There’s an irony about discussing hi-tech virtual future cities over a fledgling Skype connection that’s struggling with my woeful 4 Mbps of bandwidth. We managed it, but Ulysses Sengupta and his colleague Robert Hyde - both senior lecturers and architects at the Manchester School of Architecture - were clear: their vision of a smart city doesn’t require gigabits of bandwidth. Instead, it demands participation from locals in infrastructure planning.

That’s because Sengupta’s vision of a smart city challenges established smart city logic. The typical picture of a smart city and how it works is: sensors are dotted around a city that measure a variety of measurables such as electricity usage, available parking spaces, refuse levels and so on, all with the aim of streamlining public services and recording people’s habits to create data that no one knows what to do with. Both IBM and Telefonica are deeply involved with their own smart city projects around the world, which very much follow these lines.

“Smart cities are great, but they’re generally aimed at grabbing data,” says Sengupta. Indeed, the very idea of a smart city is a linear one. What Sengupta is proposing is far more multi-dimensional.

“We take the smart city concept and improve on it, we call this a ‘stage 4 system’,” he explains. “We take all of that smart city data, throw in historical, sociological, geographical, cultural, ecological, industrial and academic data, alongside ground data and you have something very interesting. If, on top of that, you include public participation, ie the thoughts and ideas of citizens, you can build a live and kicking virtual replica city. The more data we have, the more accurate the simulation is and the more future proofed it is”.

With all of that data layered into Sengupta’s tool, you can time travel (via extrapolation, rather than science fiction) within this virtual city. “We can observe the probable futures of a city based on current directions of change, and we can test interventions [such as new buildings and public spaces] against known trajectories and see how it affects the city.”

With this tool, users will be able to see, in real time, endless possible scenarios of how, for example, a new park will change a city. Will it lead to a boom in the local economy? A spike in population growth? What if there’s a natural disaster: will the new park help or hinder that situation?

Direct democracy

“We want to democratise city planning, too” says Sengupta as he takes me through a presentation. “Too often town planning is done from the top down. Politicians and planners implement and organise without knowing what kind of future impact their ideas will have or whether or not their ideas are popular with locals.

“We want to give everyone access to this tool, so they can see, first-hand, what the government is proposing and what effect it will have. Citizens will be able to suggest ideas and vote on which projects and ideas they like the most. This is what planning will look like in the future. And it’s not just about logging into a website and filling out an online form. We’ll go into the community and speak to people, engage with them and understand what their needs are. This is the only way to build a truly accurate simulation.”

Sengupta gives the example of a project based in Vancouver where one person had set up an app that let local people pinpoint and name areas of the city that were run down and decrepit. One particular building they focused on was a homeless shelter, which was so dilapidated - and got so much attention - that the local government had to act. He wants this sort of engagement from the public in his system.

But how engaged will people be? A popular user generated platform like OpenStreetMap is fuelled by the open source spirit of the internet and users respond in kind. But a similar platform that is associated with, or driven by, government comes with the baggage of past IT failures. At best people will be sceptical; at worst they’ll be entirely disengaged.

Tom Cheesewright, futurologist and self-described “talking head for BBC TV and radio”, thinks the public will engage regardless of who’s running it: “This approach allows planners and citizens to explore infinite scenarios. To understand possible futures in a very visual sense. It’s as much about the power of the presentation as it is about the processing: translating this volume of data into something the human mind can comprehend and work with.

“For that reason I think people will engage with it. They don’t have to be looking at the whole picture all the time. But from the model you can extract deeply relevant nuggets of data for them. What track is their area currently on for this or that measure? What does performance on this or that metric mean for their future lives? This is compelling stuff. They don’t need to grapple with the macro picture unless they want to - there’s value in the micro.”

Whether or not the public will engage aside, there’s clear interest from a tech giant that Sengupta and Hyde are in talks with, and local government too. Sengupta explained: “We’re talking to various departments of Manchester City Council in parallel. We have confirmed support from a couple of departments and will be talking to the planning department soon regarding cooperation in terms of taking this approach forward as a pilot. We also just presented to Foresight (The Future of Cities) who were impressed by the direction of the research.”

But don’t expect a downloadable app to hit Google Play any time soon, Sengupta was clear that that’s not his goal. “This is not simply a product. It is a research framework that is beginning to pick up speed, hence the idea of a ‘release date’ is not particularly useful. I am sure there will be various products, applications and open platform possibilities coming out of this approach, but probably not one single piece of software or product.”