intelligent systems were finally getting us back on track. In no time, we began to forget. We did not even know how to grow our own food. No one really did that. That was the work of machines. Taking this shift to machine learning meant we transferred everything we knew about humanity to the machines. We could not really differentiate, and we were losing our humanity. I can’t remember when this began to happen, but I do remember a highly-debated post in “social media” (this was the name given to a consortium of electronic forums which began as a way for people to be connected with each other), in which a mom prohibited her kids from saying “thank you” and “please” to her family’s artificial intelligence home apparatus. I found that curious, but then I learned some algorithms were being designed to respond to the “thank you” and “please.” I think this was meant well, to help the children with manners, but it turned out we humans began to feel affection for these machines, helping the process of business sales but also raising a generation who could not see themselves as masters of the technology but subjects to it. I guess I was one of those who began to see the signs, and I am pretty sure I talked with my friends about it, but again, I don’t think anyone was watching or thinking about the unintended consequences. No one was looking into the future. Our super-intelligent systems were doing an excellent job, but we also started noticing flaws in how these systems were operating. The first sets

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of problems were sensory distortion, malfunctions, and destruction on the first and second generation of ICT. We figured that out, but then other problems emerged. Once the problems with climate change turned acute in late 2038, the devastating power of storms was almost unpredictable, and the fury of these storms, blackouts, and even unbearable heat became mother nature’s roar—she had enough. She would take it no longer and was now punishing us for all those decades of mistreatment. By the year 2044, the super-intelligence systems could not adapt to the new conditions as well as humans could; they could no longer sustain us. And since humans got used to being taken care of, we could no longer care about these systems. Heck, we could not even take care of ourselves, but somehow there was still this latent human survival instinct which got us through and over all those years of uncertainty. Anyway, our super-intelligent systems were, in some cases, beyond repair, and it was as if we had to start humanity all over again. We did not know what to do or where to start. Citizens were beyond despair, lost.

Question 3. How Is Life in Notek City? The realities of our past can be, at times, tough to realize. But I think the exercise in recalling these things was a good one. It made me remember other things that I had forgotten. Sure, we all concentrate on the present and the future, but some of those past lessons are important, especially as we reconstruct our city. I know that we are shifting gears to “Life in the City” for our citizens, so this discussion I am about to get into has to do with this same point. I want to talk about the levels of automation in government. Although our super-intelligence systems failed beyond repair, we kept many of our primitive intelligence systems working, some of them with upgrades, so I guess I can say that we’re operating third and fourth generation artificial intelligence and ICT systems. The citizens used this level of automation to perform many government functions. Of course, automation improves the flow of monotonous tasks and speeds up processing. We have always believed that. The problem we have come to realize is that, just like it happened with the first generations of egovernments, we thought we surpassed the hurdle. This is what I mean. Several times, we have been the victims of computer hackings (other super-intelligent systems which have waged war on other systems trying to suppress the early generations of systems, as they are not as robust). When this happens, there is no more we can do, and citizens’ lives come to a

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halt. Unfortunately, their ability to pay for goods, drink potable water, and move around the city stops. This makes life in the city very difficult. We never know when these super-intelligent systems will attack, but they do. The other problem which exists is that our government’s public servants don’t know how to manually perform the processes relevant to running the city. We are slowly learning. But again, humans are not used to doing these things, we are all learning together about how to be efficient as humans so we can make our government work; in turn, we will be able to help the people of Notek City. As we previously mentioned, those situations which take us to a halt create citizen unrest. It is true the government is trying to rebuild a structure that can serve the citizens, but on the other hand, we cannot do it alone. We need citizens to step up to their own responsibilities to participate in the government and the community, not just protest. This, of course, is easier said than done. The citizen representative form of government is a good thing, but more so, citizens need to roll up their sleeves and organize community efforts. This also requires that we reeducate the population. Well, in each of the communities, citizens are rising as leaders. We are working and educating those leaders, so they can assess their communities and help us supply the necessary coverage of city services. We are not yet completely organized, and we understand this situation is preventing several sectors of the city from getting the help they need. The good thing is that these sectors are now cyber capable, so citizens can explore the digital twin sector which best serves their area. Although this is not the full capability, it does help us keep connected and serving the citizens to the best of our ability. We cannot yet predict demand, but we can act with the best sense of urgency to reach those areas in most need. The police force is crucial, but we don’t have a large enough police force to contain situations which get out of control. The citizen understands we must make tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs we had already made is a reduction of the cyber force, in order to put more police on the street. This is a tremendous change, as previously, we did not need to have a police force. This was the work of the machines, and I have to say, I think they were more efficient at this job than we humans are. As for what are the past times of citizens, most don’t have any. Again, we’re rebuilding the city. Most citizens, at least those who have stayed, understood they would have to employ themselves in work which could

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be useful for their survival because of the state of transition and reconstruction we’re in. Therefore, a great number of citizens have turned to experimentation. Some libraries have kept paper books in the archives, and with permission and under surveillance, a good number of citizens have been studying farming, steel making, and other professions, so they can become self-sufficient. Other access is obviously done via the historical archives of the digital twin, and in those areas which are accessible, citizens can congregate to learn trades they can put to use right away, so they can also rebuild their lives in new ways. I have to say, this is not a sad story; it is an inspirational tale about the will of humanity that finds its way re-emerging. We have witnessed so many remarkable stories of citizens “going back to basics,” and I mean rudimentary basics. Their stories inspire us because they show us how we can begin to live again. It’s as if our citizens have rediscovered their humanity. Neighbors are now neighbors they can talk to. Citizens can also see how they can become masters of their own choosing. And these feelings begin to give citizens a renewed sense of power, basically that they can build a new future. This future does not have to be like the past. It can certainly be much better.

Brief Analysis of Scenario Narrative Key Themes: Growth must be managed against its consequences on the ecosystem. Systems’ thinking must be employed to appreciate the unintended consequences of actions which appear to be “good.” Technology can and will fail. No system is 100% fail-proof. Before automation, ensure people can do the job in the most effective and efficient manner; then, one can automate. Humans must always be in charge. The job of managing the future should not be delegated to machines or pure luck. Technology will resolve a problem, but with each problem resolved another one will appear; this must be thought of in advance. Preoccupations: The more we automate, the greater the vulnerabilities. Sustainability questions arise with explosive growth; the answers to these questions must be attended to from a systems’ perspective. The government must be efficient, but automation can amplify its inefficiencies. Humanity’s inherent capabilities and gifts should not be lost in the process of progress. Where clearly visible leadership does not exist, chaos will most likely arrive. Identifying leaders in a community can be very difficult, but more difficult is to try to exercise distributed leadership without a clear strategy for the future.

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Major stakeholders: Citizens of the city (present generation), government, tech industry, manufacturing industry, agricultural industry, artificial intelligent systems, and mother nature.

CHAPTER 8

Ascent City

Subject: Date: Place: Time: Length of Interview:

Summary of Interview with Mayor Isla A. Kaarina, Ascent City April 27, 2053 Ascent City 1030 DST 1 hour

Question 1. What Does Ascent City Mean to You? If you can imagine a place where the thriving will of the citizen was everpresent, while at the same time technological advancement was in synch with the citizens’ future aspirations, then you begin to imagine Ascent City. We are all proud of the place we have built: a citizen’s city. I can assure you there is no other place like this one. Ascent City is a place where the citizen is at the center of the government, community, society, and technology. Every advancement which is made in our city comes as the product of co-creation between the citizen and other stakeholders within the city, with the aim of improving the quality of life for our citizens and future generations. We have found the best approach to build a citizen’s city is one which thinks holistically about how disparate parts are connected to one another, how they behave in the presence of influencers, © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_8

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and how these influencers could change the shape of future outcomes. We then think deeply about the place where we want to be, and we make collective choices to realize it. This place we want then emerges as the process of our collective thinking and interactions. And as you can imagine, this thinking is deep thinking about our future. Whatever the activity is in Ascent City, if it does not conform to this pattern, then it is not something we would be interested in doing. This framework is important, and even more significant now in an era where most people live beyond 100 years. We cannot afford approaches which are short-sighted and ultimately and substantially benefit only the private interests of a collective few. We have seen where the influence of private collective interests leads to, even in the modern societies of the early twenty-first century: extreme inequalities, poverty, illiteracy, exclusions, scarcity of resources, broken nature, and emptiness of the individual, and subsequently, society. Instead, Ascent City thrives by its empowerment of the citizen. Ascent City represents the era and place of empowered citizens who use their collective thinking and technology to create what they want to see in the world and jointly unite to stop what they do not want to see in the world. It is the citizen’s city.

Question 2. Tell us: How Did we Evolve and Get Here? Ascent City, like many other cities, has been through its ups and downs. Perhaps, the secret to Ascent’s success was the willingness of past city leaders to learn from their experiences and turn those experiences into lessons for the next generations of leaders to review, research, and find new ways to deal with the present problems, as well as to resolve for the future. In other words, these leaders had a knack for visioning and planning which was not at all evident in most cities in the first part of the twenty-first century. This is not to say that the city leaders and citizens were all perfect and that every decision was made with foresight. Not at all. The truth is the ability of city leaders and citizens grew and was made strong through a series of learning cycles and deliberate interventions. For example, back at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many cities embarked on a journey to modernize. This was initially not motivated by their inner need to become more efficient but by big technology business corporations’ economic interests. These multi-national corporations began a type of “assisted modernization” in which they would

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enter partnerships with cities to implement tech solutions making cities more efficient. This process would make cities, as the corporations called them, “smarter.” For these multinational corporations, that meant a new, steady, and profitable line of business. As for city leaders, they thought they could brand their cities in such a way that they would attract prestige and economic power. But there was really no clear end in sight and the vast majority of cities had no future strategy. Things became more pronounced with the advent of rankings and report cards promoting adoption of technologies and telling the story of how cities were benefitting from these technological initiatives. The rankings came first, and they shamed those cities which were slow-moving or late adopters, prompting them to try to accelerate their adoption (or if not already in the “smart” movement, to then jump in). The report cards came after. The report cards were effective, and everyone could understand the suggestion, as most people could relate to the old education system where students got an “A” if their work was outstanding, a “B” or “C” if it was average, and a “D” or “F” if their work was deficient or poor. These were all developed not by city leaders or citizens but by the pressure of big technology corporations and their offspring businesses. Cities were under intense pressure. Slowly, not only were cities feeling the pressure, but also its citizens. The twenty-first century began to create a climate of technology in their cities. That was the only thing that really mattered. The technology began to infiltrate everything the citizen was doing. But the citizen was the least to benefit from this. As a matter of fact, the information age (as they called it) meant these business-giants obtained data about everything that happened in the city and individuals’ patterns of behavior. This was a profitable business as this type of data could be sold. In turn, the citizen was met with predictions and targeted for more business profitability. The citizen was finally awakened, began to see the signs, began to inquire about what was happening, and protested. The first signs which made the citizen aware started with failures of systems. Although sensors were installed, they were no longer warning us about, for example, sudden environmental changes which were becoming evident, or whether we were achieving the end purposes of this instrumentation. (In many cities, this instrumentation turned into a form of citizen surveillance where citizens could not escape from.) The quality and longevity of the instrumentation began to deteriorate, but we continued buying these poor systems which would fail. Of course, there was always the possibility to buy upgraded versions of those systems, which cost cities too much (but

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they were forced to since they were now dependent on these systems). Additionally, the robust instrumentation also meant cities were vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and they became constant targets, as their local governments were inexperienced. In short, these attacks left governments without the operating budget to spend on the citizens because more needed to be spent on more technology. It was truly a vicious cycle. Moreover, now big-tech was giant-tech and had the means and influence to build entire cities from scratch. Citizens by now understood how profit was made, and no longer wanted to be bystanders watching on the sidelines. As a matter of fact, big uprisings in Canada were a turning point for citizen awareness about how the state of surveillance and profit generation was being taken to the next level by building cities from scratch which could now immerse everyone into the playbook of corporate giants. Obviously, this was not the future we wanted, and the defining moment for us was the citizen’s petition and even uprisings in Ascent City to change how we would govern. Ascent would no longer be a government for the people, but a government by the people and with the people. It was no longer going to be about the city being smart but about the citizen harnessing their innate capability to see forward and guide the government’s decision-making. In short, we had to make changes to embrace what was then termed emergence. This word really exemplified what really happened. We emerged from an “us and them” (government and citizen) way of living to a “we” form of living which clearly integrated the city into one body, responsible for and accountable to the future. We began to make changes before the great crisis of late 2038, and this set the stage for the prosperity we have benefitted from all of these decades. First, nothing can be done without the citizen involved. Citizen participation was a challenge in the early part of the twenty-first century because of the forms of government in place at that time. There were several forms of government but, for example, the representative form of government (most popularly described as participatory and representative of the citizen) did not quite promote participation, and therefore, the majority of the minority ruled. Participatory citizenship was then compulsory in Ascent City as pre-requisite to receive benefits, tax incentives, and what we initially termed “universal income” where groups of citizens received sustenance income for a period of five years while working on urban, environment, and/or social innovation. (This was the precursor of what we have today as life’s plan but more on that later.) The participatory citizenship approach meant citizens were now part of

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every initiative started and followed through to completion. Just like they took part in the judiciary system, citizens felt civic duty needed to be extended to all the other parts of how the city is governed. In other words, this city needed to be owned by its citizens. Additionally, to avert the potential for short-sighted decision-making, the minister for future generations (and her alliance for the future team) weigh in on all initiatives, to ensure the voices of future citizens, as well as the voices of nature, are heard. Technology is also a big part of Ascent City but is no queen; it’s a servant. Everyone (government, business, education, nature, and citizen) is involved. One of the things we took from the past was the incorporation of what back then, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was termed “living labs.” These were forums of innovation and platforms for testing those innovations as an integration of the sectors we just mentioned, i.e., government, businesses, etc. Another big change all of us in Ascent City believe made a significant difference was changing education. Learning is an individual process, rather than the old system of cohort school-graduation production which distinguished the past. Additionally, every learner learns and explores the future. This was a big shift since education was always based on the study of the past. Teaching the future meant learners had to engage cognitive, creative, and critical thinking processes which were not part of most educational systems. But this was crucial to engage in the process I described at the beginning of this interview. And that was the process of thinking about disparate elements, then connecting them, seeing how influencers change the outcomes, making collective choices for our future, and then having the future we envisioned emerge. We have realized this vision, and it is beautiful. But we’re not done yet; we continue to collectively understand, anticipate, and shape the future.

