ANEXOS Anexo 1 Instrumentos de recolección de datos

Geelong’s ambitious transition is still in its infancy. It began with the election of Lyons as mayor in November 2013, propelled by his bold (if not universally embraced) vision of Geelong’s resurgence. Then, following the release of the Digital Geelong report and the council’s endorsement of the city’s digital strategy in the first half of 2015, the city has only recently begun to implement the many recommendations of the report – including some that will take several years to come to fruition. As such, it is difficult in these early stages to pass comment or judgement on the vision proposed by Lyons and the Digital Geelong report or its implementation. With this caveat, however, I would like to offer some interpretations based on my research about the likely challenges to be confronted by the city as it rolls out this strategy; as well as how these fit into the broader challenges confronted by cities embracing the elusive “digital future” promised by new technologies – particularly small or medium- sized cities on the periphery of their country’s economy. I identify two key challenges that have already become evident in the early phases of the plan. These are drawn from my analysis of the literature and governmental reports, as well as several semi-structured, recorded and transcribed interviews with various individuals tasked with implementing the report’s recommendations. I then examine the longer-term challenges confronting Geelong’s digital strategy, which serve as a cautionary tale for comparable cities embarking on a similar trajectory.

A high-tech strategy imposed from above

The first issue facing the city of Geelong is how this vision is going to be translated from a broad promise into a series of initiatives delivered across multiple levels and departments of government. While Geelong’s local government is quite centralised politically, with the mayor effectively setting the agenda and organisations following it, strategy impacts on and must be implemented by a vast array of organisations, bureaucracies and stakeholders, all at different capacities and stages of preparedness. And all of this during a “time of pressure on public finances”, as Digital Geelong

doesn’t neglect to mention.18 _{Andrew Downie, Manager, Digital Information and Technology for the}

City of Greater Geelong who is responsible for the rollout of the city’s digital strategy, provides one example of how this has proven problematic, particularly in the case of cooperation between the public and private sectors. He describes a project aimed at providing an application for tracking the city’s public transport in real-time. He notes how even the task of providing tracking information for the city’s bus service has been made problematic by the mix of different public organisations and private operators who run them. He has had to negotiate across these disparate organisations and sectors to determine how many buses are fitted with transponders and if they can release that data all on one platform. In another planned project, Downie would like to provide an application mapping free Wifi services in the city, which would in turn offer “a very rich dataset in terms of where people are travelling in the city”. This involves requesting McDonald’s and Gloria Jeans (a cafe franchise) to link their services with the city’s and provide information like foot traffic outside their stores. But first he must convince these companies to give up this information in a way that “doesn’t devolve their own retail IP”, meaning they will only do so if they see a benefit in it for them and their customers, not just the city.19 _{So implementing all the finer details of the strategy – open data, analytics, real-time tracking}

information – becomes much more complex when it comes to realising them on a practical level.

This process is made all the more problematic when considering that the city’s digital strategy is being imposed from above; numerous, diverse organisations are required to adapt to and implement it at the

CONFERENCE: Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City

AMPS; Architecture_MPS journal; UWE: CMIR. 01-03 April, 2016

micro scale. This is perhaps most evident in the new, high-tech AUD45 million Library and Heritage Centre (see Figures 2 & 3 below). The Library itself is governed by the Geelong Regional Library Corporation (GRLC), an organisation that covers four municipalities including Geelong and surrounds, whose various council members sit on its board. The GRLC’s funding comes from the councils and State Government, various grants and a small amount of income generated itself. But Cathy Ferencz, Executive Manager of Collection and Technologies Access for the GRLC, confirms that the Library and Heritage Centre is very much enmeshed in Geelong’s transition into the digital economy. She states, “Geelong [is] going through a huge change at the moment from a manufacturing base to a knowledge economy: that’s where the council’s taking us. That’s where Deakin University’s taking us, and so the public libraries have to support that.”20 _{She notes that the decision to combine the}

