Ep 03 - The View from Amsterdam with Frans-Anton Vermast

Tom Huston is the Head of Development for United Smart Cities. United Smart Cities, based in Vienna, is the official Smart City program of the United Nations. I’m extremely grateful to have him on an early episode as it allows me to explore city level sustainability which is one of the core topics for this podcast. Tom is an expert at understanding and communicating the opportunities that exist in the overlap between smart city and sustainability and ..... we discuss how cities are planning to be more sustainable and what role citizen centric solutions play in that journey. In a very general way sustainability can be split into the system providers and the users of the system. We sometimes call this the supply side and the demand side. From a city perspective the supply side could be energy utility companies or public transport providers and from a corporate perspective the supply side could be the manufacturers of a product or the providers of a service. In smart city discussions the users or citizens are often split into two categories which are the political actors and the consumers of services. The political actors are the citizens that engage with the city government by attending town hall meetings, completing surveys, signing petitions etc. The consumers are the people that use the local services such as the buses, parks, libraries etc. From time to time I try to nudge Tom away from talking about the system dynamics and more towards the citizen who is a consumer of services ....... but from his point of view the main tasks and opportunities are on the system side. He quite rightly says at one point that there is no point in moving people towards electric cars if the electricity grid is dirty. Our chat gives me a chance to evaluate how mainstream the viewpoint of this podcast is and how ready cities are to wield the power of user centric urban services in order to make their cities more sustainable. If we want to people to walk more, to eat less meat or to use shared products instead of buying everything that we need in our daily lives ..... then do we do this by preaching about health or through the guilt trip of climate awareness or ......... can we achieve the same thing by making peoples live easier and saving them time – that’s what we want to explore.