Question 3. How is Life in Ascent City? The citizen is at the center of the family, which is at the center of the community; the community is linked to the city, which is a component of the country, and countries are certainly components of the planet. Sustaining the citizen is sustaining all these parts. Using this approach, Ascent City and its citizens worked to understand the future they wanted to have. Currently, the citizens lead forums in the areas of environment, mobility, technology, healthcare, social well-being, and integrated research and development. Ascent City supplies a number of resources

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to completely sustain the efforts and conclusions of these forums. From these forums, a series of initiatives emerge. Citizens and government officials then work on the analysis of requirements and select the best innovation vehicle to ensure these initiatives align with the overall vision of the future. These actions also ensure any development is not pushed onto the city but is created to fit a definite citizen purpose. Moreover, any development of an initiative is tested against the exploration of different futures, so the citizenry can assess the risks and potential benefits of such development before it is implemented. In this manner, we avoid the hard lessons of the past where technology was pushed on the citizen. On the contrary, the citizen drives innovation. Moreover, since the citizen drives innovation, the initiatives tend to produce high rates of utility, and therefore, high rates of adoption. Throughout this process, the government acts as a facilitator of success. One of the key governmental processes is to ensure we have transdisciplinary representation in each of the forums. The city government also assesses development of initiatives regarding how well transdisciplinary representation and debate has occurred in the making and proposal of an initiative before it is brought to the citizen’s council for city-wide implementation. The above approach has led to many advances over the years which have improved and paved the way for the quality of life we have today. For example, with a view into the future, we were able to foresee the environmental impacts and the effects far into the future, even before the hard years which started in 2036 in regard to climate change. We were already on our way and were able to reduce CO2 levels to the lowest levels since humans began recording them. We were able to convert all our mobility platforms to either electrical or solar, while other cities were still experimenting. Additionally, we were able to reduce the heat-island effect by planting trees which, during the late 2030s through the mid2040s, provided refuge to the city’s citizens while other cities saw the worst of those days. Our citizens were already practicing urban farming and turning available space to green space. Again, this was a process of foresight in action and did not require excessive technological investments but produced sustainability for the citizens of Ascent. This was a citizen’s movement, and the city government merely facilitated the discussion and removed the obstacles, so we all could reach our end goals. In regard to technological investments, we will tell you not every decision that has been made has been a magic pill. We have many systems and superintelligence systems tracking much of the citizens’ activities in order to

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keep them safe and free from hazards. But these implementations have been highly supervised and are regularly audited. These systems belong to the city and its citizens. One of the issues with implementing bigtech solutions was the problem with what they called intellectual property which could not be audited, so governments were at the mercy of the solution provider. Both governments and solution providers were in fear that competitive advantages could be disclosed. That was a bad system. Instead, our citizens were involved in the design of data being monitored, how it would be used, and the longevity of the data. The citizen’s protection data council audits and reports its impartial findings. Members of that council are rotated, and their rotation is a citizen-based decision. Again, the government’s role is to facilitate resources to ensure these audits happen and action (if any) is directed in alignment with the law. There is much more which will continue to happen here, but we’re confident Ascent City will continue its legacy as a place where the thriving will of the citizen is ever-present, while at the same time, technological advancement is in synch with the citizens’ future aspirations.

Brief Analysis of Scenario Narrative Key Themes: If the government is to effectively serve the interests of the citizen, the citizen must be involved. Technology should be synchronized with citizens’ future aspirations. The best outcomes of technology utility and rates of adoption will come from those designs where the citizen is a co-creator of the innovation. Before moving to solve the present, there must be an instinct to think about the lessons of the past, then stress-test solutions against the future. Protection for the unborn generation and mother nature must remain latent in any future(s) city strategy. Transdisciplinary forums offer a great setting for holistic solutions. Preoccupations: The government must be humanly effective and efficient before trying to become machine effective and efficient. The inherent forms of keeping a city free and safe necessitate the storing and handling of citizen data, but data must be audited to ensure its purposes and aims are not distorted. Technology, and, in many instances, advanced super-intelligent systems will be needed. The possibility exists even with digital literacy, the government may not reach the level of proficiency necessary to keep the city secure. Then, partnerships between big businesses and city governments must happen, but these partnerships must be open to scrutiny and accountability to the citizens.

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Major stakeholders: Citizens of the city (present generation), citizens of the city (next generation), government, tech industry, manufacturing industry, artificial intelligent systems, mother nature.

PART III

The Transition

CHAPTER 9

The Transition: From Smart City to Foresight City

Should the Future of Our Cities Be the “Smart” City? Perhaps there is no right answer to the above question. The smart city could certainly be a preferred future if citizens of the city desired this to be their future, but it does not have to be the only plausible future for a society aspiring to be the best it can. One could say the most fitting future for a city is the image of a future which the citizens desire for themselves and their future generations. If citizens can build an image of the future which collects their aspiring values, institutions, liberties, ways of life, and supporting systems to sustain and renew them as they navigate into and explore the future, then that image is their future. The problem with the smart city as a future appears to be that the pressure mounted on cities to become smart cities leaves them with no option to pursue their own image of the future. Instead, cities around the world have been lured into a single future, and once there, the doors to other potentials are being weakened. The more the cities entered this smart city future, wired themselves to take part and get connected in it, and are fully instrumented for it, the more the citizens lose the opportunity to choose their own collective path. Once in that future, the citizens must live, become accustomed to, and slowly resolve for themselves a world which has been decided for them. Citizens, then, have no choice but to reason with the impossibilities of escape from a world which has entangled them in such © The Author(s) 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1_9

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a form. The most likely way out is the reconstruction of a new world, and, at that point, the sure way to get to the reconstruction is through a revolution. Although the idea that smart cities will spring prospects of economic resurgence, improve quality of life for citizens, and become the star of environmental stewardship, the manifestation of these expectations will not be achieved by cities themselves. Truthfully, there is no such thing and cannot be (for now) such a thing as a smart city, unless we slowly edge and enter a world as the one described in the narrative scenario describing the Techno City and part of the Notek City narrative scenario. Within this scenario, super-intelligence systems (as in highly advanced AI systems), become the de facto form of government for the care and sustainability of human life and its interdependencies, due to the inability of human foresight, wisdom, will, and courage to think and make needed corrections. Some people may think both Techno City and Notek City are wildcard scenarios, and the likelihood of these developments happening within their cities are near to impossible. Most likely, when we have conversations with others about these types of scenarios, the people we talk to stand on two opposite spectrums: paranoia and skepticism. The paranoid and those seeking to build headlines speak notably different than the skeptics. The paranoid cultivates popular thinking and speaking about AI as absolute intelligence. This is faulty logic, at least for this decade. Currently, algorithms resolve for a set of functions, and that does not mean the set of functions will reason and resolve for all functions. In other words, the current AI is still primitive, and it is limited AI. The pessimist will quickly point out this thinking. This AI’s current situation we just described also stands in contrast to the human who can reason and solve for multiple situations which are unpredictable, erratic, and complex. The pessimist will also point this out and will quickly go on his way. One should not advocate the paranoid or the pessimist. These two spectrums are too far apart from each other. In its place, one could look at the developments and act with caution, but not ever dismiss these scenarios as not possible as many people do. For example, in regard to developments which may act as signposts of what is emerging in this area and should help us begin to think about the future implications, researchers report that a big shift has been happening recently toward building robust AI infrastructure within ICT—ICT being the technological infrastructure of the smart city, as we have discussed in prior chapters. The focus has increased dramatically, researchers say, in Europe, the United States, and China to develop new

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AI-based ICT and robot technology (Lu, Li, Chen, Kim, & Serikawa, 2018). Additionally, other researchers and the World Economic Forum forecast that, based on the above-mentioned developments, by 2030 AIcapable robots will operate 85% of all customer interactions, suggesting also several risks, one of them the AI’s pursuit of goals which are different from what they were designed for, causing unplanned harm (Dobrescu & Dobrescu, 2018; World Economic Forum, 2019). These conclusions (or not even having the thought that the above scenarios are possible) are a constant reminder these things can indeed happen. First, the thought of dismissing something from being an impossibility, even in our lifetime, is an actual enabling actor of those scenarios. In other words, to dismiss the plausibility of this impossibility brings us closer to this future because the dismissal causes us to forget one crucial step to ensure the undesirable future does not become a reality: Action! Secondly, by dismissing the plausibility of a future like this one and not acting, the future begins to appear, perhaps fuzzy for now. But as we move along the time continuum, the plausibility of this future becomes more concrete because of technological advances which happen while we are not paying attention, as well as our unexcused absence in guiding the development and implementation of the technology and/or actions which can make these scenarios happen. Thirdly, one can echo with confidence the view of famous futurist, systems architect, and scientist, Earl C. Joseph (1974), who highlighted that almost anything was possible in the span of 20 years. We do not need to dig too far to find recent and modern examples to make this point. The effort to get the first man on the moon was completed in eight years from U.S. President Kennedy’s announcement in May of 1961 to the actual landing on the moon (goal accomplishment) on July 20, 1969 (Garber, 2013). The smartphone that has disrupted many industries and ways of doing business has only been in existence for about 13 years—counting from the launching of the iPhone in 2007 and Google’s release of its Android operating system the following year (Soukup, 2015). In another well-known example, think about Facebook. Facebook has been in existence since 2004 (15 years) and has also been an inordinate disruptor, not only in social media, society, communications, and marketing, but also commerce—not to mention its efforts to launch and sustain its own cryptocurrency (Browne, 2019; Facebook Newsroom, 2019). Another big achievement in under 20 years was the sequencing of the human genome, a task that was once thought impossible. The tasking to begin sequencing the human genome started in 1991, the first draft

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of the genome was delivered in 2001, and the complete sequencing of all human genes was completed in 2003. The international effort was first believed to require a period of 15 years; instead, it took 12 years and gave research scientists the blueprint for building a human being (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS], 2018; HHS, 2019). The completion of the sequencing of the human genome has been now, as of this writing 16 years. Can we imagine what can be possible in science today? Thus far, we have explored some key ideas in answering the question of whether the smart city should be the future for our cities. Here is a summary to help us catch up before we move on to the next idea. • The smart city could certainly be a preferred future if the citizens of the city desire this to be their future. • The problem with the smart city as a future appears to be that the pressure mounted on cities to become smart cities leaves them with no option to pursue their own image of the future. • Once in that future, the citizens must live, become accustomed to, and slowly resolve for themselves a world which has been decided for them. • There is no such thing and cannot be (for now) such a thing as a smart city; the city is an entity. The behavior of citizens makes a city smart, and therefore, becoming a smart city is a collective of human aspirations rather than a place. • Both Techno City and Notek City are likely scenarios. Their occurrences should not be ignored, especially considering the science of our time and what could be possible in 20 years. Another important idea to contemplate when thinking about the answer to the posited question is the fact that this thing the popular media has termed as a smart city is really a used future. Futurists Sohail Inayatullah (2008) termed “used futures” as those visions of the future borrowed from someone else. Since these futures belong to someone else, they tend to ignore the uniqueness of the organizations, communities, cities, countries, cultures, environment, and social landscapes of those places in which these futures are being implemented. These futures are borrowed as a preferred future. But the point is that these futures were native to other organizations, cities, cultures, and the like. These futures

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emerged in their native places as the product of collective thought, traditions, values, beliefs, and ways of being which made these futures take root, grow, and flourish in the native place or land. Transplanting those futures into other places assumes that what worked in one place will work in another. This also assumes that the place to which this future is being exported has the same conditions as the prior place. This is seldom the case. In this sense, we act with indifference. In the instance of cities, if we think we are robbing a city of its spirit when we take a used future (the native future of another land or city) and work with perseverance to embed this future into another city, we are probably right. Slowly, we extinguishing the essence of the city’s unique qualities (the inimitable future begins to fade its bright colors and traditions to give way to the common and used). This is not to say that we cannot learn from other cities and begin to idealize how we can implement other’s best practices into our own cities. That is a good thing but requires some sort of strategy. The advantageous position for any city to be in (so it can take advantage of this sort of adoption of best practices) would be the point where a city has gone through a process of visualization, where its citizens and leaders understand their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats of the present and emerging city environment. Then, leaders and citizens can best make an analysis of these used futures and make a fit-to-use decision in relation to how those futures will strengthen the city’s aspiration for its own future, complement the city’s strengths, and positions the city to seize opportunities in what could be an uncertain and rapidly-changing environment. But as Inayatullah (2008) noted, used futures are not driven by innovation. Actually, the opposite is true: Used futures lead everyone to imitate what everyone else has already done or is doing. Wouldn’t we want to have every creation in our cities (every form of cultural, spiritual, social, political, and technological innovation) reflect the character and spirit of our people? If that is the case, we will then have to create a new future, one that is fitting to our cities. Cities which have been successful at doing this are the cities of Barcelona and Amsterdam. Both cities are widely-known to be two of the top smart cities in the world. In the case of Barcelona, the intriguing thought about this city is that their aspiration was not to be the best smart city in the world. As we have noted in prior chapters, their journey started in the mid1990s, with the realization that the knowledge economy was going to be the key driver of economic growth in the world. They built their

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own vision for the twenty-first century, and they have been refining that vision during each step along their journey. In 2010, for example, the city launched its “Barcelona as people city” campaign. Five parts defined that transformational vision: open data initiatives; sustainable city growth; social innovation; promotion of alliances between universities, research centers, and private and public partnerships; and smart services-based ICT (Capdevila & Zarlenga, 2015, p. 269). Those city efforts culminated in Barcelona earning the European Capital of Innovation award by the European Commission in 2015. That was not a borrowed future, but a future the city citizens decided for themselves. This is a powerful example depicting how the vision of a new future pulls the city to the future, rather than a used future which pushes the city into a corner of history that could be at best the present but quickly becomes the past. And lastly, we must consider that in regard to used futures, they can lead to unintended consequences for all the reasons we have discussed, mainly their predominant applicability and fitting to the native city where the future is being borrowed from as well as the insufficiency in reflecting the character, culture, and beliefs of the city into which the used future is being applied. One of those examples noted by futurists and social scientists was the concept of urbanization borrowed from western cities by Asian cities, once thought to be a model of smart urbanization. This urbanization and gentrification have left many western cities with absent green spaces, scarcity of water, extreme city sprawls, urban pollution, clashes among social groups, and a rise in homelessness and other citizens’ quality of life problems. Many of the western cities’ mayors have tried to remedy some of these critical issues, but progress has been too slow for anyone to notice if real change has taken place. Asian cities are now bearing the effects of that used future. They are plagued with the same issues, and in some cases being compiled into much bigger issues with population migrations increasing the number of megacities in the world (Inayatullah, 2004; Paddison & McCann, 2014).

