One of the tangetial brouhahas about Brexit and what’s going to happen to Great (once) Britain post the event is the potential positive impact for the cities that are competing for the businesses currently located in London. The reason to compete is obvious: it’s good for the economy.
Cities competing against one another is nothing new, it’s the basis for the original Olympic games, after all. But I think we are seeing a shift in power from national governments to cities, a move of the locus of legislative control from nation states to city states. Mega-cities (>10m population) already number 39 globally; that’s bigger than the population of Switzerland, so you don’t have to be good at demographics to work out that many cities don’t actually need to rely on their national governments for progress. And in many instances, national governments are too slow or too fragmented to deal with the particular needs of particular cities: Birmingham is not London, Madrid is not Barcelona, Perth is not Sydney. We will increasingly see cities taking action to deal with the perceived negative aspects of our rapidly changing world (such as the banning of Uber by London) and the inactivity or lack of pace in national responses but we will also see many more cities competing to be great places to live and locate a business. To attract business, cities have to be places where people want to live. So it has to offer things like safety, affordable housing, places to relax, a friendly service culture, tolerance.
So how do you differentiate your city-offering from the next place, for both employers and employees?
Branding is one path and, I believe, a crucial part of establishing what your city represents to prospective citizens. The I amsterdam campaign is a great example of this. Through it, Amsterdam has capitalised on its reputation for cool and open to increase its attractiveness as an innovation hub. By all sorts of measures, that branding has paid off and Amsterdam is now considered an attractive location to base your start up, or find innovation. Its internet is fast and its ICT services are top drawer quality. Meanwhile, Barcelona has been working with tech giants at becoming a smart city for the best part of this decade and now it seems is setting itself up as a global hub for 3D printing.
As city leaders invest in technology to make their cities better places to live and work (and be talent-magnets), it’s a good idea to also invest in the specialisations that will allow a city to compete in the way that Adam Smith argued nations build wealth so many years ago. For me, that’s a real Smart City.