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Jul 13, 2023

San Antonio’s road map to becoming a Smart City

If you enjoy traveling to the world’s most interesting and dynamic cities, one useful roadmap is the SmartCitiesWorld website. The organization is not in the travel business, but it does serve as a

If you enjoy traveling to the world’s most interesting and dynamic cities, one useful roadmap is the SmartCitiesWorld website. The organization is not in the travel business, but it does serve as a guide to how leading cities around the globe are using new technologies to make the urban world more resilient, sustainable, safe and prosperous.

Readers interested in learning more about what’s happening in other cities will enjoy the online journalism of SmartCitiesDive. It’s an effective way to keep tabs on what is happening in other cities and for tracking national trends, good and bad. Take the site’s lead story on Friday: “Pedestrian deaths hit 41-year high in 2022 with more than 7,500 killed.” Only California had more pedestrian fatalities than Texas. While San Antonio is a Vision Zero city, pedestrian fatalities have increased here, too.

It’s helpful for local elected officials to understand that the challenges we face in San Antonio are, to one degree or another, challenges faced everywhere. We can learn a lot by studying other cities and how they are deploying new technologies to better serve citizens and practice greater transparency and inclusion.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) has designed a strategic plan for cities in an effort to make sustainability and citizen engagement a global reality.

San Antonio aspires to be a Smart City, and last week the city’s Office of Innovation, itself an innovation first launched in 2007 and now building momentum, released its 57-page Smart Cities Roadmap. The Roadmap is a blueprint for transformation and change, one that takes big steps toward engaging members of the public more directly, adopting policies that respond to the city’s most pressing challenges (think poverty, transportation, affordable housing, unsafe infrastructure, climate change mitigation) and increasing public access to data.

“The City of San Antonio’s (COSA) Office of Innovation has a long track record of challenging the status quo in local government,” Brian Dillard, the director of the Office of Innovation, states in his opening message in the Roadmap. The entire message is worth reading. It clearly states community needs and the Roadmap’s objectives.

Wouldn’t it be nice to click on the city’s website for an immediate update on a disruptive road improvement project with an option to share input, and actually get a useful response?

Becoming a Smart City can’t happen simply by publication of a well-done report, regardless of how much smart thinking and community engagement went into the process. Success will be measured first by the degree of serious buy-in from Mayor Ron Nirenberg and the newly seated City Council now on summer break, and by City Manager Erik Walsh and senior staff.

Getting from here to there is the challenge. Long-term success will be measured by real change in the culture in both civilian municipal government and in the way police interact with citizens, especially in situations that too often spin out of control with fatal consequences.

All the technology in the world can’t replace a culture of mediocre service. Days after Fiesta this year I called 311, the city’s “specially trained customer service representatives ready to assist with city service requests,” to complain about the amount of litter on the street in front of our house on East Arsenal Street following the King William Fair. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the sidewalk and the litter that spilled onto our property, but cascarón confetti and much more on the street required a sweeper.

I admire Beto Altamirano, whose tech company IRYS, previously known as CityFlag, designed the tech-driven 311 system for the city. In my case, it took quite a while for a well-meaning person to get back to me to report there were no scheduled clean-ups of my street. That really wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I pointed out that Broadway was swept after the Fiesta parades, as were the streets of the King William neighborhood after the fair. I expected the same service.

Hours later as I watched from a window, a city employee came by in a four-wheeler, parked next to H-E-B headquarters across the street from our home, plucked up two pieces of litter along the grocery company’s fence, and then left without ever looking at the street litter in front of our home. By the time I made it out to the sidewalk to try to speak with her she was gone.

All the tech in the world can’t account for human behavior. But tech advances do matter. One positive step has been the city’s newly designed website, SA.gov. While the site was first launched in February, many pages have yet to be updated and moved over from san antonio.gov, but the new site is far more user-friendly.

Another important step was last week’s community celebration of the Roadmap’s release, held in the historic Dry Goods building at 107 N. Flores St., which will be renovated as the new headquarters for the downtown developer Weston Urban. The standing room-only audience for various speed-dating style panel discussions, moderated by Altamirano and myself, attracted a great mix of energized young professionals and older community members interested in improved city services.

In todays’ world, there is a lack of trust between the public and local government, Weston Urban’s David Robinson Jr. remarked in one panel discussion. He’s right, and to that I will add that master plans, strategic reports and major initiatives are only as good as the people behind them. I’ve seen such work in San Antonio bring about real change. I’ve seen other projects gather dust on the shelves of city hall offices, never implemented.

We should applaud the work of the Office of Innovation. Let’s see if the more than 13,000 civilian and uniformed employees of the city of San Antonio embrace that good work and follow the Roadmap to propel San Antonio forward, not only as one of the country’s fastest-growing cities, but also as one of the country’s Smart Cities.

Robert Rivard, co-founder of the San Antonio Report who retired in 2022, has been a working journalist for 46 years. He is the host of the bigcitysmalltown podcast. More by Robert Rivard