1 October 2017
DIGITAL CITIES
Why doing nothing is not an option
Digital investment in Stirling is vital in addressing the threat of decline, says council chief executive BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN
The arrival of the tech incubator CodeBase has been described as a ‘game changer’ for Stirling as the city embarks on a journey towards digital-powered economic growth. Founded in Edinburgh, the UK’s
Time on the Tay: In Perth, city wifi will support flexible study and work when it goes live later this month
Digital strategy that should flow into economic rejuvenation
BY WILLIAM PEAKIN
Casting a glance towards the striking new V&A building on Dundee’s waterfront, Tom Flanagan drew a parallel between its leading-edge design and the Tay cities’ ambition to create a world-class digital infrastructure for the region. “We believe a smart city approach
should become mainstream in terms of how public agencies engage with com- munities,” said Flanagan, interim head of economic development at Perth and Kinross Council. It encompasses smart energy, smart mobility and smart health, among others. “Most of all, it’s about smart people; making sure that people across the Tay cities are digitally skilled and can participate,” he said. Flanagan was speaking at the Dundee
and Perth event in the Digital Cities series hosted by FutureScot in associa- tion with The Sunday Times Scotland. He was joined by Steven Kyle, Dundee City Council’s transformation manager leading its ‘Change for the Future’ programme. Kyle emphasised the collaborative nature of the region’s strategy, with each of their councils, along with Angus, working to de-
velop a single digital platform for citizens. A technology forum provides a medium for specialists to discuss challenges, and ways round, while an improvement forum supports the redesign of council services. Kyle pointed out that the public now have a way to report issues online, across a variety of services such as community safety, the environment, housing and potential fraud. They can also check how the council is performing, based on a series of indicators. Flanagan said that there is an emphasis
on making council data available to small and medium sized enterprises, to encour- age the creation of innovative applications and so that more informed decisions can be made about the region’s future. It is opening innovation labs to support digital businesses. Dundee and Perth following Glasgow’s
lead in opening a 24/7 city operations centre to improve safety and incident response times. Intelligent street light- ing and city-wide WiFi are being rolled out, and involvement in the ‘playable city’ initiative will make visits an experience as well as just being functional. The move to become digital cities is supported by the Tay Cities Deal bid which, if successful, would see more than £1.8bn of investment
and the creation of up to 15,000 jobs for the region. Digital plays a significant part in the bid, which also encompasses the area’s potential in tourism, food and drink, cre- ative industries, eco innovation, oil and gas decommissioning, engineering, biomedical and healthcare. The 2017 Tech Nation Report identi-
fied Dundee as a hub of digital excellence, particularly in terms of games and software development, technology services and mobile app development. At 129%, it had the third highest growth in turnover in the UK, while its GVA grew by 42%. Backers of the bid – including media organisation DC Thompson – believe this expertise can play a crucial role in the wider economic rejuvenation across the Tay Cities area. Dundee now has the third fastest grow-
ing digital turnover in the UK and many companies, particularly software firms, are operating on a global scale. Between 2011 and 2015, the city’s turnover growth was 171%, the highest in the UK, followed by London’s at 106%. The presence of Abertay, Dundee and St
Andrews Universities, Perth College UHI, and Dundee & Angus College helps with supplying the skills, in terms of software
and hardware engineers, that local com- panies – such as cloud host Brightsolid and app developer Waracle - need. In addition to developing some of the
world’s biggest selling games it has sig- nificant digital capabilities in other fields, including augmented reality, mobile phone app development, data centres and cloud storage, computer hardware for customer transactions, digital media and entertain- ment. The region also has an internationally
recognised strength in cyber-security which it is believed has the potential to create a significant number of jobs over time. The digital innovation element of the Tay Cities Deal proposal focuses on investment in cyber-security, digital forensic science and digital health. Combined with the development of
world class digital connectivity across both urban and rural areas and the involvement of Perth and Dundee in the Smart Cities Scotland initiative, which is developing the range of city projects from smart waste to intelligent street lighting, outlined by Flanagan and Kyle, “the strengths of the region in digital innovation are bright,” says the City Deal bid document.
