An Interview with Bas Boorsma, CUD – Amsterdam Director

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with Bas Boorsma and interview him about the Connected Urban Development (CUD) program. Bas Boorsma is the program director of CUD in the city of Amsterdam. To be honest, when I say “we met” I mean that I virtually met him using a broadband connection and Cisco Telepresense. So, I sat in a Telepresense room at Cisco Hellas premises to talk with Bas which was in Amsterdam. The quality of voice and video and the overall functionality provided to interact was indeed superb. It’s the best video-conference I have ever participated in. Plus, our vivid discussion made the one hour chat even more pleasant.

Our interview took on from the objectives of CUD and the program’s activity in Amsterdam, and expanded to the role of municipalities and city authorities in urban development, and his views on the future of urban development activities, internationally. So, here it is:

Good morning Bas, thank you for being here with me. Could you tell us a little about your self and how you got involved with CUD?

The story starts two years ago when I was a director of iNEC. iNEC is a platform where broadband aware communities from all over the world come together and in my line of work I kept on running into a number of people from Cisco. In particular Nicola Villa an Italian guy based in the Netherlands that was doing a lot on broadband strategy and on municipal broadband for Cisco. So, he ended up being in charge of the new program called CUD which is essentially a commitment made by Cisco’s CEO John Chambers to Mr. Bill Clinton, to work together with cities around the world to apply information communication technology and broadband technologies in order to see how we could arrive to a more efficient and sustainable way of living, working, playing and so forth. When Nicola Villa was put in charge of that particular program he gave me a call exactly two years ago and asked me if I would be interested to run the program for the city of Amsterdam. I had to think that proposition for about a one minute only and accepted because to me this was and affectively proved to be a very exciting prospect. So that’s how I started in the program.

So, how CUD program actually works? How do you do it?

CUD is set out as a Public Private Partnership and a commitment under the Clinton Global Initiative. It’s public in the sense that there is a number of cities that we got to work with. The founding cities of the program were San Francisco in the US, Seoul in Korea and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The commitment made under the Clinton global initiative is still carried by the current mayors of these cities. Each city has a program director. I’m the director for Amsterdam, and what we did was essentially forge a program committee of Cisco people and city people to work on a program of projects that we would then engage as part of our connected urban development initiative. Now, if you were going to prove and go straight on how information technology and broadband technology can allow for a more sustainable way of working, for a more sustainable way of operating your buildings, for a more sustainable and clever way of running your energy networks, just to name a few examples, then you would have to sit down and define what it is that you are going to do on each of these areas.

This sounds to me like a huge task!

Yes, it is a pretty big leap for any city, it’s actually a pretty big leap even for a company like Cisco to take and requires a lot of questions and not heaving a lot of certainties because that is part of being innovative. In each city we defined a small number of projects that we actually worked on and carried out the design and implementation.

So does CUD assess the situation in a city, proposes a set of projects that can bring economic and social benefits and carries out the projects along with city officials?

Not entirely so. That would seem from a psychological perspective that Cisco is proposing a project and that city would have to buy it from us. That’s not the way it works. We actually sit down with senior advisors, policy makers and project managers, from the city and agree what are the areas that we want to work on and how can we define a common project or a series of common projects that we can engage on.

What are the CUD projects in the city of Amsterdam?

In the case of Amsterdam we ended up with three: Smart Work Centers (SWC), as a solution to get people out of traffic jams and help them work in a pleasant and efficient way close to their homes, the Personal Travel Assistant (PTA) which is essentially a convergence of services and data flows that allows people to see what is the greenest and fastest way to go from A to B through buses, planes, trains etc. and the Green IT Program in Amsterdam. There is a fourth program that is being considered right now, something that got started in San Francisco, called Ecomap, and we may want to adopt that in Amsterdam as well.

From what you are saying I understand that CUD’s objective goes beyond than simply building a sustainable future for the participating cities.

