Perform Green Founder Barney Smith and Bristol Airport’s CIO Kevin Borley tell us how the Bristol economy is worth £13.6bn and is home to a vibrant growing hub for media, arts, business and engineering.
Growth is desirable and helps the area to thrive, however pressure on resources, demand on roads, hospitals, schools and services present their own challenges. Bristol City Council’s response to meeting these demands has been to transform how the city functions and delivers key services, by becoming what is dubbed a “Smart City“, their visionary approach is leading Bristol’s position as a leading Smart City in the UK.
Perform Green Founder Barney Smith and Bristol Airport’s CIO Kevin Borley have recently been interviewed by Horizon Business Innovation to discuss their vision for Bristol and how to make the city smart for everyone.
Barney Smith, Interim Chief Executive of Bristol is Open, the collaborative organisation charged with developing Bristol into a smart city, as well as Programme Director for Bristol City Councils Smart Operations Centre, highlights:
“There is nothing really new here, since we have been producing mass transport solutions like trains and cars we have always had to find a way to manage that, going back to the invention of the traffic light….As the technology is exponentially growing in terms of its penetration and power, the data is developing and then we are finding new ways of harnessing and applying how a city works. By integrating solutions rather than stand alone solutions for one particular challenge we can leverage off that and achieve more for citizens who live and work here.”
“The smart city concept helps people to understand the opportunities we provide for them and to help us, using the data that they will provide, to find new business opportunities to make their stay with us enjoyable,” Bristol Airport CIO, Kevin Borley adds.
Bristol Smart City Challenges
The discussion provides a range of insights into why it is critical that we find new ways to manage how cities work so that we don’t hit major problems from:
- traffic, congestion and parking
- air pollution
- housing pressures
- social care & health of citizens
- increasing austerity and financial pressures
- changing consumer behaviours and expectations
Both Barney and Kevin are hopeful about the future and believe that the potential solutions for solving the cities issues can be combined with making services cheaper to run and ultimately deliver a better level of service for the people of Bristol. Barney champions driving an increasingly consumer led approach, especially when it comes to social care management, he believes
“Focusing on providing the right services to the right people at the right time. Not one size fits all, so it means focusing on people that are in a real crisis. There are massive inequalities in the city….communities that are not engaged but through the leadership of the council, NGO’s, University of Bristol and the tech industries that have chosen to invest in the city, this places Bristol in an excellent position to tackle the key challenges”
CIO Borley agrees: “I can already see dozens of solutions coming through and I can also see a lot of money being pumped into the smart ways that people run their lives where they live and the communities that they serve. The investment community does see massive potential to solve these issues and it comes, in the main, from the perspective that the technology is evolving fast.”
Bristol Airport, seven miles south of the city may not garner the attention of Heathrow and Gatwick, but the Canadian owned airport is growing rapidly and is central to the smart city ambitions of Bristol.
“It is vital to the future of business here,” Borley says of the smart city ambition. “The airport is growing at an incredible rate. We have a operating licence to take up to 10 million passengers and we are already approaching eight million, so in the next few years we have to be very clear about where growth is going to take us and how the community is going to deal with that growth.”
How do we solve City Challenges?
How important is the focus on collaboration, regional context and working relationships to the smart agenda? How do local authorities combat the ever changing technology, collection of data and find the best application of solutions for citizens? How will the people of Bristol adopt the new style of services and be part of what here, at Perform Green we call a Smart Society?
Find out answers to those questions and more via the full podcast here.