Is Our Collective Image of the Smart City the Right Image for the City of the Future? Going beyond used futures, one must also explore and be concerned about the collective images of the smart city and those of the future. What is the world envisioning? Fundamentally, those collective images are telling about what we, as leaders, could expect unless we collaborate

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with others to shape those images and create new ones which directly link to the future we want to see. After all, “all things are created twice” (Covey, 2015, p. 106). Covey, in his bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, highlighted an effective way to create the future. He mentioned that highly effective people create the world twice: first, by thinking about every detail regarding the world they want to create, and next, by working on that creation. In turn, the world is first thought of, and then it exists. We give a world existence when we think about it. At that moment the world we thought of exists, and it even has an address—ours! At least, that world exists in our minds, and it manifests itself in physical form through the actions of our labor, guided by the image we hold in our minds (consciously or unconsciously). When we image the world, we begin to think about the world we want to see. In many ways, we create this world in all sorts of detail. If the power of one person can begin this process, imagine what one billion people with the same image of the world could do! In this exploration about images of the future, my curiosity took me to my favorite Internet search engine to find popular images of what people imagine the smart city of the future to be (those images people envision the smart city of the future would look like). The text word-string used on September 25, 2019 to view those images was “smart cities of the future.” The search engine returned 204 million results. Then, I switched the view from “All” to “Images” to view all the images the search engine caught related to the word-string text. There were plenty of images. (As you read these lines, you may try the search action on your computer to experience the visual effect of the images before continuing with the reading.) Upon the computer reaction to the query, my first inclination was to go through all the images listed. I started scrolling through the images so I could have a general impression of what I was looking at. Next, I began to note that the deeper I was getting into the image viewing, some pictures began to be repeated (the greater the number of images I was looking at, the more they started to repeat). This initial scroll over the images also helped me understand what the features were which began to stand out so I could begin to decide what was important to note. The second and third scrolls over the images helped me zoom in on the pictures and select the first 208 images for further contemplation. The images began to portray some interesting characteristics. In regard to the appearance of the cities, they all portrayed condensed spaces between buildings. There was plenty of asphalt, concrete, metal, streets

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for cars, light posts, and almost every image portrayed some version of city sprawl. Additionally, the images had tall buildings of different shapes. Most of the pictures (if not all) depicted modern buildings with skyscrapers. The cities’ skies were almost always fuzzy, and very few pictures portrayed cities with clear, sunny skies. In the instances in which cities were depicted at night, the striking characteristic was energy use. More specifically, these cities were illuminated in boundless ways. Moreover, these cities at night were also depicted with a digital net cast over them. The digital net covered the entire city spaces, and sometimes, these nets were shown with dashboard-type holograms which could see through the entire “vital signs” inventory of a city, tracking everything that moved in the city. In regard to the habitat of the cities in these images, green space was limited. And curious enough, whenever the intention of the image was to portray a much advanced or futuristic smart city, the less green color was in the image. In most instances, there was no green space in these super-advanced cities. Another layer to unpack on these images is the people layer. After all, cities are meant for people to populate them, live in them, conduct their business in them, socialize and celebrate in them, and play in them. People were almost absent in these images of the smart city of the future. Sadly, out of the first 208 images, only 15 images had people in them. Additionally, out of those 208 images, only two pictures had children in them. The images, overall, lacked the participation of people either walking, playing, or spending time with families (and absolutely no pets in them). One intriguing picture portrayed a man on the top of a skyscraper, overlooking the city. The city image did not portray any other humans but this man, sitting on the floor on a cloudy afternoon, gloomily looking over the city with his robot companion who was sitting next to him. Other images were more lively portraying modern streets with what appeared to be small passenger vehicles. In many of the images where cars and people were portrayed, almost all depicted location tracking, a human controlling the action while monitoring the city, or humans being monitored by digital systems. A summary of the image content in terms of people and the environment can be seen in Table 9.1. Perhaps these are not the right images of what we would like to see our cities be in the future. The good thing is that there is so much we can do as leaders to replace these images with new ones. The advocacy in the last statement is not for these images to disappear (for us to forget and think these futures are not possibilities), but for us, as leaders and citizens, to shape the kind of image we want to have. Perhaps, by thinking about

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Table 9.1 Breakdown of smart city of the future image content 208 images reviewed

Images with people: 15 (7%)

Images with green spaces: 22 (11%)

Playing outside (3), people with disabilities (1), pinpointed for location (2), monitoring (1), being monitored (3), locating transportation (1), controlling transportation (2), standing (no faces) (1)

Green spaces were limited, and most were present in small spots between buildings and appeared to be planned. Two images highlighted green rooftops and buildings covered with vegetation.

Source Author’s interpretation and summary of imagery about the smart city

the kind of future city we want to have, we can begin to create it in our minds, therefore, giving that image existence. By giving this new image existence, we begin to open the path for a new kind of future, a new kind of city.

Making a Choice: Building the New Images of the Future Perhaps the imagery we have described of the smart city of the future is not the most fitting image for our future. The interesting fact is that the principal argument in favor of the smart city is that its prime objective is to improve the quality of life of its citizens, ensuring that both social and environmental sustainability remain as priorities (Gupta, Chauhan, & Jaiswal, 2019; Hollands, 2008). Yet, the imagery lacks both of these elements: the presence of people and nature. This fact also highlights the disconnect between what the popular narrative says about the smart city objectives and what we can see as the collective imagery of the smart city. This discovery is not just the sole domain of our reflection from the reviewed depictions; it has also been emphasized by several authors in the smart city literature. For instance, scholars noted that citizens are a necessary component (as described in many smart city definitions) because their civic engagement is highlighted as required for the smart city concept to actually achieve its aims, i.e., innovation cannot happen without people and the authentic use of the word “smart” is a human attribute. Still, within the smart city literature authors described the required and real civic engagement to be “weak and discontinuous” (Zait, 2017, p. 385),

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“missing” (Gupta et al., 2019, p. 667) or “neglected” (Simonofski, Serral Asensio, De Smedt, & Snoeck, 2018, p. 1). In regard to the environment in the smart city, although the smart city literature is heavily focused on the technological development, sustainability through the use and application of technology is documented, even graded through the establishment of smart city measurement indexes (Giffinger et al., 2007; Öberg, Graham, & Hennelly, 2017). Nevertheless, this characteristic is missing from the imagery. Since an inherent gift in our humanity is to create the future by making it exist first in our minds, leaders should then be troubled by the current smart city imagery and activate the process of replacing the existing imagery with new ones. The new images must carry the collective power of coherence between what we say the city of the future should look like and its actual imagery. This also means the narrative we have been using to describe the smart city of the future cannot be the same one we will use to describe the city of the future. When we analyze the smart city of the future in the imagery, one can ponder a few thoughtprovoking questions, among them are the following: Are these images the smart city of the future or a continuation of the present? Did any of the fundamental ways of living, being, or state of the present change giving birth to a new future? At deeper levels, we see these images are not offering a world much different from the one we have right now. For instance, the pictures depict scores of cars and streets everywhere which are constructed, not for pedestrians, but for cars. Is that the past, the present, or the future? It seems as if this represents business as usual. Although there is no wide belief that cars will disappear, the way in which cars will be used is going to change. As well, the way we begin to define mobility is already changing and currently involves other sources of augmented transportation such as scooters and bikes. Consider also that governments’ pressure on cities, car manufacturers, and in turn citizens to do their part in reducing CO2 emissions could impose use-of-the-road taxes and new permissions which can transform how citizens move and decide to own or not own cars. One can see these situations can shift how citizens will think about, not just the ownership of vehicles, but how to optimize their mobility patterns as a combination of several mediums of transportation. As we review the imagery, then one could expect the images of the future in those depictions would capture some of the aspects we just discussed. The same can be said for the pictures of people going to work. The World Economic Forum (2018) forecasted the availability and

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ubiquity of high-speed mobile Internet, artificial intelligence, widespread adoption of big data analytics, and cloud technology as big trends which will change business, and in turn, the future of work. Since these drive other key technologies which can help people seek alternative means of work (as telework, collaborative, gig economy, or no work), people can work from anywhere or adopt a different lifestyle not requiring them to “go to work.” The previously-mentioned big trends changing the future of work can be combined with any number of other sets of forces (as in the political pressures for cities to reduce vehicle congestion, increase mass transit, allow only electric vehicles in city centers, and stagger work shifts or abolish 9-5 routines) to lead to an unnumbered new ways of going-to-work possibilities. Knowing some of these trends and forces are already at play, will the way we go about doing work in the future be the same as it has been for the past 50 years? Probably not. In turn, the images we will form about the future should enable us to create the world we can already foresee given all these trends and forces; these new images of the future should not necessarily lend themselves to repeat the past, even those depictions that extend themselves 20 years from today and into the horizon. Lastly, there is one more reason why we must make a conscious choice to replace the old imagery with new ones: The world of those images (the world of the smart city represented in those images) has been distorted by dystopian contours, like the termination of the environment, the overabundance of technology restricting in disparate manners human’s freedom, the disappearance of people, and the like. These images are, therefore, not fitting to be the powerful imagery which could pull us into the future we can have. The good thing is that we have the innate capability to foresee, make choices, create, and shape the future. But we cannot do it in the place where we have been. We must find another place: a place that leads to a new way of thinking and extends our future beyond political and technology cycles. That place is the Foresight City.

References Browne, R. (2019, September 23). IBM says it’s open to working with Facebook on digital currency. CNBC. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com. Capdevila, I., & Zarlenga, M. I. (2015). Smart city or smart citizens? The Barcelona case. Journal of Strategy and Management, 8(3), 266–282.

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Covey, S. R. (2015). The 7 habits of highly effective people: Powerful lessons in personal change. Miami, FL: Mango Media. Dobrescu, E. M., & Dobrescu, E. M. (2018). Artificial intelligence (AI)—The technology that shapes the world. Global Economic Observer, 6(2), 71–81. Facebook Newsroom. (2019). Our history, 2004–2019. Facebook. Retrieved from https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/. Garber, S. (2013, October 29). Decision to go to the moon: President John F. Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 Speech. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Retrieved from https://history.nasa.gov/moondec. html. Giffinger, R., Fertner, C., Kramar, H., Kalasek, R., Pichler-Milanovi´c, N., & Meijers, E. (2007). Smart Cities: Ranking of European medium-sized cities. Vienna, Austria: Centre of Regional Science (SRF), Vienna University of Technology. Gupta, P., Chauhan, S., & Jaiswal, M. P. (2019). Classification of smart city research—A descriptive literature review and future research agenda. Information Systems Frontier, 21, 661–685. Hollands, R. G. (2008). Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial? City, 12(3), 303–320. Inayatullah, S. (2004). Cities create their future. Journal of Futures Studies, 8(3), 77–81. Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: Futures thinking for transforming. Foresight: the Journal of Futures Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy, 10(1), 4–21. Joseph, E. C. (1974). What is future time? The Futurist, 8(4), 171. Lu, H., Li, Y., Chen, M., Kim, H., & Serikawa, S. (2018). Brain intelligence: Go beyond artificial intelligence. Mobile Networks and Applications, 23(2), 368–375. Öberg, C., Graham, G., & Hennelly, P. (2017). Smart cities. The IMP Journal, 11(3), 468–484. Paddison, R., & McCann, E. (2014). Cities & social change: Encounters with contemporary urbanism. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Simonofski, A., Serral Asensio, E., De Smedt, J., & Snoeck, M. (2018). Hearing the voice of citizens in smart city design: The CitiVoice framework. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 1–14. Soukup, P. A. (2015). Smartphones. Communication Research Trends, 34(4), 3– 39. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2018). National Human Genome Research Institute: What is the human genome project? NIH . Retrieved from https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project/What. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2019). U.S. National Library of Medicine: What was the human genome project and why has it been

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important? NIH . Retrieved from https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/hgp/des cription. World Economic Forum. (2018). The future of jobs report. Centre for the New Economy and Society: WEF . Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/ docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf. World Economic Forum. (2019). AI safety, security, and standards. Strategic Intelligence: Strategic insights and contextual intelligence from the World Economic Forum. Retrieved from https://intelligence.weforum.org/topics/ a1Gb0000000pTDREA2?tab=publications. Zait, A. (2017). Exploring the role of civilizational competences for smart cities’ development. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, 11(3), 377–392.

CHAPTER 10

Foresight City

New Horizons, New Futures Our leadership must move us from the Smart City to a place where we can see the future, unconstrained and untethered from used narratives and placed into a new narrative which defines what our cities’ future ought to be: a designed future which, as previously mentioned, pulls the city to its own aspirational image, complements the city’s strengths, and positions the city to seize opportunities for its citizens several decades and centennial years from today. Our leadership must also act with one intent, meaning leadership action should not separate the city from the citizen, unlike the current smart city narrative that, although aspiring and intending to have the citizen as a co-creator within the city, is failing because the citizen and the city are viewed as two different entities. More so, the current narrative makes the city smart and the citizen dumb. This is because an extraordinary emphasis on technology continues to minimize the role of the citizen and alienates a large number of non-tech sector and non-tech savvy citizens (Gupta, Chauhan, & Jaiswal, 2019; Neirotti, De Marco, Cagliano, Mangano, & Scorrano, 2013; Simonofski, Serral Asensio, De Smedt, & Snoeck, 2018). The fact is the future of the city and its citizens are inescapably intertwined as one. The old axiom, “what we do to one, we will do to the other” would be true because the citizen and the city cannot be separated. In short, our leadership must

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take us to a new place and unify these two entities (city and citizen). That place is the Foresight City. Foresight City is the metaphor representing the gamut of humanity, the space where the current, emerging, and future generations are able to join hands as coexisting brothers and sisters responsible and accountable to one another. This metaphor forms a powerful image in our minds which, in the present, thrusts us backward in time and then pulls us forward into the future. The thrust backward gives us insight as to how we arrived at where we are today, so we can gain wisdom. The pull forward gives us farsightedness, so we can actively reach for the judgments, consensus, and advice of the future in the decision-making process of today. Foresight City certainly disrupts the order of things. It does challenge our consciousness and sensory to think deeply and be farsighted. In thinking about how the Foresight City challenges us, I am drawn first to the insightful words and leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A minister and the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement. King led the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 (King, 1964). He lived in a polarized and discriminatory world plagued by atrocious acts of violence against a minority. Most shocking when one thinks about King’s time is all the turmoil and appalling acts of violence were happening in a society known as civilized and having become advanced politically, economically, and most certainly technologically unlike any other nation in the world. Many of us could say that, as a nation and in spite of the progress still to be made, the United States has come a long way to accomplish what King spoke about in his wellknown “I Have a Dream” speech as making every hill and mountain low and the crooked paths straight (King, 1963). This progress has been an inspiration for many nations and has provided a more fertile ground for American citizens. Still, as I read some of King’s speeches today (51 years later), I cannot help but think about the prophetic sense of his words. For instance, the thought the destiny of one group is tied to another, the freedoms of one group are inextricably bound to the freedoms of another, and we cannot walk alone. And finally, even when we face difficulties today (and will face them tomorrow), it is a dream (a powerful, uncontrollable imagery of the upcoming) the force that is going to pull us through to beautiful beginnings. King’s words express the sense of the interconnectedness of all things in the universe: the physical, the spiritual (back also to Covey’s point about creation discussed in Chapter 9), the man-made, and the natural.

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Moreover, we take these four interactions combined (the physical, spiritual, natural, and man-made) and realize these are minuscule interconnected parts of a myriad of unseen forces within the universe which are not always obvious, as in the laws of physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, equilibrium, gravity, vibration, inertia, and the like each with its own unique systems of feedback loops and time-delay factors which many times surprise us. This second set of interconnections composed of universal laws and systems is the densest part of our world. Unfortunately, since these are not always obvious (although scientists have proven their omnipresence), we usually neglect to think about them or consult with them. More intriguing and incredible is the first set of interconnections, not only interacts with the denser sets of interconnections, but it is absorbed and intertwined in such way that the first and second sets of interconnections become one, creating a new system which is now alive, is goal-oriented, and is also balance-seeking within itself and its environment. The simple sketch (not really simple (protrayed in Figure 10.1)) represents the interconnectedness of our world. In Foresight City, this idea of interconnectedness is an important conceptual understanding because it forms the context for deeper thinking about the layers of change leaders set in motion when they make decisions. Moreover, we understand, especially in an era where information is ubiquitous and digital human connectedness has reached billions, leaders are not the only ones generating change. Although the leader may make decisions creating change, other actors in society, special groups, and large multinational corporations, aided by economics and advances in technology, tend to have more influence and can achieve more momentum in the change process than titled or elected leaders. Another big actor, and we have seen its undeniable force, is the environment. Its force and equilibrium-seeking phenomena cause tremendous shifts in how change happens, who adapts and does not adapt, and how fast the rate of change adoption will take place (to include the development and adoption of technology). In short, these points are discussed here to illustrate how in Foresight City we think about the future. Since the future is connected and constantly in flux due to the multitude of interconnection of components and forces which we can and cannot see (as noted in the previous paragraph and also seen in Image 10.1), we are nothing less than tested to think differently than past generations; we are required to think, at least, in three dimensions.

