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PD 8101:2014 Smart cities – Guide to the role of the planning and development process
Executive summary
PD 8101:2014 Smart cities – Guide to the role of the
planning and development process
Executive summary
Page 2 of 6
1 Introduction
In the UK, more than eight out of ten people now live in urban areas. Yet cities increasingly need to be able to do more with less, to compete in a globally-interconnected economy, and to provide for the well-being of their citizens in a truly sustainable way. In short, cities need to become smarter.
smart city effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens
SOURCE: PAS 180:2014, 3.1.62
The purpose of PD 8101 is to provide guidance as to how development and infrastructure projects can be designed and built in a way that facilitates a city’s progress towards becoming smarter.
This is important because:
• It is easier and cheaper to put in place the foundations for a smart city within a development or infrastructure project at the planning and implementation stage.
• Development and infrastructure projects often provide cost-effective opportunities to test and trial smart city products and services, and the business models and processes required to fund and operate them, before rolling them out citywide.
• The smart use of data and digital modelling can not only enable neighbourhoods to be better designed for the people who use them, but can also enable significant savings in the implementation, on-going management and service delivery stages.
PD 8101 mainly focuses on major developments, but also refers to the opportunities offered by refurbishment programmes, major infrastructure projects and streetworks and improvements to the public realm. It is useful for everyone involved in the planning and implementation of development and infrastructure projects.
2 Five key areas for supporting smart city aspirations
It is clear that the game has changed in the planning context and that incremental improvements no longer work. With the challenges that cities are currently facing, along with the enhanced role that technology can play in tackling those challenges, it is vital that planners and city leaders grasp the new opportunities that smart city approaches can bring.
PD 8101 provides guidance on five key areas where the planning and development process can support smart city aspirations.
These are shown in Figure 1.
PD 8101:2014 Smart cities – Guide to the role of the
planning and development process
Executive summary
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Figure 1 – Five key areas for supporting smart city developments
Figure 3 from PD 8101
2.1 Build partnerships to deliver holistic solutions
The integration of city systems is central to smart city aspirations. City systems have traditionally been operated in silos and managed independently from each other, resulting in:
• the inability to support synergies between different services;
• the potential for changes in one system to inadvertently cause problems in another;
• unnecessary complexity and problems for the citizens as they try to navigate around the services they need to use.
The complexity of individual city systems means that for the foreseeable future, each will continue to be managed by a separate specialist organization. However, closer collaboration between these organizations to allow holistic, citizen-centric service delivery, enabled by smart technology, is a key requirement for a smarter city.
Development and infrastructure projects provide an excellent opportunity to begin this partnership-building work. Many of the city wide service providers will need to plan how they will deliver services to the citizens and businesses that will live or be based in a new development. Given that a new development involves the installation of new infrastructures and the setting up of new systems to deliver services, this provides the opportunity to rethink how those services can be delivered.
Currently, co-ordination work on new developments is often left to the developer, who sets up one-to-one or one-to-few conversations with other stakeholders such as utility companies, neighbourhood committees, interested parties and funders. The local authority could bring these individual conversations into a single forum and broker public, private and community sector collaborations, enabling existing services to be enhanced and new services for citizens and businesses to be developed.
PD 8101:2014 Smart cities – Guide to the role of the
planning and development process
Executive summary
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Building partnerships between agencies in this way could build a strong foundation for the more strategic work of helping the city to become smarter as a whole.
2.2 Build the foundation for widespread exploitation of data
Digital technologies are increasingly being used to brief, design, procure, deliver and operate building environments. The name given to this process is Building Information Modelling (BIM).
A standards development programme is being managed by BSI, in partnership with the Government BIM task group, to enable these benefits. Requiring developers to use a BIM approach that conforms to BSI standards can make data available for reuse, including aggregation across a neighbourhood, or even over a city, in order to support wider city planning and city management.
Alongside this, increasingly new development and infrastructure projects have data collection and communications facilities built in. This is because sensor networks can be installed much more cheaply when the development is being built and also because it is easy to see how data sharing can help the development as a whole be better designed and help agencies to be better able to deliver services within it.
Doing this for a new development could provide the basis for a city to expand this to a citywide, open data-sharing process and to develop practical, citywide, commercial models to allow useful data to be made widely available, in a way that ensures its integrity and compliance with data protection regulations.