Well, in fact if that was simply the objective of CUD it would have been called SUD, S for Sustainable. There is a premise of thinking in CUD program which is that we need to combine a particular area of innovation and the ambition of becoming more sustainable to arrive to a successful 21st century format. So if you look in the past, for the last 20 years we have all these people that have been working to arrive to what we call today the digital city, the connected city, the smart city, the broadband city, the smarter it-powered city. On the other end you have an entirely different group of people, Club of Rome, Greenpeace etc that would say “listen guys we are about to burn the air, we need to do something about that, and we need to arrive to a greener community otherwise we will kill ourselves”. CUD started to combine these two schools of thoughts. There is no point to stick to only one discipline. We need to combine innovative thinking, lessons from the world of IT and of course our friends from the world of green in order to rethink the way our cities operate. And I think it might go way too far to say that we have done that completely effectively and comprehensively with CUD but I believe that we do have come a long way addressing these issues and come up with innovative promises and proof of concepts that do point the way to such a smarter and more sustainable and greener way of living.

However, IT is a big energy consuming sector. How does it tie in with the concept of sustainability?

Yes it is. There are estimates indicating that the IT sector consumes as much energy as the aviation sector, which is exactly what can make you questioning the link of IT to green? However, supposed that you want to manage your energy consumption in your building in a far more efficient way, then you need to rethink the way people access it, the way energy is managed per home or per floor, and you may want to give people the choice of when to utilize energy and when not. You may also want to give people the opportunity to generate energy on their own rules and distribute it in an efficient way, e.g. if/when the residents are not at home. This is one example where you really need to manage in a smarter way and this is where IT comes in. In the end, similar reasoning applies to other sectors of the economy e.g. transportation system, smart fleet management, show availability of transportation means, etc. If you take numerous similar examples together essentially you are looking at a world with IP enabled building, vehicles, energy networks, energy facilities, etc, and so you are not only looking at internet of people, you are more looking at a huge enhancement of the internet of things.

Ok, but does broadband ties in with CUD concept too?

Well, what I described earlier is just one very important positive. But there is another part: The way we’re using internet so far is promising, very intense, evolutionary etc, yet it seems that we are in for another way, which one could call web 3.0, I don’t care what type of name you give it, but it is going to include a high degree of quality video communication like the one we are using here (telepresense), which will allow for a significant change in culture where you could think of physical transport substitution. And this is how broadband ties in. I’m not going to say that IT and broadband are the solutions to everything; people obviously like and will still like to meet with each other, but IT and broadband have the capacity to alter for the better many aspects of our every day life.

IT and broadband do provide efficiencies in many levels but I get the feeling that this is not the only issue here.

Improvement is one layer. So you have higher efficiency and you improve a series of process, this is what we find ourselves in today. However, there is another layer which goes further which is about changing particular patterns of the way we work, live, learn, produce, altogether. So we still think that it is totally normal that we leave our homes by cars to go to our offices and send a thousand emails to other places in the world which we could have done from our home or in a place close to our home in the first place. The typical comparison that I always like to make is with the water wells. There was a time when we had to leave our homes and go to the well outside our village. We would load our jars with water and came all the way back home. That was considered normal. Then a disruptive invention called water distribution system came that could bring water at the home. People complained for a while, they missed chatting with the other villagers, yet we eventually found new ways for social life and communication, even better ones. What I’m saying is that although we are using the internet and other ICT improvements that make life and work easier and more efficient, traffic jams in the streets and pollution in the cities show that we continue to organize our lives in medieval ways when we could process information far more differently and altogether quite differently.

You mentioned the internet of things. Its founding principle, at least the way the EU has been addressing it lately is primarily the use of RFIDs. The smooth and transparent communication of electronic devices provides huge opportunities for improvements in every day life. I’ve seen a couple of cases where public utilities efficiency increase is attempted by incorporating in their operation the use of RFIDs. The same applies to service sectors e.g. hotels, resorts, airports etc. Is CUD involved in a similar project at the moment? Or is it possibly something that you are considering to get your hands on in the future?