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Man’s CreaƟon

Spiritual World

Nature’s CreaƟon

Physical World

Fig. 10.1 Interconnections of four domains (Source Author’s creation; Note A depiction of the interconnection between the man-made, the nature’s creation, the spiritual world, and the physical world. The systems within these domains are constantly interacting. All four of these domains and their interdependencies form one system. The new system is goal-seeking and equilibrium-seeking within other forces which act on this system. See also Image 10.1)

Three Forms of Thinking in Foresight City Three forms of thinking connect Foresight City. These forms of thinking are thinking encounters. They are intended for the leader to understand and appreciate not what to think but how to think. This sort of thinking promotes the emergence of insight, so we can then act with foresight. The first form of thinking is to think about ourselves. How did we get here? This is an important question usually answered superficially by many without much thought, and that in itself (not giving profound thought to how we got here) is problematic. Whatever our life experience has been, it is easy to look at our circumstances and believe the situation was either caused by our actions (internal locus of control) or entirely by others (external locus of control) for not thinking more exhaustive about the matter we had in front of us. Many times, that thinking leads

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Image 10.1 Four domains within universal forces (Source Author’s depiction of universal forces acting on the four domains; Note As the unseen balanced elements that make up Fig. 10.1 exist and are only seen portrayed in this Image, the myriad of unseen forces of the universe are not always obvious, as in the laws of physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, equilibrium, gravity, vibration, inertia, each with their own unique balancing systems of feedback loops, nodes, and time-delay factors act on the four domains. Both the four domains and the universal forces become a system of systems. The interactions depicted and still those unseen create nonlinear responses which cannot always be predicted given the multi-nonlinear relationships, feedback systems, array and natural-forming architecture of nodes, and time delays in the system of systems)

us to reason this present-day we are experiencing has been pre-determined and was, therefore, inevitable. The truth is the present-day’s frustrations we may be experiencing are a combination of countless factors, some of them out of our control (like pushes and pulls from the forces of the universe and interconnected systems as in those presented in Fig. 10.1 and Image 10.1), but others are totally our own doing (implementing quick fixes which were the product of superficial thinking). Sometimes the accumulation of these quick fixes upset the equilibrium of the environment around us and causes the friction and turmoil we get into. The opposite is

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also true: The paths of richness and prosperity we enjoy are most likely the fruits of deep thinking, deliberate planning, and careful decision making. Both just-mentioned thinking contrasts have been reflected for thousands of years in human belief, for example, as the more than two-thousandyear-old proverb goes, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth” (Proverbs 10:4, New International Version). Hence, superficial thinking is not going to get us out of many of the situations we have gotten ourselves into as the result of the quick fixes implemented in the past. Therefore, we all must contend with the law of the harvest in either of two ways in our lifetime’s journey. One way aligns with the popular wisdom stating “we reap what we sow.” The other aligns with a more ancient principle which says, “One sows and another reaps” (John 4:37, NIV). When we think about Foresight City, we can see the latter as fitting because Foresight City reaches, mends, and glues across generations and across time. We sow in this generation, and another reaps later in our generation, the present, the emerging, or the future generation. We also reap in our generation what others (consciously or unconsciously) sowed in the past. The point about thinking and asking of ourselves how we got here is to exercise a form of thinking which transcends the recent in order to inquire and challenge our assumptions about the present era. Moreover, we take the opportunity in this form of thinking to map the motivations and thought-processes which got us where we are, in addition to mapping the core belief systems which were dominant in our journey from past generations to the present. We must examine the type of thinking, motivations, and beliefs, as well as the assumptions and link them to their effects on the present conditions. The recent worldwide Corona Virus pandemic of 2020 gives context to our discussion about this first form of thinking in Foresight City. Let us recount briefly the situation. From the first confirmed case of the Novel Corona Virus (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China on 31 December 2019 to 11 April 2020, more than 1,653,204 cases have been confirmed around the world, including 102,088 deaths (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 2020; World Health Organization, 2020). In a little over three months, the spread of the pandemic has overwhelmed the capacity of countries’ medical health systems, especially in cities around the world (Allen, 2020; Blasberg, Fahrion, Sarovic, & Schaap, 2020). The pandemic has become a disruptor of major proportions. It has caused massive shutdowns of work centers, small businesses, restaurants, and the closure or forceful movement of traditional classroom education to online

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education. As well, it has triggered social distancing rules, unemployment, and the intense competition and rapid depletion of some consumer goods and medical supplies, leading the global economy to see its most brutal equity collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Jones et al., 2020). How can someone not see this coming? And if someone saw it, how could this happen, especially given the advances in technology over the past 100 years? The truth is that several thought leaders saw the advent of a pandemic, at least since 2015, some of them speaking, writing, planning, and conducting physical as well as computer-assisted simulations (Gates, 2015; Habib et al., 2019; Li et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the world is suffering (as of this writing) from the continued spread of this pandemic. It is clear we are now facing the big question, “How did we get here?” In the first thinking form, we begin to gain insight, as previously mentioned, from the analysis of the type of thinking, motivations, and beliefs, as well as the assumptions that got us here (to the pandemic). Next, we link those motivations, beliefs, and past assumptions to their effects on the present conditions (shortage of consumables, overwhelmed health systems, disruption of social and work life, as well as the economic collapse). What type of thinking got us here? American businessman and billionaire (now turned philanthropist) Bill Gates (Gates, 2015) argues that for decades the world has been preparing for a nuclear war as the most harmful scenario to tens of millions of people worldwide. Therefore, motivation has led to mass investments in nuclear deterrence because of the belief that a strong nuclear deterrence will keep us safe. The assumption of this type of thinking, and subsequent motivations and beliefs, is that no other threat is more dangerous to human existence than a nuclear war. No one can deny that nuclear war is a major threat to our existence, but the point here is to understand how this thinking promotes massive action on one side of the security dimension but ignores other threats that carry the same devastating potential. The second point is that by seeing how this thinking dominates our ways of acting, we activate our understanding of how the lack of action on other existential threats begins to create vulnerabilities. When left unchecked, these vulnerabilities can become our demise. In the example being explored (the pandemic), several warnings and world events like those of Ebola, SARS, and MERS (Habib et al., 2019; Suwantarat & Apisarnthanarak, 2015), allowed us to begin to see the world’s health vulnerabilities caused by the lack of

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action. Without investments in health infrastructure, response preparedness, contingency plans (including, logistics, social, and economics), and associated leadership and inter-agency communication collaboration, we could have foreseen the following: quick depletion of reserves, the rapid spread of the virus due to unknown facts about the make-up of the “enemy” nations were fighting, unsuccessful attempts to contain the spread in the early stages to avert massive pandemic spread, shortage of health workers and inability to protect them, misinformation and panic, a surge of death toll followed by a slow stabilization period, rapid depletion of consumables as panic sets in among the populace, and disruption of a country’s economics. All of these took place. The second form of thinking is to think about others. In Foresight City, we inquire others. We want to know and understand others’ perspectives. What do they know about the past, the present, or the future? This is a good place to verify our assumptions against what other people know and see is been happening over time, so we can join those perspectives and compare them against our own. The purpose is not to validate whether one is right or wrong. The aim is to seek an understanding of the world around us. This understanding leads us to awareness which is crucial for change to occur. One is seeking to reduce blind spots in thinking. Multiple perspectives help us do that. In working with students and clients, I often introduce the concept of the Johari Window to illustrate the notion of blind spots in leadership thinking. This tool is also useful in analyzing our own dimensions of awareness. The Johari Window was initially designed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham (1955) to be a communication tool to analyze how someone uses and receives information (Ivanovic & Collin, 2006). It is normally depicted as a four-quadrant matrix representing four areas of self-awareness—what you know about yourself and others know about you (open self); what you know about yourself and others do not (hidden self); what you and others do not know about yourself (unknown self); and lastly, what others know about you but you do not know about yourself (blind self) (Glew & Harper, 2018; Harriss & Witwicka, 2012). Not only is this tool useful when we are thinking about leadership processes, it can also be adapted to processes which help us explore the future. This is one of the reasons why we briefly bring it to this discussion of Foresight City. Recall that in the first form of thinking, we learned about ourselves (how did we get here); in thinking about ourselves we gained insight, but that insight was not enough to tell us about the future. Therefore, it was

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paramount we embraced the second form of thinking in Foresight City: thinking and seeking others through inquiry. Using the Johari Window to accomplish the inquiry, we query others with the aim of reducing the sizes of some of those quadrants, for example, creating greater self-awareness to reduce our blind self. The shift here, in the adaptation and use of this tool to gain awareness about the future, is we can use it as a form of inquiry to generate questions and learn about the future. One way is to substitute the wording of the pronouns and shift the aim for the target of inquiry, so we can generate future-focused questions. Table 10.1 portrays the Johari Window adapted to the futures’ function. In short, the adaptation of the Johari Window in a futures’ inquiry tool produces the Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool. Let us discuss this tool as one of the principal vehicles used for futures inquiry within the second form of thinking in Foresight City. The Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool takes us through four stages of future awareness named the Open Future, the Hidden Future, the Blind Table 10.1 Johari Window adapted as a Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool Open Future: What you and others know about the future. Future Inquiry: What do we collectively know about the future? What critical uncertainties, issues, and existential hopes do we share in relation to the future? What critical effects do we tend to understand as most critical for our future? If we see this future, how can we make it a reality? Hidden Future: What you know about the future, but others do not. Future Inquiry: What do I perceive about the future which others cannot? How did I gain this perspective? What kind of experiences led me to see what others did not see? What experience prevents others from seeing the future I see?

Blind Future: What others know about the future, but you do not know. Future Inquiry: What kinds of perspectives I have not considered? What biases and ways of thinking prevented seeing critical events in our past and our present? Why were we not able to detect the signposts of the critical event? Unknown Future: What you and others do not know about the future. Future Inquiry: When individual and collective perspectives join, what kind of futures we have not seen? What kinds of elements and critical uncertainties we have not discussed? Can these be combined into new forms of plausible futures?

Source Author’s adaptation of Luft and Ingham’s (1955), Johari Window Note The Johari Window helps us increase our self-awareness, so we can efficiently, as leaders, communicate with others. That framework is an excellent contextual base to help leaders generate inquiry, awareness, and insight about the future. The Future Awareness Inquiry Tool is designed for that purpose. The questions posited in the tool are some examples of the question-generation method this tool incites. In Foresight City, the aim is to enlarge the view of the open future quadrant and reduce all others

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Future, and the Unknown Future. The open future is the future we all can envision. This future is collective given our shared experience, consciousness, known facts, and exercised collective deductions derived from those facts, present trends, and shared assumptions. In the open future, we feel strongly we can understand, anticipate, and shape the future(s). Therefore, there is a future we can create (or several of them). The aim is to enlarge this open future stage as large as possible, so we can see more details of the future, shape the future, and create a powerful, more collective image of that future. Examples of this open future are autonomous vehicles and even space tourism. Given the knowledge we have today and the conditions of the environment around us (political, legal, technological, and social), we know these futures are already in motion, and although these futures may not be immediately plausible as there are things that are still needed to be worked out, i.e., ethical implications, these open futures are well within our reach. From that envisioning, we will give way to the physical manifestation of that open future. The hidden future is the next stage in the Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool. This stage describes a position in which we can glean insights based on our research, experience, scholarship, as well as mental and spiritual gifts. This experience may be unique to a leader or a small group of leaders but foreign to many others. The purpose of inquiry here is to understand the logic or mental images that led to the discovery of something one can see but others cannot. Remember, the aim is not for futures to be hidden, but for them to be visible, so we can deal with those futures appropriately. The recent COVID-19 pandemic discussed previously is an example of a hidden future. This was a future a selected number of leaders and organizations were able to see (Gates, 2015; Habib et al., 2019; Li et al., 2016; Petersen, 1997). They saw it and warned the world about this undesirable future. They could see this future given their exploration, experience, and scholarship despite this future being hidden to most people. The next stage in our discussion of the Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool is the blind future. This is the future that remains invisible to us but not to others. This invisibility can be the payoff of biases, ignoring signposts, or simply not paying attention. An example of the painful experience of this future is disruption. The iPhone, is perhaps, for many businesses and product developers a painful (or pleasant) example of this blind future. It may have appeared to have come without warning, rendering obsolete many of the products that were once designed for separate consumer product markets. For example, when I was to travel around the world

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across cities, over days, weeks, or months, I remember making sure I had planned (as part of my travel checklist) to take with me my phone, my music player, my GPS, and my small camera. I also planned to take four different sets of power cords, adapters, and batteries just to make sure all of these products would work. I sometimes wondered if these four products could be combined into one, so I would not have to carry them all. Well, it happened. The iPhone became the phone, music player, camera, and GPS—all in one! As the iPhone became main stream, the need to pay for subscriptions to keep maps up-to-date on my GPS (and the device itself) disappeared. As well, the time and preparation to keep up with the needs of the other separate products for the other functions (music and camera for example) also disappeared. Such sudden consumer shift took many companies by surprise, causing several of them to painfully switch to new lines of businesses, adjust to the new market the iPhone had created, or fade, vanish, and disappear. Certainly, this stage (the blind future) requires us to stay in contact and form a dialogue with others who can offer us different perspectives and new knowledge, increasing our awareness so the blinders can be removed. The fourth (and last) stage in our discussion of the Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool is the unknown future. The unknown future is the future we, as well as others, do not see. The kinds of futures we see in this stage are mostly unanticipated and come as a surprise because the likelihood of some of these futures taking place is very low. Nevertheless, leaders should be concerned with the probability of these futures happening because their appearance (although not as likely) cause dramatic changes in our lives, and in most instances, overwhelm human response systems. Unexpected natural disasters are an example of this kind. The unexpected appearance of a devastating tsunami overwhelms emergency response mechanisms, but also, the tsunami creates a series of chained events that can continue to deepen the crisis, i.e., the collapse of the country infrastructure hampering traffic and logistics movement, in turn creating poor delivery of food and supplies, which in turn creates famine and extreme economic downturn. Although the previous example was environmental, renowned futurists warn us about others: self-aware machine intelligence, perfected human cloning, no-carbon economy, super-fast transports, cessation of EU-US relations, etc. (Hauptman, Hoppe, & Raban, 2015; Petersen, 1997). In foresight, we name these futures “wild cards” (Cornish, 2003; Petersen, 1997). The aim of the leader when

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doing an exploration of this stage is to reduce the size of this quadrant by continually exploring the plausibility of future horizons. The third form of thinking is to think about what we cannot yet see. Here, we raise our sights beyond ourselves and others to come to terms with uncertainty. This is not an easy process, especially when we have been conditioned to dismiss those things which do not fit our senses. As humans, we trust those things we can distinguish through our sensory systems. The five basic senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell integrate a complex set of interactions which send information to the brain, so we can reason and perceive the world around us. Only a few people venture beyond these five senses. And in regard to the future, as some people like to point out, it cannot quite be distinguished; therefore, it does not exist, so why spend neurons trying to explore something non-existent? For one, we can agree the future cannot be predicted—the complexity of the millions of interactions create unnumbered possibilities, as we have previously discussed, and so predicting with accuracy is not yet possible. But then again, we are not trying to predict the future; we want to explore it. As we have discussed in previous chapters, we can see the future(s) developing. Then, why not explore the great diversity of futures and devise a framework for living so we can shape the future(s), or failing that, be prepared for the range of possibilities? To let the future happen without leadership action is irresponsible. Robert Greenleaf (2002), best known for introducing and pioneering the theories of servant leadership in the 1970s, saw decisively the leader needed to harness two important intelligences. One of them was to “have a sense for the unknowable” and another was to “foresee the unforeseeable” (p. 35). Later, Greenleaf noted the leader who fails to foresee (or refuses to foresee) commits an ethical failure (p. 39). This is a very serious charge! To his point, Greenleaf observed most serious ethical failures and ethical compromises can be traced to a leader’s inability to make an effort to foresee the consequences of decisions when there was freedom to act. Once the unforeseen future is upon us, there is little we can do to shape it. Consequently, our innate intelligences never develop, in turn, leading to undesirable futures, incapable people, and incapable organizations. But the leader, per se, is not the only one needing to make the effort to develop these human intelligences. Leadership today, as it is a collective endevour, must also be a collective set of intelligences. Therefore, an entire community, city, and country should develop these intelligences—to sense for the unknowable and foresee the unforeseeable.

