Building a smarter city

This paper is adapted from a conference paper at the prestigious "CSID AUN-SCUD International Conference on Sustainable Infrastructure and Urban Development" held in Jakarta in November 2018. It draws on literature to develop a historical interpretation that explains why the world is changing as it is, and how it might subsequently evolve. The paper recognises that we live in a period that marks the end of an old era and the start of a new digitally enabled era. The role of creativity becomes ever more important as the evolution of the Internet unlocks new opportunities around innovations in IoT, Big Data, and Cloud Compute, to name but a few. Whilst some organisations try to repeat what they have done in the past, only this time with digital technology, others (e.g. Elon Musk) set out to reinvent value chains and in so doing move economic power away from established players. It is by seeing the strategic, tactical and operational possibilities in an integrated way that substantive ideas emerge (e.g. Airbnb becoming the largest hotel chain without owning a single hotel). In particular, our paper explores the intersect between the evolution of our cities and levels of awareness, of consciousness, that mark the maturity of urban evolution (i.e. the 'smartness' of the city and its citizens). Finally, it reports on an attempt to push such an evolutionary improvement in the UK city of Sheffield.