Yes, we are doing that in two folds. One is buildings; we are making buildings smart, something we call connected real estate and basically we add intelligence in building management, and provide access intelligently. Especially cities that joined the program later on like Madrid, Birmingham and Lisbon are actively engaged in that. In Lisbon we are working with EDP the power company in Portugal to work on a number of test buildings in which we tie vehicles, energy management, and anything that tie in to it and essentially IP enable it. The other example is the mobility ecosphere and especially Hamburg and Seoul are working on this. We don’t look at standalone solutions like smart buses or a number of information flows to the consumers but we try to tie them in altogether making vehicles smarter, introducing dynamic road pricing which is based on a very similar type of technologies, and by addressing it so, we create an ecosphere and receive higher benefits compared to if we had simply smart vehicles, buildings, buses etc.

CUD projects look promising, but I would like to ask you, what do you thing, from your experience are some major factors that could possibly make municipalities reluctant to following the CUD path. Is it the costs, is it the relatively lengthy time to experience the economic benefits and social impact from these initiatives?

First of all I would like to say that we are eager to work with cities that are most likely to prove good partners from the outset, so let me first address the positive side. What would be the critical factors in our selection of cities that we would like to work with is to deal with an administration that would be seen progressive and ready to collaborate as part of a Public Private Partnership. And that is because it is not necessary that every political entity, or government or even culture is ready to embrace this concept. Another element is whether there is a sufficient amount of infrastructure available to experiment. Not every city we are experimenting with is as “broadbanded” as we would like to see it but they have to have a vision or would like to pilot it and of course Amsterdam would be a fantastic example where we have fiber to the home and also Almere, a sister city within the vicinity of Amsterdam which is fully fibered. Because of all the available fiber infrastructure and the relatively high degree of competition in higher speeds broadband in the city, an acceptable pricing of high speed connections is provided to enable us to experiment for instance with smart work center. The same applies to Seoul, that as you know, along with the entire country (South Korea) is one of the most fibered areas in the world, based on ITU statistics.

On the downside, there are a number of things. First of all PPP sounds great and it does make good sense because governments do not seem to arrive to real innovation alone, they don’t have a business outlook of life or the world and would actually be averse to dramatic change most of the times, especially the middle level administrators. Companies have short time cycles in a sense that they need to think of share over value and show results at the end of fiscal year. In a PPP you have a public platform addressing public interest with public means with the dynamism and potential of investment by the private sector and that combination is in itself a very promising source to harvest. The reality is that this combination is not so easy. PPP is a difficult marriage between two completely different cultures. Through CUD we have seen that there exists a conflict of culture between typical public bureaucratic attitudes in the city and typical attitudes that you can expect from larger companies like Cisco. So that’s one. Secondly, you might have a number of people that you work with that understand what innovation is all about, and the type of change you are trying to address but when you introduce a project and try to scale it, you need to work with a larger crowd of people, whether it’s within the city administration or potential customers. Then, you might run into a problem of people not understanding what you’re trying to do, people not ready to adapt to this change, people being fearful of this change. And there is obviously a clear possibility that a policy advisor would say, “we like your idea for innovation we understand what we are trying to do here but I cannot go to my CEO or elderman and say you need to make a multi million dollar investment for the project because we believe we can have a positive output to this or that direction but we cannot be sure because this is innovative”. Those are typical examples of clash of cultures, fear of innovation and change. Those are the two elements that are among the difficult part in getting all this going.

Do you consider investment money to be also an issue?

Actually it depends on whether you operate it well because we have setup the collaboration with cities not so much as to ask the cities, “now you are a partner, please come up with an investment of millions of dollars” but to work with cities to create a public platform, to create a vision and then enhanced that platform to work with third parties. In that sense, we want to help create business models that will ensure the solution that we seek to introduce are actually scalable and replicable. So, for instance, the smart work centers is a solution whereby people can work close to their home with excellent connectivity speed, telepresense facilities, child day care so they have this large array of service that helps optimize the day life of the user. What is important about that is that the city of Amsterdam helped to introduce the concept, make it a public solution through public attention, but the concept became the focus of investors that create their business model. So, now they are having a return on their investment because there is a healthy business model in place. We did not ask for a subsidy, we created a business model and that is one of the elements that required the CUD that if the solution we seek to introduce, and this does not apply to all solutions, but if we can apply or link a business model to that solution, that works then this is the best guarantee that we can scale and replicate.