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When we talk about Foresight City, we are not center-staging the lone leader with the great vision which everyone will “surely” follow; instead, one can envision a city where its citizens have developed the two intelligences we have been talking about. Of course, the leaders are critical enablers, and they need to be versed in how to develop these intelligences in themselves and others. But ultimately, we should not think foresight is a competency colonized by one person, an entity, or a thing. These intelligences have always been a human capacity, and in describing that development here, we make explicit an entire society must commit to working as one to grow and develop these intelligences over time and across generations. Developing a sense for the unknowable starts with the understanding that reality goes beyond what our senses can tell us. (This is one reason the lone leader will be ineffective; the capacity for sensing is limited in one person, but it is infinite in the aggregate of the collective.) Our collective senses are a starting point. Additionally, practicing the two previous forms of thinking in Foresight City is a second good step. But here we emphasize other dimensions of reality exist; although not always seen, they cannot be discarded. Most times, these dimensions carry signposts of the future, and what we must do is use the previouslymentioned starting steps (our senses and forms of thinking collectively) through a sort of magnifying glass (see Fig. 10.2) to develop a sense for the unknowable. This action does exactly what the magnifying glass does for the human eye: it brings the future from its far, perhaps microscopic, dimension on the horizon (non-existent to the human consciousness), to the dimension of our reality, so it can be scrutinized and studied. For example, as illustrated in Fig. 10.2, we develop a sense for the unknowable through our senses and forms of thinking. The stimuli this process produces activates our sensory systems. The sensory systems allow us to understand something is present, perhaps without being able to clearly define what it is just yet. As we explore our perceptions of the world we cannot yet see, there will be a need for insight triggered by our own desire to make sense of what we do not quite understand, asking us, “What are these signposts telling me about futures to come?” That activity triggers our consciousness which uses a combination of attention, perception, memory, and awareness to equip us with the power of thought so we can make choices about what to think (Martin & Morich, 2011; Pierson & Trout, 2017). When combined with cognitive processes, we begin to get a sense of the unknowable as a picture of plausible futures that begins to take form. The narrative scenarios of Techno City, Green Spaces, Notek

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Sensory Systems

PercepƟon Consciousness awakens

SƟmulus Act

Memory

Awareness

CogniƟon

ImaginaƟon Sense

Fig. 10.2 Seeing and thinking through the magnifying glass (Source The author’s depiction of the citizen’s foresight process; Note Stimulus awakens the citizen’s sensory systems triggering the processes of consciousness and cognition, leading to deep thinking about what he knows and does not know. The citizen then explores the distance between these two poles to magnify the view of the future and get a sense for the unknown. In turn, the citizen can foresee what is not always foreseeable. When the citizen acts from the outpour of this process, the citizen acts with strategic foresight)

City, and Ascent City discussed in the earlier chapters are examples of that process. If you recall, we began a literature review followed by several perspectives about the smart city, followed by an examination of signposts, predetermined elements, and critical uncertainties on the horizon. These began to paint a picture of plausible futures depicted as the narrative scenarios. Lastly, the aim of this entire process is action (the last step left to discuss in Fig. 10.2). When we decide to make a choice informed by our senses and forms of thinking collectively and based on seeing and thinking through the magnifying glass, we gain a sense of the unknowable and the ability to foresee the unforeseeable. We are then certain we have acted with ethical forethought; we have exercised foresight. When the leaders and citizens of the city act in this way, they are known as citizens of Foresight City. Foresight City is the epitome of exercising ethics in leadership. It is the space where the current generation, the emerging generation, and the future generation are able to join hands as coexisting brothers and sisters responsible and accountable to one another. Foresight makes this possible

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in Foresight City. It is called Foresight City because the people give the city its name through the vibrant exercise of sensing the unknowable, seeing the unforeseeable, and acting with foresight (while also practicing the other two forms of thinking discussed in the previous paragraphs). In turn, the citizens change the future deliberately in myriad dimensions. i.e. politically, socially, technologically, and economically. Becoming Foresight City is, therefore, not a badge. It is the deliberate ethical leadership action of the citizens. Anyone visiting the city can see the signs of foresight orientation in its citizens. The citizens of the future are represented in the forms of government; leaders make time to be teachers; cross-generational citizenship co-creates long-term solutions, while scanning the horizons for signposts; nature and humans live in mutual admiration knowing their relationship is symbiotic; and technology serves the aim of the collective, not idolized as a deliverer but as an enabler. Another sharp sign of Foresight City is seeing how little boys and girls rise to be explorers of the future through foresight education and practice. This is nurtured by the preceding generation who carefully injects a sense of curiosity, storytelling, vision-creation, and responsibility for the future. That generation carefully mentors and guides the new generation through those methods, so there will be generation after generation of explorers who know how to think about futures, how to explore the myriad of futures developing on the horizon, and how to act to seize the desired futures and not be captive by undesired ones. Surely, the skeptic would ask, can this ideal of Foresight City be realized? One can wonder how much different this ideal of Foresight City could be from the ideal of democracy. If democracy was realized, why couldn’t the aspirations of a collective body of smart, foresight-minded, future-oriented people be realized? It takes a different kind of leadership, one armed with foresight.

References Allen, G. (2020, April 5). Funeral homes overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2020/04/05/826972795/fun eral-homes-overwhelmed-with-covid-19-cases. Blasberg, M., Fahrion, G., Sarovic, A., & Schaap, F. (2020, April 10). Eat or be eaten: A nasty competition emerges in hunt for corona protective gear. Spiegel Politik. Retrieved from https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/eat-

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or-be-eaten-the-global-medical-products-market-has-gone-feral-a-e6f65515c913-4837-a121-be6567372c42. Cornish, E. (2003, July). The wild cards in our future. The Futurist, 37, 18. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. (2020, April 5). Situation update worldwide: Epidemiological update. Retrieved from https://www.ecdc. europa.eu/en/geographical-distribution-2019-ncov-cases. Gates, B. (2015, March). The next outbreak? We’re not ready [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outb reak_we_re_not_ready?language=en. Glew, D. J., & Harper, S. C. (2018). Leverage emotional intelligence with cultural intelligence. Industrial Management, 60(3), 25–30. Greenleaf, R. K. (2002). Servant leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Gupta, P., Chauhan, S., & Jaiswal, M. P. (2019). Classification of smart city research—A descriptive literature review and future research agenda. Information Systems Frontier, 21, 661–685. Habib, A. M. G., Ali, M. A., Zouaoui, B. R., Taha, M. A. H., Mohammed, B. S., & Saquib, N. (2019, October). Clinical outcomes among hospital patients with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection. BMC Infectious Diseases, 19(1), 1–6. Harriss, A., & Witwicka, S. (2012). A sharper leading edge. Occupational Health, 64(10), 19–21. Hauptman, A., Hoppe, M., & Raban, Y. (2015). Wild cards in transport. European Journal of Futures Research, 3(1), 1–24. Ivanovic, A., & Collin, P. H. (2006). Dictionary of human resources and personnel management. London: A. & C. Black. Jones, M., Strohecker, K., Ranasinghe, D., Ahmed, S., Ranganathan, V., Rao, S., & Char, P. (2020, March 27). Take five: Quarter-life crisis. Reuters. Retrieved from https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-markets-themes-gra phic/take-five-quarter-life-crisis-idUKKBN21E2S9. King, M. L. (1963). I have a dream: Speech of the Rev. Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Retrieved from https://www.archives.gov/. King, M. L. (1964). In the Nobel Prize. Retrieved from https://guides.himmel farb.gwu.edu/c.php?g=27779&p=170342. Li, Y., Li, H., Fan, R., Wen, B., Zhang, J., Cao, X., … Liu, W. (2016). Coronavirus infections in the central nervous system and respiratory tract show distinct features in hospitalized children. Intervirology, 59(3), 163–169. Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari Window: A graphic model of interpersonal awareness. In Proceedings of the western training laboratory in group development. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Extension Office.

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Martin, N., & Morich, K. (2011). Unconscious mental processes in consumer choice: Toward a new model of consumer behavior. Journal of Brand Management, 18(7), 483–505. Neirotti, P., De Marco, A., Cagliano, A. C., Mangano, G., & Scorrano, F. (2013). Current trends in smart city initiatives: Some stylised facts. Cities, 38, 25–36. Petersen, J. L. (1997, July). The “wild cards” in our future: Preparing for the improbable. The Futurist, 31, 43–47. Pierson, L. M., & Trout, M. (2017). What is consciousness for? New Ideas in Psychology, 47, 62–71. Simonofski, A., Serral Asensio, E., De Smedt, J., & Snoeck, M. (2018). Hearing the voice of citizens in smart city design: The CitiVoice framework. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 1–14. Suwantarat, N., & Apisarnthanarak, A. (2015, August). Risks to healthcare workers with emerging diseases: Lessons from MERS-CoV, Ebola, SARS, and avian flu. Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases, 28(4), 349–361. World Health Organization. (2020, April 6). Rolling updates on coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Retrieved from https://www.who.int/emergencies/dis eases/novel-coronavirus-2019/events-as-they-happen.

CHAPTER 11

Leadership Practices in Foresight City

The Cost of Not Exercising Foresight Stories, irrespective of whether they are from old or from new, can help us burn in our mind unforgettable lessons. Sometimes we do not understand their message and other times we do. Regardless, the wisdom of these stories tends to appear at the right times in our lives. One of those stories was the story about a King named Hezekiah. As I think about his story, I remember sitting in the circle of family members (old and young) listening. What is striking to me is how much this ancient story speaks to the consequences of attempting to lead without foresight. Here is a condensed version of it. Historians speak of a great king named Hezekiah. They believed his reign happened between the years 715–687 B.C in the Kingdom of Judah (Halley, 2007; Walton, Matthews, & Chavalas, 2000). Hezekiah reigned for 29 years bringing tremendous transformation to the kingdom. He was not only described as a good king, but also a great administrator and a dominant technological innovation force of his time. He fortified the walls of Jerusalem, built a water tunnel to bring water into the city (the remains of which are still visible today), and made great military preparations leading him to gain independence from the ruthless and allpowerful Assyrian Empire. However, he grew careless and only concerned with his name and, as we would say in modern times, his term in office.

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One day, an envoy from a distant land came to visit him. Proud of his treasures and what he had built, Hezekiah showed this envoy his city in every detail. There was not a place or hidden corner the king did not proudly show to this far-landed envoy. When his most trusted advisor (a prophet) inquired of the king as to who these people were and from where they came, King Hezekiah replied that this envoy was from a faraway land—Babylon. His trusted advisor pronounced the day would come when all the king’s possessions, children, and wives would be carried to Babylon and his people would serve as slaves. But all Hezekiah could think of was the wish granted to him when he was healed from illness and allowed to live for 15 more years. He thought, “Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?” (2 Kings 20: 13–17, New International Version). History showed this to be true. Hezekiah’s people enjoyed peace during his time, but then they suffered dearly. The Babylonian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Judah about 55 years later, and the people of Judah lived in exile and as slaves for more than 50 years (Halley, 2007; Walton et al., 2000). As unfortunate as this story is, it repeats itself throughout time, disguised in many forms all over the world, and yes, in industrialized, high-tech, advanced societies, as well as emerging ones. Some recent examples remind us of the consequences of acting without foresight. The humanitarian crisis in the Island of Puerto Rico, especially after Hurricane Maria in September 2017, is one instance. The lack of investment in human capital, renewal of physical infrastructure, poor administration and stewardship of resources, as well as failed economic action over the years before Hurricane Maria devastated the island created the bleak situation the island and the world see today—massive exodus, poverty, failing infrastructure, and a government citizens cannot depend on because it has reached all the characteristics of failed-state chaos (Brown, 2017; Cabán, 2018; Hernandez, 2018; Sutter & Hernandez, 2018). One can think of another example where lack of foresight was also devastating: The ransomware attack on the city of Atlanta, Georgia on March 22, 2018. Although cyber-attacks are not new to the world and have happened in the past to other cities and countries as in attacks on the power grid in Ukraine in 2015, the municipal railway of San Francisco in 2016, and the transportation administration systems of Sweden in 2017 (Cerrudo, 2018; Zetter, 2016), the case of Atlanta distinctively highlight several failures in foresight. For example, the attack crippled the city resulting in damage estimates of over $17 million dollars; some damages were termed

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irreparable (Olenick, 2018; Schwartz, 2018). City officials highlighted, as they were struggling with bringing critical municipal systems back online, they wanted to “use the experience as an opportunity to become a ‘model city’ for how municipalities can protect against and prepare for cyberattacks” (Wray, 2018, para. 13). The statement leads one to wish the example of thinking through the realm of possibilities and preparing for different scenarios would have been a better example to make. Among the lessons learned, city officials also highlighted the lack of understanding and struggle through manual procedures and system interdependencies, all of which became evident once computer systems became crippled after the ransomware attack (Hutcherson, 2018; Wray, 2018). Unfortunately, this is not typical of just the city of Atlanta. It is typical of most cities and many organizations because they believe automation makes them more efficient; this thought is false without analysis, mapping, and the making of processes as humanly efficient as possible, first, before injecting automation. These unfortunate situations are examples of what Greenleaf (2002) noted as the failure to foresee today’s events in the past—to exercise foresight and take the right actions when there was freedom of initiative to act. The good thing is we can exercise foresight and identify better choices ahead.

