How do you start planning the first city in Europe for 50 years, and not worry about how it keeps pace with technology? When the pace of innovation is so rapid, won't your initial set of plans drawn up a few years prior be out of date as soon as the first brick is laid, or the first beam of cross laminated timber is lifted into place?
As the newly appointed Technology Group Lead for Forest City 1, this is the conundrum I've been given to resolve. Whilst this city for 1 million people is planned, and choices are made about the built environment in the next few years, can our group of technologists keep everyone ahead of the curve?
The Technology Challenge
On some levels, it is counterintuitive to have a group deal with "technology" as a separate thing. The city will only succeed if it harnesses the best available innovations to deliver a new community in a more effective way than has ever been done before. If we don't exploit the most cutting edge technology, the project just won't meet its objectives for the environment, transport or productivity.
Specifically our goal for the next few months is this: identify the half dozen or so foreseeable technological developments that it would be an oversight not to consider and incorporate when we get to setting out the detailed business case and masterplan.
Learning from Milton Keynes' Mistakes
Perhaps it all sounds very obvious. If you're going to build for the future, shouldn't one of your first worries be about what that future might hold? But there are very real failures to point to on this very basis, most especially from the last time Britain built a city: Milton Keynes.
Conceived in a very different world, but sharing much of the ambition we have for Forest City, Milton Keynes was built out just before the internet and consumer data communications arrived as an end user technology. People working in the industry knew the internet existed and were able to see a vision of home computers and information connectivity and the revolutionary impact it would have.
Fibre optic networking had been invented and our then newly privatised national telco, BT, was at the forefront of fibre access R&D globally. It was entirely foreseeable that there would be a need for fibre optic networking to every home and business, but we built successive phases of a new city on a greenfield site without incorporating that into the plans.
In fact planners did worse than that, they used the impending fibre optic revolution as a justification for implementing a sparse network of distant telephone exchanges connecting subscribers on long copper lines on economic grounds and then lazily copied the US model of co-ax copper cable TV networks as the only content distribution that would ever be needed. As a result, the comparatively modern built environment in Milton Keynes lagged substantially behind many older UK cities for high speed internet access until very recently when fibre altnets intervened by digging up the streets again!
Why Technology Predictions Fail
The need for fibre networking provision being entirely predictable at the time Milton Keynes was being developed was not quite as unambiguous as it may seem. That future was controversial within the industries it impacted, leading to the paralysis that caused the planning to fail. It often happens when technological shifts occur at speed, leaders and experts often disagree and project different futures. For every earnest futurist who (rationally or not) projects smooth and rapid deployment, there is a more conservative voice. Both are often swayed by their own interests.
Our Approach: Systematic Discovery
So how do we learn from this? How do we ensure we independently and objectively identify technologies that will profoundly change the way we build or live in Forest City? They may be things that change the economic or environmental parameters on building out the city in the next 5 years. They may also be things that will impact how we use it in 20 or 100 years. Things that our grandchildren will be thankful we had the forethought to design in.
To stay well ahead of the curve, we need to generate our best projection of when and how the development cycle of these technologies will intercept and affect the build and occupation. But our first task is discovery.
Before we deliver a depth of analysis and commission subject domain experts to scrutinise the impact of these key technologies we need to create a longlist.
That longlist needs to identify every technology shift that will affect how we build and want to live in Forest City.
An Example: Battery Storage Technology
As an example, building carbon neutral power infrastructure to meet peak local and national demand is a key driver to infrastructure planning and implementation. One of the key technologies that has the ability to help is battery storage at city, locality, and individual property level. Battery storage technology isn't new, it is as old as our knowledge of electricity but only recently has it started to become feasible for domestic electricity storage. We are at an early stage with technologies like LiFePO4 which are being used but still aren't ideal for mass adoption. Will they mature to the point where every home has one of these batteries alongside their solar tiles, or will developing technologies like concrete batteries overtake and become an essential deployment? We don't know, but with the help of the right experts, we can form the best possible view and plan to hedge against the range of outcomes.
We Need Your Input
That is where everyone with an evidence based opinion comes in to help us with this longlist. Do you believe there is a technology we should be looking at which will have a tangible impact on our plans for Forest City?
In your own words, why?
What are the authoritative sources of information about it?
What has already been written about it, who are its notable exponents and critics?
Just to be clear, this call for information isn't a sales opportunity. Objectivity and rigorous evidence based justification for conclusions and technology recommendations are crucial to the credibility of the whole project. This is a starting point to help us ensure we have fully mapped all the technologies and expert knowledge that is available to us right now.
A Resource for Humanity
Finally; irrespective of whether Forest City 1, does in fact get built - and we all hope that it does - there is a value to humanity more widely for a consolidated expert analysis of how technology will affect building communities rapidly at scale. If we do our analysis openly, broadly, and methodically we could and should deliver something that acts as a reference and inspiration for other projects worldwide.