I know that CUD activities are very recent but I would like to know whether you managed so far to quantify the impact of these initiatives to cities or do you think that it is still too early to talk about a quantitative evaluation, at least more than the initial projections and forecasts on the impact which you run beforehand.

I like your question. What is important is that there is a huge difference between projections and “guestimates” on one hand and actual measurement on the other. We are in a business of creating proofs of concept which helps show the way towards a more sustainable and more connected urban environment. The reality is that some of those proofs of concept may be commonly used in 5 or 6 or 7 years from now, and we may only then be able to apply a general measurement on the impact of what these models. Take for example the smart work centers. We introduced it and not it is being scaled throughout the Amsterdam area. Maybe in 2-3 years we will have real numbers on what the impact of smart work centers in the economic and social life of the region. To say today that we can have a real estimate in quantitative terms of the impact of what we are doing would be false.

In which ways do you see CUD solutions scaling to cities other than those already participating in the CUD program? And if for instance a Greek mayor is interested in experimenting and/or applying one or two CUD concepts in its premises, what would you propose him to do?

There is a difference in scaling the CUD solutions and scaling the program. If you scale the program you create a lot of overhead. We don’t want that. We don’t want to have 100 cities to experiment. We just need 7 or 8. We have 7 now but some of the solutions can and should be replicated to countless other communities although this does not have to go under the label of CUD. If the solution works it does not need to be called CUD. The solutions can go to any non CUD communities, like many cities that we are currently working with e.g. Dubai, Singapore, many member communities of iNEC, etc. With any interested city, we can work and assist in scaling the preferred solutions.

Now, if a Greek municipality is aware of the CUD program and is also interested in a number of a single of our solutions of CUD we can advise and assist in the replication of such a solution in that city. So for instance, if Athens was to be fantastically enthusiastic about smart work centers we could come down, help and advise on the matter like we currently do with Copenhagen, London, Hamburg, Paris, Buenos Aires etc. The same applies for ecomap, connected buses and so forth.

Some very ambitious projects on sustainable and connected urban living have been postponed due to, among other things, the current financial situation. I tend to consider large projects of each respective industry (telecoms, energy etc) to be what Antarctica is to environmental change, i.e. environmentalists go to Antarctica to understand how the environment may react in the future due to the climate change, for instance. Do you think that some initial understanding is to be extracted from these failures for the future of initiatives driven by similar motives as the CUD Program? Because, for what is worth, outside the economic and social benefits of CUD solutions, significant costs, not only monetary, incur.

Yes and no. It depends on the particular project or policy maker. Obviously there is a sense of urgency on a premium scale in US, EU and other parts of the world where people are recognizing that there must be a huge dedication in the creation of new jobs, for instance. And so, up to certain point sustainability in the public sector’s policy agenda would be out of rank. Having said that, there are a lot of people increasingly aware of those topics and their interrelations, to understand that innovations, new infrastructures and sustainability are in link. Great example would be Detroit and the car industry. To have a fighting change, they will most likely have to reinvent themselves to create far more fuel efficient, cheaper and smarter cars interconnected to mobility ecosystems. Car industry can reinvent itself and become a source of incredible dynamism to the US and the rest of the world. That’s a nice example where all these things tie in and some of the advice learned from the CUD programs could apply to Detroit. So, depended on where you look sustainability may be a less of an important issue for now, on the other hand I believe that it may actually be part of stimulus packages that are seen to be drafted in various ways in Washington, Brussels and other decision policy bodies.

Overall, I think that urban evolution is a combinatory process. The question is not sustainability alone and it’s not broadband alone. The question is how do you arrive in a 21st century city that is livable, pleasant competitive and sustainable. Then, there are a number of elements, of course everybody needs to have their jobs, of course everybody needs to have access to a high quality medical health care in a society that is aging and of course people need to have enough access, which can be provided either by physical mobility, or by virtual means, i.e. moving bits rather than individuals. So you see those agendas actually come together and truly how some of these are being addressed by the CUD program are now becoming part of the overall stimulus agenda as is being defined around the world.

Bas, thank you very much for this interview.

Thank you too. It’s being a pleasure.