Practicing Leadership in Foresight City The previous chapter discussed Foresight City. Recalling that discussion, we noted Foresight city is not a badge. It is the metaphor representing the gamut of humanity, the space where the current generation, the emerging generation, and the future generation can join together and coexist as brothers and sisters responsible and accountable to one another. The citizens gave the city its name because of how they collectively think. In short, they think and act collectively different in two significant ways. First, they have a sense for the connectedness of all things. Secondly, they exercise three forms of thinking which shape their collective future consciousness and their actions in the city. The first form of thinking answers the question: “How did we get here?” Answering this question deals with an understanding of root-beliefs to transcend the recent and to inquire and challenge assumptions about the present era. The second form of thinking is to enquire about others and seek multiple perspectives to reduce hidden and blind spots and make the myriad futures public (using the Future Awareness Inquiry Tool). And in the third form

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of thinking, the citizens of Foresight City are able to bring the future from its far, perhaps microscopic, dimension on to the near horizon, so it can be scrutinized and studied. The citizens do this through the exercise of two leadership intelligences (seeking a sense for the unknowable and foreseeing the unforeseeable). These forms of thinking lead to ways of acting in Foresight City. These ways of acting give birth to leadership foresight practices which are intertwined and cannot be separated from the preceding discussion about forms of thinking. The forms of thinking and the leadership foresight practices are interwoven. Without deep thinking, leadership solutions may only, at best, treat symptoms, creating the re-occurrence of problems, lack of progress, and frustration from those involved. Both the forms of thinking in Foresight City and the leadership foresight practices create an inclination toward foresight culture for the city and the citizens as their way of life. This is how leaders and citizens become architects of culture— culture being the product of a collection of people’s inner thoughts and outward expressions (LugoSantiago, 2017); in the case of Foresight City, this is how foresight culture is practiced and expressed (through the forms of thinking and the nine leadership foresight practices). The forms of thinking and the leadership foresight practices become mutually reinforcing. By practicing the forms of thinking, the leader gains depth in reasoning and draws from multiple frames of reference. And by applying the leadership foresight practices, the leader gains wisdom. Here is where the leader clarifies, validates, and/or discovers to what extent innovation and creativity must be mobilized to make way to a more precise roadmap to future outcomes. The leader is then sharpened, more able to foresee, and more able to act. The forms of thinking were discussed previously. We will next discuss nine leadership foresight practices of Foresight City. These practices are contained within three domains held together by a sustainment band. Table 11.1 depicts these leadership practices (P1–P9) within their domains (1st to 3rd). Seldom do linear solutions lead to effective, long-term solutions. This is the reason the nine leadership practices are depicted in Fig. 11.1 as a system of leadership thinking, anticipating, and action-shaping, embedded in three domains which are constantly being refreshed by a foresight sustainment band. This robust system has as objective the function of magnifying the view of the future while frequently renewing the foresight eye into the horizon, so the leader can gain a sense for the unknown

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Table 11.1 Nine leadership foresight practices and sustainment band in foresight city 1st Domain: Understanding Past, present, & future

2nd Domain: Anticipating Sense, design, & co-create

3rd Domain: Shaping the future Action, culture, discourse

Sustainment band

P1. Question assumptions about present, past, and future P2. Think holistically, multi-layered, and multi-generational P3. Map the culture and map the system

P4. Scan the horizons for emerging futures

P7. Take action in synch with design and strategy

Seek Multiple Perspectives+Scan Continuously

P5. Design futures (for humans with humans)

P8. Discourse—Do not just think about the future, talk about the future P9. Monitor and scan to see signposts of preferred future

P6. Co-create strategy

Source Author’s conception of foresight practice into domains, practices, and sustainment band Seek MulƟple PerspecƟves

P8: Discourse

P2: Think P1: QuesƟon

3rd Domain: Shaping the Future

1st Domain: Understanding

acƟon, culture, dialogue

past, present, future

P5: Design Futures

P3: Map

P7: Act

P9: Monitor

2nd Domain: AnƟcipaƟng sense, design, create

P4: Scan Horizons

P6: Co-create Strategy

Scan ConƟnuously

Fig. 11.1 Leadership practices in foresight city (Source Author’s creation. Note A generic model for leadership foresight practice. Foresight practice is divided into three main intertwined domains [understanding, anticipating, and shaping the future]. Within the three domains, nine leadership foresight practices exist. The domains are being constantly refreshed by two elements [seek multiple perspectives and scan continuously] acting as the sustainment band of effective foresight practice)

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and the emerging. Why is this important? Scholars tell us the mental frameworks we have constructed to cognitively process information about the world around us can compress our ability to see critical information on the horizon (Gordon, 2009). Therefore, the renewal of the foresight eye into the horizon is a necessity, not only to reconstruct the meaning of those events and trends we see on the horizon as they move in the time continuum, but also to serve as an intelligence warning system. As its name implies, the intelligence warning system alerts the leader about impending changes or emerging activity in the environment, so these changes or emerging activity can be examined against assumptions originally made and the knowledge previously acquired about the future which was once explored. Let us look in more detail. For ease of explanation, we will explore these practices by domain first (understanding, anticipating, and shaping the future), and lastly, we will examine the components of the sustainment band (seek multiple perspectives and scan continuously). It is also important to note that although the following discussion will present an introduction to the model for leadership foresight, the insight will improve the leader’s quality of thinking, capacity for reflection and learning, and strategic future-oriented action in the complex city environment (or any other volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment) in which the leader may be operating.

The First Domain: Understanding The first domain is intimately associated with the first form of thinking in Foresight City (previously discussed). If you recall, that process started with asking ourselves: “How did we get here?” This domain includes the process of achieving understanding about how the past was formed, how that past relates to our present conditions, and how elements of the past and the present can combine to form the future. Another way to think about this domain is to think about this domain as achieving strategic awareness. In the planning and strategy field, many have studied the legendary writings of Sun Tzu, who was believed to have written his Art of War around 400 B.C. In it, he delineated early military doctrine about when to attack and when not to attack, how the conditions of the terrain favor or disadvantage military forces, as well as assessing the morale and fitness of the troops (Sawyer, 1994). This was the process of gaining critical situational awareness, so deductions could be made about who would win or lose in battle. In modern times, we have expanded our view

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of situational awareness with the advent of space systems. For example, the United States acquires space situational awareness through the integration of space surveillance, collection, and processing; the status of U.S. and allied satellite systems; understanding of U.S. and multinational space readiness; and analysis of other space domains (U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2018). In business, the basic strategyformation process has taught us we should look at internal conditions of the organization, compare them to the external conditions of the organization in order to inventory key core competencies and success factors (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 1998). But the deficiency of these processes is they focus on the now. This knowledge is insufficient in Foresight City because, without understanding the evolutions, revolutions, and still-emerging phenomena, we cannot really gain critical strategic awareness about how we got where we are. We only know perhaps onefourth of what we need to know to have a good assessment of the real field conditions. Foresight must look much deeper. Achieving understanding, therefore, means we are required to critically question our assumptions (core beliefs and motivations) about the past, think holistically about the present (multi-generational and multi-layered), and be able to map both the prevailing system and culture accentuating the status quo. Let us dive deeper into this first domain (Understanding) by exploring the first leadership foresight practice contained in it. This is the leadership foresight practice of questioning our assumptions about the past, present, and future. In regard to critically questioning our assumptions (the first leadership foresight practice), certain areas of study are necessary. One good place to start is to research key milestones in the last 50–100 years. Who were the city’s heroes in the past? What were they celebrated for? What major political changes, ideologies, revolutions, and technologies shaped the ways society sees itself today? Can we still see the signs of those revolutions in the people, the walls of the city, the layout of the streets, and the parks? When one goes out to the people and asks them about what they enjoy the most about the city, what do they highlight? If one goes out and asks people to think about things which have disappeared, is there some key element most people mention as a characteristic or feature they miss the most? As we explore those areas, other areas are also critical. Specifically, what changed? And what did not change? Can we explain the forces which made change happen? And what forces, mechanisms, dogmas, or movements kept things from changing? The collection

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of these answers can begin to give us an idea of the inventory of core beliefs and motivations to compare against our preconceived assumptions of the past before attempting to change the future. The City of Ghent in Belgium and the City of Barcelona in Spain were successful cases of future change, in part, because this process of questioning, observing, and understanding the core beliefs and motivations of citizens became central to their chosen pathway to the future. Ghent had an economy defined by an industrial port activity and an entreprenuerial activity near its city center, making citizens unsurprisingly choose environment, social, and human capital investments as their natural pathway to the city of the future (Van den Bergh & Viaenea, 2016). In a similar manner, when one looks at Barcelona, its social collaboration and association movements have been rooted in a historical Catalan tradition, where spaces for meeting and socializing are important facets of cultural identification and life; consequently, the citizens were a natural fit to the collaboration and participation requirements that were needed in the adoption of technology that made the city such an icon of smart city success (Capdevila & Zarlenga, 2015). As seen, the collection of those answers can help us piece together disparate fragments and think holistically about Foresight City. Thinking holistically, the second leadership foresight practice, is about exercising critical thinking that breaks free from paradigms and frames of mind which have been molded by the present-day headlines and/or popular narratives dominating the airwaves. One of those headlines shaping our thinking (consciously or unconsciously) is the narrative about the pace of change. For over 20 years, the narrative has been describing the pace of change as exponential, accelerating, and transforming everything. Technology has been the major culprit, at least this is the popular narrative. When one reads the headlines about technology, the same narrative is described: exponential, transformational, changing everything. Although there may be some truth in some of these statements, when we think and see the world, we notice everything has not changed. Yes, innovation is happening, but not all innovation is creating a new reality or ways of living for a society. To illustrate, renowned researcher and futurist Bill Sharpe (2013) introduced a three-horizons framework; one of those horizons is what he called H1 (or Horizon 1), representing the status quo. Sharpe wrote about systems and ways of doing things within this statusquo horizon permeating society in such a way that these systems and ways of doing things become infrastructure. Think about transport and traffic

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systems, governance systems, and energy platforms as examples. A lot of innovation has happened in these areas, but the vast majority of innovation thus far has not replaced the car, the roads, the government, or our energy systems. One can see that although great improvements and accelerated technologies have revolutionized these systems, the effort has just extended further into the future the way we do things, and has not replaced them. In other words, when one thinks about change, one must think about change in all its parts, i.e. economically, politically, environmentally, legal, and social, to avoid being trapped by hollow narratives and headlines. Here is a way to help us think about change in all its parts. Described as an “American titan of futures research,” Graham Molitor outlined one of the most comprehensive models of change in his trailblazing work published in 2003 entitled The Power to Change the World (Gary, 2018). In his model, Molitor described 22 points (or time points) on the road toward change. These points traversed a change journey which lasts anywhere from 21 to 100 years and covering from the time the change is first spotted to the point where judicial or constitutional changes are made to institutionalize the change as part of society’s adoption. Figure 11.2 depicts (on the right side) a modified version of his model. Although this is helpful in seeing the roadmap to change, we must think about this road in terms of forces pushing the change across the stages he had named. Yet, this notion of change would be incomplete without seeing emerging change and the forces cultivating and moving the change forward. On the left side of the figure is how we see change emerging. Basically, most changes are seen in some form of technology as weak signals in the beginning. They happen, a few people talk about them, but not much is changed. As the emerging change begins to become known and its potential for disruption grows larger, the discourse also grows, as well the implications regarding economics, social and environmental; then, political discourses increase. (This is represented by the growth of the “thinking about change” cone which starts very small at its bottom, and as time passes and more discourses, debates, events, etc., take place, the cone grows taller and wider—forming the upside-down triangle ending at the words “thinking about change.”) Ultimately, once the change is well-known and legislation is debated, the case for discourse begins to dwindle and most people begin to move on to the next headline. (This is represented by the cone reaching its largest width at the words “thinking about change” and then beginning to contract to its smallest width at

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Fig. 11.2 Thinking holistically about change (Source Author’s adaptation of Molitor’s multiple-timeline model of change [Molitor, 2018, p. 14]. Note This figure makes use of two perspectives to think about change. The combination of understanding the change roadmap as change travels through Molitor’s three stages is combined with thinking about change in the social, technological, economic, environmental, political, legal, and ethical perspectives to create one holistic view of how change happened in the past and how emerging change could happen and travel into the future)

the top of the cone—forming the regular triangle form). Then, the cycle repeats itself with other and new emerging change. We can take the history and adoption of the car as an example and see this cycle. More recently, we can see social media’s development, AI, and the environment as other examples, although the change cycle has not been completed for these two latter examples. More specifically, one can take the instance of Facebook’s origins, rise, and now debates with Congress over data and citizen privacy (Romm, 2018). All the phenomena we have listed move at different speeds through the cycle depending on who are the proponents and what causes they decide to champion, and at what level of impact they begin to influence change (technological, economic, etc.). Seeing change holistically requires us to take both perspectives depicted in Fig. 11.2. The leaders in Foresight City must see and analyze these perspectives in

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the past and follow them to the present. As well, the leader must perceive weak signals of change and foresee them moving forward into myriad futures. But before we move into the future, another critical aspect of achieving understanding is mapping both the system and the culture. Mapping the culture and mapping the system is the third leadership foresight practice; this is also the last practice within the Understanding Domain depicted in Fig. 11.1. This practice is concerned with deepening our conceptual grasp about the profound structures defining the city. (The same practice can be used to define societies, nations, and all kinds of systems surrounding us.) Just as we noted the human genome in Chapter 9 as the blueprint for building a human, mapping the culture and mapping the system delineate the sequencing of nodes which build what we see today as the city. This is, of course, a complex process but is worth undertaking. Just look at the volumes of books written about culture. Still, many leaders are unsure about how to change or deal with culture in an organization. Yet, we cannot let this culture illiteracy get in the way of understanding the past and foreseeing the future. In short, we cannot discard culture as part of achieving a deep understanding of the past, so we can consider its potential evolutions into the future. Culture is important because it is “what we collectively think and believe…what we repeatedly say and habitually do…and what members in an organization [or city] will collectively feel” (LugoSantiago, 2017, p. 86). These collective forces, forms of thinking, forms of values, and forms of feeling, as we have seen by looking at the history of countries and civilizations, have shaped the past, continue to shape the present, and have an increasing potential to shape the future. We, therefore must understand what these forces, are. Mapping them begins with seeing them. Scholars and subject-matter experts, Drs. Edgar Schein (2010) and Ira Levin (2000), highlighted culture embedding mechanisms as telltale signs of the culture, as well as windows we can look through to inquire about culture. Some of those signs included rites, rituals, and traditions; stories, legends, and symbols; formal statements about values, creeds, and/or charters; leadership practices; and design of physical space. In mapping the culture, we seek to trace these embedding mechanisms and what we see through the windows as nodes and points in history. One way is to identify these signs and trace them to historical events, or key points in a horizontal timeline. One can also branch out (and connect) these historical events or traditions to other events and traditions to mark how one set of events, rituals, traditions, etc., led to the emergence of others. Then,

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one can draw branches from those points of reference and connect them to their individual effects (also marked as nodes or points). In the end, the visual may compare to a system’s map, chronological tree, or concept map. The usefulness of this exercise is the thinking through and visualization of a cultural sequence and the interconnections to help us achieve deep understanding about how the present was formed. The practice of mapping is not new, and its use in the city is not foreign either. The method has been used to deepen the contextual grasp of structures that are sometimes hidden. By drawing relationships between ideas, concepts, facts, and events, much can be discover. In that sense, mapping can also help define hidden aspects of city life, feel, and culture which may not always be obvious. For instance, the city of Melbourne, Australia embraced a study to consider feasibility considerations in urban policymaking in relation to people with disabilities. The aim was to build a disability-inclusive city—one city that could be enjoyed by everyone. Concept mapping, for example, was use to make active the participation of both citizens and governmental decisionmakers. During the process, priorities were identified as well as actions that would most likely drive the vision and goal of a more inclusive city (Rachele et al., 2020). Similarly, the City of Barcelona employed the use of mapping methodology to deepen its understanding of the perceptions of citizens living in different portions of the city against the city’s large-urban renewal projects. From planting trees to walkability and accessibility of the city by different mediums of transportation, the city was better able to understand the relationship between these projects and their positive or negative effects on the health and wellbeing of its citizens (Mehdipanah, Malmusi, Muntaner, & Borrell, 2013). Just as with culture mapping in the city, we move next a step further into mapping the system. System’s mapping is a deeper look at the structure of things, their constitutions, and interconnections, so we can better understand what the outputs of that system would most likely be. Deeper inquiry into the system of things also facilitates a better forecast about outputs, in the present and the future (based on the feedback loops within the system’s structure that offer time lags between inputs and their resulting outputs—this is the black box of systems). Scientist and world’s foremost systems’ analysist, Dr. Donella Meadows (2008) highlights we would be less likely to be surprised by events if we could see how events accumulate into dynamic patterns of behavior; the system structure is the source of the system’s behavior and its resulting events. System’s mapping

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starts with an understanding of the key actors in an environment and how they are related. We call these key actors, variables. We also express the relationship between the variables as links, and we observe the effect of one variable on another through symbols or letters. For example, in those variables depicted in Fig. 11.3, the letters “S” (same effect) and “O” (opposite effect) are used to state the type of relationship among the variables. Other authors may use other letters or symbols to depict those relationships. The main thing is one can map the system and be able to articulate the relationship one sees between the variables, so we can better understand and foresee the system’s potential behavior. Another important observation to note is how one system has connections to and effects on other systems. Figure 11.3 displayed that relationship through feedback loops. One can also note the feedback connection not only connects and make systems interact with each other, but also produces a reinforcing or balancing behavior on another. The relationships displayed in Fig. 11.3 were kept simple for ease of explanation. Nonetheless, these become more complicated as we map and discover

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Fig. 11.3 Dynamics among variables in a system (Source Author’s creation. Note Sketch of the relationships among the variables affecting population migration and the relationship of this system to the environmental system in a city)

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new relationships. This exploration is especially useful in helping us understand why events happen despite expectations to the contrary, given the solutions we may have implemented in the past. (See Fig. 11.4 for an instance of a more elaborated case of system mapping.) For example, using the simple system dynamics portrayed in Fig. 11.3, one could imagine a city government being decisive about implementing measures to drastically reduce CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, several years later, they still see the degradation of the environment. The people in the city would be puzzled and ask, “Weren’t we aggressive about reducing CO2 emissions? Why is the environment continuing to deteriorate?” A look at the system would reveal the heavy toll of pollution has a time-delay effect on the environment. In other words, solutions will take time to see their benefits realized; this is the expected phenomenon seen in all natural systems around us—change is happening but seeing it will not be immediately apparent until sometime after when the magnitude of the change is MigraƟon to City

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so vast that it can now be measured. This is the reason why is important to appreciate how quick solutions will not solve problems in the long term. In Foresight City, systems thinking (and systems dynamics) is fundamental in understanding not only today’s world but how the world would have to change to realize the behaviors we want to see in the future. We are truly illuminated when we are able to map the system. The grand discovery is the realization of the system’s structure. If we want to see change, we will have to work on realizing solutions that get to the system’s structure: change the structure, change the system’s behavior!

