Envisioning and Implementing a Smart Society That Will Reach
all City Services
Part 1. Introduction to Almere
Good morning!
First, I would like to thank the organisation for giving me the opportunity to present
you with the story of a Smart Society in the Netherlands. It gives me great pleasure to
contribute to this Smart Cities Summit.
The City of Almere is arguably one of the most advanced smart cities in
Europe...perhaps you have never heard of it! This is because we have a short history,
but we have a big future!
As its Mayor, and as someone involved at The European level with the issues that
accompany developing Smart Cities....let me share with you three key factors for
success and two main challenges....its more about co-creation than IT....
But let me start by introducing my city to you.
Almere is located in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, which sits in the northwest of
the Netherlands, which in turn is in the northern part of Europe.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
In many respects, Almere is an unusual city in the Netherlands. Whereas all other
cities have a history, which in some cases dates back hundreds of years, this is a city
that is less than forty years old.
It is situated in an area that was still a sea sixty years ago. A city built on new,
reclaimed land about four metres below sea level. A city that already has 196,000
residents and will continue to grow towards a population of 350,000 to 400,000
people.
As it is possible to identify several main topics in the city’s evolution that are also
recurring themes in our development of Almere into a Smart Society, I will briefly
outline the history of this city in its infancy.
The city of Almere came on the drawing board due to the housing shortage in the
Netherlands in the nineteen sixties and seventies. Almere was to meet the housing
needs of nearby Amsterdam.
But the ambition went beyond that. The idea was to develop a city with the twentyfirst century in mind. The founders sought to create a proper city, preferably ageless,
with streets and squares as they used to be, but functioning in today’s and
tomorrow’s world. This gives us the first of the recurring themes: the city’s eyes are
always on the future (what else can it do, seeing it has no past!).
The founders wanted to develop a city with a mixture of functions – small businesses
on street corners, homes above shops – where people would feel at home again. The
question that needed answering was how a city actually functions for the people
living in it. A nice little example to illustrate this is that the design process of Almere
Haven (the first urban district to be developed) soon gave rise to the question what
amenities would be needed. ‘A beautiful cemetery,’ the then director replied,
‘because if we want people to feel at home in this new city, they should be able to
bury their loved ones here, and be buried themselves, with dignity!’ The second
recurring theme in the city’s evolution is therefore the notion that people make the
city rather than the other way around!
An important aspect of the development vision was the multiple-district city plan,
because it allowed a flexible response to future growth. The greenbelts in between
became the foundations of the urban structure. Agriculture and countryside have
always been the precursors of urbanization, and this principle was and continues to
be applied in Almere. This is why it is so fitting that, in 2022, Almere will host the
Floriade World Horticultural Expo, an international exhibition held every ten years
which showcases agricultural and horticultural innovations. For that purpose, a new
district will be developed in and from what is now still a rural area. Our expo’s title is
‘Growing Green Cities’, to which I would like to add the adjective ‘Smart’. Right from
the beginning, which is now, we try to involve as many residents, professionals,
businesses and other stakeholders as possible in the development process.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
And this gives us the third recurring theme in this New Town’s early evolution: the
search for new forms of cooperation and organisation that bring public services
closer to the community. A good example of this is the organisation of primary
healthcare services in Almere, in which respect a rule of thumb throughout the city
was that care should be combined and provided close to home. Owing to its success,
this setup – which was developed in the nineteen eighties – subsequently served as a
model for many other municipalities.
In this city we are always on the lookout for unusual alliances and for the energy that
is generated when people from entirely different disciplines and backgrounds are
keen to work on something. This energy of development is typical of Almere!
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
Part 2. The Challenge for Almere
The challenge our city currently faces is to again look into the future thirty to forty
years from now, just like Almere’s founding fathers did forty years ago when they
first outlined the city that was to be built on marshland and be home to some 250,000
people. Our guiding principle, even more explicitly than in those days, is that people
turn a collection of bricks, cables, wires and asphalt into a city. People make the city
and not the hardware.
So, thinking ahead is what we’ve been doing in recent years. The Dutch government
has again asked us to accept a growth target, ultimately to expand the city into a
population of 300,000 to 350,000 people. What’s more, the expansion is tied to a
major economic target: it’s not just a matter of building new homes, but also of
creating a great many new jobs.
The conception of the vision of the city’s further development started with identifying
and defining the principles on which that continued urban development should be
based. We asked William McDonough to help us do that and this process resulted in
an important document entitled ‘the Almere Principles: for an ecologically, socially
and economically sustainable future of Almere 2030’.
Starting from these Principles, the Municipality tries to create conditions for the
city’s ongoing development. A closer look at the Principles reveals how well they link
up with the three recurring themes in the city’s evolution and why the development of
Almere into a Smart Society is such a logical step. It’s easy to recognize those three
themes in the Almere Principles: people make the city, a future orientation and
innovative partnerships.
The Almere Principles deal with ecological, social and economic sustainability. The
first of the seven guidelines illustrates the broad scope of the Principles: ‘cultivate
diversity’. It is related not only to biodiversity but also to social and economic
diversity. The other six Principles are related to the relationship between Almere’s
own identity and its surroundings:

