The rise of the smart city must not be built around servicing a connected elite, according to Mark Prisk, Chairman at APPG Smart Cities.
He told the industry at HyperCat’s IoT summit in London that "we need to make sure we don’t simply engage with the connected elite".
Prisk, also a Conservative MP for Hertford and Stortford, said that smart cities are about changing organisation and political culture and "everybody needs to be part of the change or there is no change at all".
Business leaders need to work with "political parts" from the beginning and that is going to make the sector look at community groups as partners.
Prisk opened the debate to rethink what "we mean by representative democracy". He added: "The huge appetite for neighbourhood solutions could provide a framework for groups, politics, business and others to really participate.
"People have to participate from the beginning through the process because a smarter city is not just about a connected network of systems; it needs to offer opportunities to who lives in it."
For London with a population growing at a rate of 100,000 people per year, Lean Doody, Associate Director at ARUP, added that "£1.3tr needs to be spent in London alone to smarten up the capital’s infrastructure by 2030".
The smart city session ended with panellists alerting authorities that existing boundaries in many cities need rethinking, so the industry can think about the citizen and promote a healthy collaboration between growing areas.
David Gann, Chair at Mayor of London’s Smart London Board unveiled that what awoken the capital’s decision makers for the necessity of a smarter infrastructure was the Olympic Games in 2012.
He said: "The Olympics put people on the streets smiling, and that was due to tech we put out there and the way things worked. That made us realise we could actually deliver this."