The Second Domain: Anticipating Some years ago, I worked with members of a city council to facilitate strategic thinking about the future of their city. The council members felt population migration and urban development (among other sets of factors) around their city were growing fast, due to families trying to escape the growth and price hikes of the big city and opting for smaller towns. This was perhaps correct, but it was not going to be enough to understand what else was changing and how they would need to plan for it. The council members went through a series of exercises, leading to the formation of future visions. We did not get too far into that exercise, but what we discussed in that session just before we wrapped up for the day was enough to spark one member’s memory about an Apple video displaying some of the similar things we were talking about in our workshop. The video he was referring to was Apple Future Vision 1987 (Inmoreau, 2011). This was a fascinating short video, perhaps the most likely product of a scenario development process (just like some of those discussed in Chapters 5–8). In it, a professor enters his office (a wide and spacious place with classic dark furniture). He opens a booklike computer (opened in the same manner with which we open a book). Then, he moves toward the window, and as he is looking outside through the window, requests to his electronic assistant to arrange his schedule, make appointments, and look up research for him. All these activities were done by talking to the computer he just opened (a form of a maleSiri was orchestrating the action). The tone was always conversational between the two of them. The professor was able to touch-screen his way through the computer once he returned to his desk, do some scenario modeling through parameter forecasting, and even overlay distinct and

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separate research pieces into other pieces to explore the validity of his colleagues’ research findings. Then, he asked his electronic assistant to patch another colleague on the telephone line. They conversed via what looked like an earlier version of FaceTime, finished the conversation, and later the professor went to get lunch. Interestingly, as we move from scene to scene in the short video, one can see on the desk what we know today as an iPad (except that it opened like a book). In this device, we see FaceTime, iCloud, embedded cameras, and gesture and voice controls like those contained within Siri. But wait! The iPad’s first generation was released in 2010 (Apple Inc., 2010). From the time of the video to 2010 over 20 years have passed (23 years to be exact). If we would have been watching throughout those 23 years, we would have noticed touchscreen technology being developed, nanotechnology being advanced at great speed, giant steps taking place in speech recognition starting in the 1980s (Pinola, 2011), Siri being founded and later acquired by Apple, and other key advances in cellular phone technology. These things were emerging, and if we had thought about how we could put all these technologies together, we could have sensed the birth of the iPad. The same could have been said about the iPhone, social movements, business models, and the contemporary disruption of several industries to include the global economy. And if we had been paying attention, we would have, perhaps, acted or reacted differently to these changes. Herein lies the power of anticipating. Anticipating is the second domain in foresight practice, and embedded in it are three specific leadership foresight practices. Recall the second domain and its three practices are depicted in Fig. 11.1. In Foresight City, citizens have freedom to maneuver because they have institutionalized anticipatory systems through the application of the three leadership foresight practices in this domain: Scan the Horizons, Design Futures, and Co-Create Strategy. The efficient and methodical integration of the three leadership foresight practices that make up the first domain with the actual application of anticipatory practices in the second domain produces three capabilities in Foresight City: (1) development of a sense for the unknown, (2) growth of intellectual capacities to foresee the plausibility of futures and the design of a future fitting of its citizens, and (3) the co-creation of the roadmap to the shared-image of the preferred future. The first leadership foresight practice in this domain is scan the horizons. In essence, we take what was learned during the first domain of foresight practice (assumption and inquiry; reflection about the past,

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present, and possible future implications, and the culture and system maps), and next we project this understanding forward. Projecting this understanding forward will highlight pockets of obscurity we must further explore. In projecting our understanding forward, we explore the horizon for signs, trends, and archetypes of what we know about the future, as well as possible emerging phenomena within those pockets of obscurity, creating a scan hit inventory. This scan hit inventory, the product of the horizon exploration for those signs, trends, etc., may be a validation of our understanding about the future. Nevertheless, this validation must be put to the test. Richard Slaughter (1999), renowned scholar and futurist, in his book Futures for the Third Millennium, noted the world is constantly emitting an infinite number of signals about the future, and a careful scan of these signals can reveal powerful new forces, opportunities, and dangers in the macro-environment; therefore, the goal of horizon scanning is to “reconcile sensitivity to new and significant information with careful, systematic selection criteria” (Slaughter, 1999, pp. 256– 258). Therefore, we put the scan-hit inventory on trial by testing its content against, for example, the opinion of experts (as in the Delphi technique), strategic brainstorming, Futures Wheel, Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool, predictive analysis, and modeling to garner what strategy experts called Strategic Intelligence (Ashley & Morrison, 1999; Voros, 2003). This point about putting the scan-hit inventory to trial is important because it points to the aim of this horizon scanning process. The process of horizon scanning should be flexible in its practice, not systematized and tied to one or two specific tools, but expansive and in need of a multiple source of inputs, in addition to a system that will enable the leader to discriminate among all of the inputs to select critical information which helps Foresight City achieve strategic intelligence about the future. Surely, the leader can resort to artificial intelligence and automated data acquisition systems (to scan for specific data), but ultimately, the leader in Foresight city should not substitute any of these for the capacity of the human to think creatively, critically, and analytically about the selected essential information. Having gone through the first leadership foresight practice in the Anticipating domain (Scan Horizons) to achieve strategic intelligence in Foresight City, leaders now prepare to design futures (the second leadership foresight practice in this domain). The leadership foresight practice of design futures starts with the confrontation of self. How does change look to me? What kind of “change” person am I? These two questions,

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in particular, are aimed at confronting the views one has about change. Any of us can go back in our memory bank and think about the last experience we had, for example, at a conference. Whenever the speakers addressed change (or maybe we were the speakers), what form of change did they address? Out of the myriad forms of change which exist, one could bet the most prominent form of change addressed was technological change. Perhaps 80% of the time it was technological change being discussed while at more recent times it was something related to climate change. Beyond these two, people have a tough time thinking about other drivers of change. There was a time when very few people would speak about the environment as part of their change discourse. Matter of fact, I ask my students this question often and in seminars, and the response is almost always the same: technology is the number one answer, followed closely (and recently) by climate change. However, since the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when I ask the same question, economics scores the top place, followed by technology, and climate change. And there is a good reason to shout economics as the top answer given the economic devastation felt as the result of the pandemic. But why is this discussion important? When one hears a person subscribed to technology, for example, as the major source of change, odds are the person describes every change as exponentially (the exponential pace of change). There is some truth in the exponential growth of change (the doubling of growth within equal periods of time), but this is not always constant across all things; in some areas, as in the depletion of natural resources, the doubling effect is occurring at shorter time intervals (Vago, 2004). If in another instance, when we hear a person who subscribes to the cyclic nature of change, we could expect the person to speak about change in terms of economic or political phenomena. Regardless, the main point is we must understand our biases, so we do not confine the future to one or two perspectives. There are other power perspectives one can explore in this process of confrontation. Sociologists and other practitioners speak about societal change, and very often, can explain the past and future through various theories, for example, culture theory, conflict theory, cycle theory, market theory, technological theory, evolution theory, and power theory (Bishop & Hines, 2012; Noble, 2000; Vago, 2004). In Foresight City, the process in this area of designing the future is to first understand the frame of bias. Secondly, it is for the foresighted leader to analyze the collected strategic intelligence through the process of horizon scanning and filter it through the different perspectives of change to see

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how these perspectives explain how change might occur or develop in the future. Once this analysis is completed, the leader is ready to see and design plausible futures. The process of seeing and designing futures is parallel to the process we discussed in Chapters 4 and 9. Therefore, in this discussion, we will not cover the same material but will touch on some of those areas as needed to clarify or expand the discussion in regard to Foresight City. In that discussion, we first discussed seeing and observing signposts, separating the predetermined elements from the critical uncertainties, and then finding the two most critical uncertainties to form the axis of uncertainty. Similarly, applying the process posited in the discussion of the first domain, its three leadership foresight practices, followed by the Scan Horizons leadership foresight practice of the second domain (refer to Fig. 11.1), we become equipped to do the same work done in Chapters 4 and 9, the work of imaging the future, but with more fidelity and impact. Therefore, we now move with confidence to work on building the axis of uncertainty and develop plausible futures scenarios (just as we did to build the four narrative scenarios of the cities we previously discussed in Chapters 5 through 8). Scenario development is a crucial part of Foresight City because it forms the additional layer of learning necessary for knowing and foreseeing. Again, just like we mentioned in Chapter 4, the scenario development process is not intended to predict what the future will be but to explore what the futures (in plural) could be. This scenario development should not be the sole domain of a few individuals. As a matter of fact, in Foresight City, this is the collective input of citizens because they have been active participants and have developed an inclination for foresight which is now used in this phase to garner collective visions of the future, ranging from among the plausible, sometimes undesirable, to the preferred. The importance of their participation is accentuated by the need to create a layered and multi-generational view of the preferred future. In defining these macro visions of preferred futures, we deepen the understanding of the future we want to have, and then, we image it. Futurist, Sohail Inayatullah (1998, 2007), developed a method called Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) aimed at deepening the understanding of the future we want to create by creating new narratives of them. Using CLA, the city can be described at four levels ranging from the litany (the first level known as the day-to-day headlines about the city), progressing

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to the systemic view (short-term analysis that may include historical facts), to the worldview (employment of critical thinking that seeks multiple perspectives), to the deeper metaphor or myth (the fourth level describing the deepest, unconscious dimensions about the city) supporting the new narrative about the future. The point here is that this framework offers a multi-layered approach necessary in the design of futures that move cities beyond the superficial. For example, if one thinks about the city at the litany level, one thinks about what is superficially known: traffic congestion. In designing the future, this level envisions a congestion-free future. Designs at this level may be too superficial and will not bring true transformation. Think for a second. What has been the visionary response of cities to this problem of congested cities? For the most part, the answer has been the vision of cities with big bridges, widened streets, and so on, all of which have caused more congestion. This design for the future did not bring transformation; on the contrary, it brought more of the thing we did not want to see. At the worldview level we can think of the city as the sustainable city, tech city, or smart city, but this is not enough for enduring, meaningful change. If we move up the levels of CLA to the metaphor or myth level, we then think about the city in much deeper dimensions. What is the deeper metaphor or cultural belief that will describe the city of the future? For example, wealth in the city, big city/small village, citizen as architect, united humanity, lost city, or social control metaphors will all convey different core beliefs, in turn producing different responses about the future. Here lies the real pathway to envisioning a design about the future that will be transformative. Following closely this envisioning, we image the newly created metaphor in order to form a more perfect, collective picture of the future. Imaging is the powerful instrument of Foresight City for the reasons we explored in Chapter 4. (Imaging was also discussed in Chapter 9.) The aim in Foresight City is to iteratively go through the process described here until a collective image of Foresight City is completed. Then, we can move to the last leadership foresight practice in this domain: Co-creating strategy. This last leadership foresight practice of co-creation in this second domain (Anticipating) emphasizes the word “co-creation” to make known this is a cooperative process, not the domain of a solo leader or a small group of corporate folks. Co-creating strategy is simply envisioning collectively the plan detailing how we are going to get to the preferred future. Simply thinking about a plan is not enough fuel to thrust

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us forward. In Foresight City, the process of strategy is one of reflection. This strategy process is about seeing the different paths toward the preferred future (not one path but several may be appearing). Therefore, in preparing strategy, those involved in the process (a team composed of a multi-diverse set of stakeholder citizens and city leaders) reflect on what has been learned thus far (the discoveries made in the first and second domain) and analyze who are the power brokers in the environment (present and future), what has been affecting change, what is changing and what is not changing, and what is the direction of change. Moreover, those in the strategy process also reflect on the cultural structure and philosophies (evolutionary theories, technology theory, cyclic theory, and the like) which seem to explain what makes change happen in the environment of the city. Next, the strategy team designs every detail of the roadmap. There are thousands of methods and descriptions of strategy, from the typical classical models to more agile methods as in hoshin planning, describing strategy as perspective, position, plan, pattern, and even emergent; many also argue about the viability of strategy because its longrange view does not seem to be useful for organizations (Mintzberg et al., 1998; Westcott, 2014). Therefore, to delineate a prescriptive method is not possible here and would be foolish. Nevertheless, one can see how the flawed logic that strategy is unimportant has created a myriad of unintended negative consequences in the overall performance of smart cities (many of them discussed in the previous chapters). Perhaps, the greatest sign of a lack of performance has been the actual absence of a smart city strategy. This leads authors in the literature to seek intently but become frustrated in their attempts to “find a trustworthy description of what it takes to become a smart city” (Van den Bergh & Viaenea, 2016, p. 5) or stunned about how this important brick piece of building the future is largely an “unexplored field” (Gupta, Chauhan, & Jaiswal, 2019). Rome was not built in a day (as the old saying goes), and neither will our cities of the future be built in a day. Therefore, in Foresight City, it is understood and practiced that strategy must be a process of multi-diverse teams with multi-generational reach, and a long-range view of the future. It is a relay race adjusted in speed and distance as the team moves in time and space, and as it gains more strategic intelligence about the future and the hazards of the journey. The product of the reflection is a roadmap (as we previously mentioned), but it is a visual roadmap used as a storyline of the future. In other words, in Foresight City, members of the strategy team, once they have completed this roadmap and have sought multiple

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perspectives to develop the collective imaging artifact (an iterative process that produces the roadmap), they will feel as if they have been at the end of that roadmap. They journeyed and lived in the preferred future. The process was experiential and challenged the human senses. They were in a time dimension allowing them to experience the expedition as explorers and architects of that preferred future. As for everyone else, they are being tele-transported to that future, so the team members and the “past generation” can hear the stories of that voyage, and the strategic responses the team had to create as they went along the journey, discovering unplanned emergent phenomena, and overcoming it.

