The next plenary session of the conference was entitled "Developing the Intelligent Cities of the Future: Joining Up E-Government and E-Inclusion." The city of Manchester, England was used as a case study for the session. Dave Carter of Manchester 's Digital Development Agency discussed his communities involvement in the IntelCities project. Launched in January, IntelCities is a partnership between 18 cities, 20 ICT companies and 36 research organizations. The project is allowing cities to deploy and assess a variety of e-government services. "E-government should be available 24/7, making life easier for citizens and businesses," he said, noting that e-government cannot be seen as a success if only 10% of the population is able to use it.
The IntelCities project hopes to develop an "eskilled society," by way of a a new "Integrated Open System City Platform," a collection of systems and services built upon accepted Internet protocols. Government agencies can use e-government to improve their decision-making process, utilizing technology to expand the participatory process to all citizens. Through the 18 months of the project, the team hopes to pool their collective experiences in e-government, e-planning, and e-community building to create a set of tools and benchmarks that can be replicated elsewhere, as well as potential business models for helping support the costs of e-government.
"In the last 20 years, we've been trying to convert the city from ashes of being the first major industrial city - and one of the first cities to feel the effects of de-industrialization," he said. As new businesses have become established in Manchester, many of the new jobs associated with have been filled by people from the outside, leaving many locals unemployed.
Carter discussed the notion of "e-regeneration," improving urban governance through the use of efficient and sustainable technologies, and renewing local democracy by re-engaging citizens in civic life. "Each year, less and less people vote, less and less people participate in society," he said, "and we hope this will give people more interest, more confidence in participating in civic life."
In New East Manchester, the unemployment rate is double the national average; the population has declined from 100,000 to 30,000. They are now working to build "a new town in the city," hoping to double the population to 60,000. This requires building new services and economic capacity through the use of ICTs. Carter demonstrated how the city is using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to identify opportunities for economic development, improving the efficiency of services such as waste disposal and recycling. GIS is also helping policymakers and citizens visualize their city in new ways. "Using GIS, citizens can say, 'We think the new development should look like this, rather than that,'" he said, noting that GIS can overlay relevant data sets to help citizens articulate their vision for local economic development.
Citing the neighborhood of Seedley as an example, he showed how virtual reality fly-throughs of an economically-collapsing community was used by the citizens to think creatively about developing initiatives for urban renewal. Local home values had plummeted to the point that people were literally abandoning their homes rather than trying to sell them, so the virtual reality tools helped members of the community become civically engaged with local government decisions to renovate and rebuilt the neighborhoods. The tools also helped the city sell their urban renewal programs to potential investors.
Carter notes the high level of economic exclusion in Manchester has been a barrier to get communities involved: surveys showed that an astonishingly 30% of households in some neighborhoods no longer had phones because they couldn't pay the bills. "If you don't have a credit card, a bank account, etc, you can't sign up for broadband because you don't meet the contract rules," he said. So they established a local broadband initiative to give low-income families easier access to the Internet. Nationally, 10% of the population uses broadband, but now neighborhoods participating in the program have 20% access. The city has also partnered with the local credit union to create a "community credit card" - a local savings account to help low-income systems save money for purchasing computers and broadband access. The program is also helping people gain new routes to entrepreneurship, something that is vital to the community's economic renewal.
In conclusion, Carter said that city's e-government programs aren't always connected to the real needs of local citizens, particularly undeserved population. Creating initiatives that help people gain access to ICTs while giving them a sense of ownership in local urban renewal is helping Manchester renovate communities that have been economically ravished by de-industrialization.