connect place and context;

combine city and nature;

anticipate change;

continue innovation;

design healthy systems; and

empower people to make the city.
We believe and have therefore formulated a Principle to the effect that the residents
of Almere should have a much stronger influence on the development of the city.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
People ‘make’ the city and cooperate in unique groups on their own future and,
consequently, on the future of Almere.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
Part 3. Current Success and Next Steps
Indeed, we are well on our way towards creating a Smart Society. I’d like to mention
a few practical examples of technological innovation and smart applications. They
will give you an everyday idea of what we are doing in Almere and what else is
possible.
Let me start with a little story about my own neighbourhood. I live in Almere
Overgooi, a friendly part of town with many detached houses. My female next-door
neighbours and I set up a little WhatsApp group. Although most of our messages are
typical women’s talk, sometimes they can be very useful. For example, if we notice a
suspicious car parked in the street, we tell one of our tough husbands to take the dog
and go check it out. Or if the neighbours are out for the weekend and their teenage
daughter is left home alone, she is temporarily given access to WhatsApp to keep in
touch. WhatsApp has enhanced social cohesion in my neighbourhood. This is only the
first example of how we use existing technology for new networks.
Now and in the near future, it is all about the application of ideas, innovative
techniques and new methodologies. An important precondition in that context was
the construction of a fibre-optic cable network throughout the city several years ago.
Now every home, institution and business can apply for a connection to the network
or already has one. With that, we have installed a high-quality basic infrastructure
that will enable many applications.
Doing business in these times requires awareness of scarcity and sustainability.
That’s precisely where the ‘smart’ bit comes into play. The following two examples
show that wasting energy and resources is a thing of the past.
A newly built supermarket in Almere Poort has a new product in its range: energy. As
you know, supermarkets sell large amounts of fresh produce that must be displayed
in refrigerated display cases. Rather than cooling the interior, this supermarket
removes heat and transports it to the adjacent apartment complex, where it serves
as an energy source.
The world of waste has changed radically within a short period of time. It is like a
paradigm shift. There is no waste, because each and every particle can serve as the
raw material for new products. In Almere, we launched a campaign entitled ‘mijn
afval maakt winst’ (literally ‘my waste makes a profit’) to encourage the sorting of
household waste so that it can be resupplied to the market as new raw materials.
The campaign is paying off, given that people’s sorting behaviour continues to
improve considerably. Good for our climate and good for our household bills.
A smart supermarket suddenly turning from energy waster into energy supplier and
a smart waste processing company turning from rubbish dump into commodity
market. They are two examples of developments that can easily be supported by the
use of new technology. Energy systems – whether to generate, consume or transport
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
it – are manufactured smarter, which makes them more efficient and allows them to
be combined more easily. It’s simple to make the sorting of waste easier by fitting a
chip in people’s bins to optimize the collection logistics.
The fibre-optic cable network in Almere allows us to make video applications
available to businesses, institutions and citizens on a large scale. The use of video
allows people to get and stay in touch with each other, whether for business or for
pleasure. For example, a group of senior citizens sang together in two different
locations and discovered the potential meaning of this technology in their lives. They
even sang with a choir in Australia. The event has resulted in a true community of
elderly citizens who upload videos, exchange e-mails and regularly follow one
another online via a live feed. It may seem harmless, but a new world has opened for
them. In addition to learning how to operate new devices, they now have access to a
social network that didn’t exist before. The elderly have something to occupy them
and they are having fun. It’s killing three birds with one stone and invaluable, also for
all service providers involved!
We all know what today’s congested roads are like, but even there smart solutions
have already made quite a few things possible. The use of navigation equipment has
become widely accepted to make it easier to get from A to B. In Almere, we use the
fact that virtually everyone now has a device like that in their car to our advantage.
We pick up the signal that is transmitted by these devices, which allows us to
