Marketing as a social concept has a crucial role to play in creating socio-economically
inclusive Smart Cities: Here is how
Projections show that urbanization, the gradual shift in residence of
the human population from rural to urban areas, combined with the overall
growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban
areas by 2050 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018). How all
those citizens of cities live, and what their lives are like, will depend on
important choices policy makers working with other stakeholders make today and
in the coming years.
Smart cities and the technology that underpins them has
the capacity to improve citizens’ lives, with big data from multiple sensors a
crucial component. For example, the city of Nanjing, China, has installed
sensors into 10,000 taxis, 7,000 buses and 1 million private cars. The
resulting big data transfers daily to the Nanjing Information Centre, where
experts centralize and analyse traffic data and send updates to commuters on
their smart phones to help improve their journeys. IBM is working with the city
Rio de Janerio in Brazil to create a citywide-instrumented hub that integrates
big data streams from thirty agencies, including traffic and public transport,
municipal and utility services, emergency services and information sent by city
employees and the public through their Smartphones. This single data analytics
centre allows city officials to access real-time information, allowing them to
make sense of and manage living in the city in the here-and-now, envisioning,
and enabling future developments. Hypothetically, the mobilisation of big data
citizen insight should provide the basis for transitioning Rio communities,
with their extreme inequality and poverty, to a socio-economically inclusive
and equitable places to live for all citizens. This is largely dependent on
views on two distinct but related understandings as to what makes a city smart.
First, the notion of smart city represents a response to incoherent
infrastructure design and urban planning of the past, with smart cities
promising real-time monitoring, analysis and improvement of city
decision-making. Ubiquitous computing and digitally instrumented devices are
built into the fabric of urban environments, monitoring, managing and
regulating city flows and processes in real time and producing big data and
about citizens and their use of city utilities. Smart cities make use of
Internet of Things (IoT) devices to fetch data and efficiently process it for
implementation in specific locations. By inserting sensors across city
infrastructures and creating big data sources — including citizens via their
mobile devices — city policy makers are using big data analysis to monitor and
anticipate urban phenomena in new ways. Smart city sensors and connected
devices collect big data from various smart city gateways installed in a city
and then analyse it for better decision-making in transport and communication
infrastructure, security, educational and health developments. The results
proponents say improve efficiency, sustainability of resources and citizen
engagement. Criticism points to propagation of technocratic forms of
governance, with projects like Songdo Ubiquitous City, South Korea, and Masdar
City in the United Arab Emirates led by policy makers and corporates using big
data in a way that can infringe citizens’ privacy. This smart city definition
holds interest as it is a dominant paradigm, cutting against the smart city
concept espousing the increased liveability of cities inclusive of all
citizens.
Second, the notion of smart city can be viewed as one whose
socio-economic development and governance is driven by innovation, supported by
digital devices and big data and enacted by smart people. While smart cities
instrumented with digital devices to produce big data and real-time analysis
offers considerable potential, this technology in and of itself embedded in
urban infrastructure does not make a city smart. It is rather how big data
insights, in conjunction with human and social capital and wider socio-economic
policy, can manage urban development that makes a city smart. The use of big
data in smart cities, must enable citizens to participate fully in
so-called knowledge societies. This notion of smartness is closely linked to
the questions of economic and social equity. A smart city must be liveable,
socially inclusive and must promote the wellbeing of all of its citizens. Smart
city projects are big investments that are supposed to drive socio-economic
transformation in areas such as transport infrastructure, education and
employment and inclusive of traditionally deprived communities. This smart city
definition positions participatory governance as key to creating inclusivity
around urban issues (i.e. economic, social, and environmental), constructed
through deploying big data to facilitate constructive interplays between policy
makers, private and third sector and civil society.
Consideration of these two smart city perspectives, allow one to make
a simple choice in terms of the marketing discipline and its relevance. On the
one hand, smart cities are unique 21st Century opportunities for
marketing to position itself as crucial for corporate behemoths to develop
value propositions for their technological offerings, such as artificial
intelligence and analytics packages. On the other hand, smart cities are unique
21st Century opportunities for marketing to position itself as a
social concept to develop value propositions that harness technology for the
socio-economic good of all citizens. Commercial marketing typically seeks to
create value by understanding the various needs of diverse groups of customers,
selecting relevant segments of customers with similar needs and targeting them
with value propositions. Social marketing is the application of marketing
principles to transform peoples’ well-being and social welfare. Social markets
in a smart city, include a range of stakeholders involved in exchanges to
improve or add value to citizens’ well-being and social welfare. Social
marketing begins with understanding the barriers these stakeholders perceive to
engaging in activities that improves, for example, employment opportunities in
smart city communities. Social marketing also emphasises the importance of
strategically delivering programs so that they target specific segments of
smart city communities and overcome the barriers to them engaging with
stakeholders to improve their socio-economic conditions. To achieve this,
requires specific steps to be taken by smart city policy makers: 1) designing a
governance platform to create collaboration between policy makers, private
sector and local communities in smart cities; 2) deploying through this
platform social marketing tools to mobilise smart city big data in segmenting local
communities into groups with specific socio-economic challenges; 3) using
social marketing and big data to promote inclusive socio-economic opportunities
to these communities. While these steps may look straightforward, they will be
continually buffeted by competing socio-economic needs of different
stakeholders participating on the governance platforms. Creating value for
these stakeholders that meets their needs through exchange of ideas and collaboration
is facilitated by big data mobilised by social marketing.
This principle of exchange lies at the heart of reflexive governance
as well as social marketing, with the recognition that there must be a clear
socio-economic benefit perceived by stakeholders if change is to occur. The
notion of targeted audience reflects the use of the customer orientation by
social marketing. Social marketing in a smart city to achieve socio-economic
change, needs to target specific, identifiable and reachable segments in
relevant stakeholder groups. Such an approach can work with different target
groups, for example at the community level segmenting by age, ethnicity and
demographic profile. Part of the goal of such smart city engagement should be
to understand the needs of all stakeholders and particularly local communities,
to enable the resolution of competing goals. The compelling challenge for
reflexive governance in smart cities is harnessing the power of big data using to
resolve the competing socio-economic needs of multiple stakeholders. Changes of
individual behaviour resides at the centre of this process, dependent on
creating relationships and partnerships between various stakeholders. A key
contention of my research going forward is that social marketing tools are crucial
to mobilising big data insight to achieve this change in smart cities, through
empowering reflexive governance.