largest tech accelerator hub has formally opened a new Stirling base as it looks to replicate its model of nurturing tech talent in the capital. The new hub is in the middle of an
extensive refurbishment that will see prominent tech companies relocate to the former municipal buildings in the city centre by early next year. It will also act as a feeder, hoping to attract and retain graduates from Stirling University and Forth Valley College as they embark on tech careers. CodeBase is set to be the fulcrum of
Stirling’s stated ambition to create a ‘Digital District’, which is just one of six infrastructure projects outlined in its City Region Deal, announced by Chan- cellor Phillip Hammond in his Autumn Statement last year. Under the deal, Stirling is hoping to
secure investment of up to £600m from the UK and Scottish Governments, and to attract private capital; the money will be used to revitalise the city, creating not only a vibrant digital economy, but also restoring its waterways to public use and creating an international standard city park at the foot of its iconic castle. Speaking at CodeBase during the Digi-
tal Cities series, Stewart Carruth, chief executive of Stirling Council, painted a stark picture of decline if the city - which has established a commission to oversee the City Region Deal - failed to invest in key sectors such as digital. He said: “The first thing that we
recognised was that Stirling’s economy was very much driven by what one might term traditional sectors – construction, services, tourism – and we recognised that we had to look after those sectors. “But we also felt a little bit vulnerable.
We felt that if we didn’t intervene in some way there was a danger that the economic growth that we were looking
for, which would allow people to stay, or come and work here from outside the Stirling area, actually might go into de- cline. One of the big drivers for that was some of the information that we were beginning to get around, ‘what if we did nothing?’ and the impact that would have on average earnings.” He added: “We recognised that if we
didn’t make a move that in all probability average earnings would decline, and the opportunities for jobs in the whole of Stirling would start to fall, too. So, this is a very deliberate intervention in recog- nising that digital has a key part to play in strengthening our position not just in Scotland actually but internationally, too. In doing this we’ve recognised that the digital district is the key to doing that.” Carruth welcomed the fact that Co-
deBase - founded by brothers Jamie and Stephen Coleman - has taken its venture outside Edinburgh for the first time. In the capital, it has become synonymous with tech development since its launch in 2014, helping to galvanise a community of like-minded coders, web developers and entrepreneurs; it now plays host to 90 start-up companies, employing around 600 people. CodeBase Stirling will be of an order
of magnitude smaller, with space for 50 companies across four floors. It is also geographically well-placed in the Central Belt to attract talent from elsewhere in the country, said Carruth. “CodeBase Stirling is actually for the
rest of Scotland and that for us is excit- ing because it opens up beyond the city region into other areas and also brings an international dimension as well, so for Stirling this really is a game changer,” he said. The ability to attract people to live,
work and play in the city are central to Stirling’s plans to turn it into an ‘economic and cultural powerhouse’, creating over 3,000 additional jobs and increasing the region’s GVA by 6-7% over the next ten years. It is hoped those economic impacts
will be supported through the reimagin- ing of some of the community ameni- ties in and around the city - which also include a plan to restore its former river harbour to use. The city has also put digital skills at
the top of its agenda; the creative indus- tries, which includes digital technologies, are one of three key sectors adopted as core elements of its vocational training offer at Forth Valley College.