2.3 Use digital modelling to provide a people-centred physical environment
Many of the challenges that cities face today relate to the rapid changes that are taking place in city life and the need to anticipate these. It is therefore vital for planners to utilize the best data available on how cities work today and on how they are likely to change.
Of course, data has always been used in the design of development and infrastructure projects. For instance, demographic data has been used to identify the sort of housing that is likely to be attractive to local people. Surveys and other methods of collecting travel movement data have been used to understand how to design neighbourhoods in order to promote traffic and pedestrian flow.
However, up until recently it has been expensive and time-consuming to conduct research as this has normally involved large-scale surveys involving face-to-face interviews. These are not only expensive but can be unreliable, in that people do not always report honestly on their behaviour.
Now, though, reliable information on people’s actual behaviour can be gathered comparatively cheaply, for example, by using mobile phone data to discover how and when people move through an area and even, by inference, what mode of transport they use.
In addition, if the local authority develops its own digital model of how the city, or a particular area of the city, is working at the moment, it could then test different designs from developers to evaluate their likely impact on the wider city and use that to make evidence-based planning decisions and as grounds to negotiate design changes with developers. Digitally-enabled visualization could also form a key part of engaging non-technical stakeholders in the consultation process.
2.4 Put in place an enabling digital and communications infrastructure
A smart city harnesses the power of data and the opportunities of system automation to help simplify city management and make it more effective. This requires sensors to be embedded around the city infrastructure to collect data and actuators to use the information from those sensors to help
PD 8101:2014 Smart cities – Guide to the role of the
planning and development process
Executive summary
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automatically manage key parts of city systems. It also requires a ubiquitous wired and wireless communications system, able to take data from the sensors to where it can be utilized.
Digging and retrofitting communications networks can represent anything up to 80% of the cost of installation, so it is likely to be cost-effective to ensure that adequate provision for these potential additional services is built in to new developments at the construction stage.
Communications networks that are installed to provide high-speed broadband to homes or business premises need to be designed to also support existing and potential smart city applications. This might include, for example, ensuring that the network could be extended to connect to street furniture to support the installation of sensors and wireless access points.
Fitting new and refurbished buildings with accessible ducting and equipment to support not only current, but also anticipated needs for in-home entertainment, homeworking and home environment management, could support smart city services in the future, while avoiding the costs of retrofitting.
2.5 Develop and test new business models and processes
Cities today face many challenges requiring urgent solutions, with limited resources to deal with them. Traditional solutions are no longer effective, as city problems become increasingly complex and inter-related. Also, the financial constraints faced by cities make it difficult to find the upfront investments required to deal with the long-term issues they face.
Existing procurement processes used by local authorities can also be too rigid. When the local authority is procuring infrastructure, such as improvements to the public realm, street lighting and major refurbishment programmes, the procurement processes are usually managed by one part of the local authority, with a brief to achieve specific objectives at the least possible cost.
These processes therefore need to be reviewed and integrated with smart city planning in order to identify opportunities to provide wider benefits at little extra cost.
Another need is to identify new business models that offer lower upfront costs and risks, for example:
• using long-term service revenues to pay for the capital costs of necessary infrastructure provision;
• using the increases in land value as a result of the smart facilities included, as a way of securing loans to pay for the infrastructure.
These new business models could provide win-win solutions, where cities get better services for less and industry gets the opportunity to provide additional services.
3 The opportunities of the planning and development process
In order for the planning and development process to effectively support smart city aspirations, there needs to be a golden thread that leads all the way from the requirements of a particular development or a neighbourhood plan up to the highest level strategic plan.
Different actions are needed at each stage in order to ensure that the key opportunities are not missed.
The key points can be seen in Figure 2.
PD 8101:2014 Smart cities – Guide to the role of the
planning and development process
Executive summary
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Figure 2 – Planning and development process – Key recommendations
Figure 5 from PD 8101
4 Conclusion
PD 8101 covers a range of practical steps that can help ensure that development and infrastructure projects can support the city on its path to becoming smarter. It is clear that new approaches are required and that the smart city approach provides opportunities to identify new and more affordable ways to do this. New developments provide opportunities to trial and test such new approaches, but this will mean that city leaders need to be willing to take risks.
Most important of all is that smart city applications support citizens in taking an active role in the city and make it easier to gain contributions from stakeholders that would not traditionally be involved in the planning and development process.