library and heritage centre – a previously separate body responsible for archives about the city’s history – came from above. This has some advantages: previously the collection was split over five areas across the state of Victoria, but now the entire collection is in one central location in Geelong. But at the same time, the plan to digitise the collection cases complications for the library’s management system which “doesn’t manage archive records very well”; and conversely the heritage centre staff must themselves adapt to working with digital collections, despite “not [being] used to that level of technology at all”.21 _{Even more troubling is that while the library is closely integrated into the}

city’s digital strategy – providing work spaces and meeting rooms for businesses and start-ups, offering workshops on how to use tablets and mobile phones for citizens – the library’s performance is still evaluated based on outdated metrics. Ferencz says, “councils tend to want to know how many books were borrowed, how many members you have and how many people visited the library…there's a huge number of people that visit the library that don’t come to the library to borrow a book, but they might use the library twice a week, three times a week” for open lectures or multimedia. Yet despite this being central to the library’s ‘new role’, the government statistics don’t recognise this. “They don’t want to know anything else…it’s just so unfortunate, because that’s not where the value lies.”22

This highlights a disjuncture between the strategy’s rhetoric and the practical measures used to implement and assess the success of its vision. It demonstrates the need for a more cooperative, two- directional implementation of the strategy rather than a grand vision unilaterally handed down from above with the expectation that it will be seamlessly implemented.

CONFERENCE: Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City

AMPS; Architecture_MPS journal; UWE: CMIR. 01-03 April, 2016

Figure 2: Façade of the Geelong Library and Heritage Centre building (Copyright Sydney Morning Herald)

Figure 3: Interior of the Library and Heritage Centre (Copyright John Gollings, 2015).

CONFERENCE: Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City

AMPS; Architecture_MPS journal; UWE: CMIR. 01-03 April, 2016

Geelong as a “smart”, global city?

The problem of coordinating Geelong’s digital strategy across multiple bureaucracies and public and private organisations is complicated even further by the fact that Geelong is effectively starting from scratch when it comes to smart city infrastructure and services. Andrew Downie makes this clear when he acknowledges that the only data being collected by the city in late 2015 was “early [stage] pedestrian counting]” and “survey-based or old fashioned data collection.”23 _{Likewise, while Downie}

was in the negotiating stages of smart city initiatives at this time – a “smart home health project” providing assistive technology in the homes of elderly people, smart street lighting, smart rubbish collection – these will only be in the pilot stages by 2016, with several more years before they are widely implemented. As such, Geelong is still a considerable distance from being a “smart” or “sentient” infrastructure and sensors producing even the most basic datasets and analytics that are already standard in many other smart cities around the world. Despite this, Digital Geelong is already positioning Geelong as a competitive global city. An interesting recurring theme throughout the report is Geelong’s rivalry with nearby state capital (and Australia’s second largest city by population and GDP), Melbourne. The report proposes “market[ing] Geelong as a networked community and as the ‘competitive edge’ of Melbourne”; positioning Geelong to “exploit” Melbourne’s growth as Melbourne becomes Australia’s largest city over the next 25 years; and competing with Melbourne” for the dream demographic” of 25-35 year olds.24 _{Given that Melbourne is already well underway in}

smart city initiatives – with real-time pedestrian counters in place since 2009, numerous participatory planning initiatives underway and a newly appointed “chief digital officer” to head the city’s “smart city office” – it is difficult to see how Geelong can catch up to, let alone compete with, its much larger rival in this regard. As numerous theorists25 _{have pointed out, smart city initiatives also tend to be}

extremely technocratic, top-down and vendor-driven, consisting primarily of generalising promises made by corporations like IBM, Cisco and Intel which are by their very nature impractical to implement. This raises the question: how is Geelong, a relatively small city in a country already marginal to the global economy, going to attract investment in smart city projects that even in the most “successful” cases (Rio de Janeiro, New York) don’t always live up to the rhetoric surrounding them? There is a considerable risk that Geelong is biting off more than it can chew, investing vast amounts of funding and resources into projects that are more rhetorically attractive rather than inherently beneficial for the city’s economy or management.