3
COMMENT
Let’s not waste this once- in-a-lifetime opportunity
BY BILL BUCHANAN
The City Deal for Edinburgh and the south-east region comprises £300m each from the UK and Scottish Governments, with additional related investment bring- ing the total to around £1bn. With some of the finest data architects, cybersecurity professionals, and cloud architects any- where in the world, we have the chance to create a new blueprint for the city; in the way that the designers of the New Town did all those years ago. If, in five years’ time, I still need to
attend a damp and smelly room in a community centre on a rainy evening on the last Wednesday of the month, to express my concerns and to contribute to the operation of the city, we have wasted our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I hope ambitious targets can be set, and which can really stretch those involved to think in new ways. If we have spent it on a shiny new glass
building in the middle of town and have funded a bunch of data scientists to write research papers and to present at “world- renowned” conferences, we have lost sight of creating a new virtual world, and which places the citizen at the centre. I write this as an Edinburgh citizen, and not in my role of an academic. As tech-driven and innovative as it is,
Edinburgh is a long way from being ready for large-scale ‘data fusion’. I worry that the new money will go into new buildings and in employing research staff, and, in the end, there will be little change which the citizen can point to and say that their lives have been changed. Without leadership and a guiding
light, and targets which take us into the 21st century, we could end up with an unfocused strategy. I hope that innovation becomes a key part of the new investment and that new thinking can promote the development of innovative companies, who can scale across the world. I hope that our small businesses get a chance to be part of the building of a new city, and that it is not all about universities defining the problems that need to be solved. There are problems in Edinburgh
which need to be solved – as in any city – and if a child in Wester Hailes does not have the same opportunities that a child
with the same abilities in another part of the city has, we are not addressing the core issues. If we educate smart people from around the world, and then allow them to leave (even though they want to stay), we will not build an economy which can take its place in the world. One thing is obvious; Edinburgh needs
an architecture which supports the gathering of data – parsed from existing sets and from new ‘frictionless’ methods – and its presentation back to its citizens, and for our citizens to play an active part in contributing to this data. That is what democracy is all about.
DATA OVER THE WALL? Unfortunately, the public sector is often not setup to be a provider and enabler in the capture and provision of data. It often protects the data that it needs, and struggles to release it in a form that could be useful. With political pressure, there is often a resistance to release tracking infor- mation on civic issues. There are generally four main approaches*: 1 a status quo ‘data over the wall’ form of government data publishing; 2 a form of ‘code exchange’, with government acting as an open data activist; 3 open data as a civic issue tracker; 4 participatory open data. London is on a path from 1 to 4, has
passed number 3, and now is working on 4. The London Datastore tracks key civic issues, such as jobs and economy, trans- port and housing. London is now also investing in full data sharing across the city, with a vision of it having “the most dynamic and productive city data market in the world. City data will be recognised as part of the capital’s infrastructure. And London will achieve global renown for data impact”. For my own city – Edinburgh – we are
still at ‘data over the wall’. From what I see most of the data within the Edinburgh open source portal is in the form of PDFs, and gives little pointers on the general health and activity of the city. There is little in the way of taking data from dif- ferent sources, and fusing it together, and little in the way of dialogue with its citizens – apart from turning up at com- munity meets to meet my local councillor. We need to drag our cities into the 21st century, and the City Deal is one way to
take Edinburgh into a new world – built on data and cyber security. I hope that Edinburgh can become an amazing place of new ideas and place that those with great ideas will come to, and be part of a citizen-focused world. Businesses in the city should have an advantage in operat- ing here, and be ready to integrate into a worldwide infrastructure, and where ev- ery citizen can be involved in the growth of the city. I am going to say it: ‘Don’t let universi-
ties define the problem, as they will define their own problems that they want to ad- dress’. Let’s focus on building a new city, with software and cyber security, don’t do as we have done for the previous century. The City Deal is just too good an op-
portunity to miss, and I hope that it shows real vision, which doesn’t involve doing the same old things and benefit the same old people and organisations. We need to build new cyber-enabled cit-
ies; otherwise, we have failed to properly create an infrastructure for our kids to move into, and they will leave and find the cities which best support their vision of a connected world. We, too, need to attract people with ideas from around the world and provide them with an infrastructure which allows them to take their ideas to the world. My hope is that in five years’ time I
can take to an international stage and present on how #edinburgh showed real vision and implemented one of the most advanced Blockchain and smart city infra- structures in the world, and truly engaged with its citizens and businesses. I hope I don’t have to make my concerns known through my local community centre – which is rather lovely, but not quite the place to voice major concerns – on a dark, rainy evening on the last Wednesday of the month.
*Civic open data at a crossroads: Dominant models and current challenges
http://bit.ly/2xqfm9M
Bill Buchanan is a Professor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University, and a Fellow of the BCS and the IET. For the full version of this article, go to
http://bit.ly/2fsGfCY
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