The Third Domain: Shaping the Future The last domain, Shaping the Future, is perhaps the hardest for most but certainly conceivable in all respects. It deals with setting in motion the future we have already envisioned and have experienced. As seen in Fig. 11.1, shaping the future consists of three leadership foresight practices: Taking Action, Creating Discourse, and Monitoring. In Foresight City, shaping the future is doing what Michelangelo, perhaps history’s greatest sculptor, did in the year 1495 to create out of a marvel stone one of the world’s most prized creations: the angel at the Basilica of San Domenico, Bologna (Dunkelman, 2014). Popular media is replete with quotes about this moment; the most famous of them states Michelangelo saw the angel in the stone and chiseled until the angel was set free. Regardless of the historical evidence of what was said over 500 years ago, we can learn a credible point in this story. And that is the point of envisioning the future, allowing that vision to take over and release our natural human talents to be creative, letting the vision guide our hands and chisel, and finally, to be persistent, agile, and observant in the chiseling until the future is set free. As noted above, the process is hard for most, but not because it requires super-human powers and intellect, but because it requires long-range, multigenerational views and linkage, and one more important effort: diligence. The hard part is not to accomplishing the chiseling; the hard part is changing our ways of thinking and acting about the future. The first leadership foresight practice of taking action in this domain manifests into the physical world (and sets in physical motion) the envisioned design and collective imaging of the future. Taking action is about taking the journey of our team (discussed in the previous section), the

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team’s experiences in that journey, and their responses to the unplanned emergent phenomena, and building all these elements into actionable steps. The plan was envisioned earlier, and it was co-created into a roadmap. Moreover, the roadmap was traversed by members of the team and others who were able to experience the future and come back with lessons learned. In this first domain’s leadership foresight practice of taking action, all this data, experiences, intuition, vision, and the responsibilities which key stakeholders must have over the long-range view are fused into a plan of action with clear milestones and resources allocated to people and time eras. Today, we can see contemporary methods providing a template into how this method should be outlined. Typical project management methods could fit here, as well as other more agile methods as in those done in hoshin kanri and hoshin planning (Japanese-based strategic planning and policy deployment processes) practiced by modern quality professionals. In the instance of hoshin kanri and hoshin planning, designers of the actionable strategy can select up to four vision statements and link them through waterfall associations to actionable work plans, goals, multiple social groups and people, and other resources over extended long-range views to realize the predominant vision of the future through consensus in the development and deployment of action plans (Kubiak & Benbow, 2009; Tague, 2005; Westcott, 2014). The consensus and deployment processes are what conceivably make this leadership foresight practice of taking action difficult. There could be many reasons for the difficulty. Earlier in the book, we noted the short-mindedness of many leaders as a factor in not being able to progress toward collective visions of preferred futures, i.e., political cycles, and leaders who move too quickly to the next job. Another difficulty not always realized is that strategy and action are social processes, and therefore, must be negotiated as part of the implementation and action processes (Ackermann & Eden, 2011). Without the consent of people, great initiatives will not flourish. This means leadership must be distributed (several power brokers involved in the processes, being actors and proponents) in both planning and deploying, so action plans can be reviewed and improved with input of many, rather than being developed in the black box of corporate offsite meetings and expected to be accepted by everyone. The hoshin kanri and hoshin planning we briefly discussed earlier is a good first step as it works on consensus from the beginning— consensus is part of the development and deployment of action plans, averting the flawed assumption that everyone will naturally accept and

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carry out the plans as conceived. Another way to improve the chances of success in deployment of action plans is to give the strategy and action plans another look against acceptability. This acceptability test must happen in two phases. First, one must discern the strategy, and next, one must make an assessment of it against culture. For example, authors Burton, Obel, and Håkonsson (2015) used a simple model to discern organizational strategy based on two dimensions: exploration (seeking innovative technologies and ways of doing things) and exploitation (taking advantage of known technologies to do new things). When those two dimensions of exploration and exploitation intersect, a quadrant chart is formed describing four states of strategy zones, i.e., high exploration with low exploitation, etc. (pp. 32–33). Applying this to cities, the acceptability examination is about looking at the strategy and action plans and discerning, in the end, what kind of strategy is the combination of strategy and action plans promoting; for example, is it high exploration with low exploitation? But this test alone is insufficient to speak about the potential for acceptability. Many leaders end up with strategy plans that seemed likely, but the plans end up failing the organization. Therefore, this assessment must next be matched to a city’s culture assessment to make a strategy-culture-fit test. For example, if the designed future strategy and action plans seem traditional (low exploration with low exploitation), and the city’s culture assessment reveals the city embraces values of innovativeness, entrepreneurship, and agility, how acceptable and successful the designed future strategy be? The strategy and the city are at opposite ends of each other in this example, and therefore, the chances for acceptability and successful deployment are dim. A more profound interpretation of how strategy and action plans can be perceived is likewise desirable. Thus, we compare our findings about the strategy, action plans, and culture assessment against the culture and system maps we developed in the first domain (the Understanding Domain). Where are the conflicts in perceptions, culture paradigms, forms of thinking, and ways of acting? Where should we make adjustments? Where should we make compromises? One important point, once again, must be stressed here: In Foresight City, the process just described is being performed across multi-generational and environmental views to see that the road to the preferred future takes into consideration the resources needed (those resources people, groups, locations, and time will need) and those resources that will be constrained or depleted based on

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the consumption of human activities. Additionally, foresighted leaders, in making a wholesome examination, should not lose sight of the emergent phenomena future generations can expect to face and will need to overcome based on what we know today about the future. Next, leaders embrace and set in motion the second leadership foresight practice in this Shaping the Future Domain: active future-focused discourse in the city. In Foresight City, we are reminded the city should remain the domain of the citizen. Everything else should be subordinate to him or her. Hence, the first part of the name used to describe a city inhabitant (citi) reminds us of that value. Perhaps, the second part of the name (zen) reminds us about the oriental forms of culture aimed at enlightenment through thought and contemplation. This second part also reminds us about the responsibilization of the citizen—the growing of a city inhabitant into one who thinks about the city in all its forms to construct a collective, more prosperous union between the present and the future. The city and the citizen cannot be separated; their futures are tied together, and citizens of all kinds (city leaders, civil servants, community, or business leaders) must feel empowered and capable to teach and mentor others about the future. Without the citizens thinking about the city in all its collective forms and how those forms guide the future, there will be no achievement of a preferred future. The future will happen regardless; the effort is to make the preferred future we want to unravel. But a pre-requisite is that citizens become conscious the futures exist and have been explored. One of those mechanisms in foresight is telling stories (Bishop & Hines, 2012). These stories should include details discovered during the exploratory journey of the future which the strategy team embraced. These stories must inspire and spark the imagination of young and old to clearly recognize the collective imagery and design of the future that was iteratively built during the Anticipating Domain. The other important aspect of this future-focused discourse is to spark a debate about the future. In this debate, citizens begin to be curious about the future, a younger generation rises adopting and seeing future discourse as a natural habit, creating a link between what one generation saw and what the new generation will see and do. In particular, the actions we have thus far discussed begin to “chisel the marble” until the preferred future is set free. The current generation in Foresight City grows this sense for the unknown into the next generation as well as the capability and inclination to foresee. Because of the habit of future discourse, based on an exploration of the future(s), citizens cultivate more ethically-sound

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leaders (refer to our previous discussion about the ethics of leadership and foresight in Chapter 10). The citizens also teach the future and are more likely to attain their preferred future because the visualization of that future changes neurological pattern formations in the brain, and the brain, not being able to tell the difference between what it experiences through the senses and what it imagines, begins to see the future as credible and achievable, even creating memories of that future (Chermack, 2011; Ingbar, 1985). Researchers also note the episodic details of the experience are used to create these memories of the future, which then form the basis for people’s anticipation and goal-directed behavior (Addis & Schacter, 2012; Ingbar, 1985). In other words, the discourse and the vivid experiences leave an imprint in the citizens, giving them the impetus and urge to create the preferred future. This concept, although amazing, is not new. Olympic athletes are known to practice this visualization as part of their training (Clarey, 2014). In Foresight City, the practice is to not only visualize the future but to actively engage it as part of the culture and habit of future-thinking. Engaging in public discourse sets in motion the future we seek, helps gather multiple perspectives, and further shapes future outcomes. The last leadership foresight practice to discuss in this domain is that of Monitoring. The work is not done with the plan of action, action in place, and even the support and active participation of stakeholders. The environment of Foresight City, as for any other city or organization, is fluid and ever-changing. Therefore, the monitoring activity refers to the actual examining of signposts in the environment to signal the steps we are making are leading us down the path and future we envisioned. These actions are similar to ones we would take when visiting a friend. Our friend has given us directions to her house. We know we need to take road 123, then exit on Alpha Street, drive through High Street until we reach the stop sign. At the stop sign, we take a right and follow the street for two kilometers. Then, we take a right and see three houses: one yellow, one green, and two white. Our friend’s house is the first white house. As we drive down the road, and especially if your GPS is not working, we look for these signs. Once we see the signs, we are confident we are headed down the right path, and we will arrive to our future destination (our friend’s house). In monitoring, we do the same thing. The strategy team and other key stakeholders involved in the process look out for the signposts we know we could see. As these signs of the future appear, we make adjustments as necessary—we had already

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traveled through this road, so we know what to do and where we perceive the sharp turns to be. Therefore, our experience on the road is a much more confident one, and we become increasingly better at anticipating hazards on the road. An important aspect of this journey is what authors Ashley and Morrison (1999) have termed as an Anticipatory Management System. This system allows the city to gather strategic trend intelligence and perform issue-vulnerability audits at regular intervals to forecast major roadblocks which can deviate the city from achieving its preferred future. Having this kind of strategic intelligence, city leaders and its citizens can prioritize issues based on vulnerability, impact, and effects to create appropriate responses. There are many tools available to leaders to do this; many of them measure and collect weak signals using artificial intelligence to do the scanning and organize the scanning hits into categories for further analysis. This process is continuous, always managed, and always communicated, so everyone in the city understands how we are approximating our destination. This process also requires the measurement of milestones, the examination about the effectiveness of measures, and the leadership accountability to citizens regarding the decisions being made, as well as the results.

The Sustainment Band There must be a process of renewal and refreshing. That process is activated by the ever-happening presence of the sustainment band. The sustainment band in Foresight City is composed of two elements: Seek Multiple Perspectives and Scan Continuously (See Fig. 11.1). Both elements have processes of their own. We have discussed within the three domains these two sustainment band processes. For example, in regard to seeking multiple perspectives during the Understanding Domain, leaders assemble a diverse set of teams to look through the windows of the Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool. At each window stage, the team or leaders seek to develop foresight intelligence (to get a sense for the unknown and foresee the unforeseeable). This perspective-seeking is refreshed during the Anticipating and Shaping the Future domains, renewing what was known, so decisions, solutions, roadmaps, forms of thinking, and ways of acting can be synchronized to build the right imagery of the future and the preferred future. Moreover, as that is happening, the second element of the sustainment band is actively seeking and scanning for changes in the environment. As changes or signposts of

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the future are recognized, these are fed back into the decision-making and strategy loops to forecast and adjust in real-time when necessary. The aim of all these components discussed (the domains, practices, and sustainment band) is to form a complete system which takes us from the present to our designed and preferred future.

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Index

A Amsterdam, 3, 7, 36, 37, 46, 99 Anticipating, xiv, 25, 130, 132, 142, 146, 153 Artificial intelligence (AI), 65, 68, 80, 81, 96, 105, 136, 143, 153 Ascent City, xiii, 59, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 122 Atlanta, 128, 129 Axis of uncertainty, 47, 56, 145 B Barcelona, 3, 8, 16, 35, 46, 99, 100, 134, 138 C Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), 145, 146 City frameworks, 6, 7, 21 City of the future, xi, xiii, 35, 48, 58, 95, 101–104, 134, 147 City sprawl, 100, 102

Club of Rome, 25 Co-creation, 11, 14, 15, 30, 36, 40, 46, 85, 142, 146 Cognitive process, 89, 121 Collective intelligence system, 65–67 Consensus and deployment processes, 149 COVID-19, 114, 118, 144 Critical uncertainties, 57, 58, 122, 145 Culture, 3, 9, 69, 73, 78, 79, 98, 100, 130, 133, 137, 138, 150, 152

D Definition elements, 14, 15 Designing the future, 109, 142–146, 150, 151 Digital city, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 29, 34, 35, 38, 50 Domains of leadership foresight, 133

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020 J. A. LugoSantiago, Leadership and Strategic Foresight in Smart Cities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49020-1

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INDEX

E Electronic urbanism, 40 Empowered citizen, 86 Energy, 16, 29, 30, 47, 51, 67, 68, 70, 73, 75, 80, 102, 135 Ethical failure, 120 Ethics in leadership, 122 Existential risks, xiii, 24, 25, 45, 47, 57, 68 Existential threats, 63, 71, 115

F Foresight City, xi, xiii, xiv, 105, 110–112, 114, 116, 117, 121–123, 129, 130, 132–134, 136, 141–148, 150–153 Future of smart cities, 33, 51, 101 Futures Awareness Inquiry Tool, 117–119, 143, 153

G Ghent, 134 Green spaces, xiii, 72, 74, 90, 100, 102, 121

H Helsinki, 7, 35–37, 46 Horizon scanning, 50, 123, 143, 144 Hoshin kanri, 149 Hoshin planning, 147, 149

I Imaging the future, 50, 56, 145 Industrial economy, 58 Information city, 5, 8, 10, 12, 13, 29, 34, 35, 38 Information communications technology (ICT), 6, 8–11, 13, 15,

16, 21, 28–30, 34–36, 81, 96, 97, 100 Intelligence warning system, 65, 132 Intelligent city, 5, 10–14, 34, 36, 40, 50 Intelligent City of the Year, 10

J Japanese City of Aizuwakamatsu, 38 Johari Window, 116, 117

K Knowledge city, 5, 8, 9, 12, 29, 34, 35, 38 Knowledge economy, 5, 29, 35, 38, 99 Kyoto, 7, 35

L Leadership foresight practices, xiv, 130, 133, 134, 137, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152 Limited resources, 58 Limits to Growth, 25, 71

M Mapping culture, 137, 138 Mapping the system, 137, 138 Market potential, 58 Melbourne, 8, 138 Mobility, 3, 9, 15, 16, 23, 30, 63, 72, 74, 80, 89, 90, 104 Molitor, G.T.T., 135 Multiple Timeline Model of Change, 136

N New Songdo, 9, 10, 35

INDEX

New Urbanism, 5 New York City, 46 Notek City, xiii, 59, 77–79, 82, 96, 98, 122 P Paris, 3, 29 Participation, 10, 88, 102, 134, 138, 145, 152 Population growth, 25, 26, 57 Practices in Foresight City, 127 Proliferation of technology, 25, 30, 36, 58 R Renewable energy, 68, 72, 73 Rio de Janeiro, 23, 24, 46 S San Francisco, 128 Santa Barbara, 46 Scanning, 50, 153 Scenario development, 50, 141, 145 Scenario narrative, 68, 75, 83, 91, 96, 122, 145 Sense of the future, xiii Signposts, xiii, 47, 48, 50, 96, 118, 121–123, 145, 152, 153 Singapore, 10, 36 Smart city, xi–xiv, 3–8, 10–16, 21–25, 29, 33–38, 40, 41, 45–47, 49, 50, 58, 95, 96, 98–100, 102–105, 109, 122, 134, 146, 147

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Smart city divide, 29 Smart city scenarios, 47 Social and political pressure, 25, 28, 58 Strategic intelligence, 143, 144, 147, 153 Strategy, 16, 23, 46, 51, 83, 87, 91, 99, 132, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149–152, 154 Strategy acceptability test, 150 Sustainment band, xiv, 130, 132, 153, 154 Systems dynamics, 141 Systems thinking, 13, 141 T Techno City, xiii, 59, 63, 64, 67, 68, 96, 98, 121 Three forms of thinking in Foresight City, 123 Time eras of cities, 149 Types of cities, 12, 45 U Ubiquitous city, 5, 9–13, 34, 35, 40, 41 Urbanism, 11, 40 V Variables in a system, 14 Views of the future, 90, 130 Vision, 5, 10, 16, 24, 35, 37, 50, 51, 89, 90, 100, 121, 141, 145, 148, 149