Dan Hill, Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova. Visiting Prof at UCL Bartlett and Adjunct Prof at RMIT. Mayor of London's Design Advocate

The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the move to digital service delivery, It has also prompted a broader realisation that we are engaged in many forms of systemic transformation. COVID-19 is an accelerant, albeit of the most brutal and awful kind.

It makes clear that we are well beyond the finite limits of our habitable environment, but that another environment is rapidly possible. Centralised patterns of living and work have been shown to no longer be sustainable or universally desirable. Our health and wellbeing is in crisis, and our sense of social justice is fractured. The Black Lives Matter movement has vividly and powerfully demonstrated this too, playing out in our streets. We need to learn from this moment as much as possible, given that it is only via extraordinary events such as these that rapid change occurs — and rapid change is what we need. This rapid change will not only shape our approach to digital services, environments, cultures, and processes, but the wider contexts that digital services are embedded within.

Digital is not separate, but infused within our systems of living. It is like oxygen; all around us, impossible to be without, but also tricky to pick apart from everything else. It is useful in the richest sense of that word, but also difficult to handle from a policy point of view. There has been a rapid shift to working from home for much (though far from all) of the world. This has been prompted by COVID, but enabled by digital technologies. There has been more transformation in two months than in two decades, but the impact is due to the physical and the digital being entwined around each other. Teleworking - which seems a quaint word now that so many are doing it - is about physical space, neighbourhoods, accessibility, organisational models, local and global economies, and so on. Shopping online is about the future of the high street, the local economy, low-carbon logistics and mobility, manufacturing, provenance and cultural identity, precarious jobs and local taxation.

Contact tracing apps are actually about privacy, identity, civic data for the wider good, and the role of expertise and citizenship. So the impact of digital technology is felt not only in a city government’s digital team, but in urban planning, transport, health, economic development. Digital technologies impact the whole future of the city.

COVID-19 is inadvertently building habits for working and shopping from home en masse. This is likely to take the steam out of the commercial property sector, but this is no bad thing. It means city-making can be driven by a richer sense of what a city is for. We do not make cities to make buildings, after all. It might enable a rebalancing of the CBD and the suburbs, and the middle ground in between. This could be transformational, in terms of reinforcing genuine neighbourhood centres across the broader city, ensuring that they are places people work from, whether at home or in neighbourhood hubs, cafes, libraries, small factories, co-working spaces etc, whilst going to the city a few days per week, or at different times of the day, rather than the Monday-Friday 9-5 slog (which research always shows is peoples’1 least favourite activity!) Digital infrastructure is core to making this work, as much as electricity, but the outcome will be seen in many other sectors of life.

This does not mean no more CBD of course; cities are what humans tend towards. But it could enable a more equitable dispersal of potential over multiple, diverse places—a genuine poly-nodal city, with active transport buzzing around locally, and a metro connecting over long distances. (We know this polka dot pattern can be scaled up to suit a large city—this is what Tokyo is.)

This takes the weight off the transport network, enabling a new patterning of '15-minute cities’ (as per Paris’s current strategy ), in which all your daily needs are within walking or cycling distance. Melbourne, with its relatively flat landscape and temperate climate, is actually ideal for this, assuming an extension of its pioneering Urban Forest Strategy , in order to shade the street, to soak up storms, and ensure ‘sticky’ places .

For other types of transport, there is no doubt that digital human-less delivery systems can be produced. The broader question is, should we produce them? Perhaps it is better framed in terms of ‘what are humans good at?’ versus ‘what is code good at?’. Sorting through questions such as these, with citizens and in civic places, would help us understand how to create logistics systems that reward human interactions and low-tech solutions, whilst using the best optimisation techniques and hi-tech on offer. Utrecht is a good example of how to build a low-carbon logistics network, based around smart contracts, cargo bikes, electric vehicles, and meaningful engagement with businesses. It would be interesting to build around this longer-term impact of COVID. How can we make sustainable resilient places, rather than relying on short-term strategies of distancing and no-touch. The simple question of logistics is a good testing ground for that kind of thinking.

All of this—the bikes, the forest, the new focus on neighbourhoods—are an outcome of a digital technology’s ability to disperse work over distance. The CBD need no longer carry the weight of the city, just as the roads need no longer carry the weight of incessant and unsustainable traffic. Clearly, this will require new forms of partnership between the various councils that make up Melbourne, as well as the state government. The boundaries between these government entities do not make much sense from a systems point-of-view—but equally, they need not be thrown up in the air. There is an ‘all boats rise on the tide’ potential here, which can be achieved simply by intense and creative collaboration. Digital technology has a fundamental role to play there too, as a platform for that partnership, built on shared and open data. But rather than focusing on the digital, this work has to be cultural and political, looking at the broader pattern of the city.

This is ‘upstream’ thinking: creating an environment that intrinsically cares for and regenerates a place, in terms of people and ecosystems, rather than over-paying to fix it later, with all the ethical issues that such an approach tends to engender. This is a huge shift for city government. But it is also one that only a city government can do, given its role as long-term arbiter of the city as a public good. It will require a shift in governance cultures, practices, and toolkits, particularly in ensuring that there is diversity of ownership, design, and dialogue.

To address ‘digital droughts’, projects like the European Union-funded DECODE describe an approach, and an infrastructure, for citizens owning their own data (because all data about the city should ultimately belong to citizens) and being able to decide what to do with it. This does not mean an individualisation or diminution of data, but instead it gives citizens a range of tools with which they can decide what can happen with their data. This project was, in turn, included in rich smart city strategies in Barcelona and Amsterdam , that also included approaches to mobility, property, economic development, and so on.

Again, these smart city approaches can benefit from understanding a wider urban perspective, a richer range of stories and references outside of the narrow world of ‘I.T.’. Here in Sweden, we are driving the design and scaling of a universal ‘kit of parts’ street infrastructure - modular pieces which can be set up in parking spaces. This infrastructure strategy looks like the parklets you might have seen in many cities, incorporating fixtures for sensors and vegetation. Our kit of parts operates with a similar ownership model to DECODE, but applied to the street itself.

This will ensure that, when digital street elements are built in the broader physical and urban context, participation will find the balance of individual privacy and rights alongside civic sensibilities and structures. This approach is a development of ideas emerging during my work with the Melbourne Innovation District, City North.

In all this, the municipality needs to be a clear leader, in terms of doubling-down on the work it has done over the years in terms of the ‘ Knowledge City ’ and ‘Deliberative City’, helping build literacy, capability, and engagement among its citizens. Increased participation is the best way to ensure greater awareness in communities, greater ownership and responsibility, and diverse representation—and actually, better ideas. COVID-19 thrives on the inequalities and fractures in our systems; but the way it spread also demonstrates that a systemic response would not only prevent the increased likelihood of pandemics, but also bushfires, health inequalities, climate crisis, and so on, whilst developing social and economic resilience and thriving culture. The only way to address this coherently is through far deeper and greater levels of participation than city governments have previously attempted. If we achieve that deeper participation, we will discover the answer to questions not only about digital technology, but about the entire city.

This opinion paper is part of the City of the Future event 2, exploring focus are 4: Data and Ethics.

Problem statement: How might we accelerate our digital infrastructure while maintaining ethics and privacy?