establish how many people are located where in the city and how long it takes for
them to travel a particular distance. We then return that information to road users to
enable them to adjust their route if necessary, in addition to using the information
ourselves to better understand and analyze traffic flows. Although it is not yet
common practice, it’s quite conceivable that we will be using people’s navigation
systems to gain insight into who plans to visit Almere on a certain day and to offer
them certain services, for example pre-booking a parking space.
Most of what happens in the street can be captured on camera. This is being done in
two of Almere’s districts. Our CCTV control room is equipped with state-of-the-art
facilities. Not just for public safety purposes, but also for the day-to-day
management of the city. The monitoring will have an impact on a larger scale once
we connect it to various kinds of operational systems in the city. In the future, we will
also be able to remote control barriers, street lighting, traffic lights, bridges, lifts and
many more. Not as a purpose in itself, but simply because it’s in the interest of
everyday public life and safety in the city and because the combination of
infrastructures creates opportunities to come up with new, even interactive,
applications.
I hope these practical examples have served to give you some idea of the
developments and experiments we are working on to create a safer, more livable,
more economical and healthier Almere. It is all quite something in Almere, albeit a
mix of maturity and infancy. Maybe it’s also typical of the way we try to innovate:
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
everybody takes a small step towards tomorrow’s world in their own field, but
coherence is missing. Therein lie the challenges of the concept of Almere Smart
Society.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
Part 4. Our Smart Society
The essence of the Almere Smart Society mission statement is that we seek to use
the full potential of information technology to make living and doing business in the
city better, easier, cheaper and more fun.
The concept of Almere Smart Society does not exist in isolation but creates
conditions in the city that enable services, businesses and residents to be smart in
what they do and how they live.
The most important questions and challenges in the development of a Smart Society
are not to be found in the field of technology or finding ways to connect systems.
Anything (and indeed everything) is possible already and technology will continue to
develop. In my opinion, Smart Society therefore has little to do with ICT in the sense
that it requires our focus. Obviously, getting properly organized on a technical level is
an important precondition for any city – for example, every household in Almere can
get a fibre-optic connection because the network is there – but once you’ve reached
that stage, entirely different issues come into play.
We are going through the transformation from an industrial era, with organizational
principles based on production lines, into an era that focuses on networking and
using the full potential of human interaction. And cities are where it’s all happening.
We no longer look at reality through institutional glasses but take an urban-scale
view, because an ecologically, socially and economically sustainable system will
arise from human alliances. People make the city, or, as Richard Florida put it so
succinctly, ‘the city itself is the central organizing unit of our time’.
The transformation from an industry-based way of living, working and organizing into
a network-based way of organizing is the biggest challenge of our time. Such
transformations don’t happen just like that, they may well take a generation. Let’s
start small first.
One of those challenges is finding a way to break the conventional mode of thinking
in terms of customer-supplier or client-contractor relationships. That approach is
based on a hierarchical and contractual way of organizing, in which money is the
regulating force. It’s a model that is all too familiar to us. In fact, we spend entire
days negotiating with each other. Added to that is that we have little faith in one
another, so every agreement is made legally watertight. One of the reasons for that
lack of trust is a lack of knowledge of one another, at any rate when I’m referring to
the vastly different worlds of government, business and NGOs. We simply don’t know
each other well enough, we frequently misunderstand each other and often don’t
even speak the same language!
In my view, these times are not regulated by money and competition, but rather by
co-creation. More specifically, the degree to which co-creation can happen. Typical
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
smart-society elements like open data, open networks and open platforms help
create the right conditions!
In our search for a new approach that is appropriate to the transition from the
industrial era and its related organizational principles to a network society and its
underlying principles, I believe we are faced with two major questions that require a
