Making Manchester a smart city: a tale of two evaluations

The recent era of increasing urbanisation has coincided with the rapid growth of a wide range of information and communications technologies and has led to various attempts to harness these technologies to address the needs of those living in cities. A key objective of these attempts is to realize the ‘smart city’, in which effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment, transport infrastructure, public services, cultural and community-based activities is presented as a means to deliver sustainable, prosperous and inclusive futures for its citizens. Central questions for Triple Helix scholars concerned with the roles of public and private sectors, universities, and citizens are what has been learned so far from a number of implementations of ‘smart city’ technologies in terms of what such technologies can achieve, and how best should smart city development and operation be governed. Much smart city development has currently resulted from pilot or demonstrator programmes, which are on a small scale but which are beginning to provide some answers to these key questions. In this paper we consider one of the most important UK programmes in recent years, the CityVerve programme, in which the attempt has been made to demonstrate a number of smart city underpinning technologies, commonly referred to as Internet of Things (IoT), in the inner city of Manchester in northwest England. Our paper draws on the literature of smart city and IoT evaluation in elucidating the achievements of the CityVerve. We focus on two aspects of the programme: we draw lessons from the CityVerve IoT demonstrator programme for the implementation of the smart city generally, but we also consider the influence of the design and management of the demonstrator programme itself in terms of influencing the outputs and outcomes of CityVerve.