How IT can make city life better

If councils want to use the web to assist urban revival, they should spend less time on waffle and more on building useful services.

Around 1998, I flew up to Edinburgh to pitch for some business. I’d done a bit of consulting in urban strategy – IT included – for Birmingham and Glasgow. Now I was one of a design team hoping to scoop up Scotland’s capital.

A talented, post-modern and faintly mad Scottish interior and furniture designer had the inside track to the client. But as he began his opening presentation to local bigwigs, my heart sank, and the leader of our team – one of Britain’s best-known names in design – promptly put his head in his hands.

The thing that turned everybody off was his title: Edinburgh as a “smart city”. He was nodding, at what in retrospect was quite an early date, in the direction of IT. But he also seemed to be nodding at the importance of education to urban revival. Or was he pointing out that Edinburgh’s inhabitants ought to wear smart clothes? With all the ambiguity, it soon became clear that he only really had the adjective “smart” to play with.

How things have changed. A year ago this month, Edinburgh City Council revised Delivering the Smart City: a 21st Century Government Action Plan, its vision for how what it calls “customers” will access services in future. And it’s not a bad document. It calls for a single city portal through which people can do business with the council, plus a common database of citizens and property. Refreshingly, it talks up the productivity improvements that IT could bring to council services.

It’s just as well. As the council points out, Edinburgh has the fastest growing economy in the UK.

So how smart is Edinburgh now? Well, there’s a portal for planning and building control, and other advances are being made. But it still seems as hard to pay one’s council tax online there as it is in Wandsworth, where I live. And although Edinburgh’s excellent web site lists many subjects, searching for IT as a category mainly brings up “ice and snow” and the council’s Infectious Diseases Section. Doing the same for telecoms brings up “tattooists and piercing”.

In short, it is not thought that the public – or inward investors, for that matter – has any interest in IT, getting educated in or through IT, or the local provision of broadband (“badgers” take precedence).

That can’t be right. Still, with New Labour’s election manifesto likely to talk up regional assemblies and all the rest, we’ll likely hear a lot more about the relevance of IT to cities as regional hubs.

It is hoped the word bandied about will not be “smart” – and maybe Edinburgh aside, we will let Canada take the franchise on smartness, now that Halifax is calling itself a “smart city”, and Edmonton is actually offering Smart City awards.

When I can pay for my parking though my mobile, rather than a panting rush to meet one of those nice meter men, I’ll know I’ve arrived in a genuine smart city.