joint answer from governments, NGOs and the business community.
The first issue is about governance or, to put it another way, how we collectively aim
to shape developments, divide responsibilities, build in transparency and organize
public accountability. In the industrial era, the governance model was quite simple.
The public authorities – governments – organized the division of responsibility
through politics and administration and served as the platform for public
accountability. There was a variety of relations between governments, private
companies and community-based partners, but they were always embodied in a
client-contractor or customer-supplier relationship. Governance at communitybased and corporate organizations was limited to their own entity. Clear cut and
manageable.
But if we assume that a smart society will no longer be based on principles from the
industrial era but rather on open cooperation in varying partnerships, the questions
are how exactly are we going to do it and how will we get there.
The second issue is closely related to the first and concerns the revenue models
associated with the development of a smart society. In the industrial era we would
have called them ‘business cases’, but that term is no longer appropriate here.
Perhaps ‘value cases’ is a better term for what I envisage. It involves the
development of revenue models in which investments, savings, proceeds and
management costs are shared among all parties involved in a different way. Not on
the basis of temporary contracts between individual parties, but rather on the basis
of a sustainable financial system in which the development belongs to us all and in
which each of the parties involved may, or even should, act in enlightened selfinterest.
I realize that this may all sound rather abstract, so let me give you a specific
example.
In Almere, we are working hard on the development of an Early Warning System for
families at risk. We are able to combine large amounts of data from our own as well
as other sources and link them to postcode. A test version of the system is being
used now. It gives an aerial view of the city and allows you to zoom in on streets,
combine data on particular streets, save and improve information and access the
data used by private parties for marketing purposes. Discussing such images of the
city is conducive to building bridges between social workers in the field, strategists
and directors of community-based partners.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
On a policy level, we know what factors make families vulnerable and we also know
which factors combined increase the potential risk. For example, we know that a
combination of high-risk loans, an income from two jobs, home ownership and high
mortgage payments is a major sign of socio-economic stress. The Early Warning
System enables us to present this information geographically, which allows us to
better predict in what parts of the city social problems are likely to arise, possibly
resulting in domestic violence, urban blight or crime.
From a policy perspective, the Early Warning System obviously is wonderful
progress, because it enables us and other community-based organizations to take
better preventative action. And prevention is still cheaper than cure. However, all
kinds of new questions present themselves to which we do not yet have an answer.
What about people’s privacy? How can we use the knowledge derived from the Early
Warning System to implement the public and possibly private funds we pour into our
neighbourhoods each year in a smarter and more efficient way? How do we prevent
private parties, including banks and insurance companies, from using information
from the Early Warning System to impose different conditions on their clients? But
there is more: what if insurers were to realize that such an instrument would be of
great interest to them too if it could help reduce claims arising from domestic
violence, burglaries or vandalism? In that case, serious money would be involved and
it would seem advisable to join forces to see how we can flesh out this development
without assuming each other’s responsibilities. I don’t know yet how exactly we
should organize all this, but what I do know is that we should.
This is only one of the many examples I can give you of where we’ll be seeing new
forms of cooperation. At this point, I would once again like to quote Richard Florida,
even if for the sole reason that I’m giving this presentation in Toronto. I think he is
spot on when he says that the city is where new alliances will be created because it is
the place where people meet, link and combine things and, by doing so, start off a
creative process that drives economic development in the new era.
I like to draw my inspiration from his works when it comes to how all parties involved
can accomplish new ways to develop and cooperate, challenged by an urban society’s
ambitions, questions and promises.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
Part 5. How to Get There
I started my presentation by outlining the three recurring themes that characterize
Almere’s evolution. They were:

keeping our eyes on the future;

putting people first; and

looking for innovative forms of cooperation and administration.
They are the exact same principles we apply to the development of Almere Smart
Society. It is also the reason why we call ourselves Smart Society rather than Smart
City, which could give the impression that it’s driven more by technology and
institutes. In our view, a Smart Society will come into being only if it is developed for
and by a city’s residents, businesses and institutions.
A catalyst for this development is the partnership that the Municipality entered into
last year with a number of private companies united in a consortium. They are IBM,
Cisco, Living PlanIT, Philips and utility management company Alliander. But these
are all institutes, I hear you say. Yes, indeed they are, but that is precisely why I’m
describing the partnership as a catalyst for the development into a Smart Society.
Together with these parties, the Municipality has started off a process aimed at
involving more and more residents, businesses and community-based partners in
the creation of a smarter society. Important principles for this collaborative effort
(and also for the partnership between the Municipality and the consortium) are the
principles of Creative Commons.
In the next slide, we have tried to capture the essence of the approach. The subject
areas in which the city wants to improve are at the centre. We have selected four
broad thematic areas, which we have translated into key administrative objectives we
seek to achieve in each of those areas. The themes are economic growth, sustainable
urban development, efficient urban management and social innovation and cohesion.
The cooperation we are developing in the city – together with the consortium parties
– will result in what we have referred to here as an ‘urban network’. The network is
made up of all those who want to contribute to the development. Inspired
involvement, continued innovation and co-creation are the key concepts of our
partnership. Our collaboration in the field of ICT is based on three familiar principles.
We seek to:

create an open network infrastructure;

develop an open platform; and

use open data.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
We have laid down our joint ambitions in a Memorandum of Understanding which will
expire at the end of 2013 but which is aimed at the longer term. Rather than
conducting pilots, we instigate projects and initiatives of a sustainable nature. We are
convinced not only that we can, but, more importantly, that we have to. Because if we
don’t, we will be stuck with the systems and solutions of the past. We endorse the
view that ‘the city itself is the central organizing unit of our time’. If it truly is, what
matters most is creating the conditions that will allow the city’s full potential to
manifest itself and thrive.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation
Part 6. International Cooperation
In conclusion, a conference such as this one – considering the number of
participating cities and the level of the representatives – demonstrates how eager we
are to take a look behind the scenes and learn from one each other’s experiences
and how quick and easy it is to contact each other these days, right across the globe.
That’s tremendously valuable, because the issues facing an individual city are never
isolated.
We all come up against similar environmental, social and economic issues and we all
strive for the best for our residents and businesses. We all seek to find solutions in
which our city can make a difference. There’s so much we can learn from each other,
as there will always be others who are ahead of us in some respect.
The good thing about a conference like this is that it provides an excellent meeting
place for the three worlds I talked about earlier, of governments, businesses and
NGOs. What I have tried to explain in my presentation is that the crucial issues are
not related to technology or substance, but rather to how we can collectively shape
and enhance the development towards smarter societies. Let’s start today!
Thank you very much for listening. I will be happy to answer any questions you may
have.
Smart Cities Canada Summit, Toronto, ON, Canada – Keynote Presentation