Stupid Questions about ‘Smart’ Cities
For the past year or more I’ve participated in meetings, conferences, projects, and brainstorming sessions with the words “smart cities” somewhere in the title. Often these begin with a definition of what makes a city “smart.” Sometimes, all we try to do is agree on a definition of what makes a city smart. In nearly every case, our discussions or plans for increasing “smartness” include technology and data applications. Yesterday I came across an article that was a welcome slap in the face. The article appears in The Atlantic and is titled “Stop Saying ‘Smart Cities’,” with the apt byline “Digital stardust won’t magically make future cities more affordable or resilient.” I really enjoyed this article, because it throws some very good arguments against the swelling tide of “smart city” evangelists — myself included. From the get-go, the article lashes out at people who throw around the term “smart city,” by saying that “‘smart’ is a snazzy political label used by a modern alliance of leftist urbanites and tech industrialists. To deem yourself “smart” is to make the NIMBYites and market-force people look stupid.” Although I don’t like being called a leftist urbanite, it might be because the truth hurts. So I kept reading.
The article points to Rome and London, saying that some might consider London “smart,” and maybe only because it “does have some of the best international smart-city conferences.” In fact, the article says that both London and Rome are “huge, sluggish beasts of cities that have outlived millennia of eager reformers.” This resonated with me, as I could tell that the article was going to dig a little deeper into what makes cities “smarter,” or more importantly, what makes cities such a critical part of modern life and society. As I read on, the article began to parallel many of the ideas espoused in the book “Why Liberalism Failed” by Patrick Deneen. This made me think that there are some important issues to discuss and consider as we work to make cities “smarter” for everyone who lives in them.
What are the Elements of a Smart City?
When I am involved in discussions about or projects related to making cities smarter, technology is always at the core. We talk about technology — in terms of fiber optic communications and signal and sensor technology — as the backbone of a smart city. The Atlantic article provided some welcome statements regarding technology as it relates to smart cities:
The digital techniques that smart-city fans adore are flimsy and flashy — and some are even actively pernicious — but they absolutely will be used in cities. They already have an urban heritage. When you bury fiber-optic under the curbs around the town, then you get internet. When you have towers and smartphones, then you get portable ubiquity. When you break up a smartphone into its separate sensors, switches, and little radios, then you get the internet of things.
These tedious yet important digital transformations have been creeping into town for a couple of generations. At this point, they’re pretty much all that urban populations can remember how to do. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent — these are the true industrial titans of our era. That’s how people make money, that’s how they make war, so of course, it will be how they make cities.
The article says that “the cities of the future won’t be ‘smart,’ or well-engineered, cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, affordable, or resilient,” rather “the future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed by City Hall, mostly for the sake of making towns more attractive to capital.” Then the article says that smart cities of the future won’t be “a solutionist paradise,” rather they will look “more or less like… Los Angeles.”
Right on! I’ve often felt that so goes Los Angeles, so goes the US. We are one of the most culturally diverse regions in the nation, and as much as New York is the City that Never Sleeps, Los Angeles is the creative capital of the world. It’s just like Walter Sobchak says in The Big Lebowski, “You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me.” — because you can get anything you want whenever you want it in Los Angeles. And that makes it a real, vibrant, robust City.
The points made in The Atlantic article related to what makes a city smart directly related to topics discussed in Deneen’s book, which noted that “The loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life — familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national — reflects the advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.” These social bonds are being directly loosened by the expanding impact of technology and communications, and Deneen rightly states that “among the greatest challenges facing humanity is the ability to survive progress.”
So if technology won’t make a city smarter, what will? Very interestingly, the Atlantic article points to the fierce competition to attract the new Amazon headquarters (aka “HQ2”) in US Cities, and says that this shows “that the flat-world internet game was up, and it’s still about location, location, and location.” Following this logic, the article says that “smart cities will use the techniques of ‘smartness’ to leverage their regional competitive advantages.” From where I stand, this means that a focus on smart cities should look more at the intangible fabric of a city, rather than rely on technology solutions alone. The location of a city is paramount, and not the only element of a smart city. Technology is a ubiquitous part of our modern lives, and will therefore play a part in any future smart city. The question is, how will we use technology?
Is Technology Necessary?
For anyone who has read some of my other writing, they will know that I am a proponent of automated enforcement. My focus is on traffic safety and the epidemic of traffic fatalities our nation and the world faces. I believe these fatalities are preventable, and we need to rely on proven behavior modification techniques. When it comes to traffic safety and traffic laws, that means enforcement. And given the broad freedom of our vast population and limited personnel resources for enforcement, this means increasing automated enforcement and surveillance. In Deneen’s book, he writes about the growing role of the state in relation to establishing laws and enforcing those laws, by saying “the state is created to restrain the external actions of individuals and legally restricts the potentially destructive activity of radically separate human beings” and “law is comparable to hedges, ‘not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way’.” When considering traffic safety and enforcement, Deneen writes about this as a decline in the civic norms of adhering to basic traffic safety laws, and that “the threat and evidence of declining civic norms require centralized surveillance, highly visible police presence, and a carceral state to control the effects of its own successes.”
Coming back to the Atlantic piece, the article takes a similar turn when it talks about the evolution of how cities used the internet to expand engagement and citizen participation, and that the trend now sees cities “adopting that new surveillance-marketing paradigm of ‘data extractivity’” to monitor all aspects of city life. The theory is that “smart” cities will therefore not have to “ask the ‘citizens’ what they want from urban life,” rather cities “can accurately surveil the real actions of city’s ‘users’ and decode what they’re actually doing, as opposed to what they vaguely claim they might want to do.” This then leads to a very compelling section of the article:
Historically, this is a rather typical drift for a left-wing mass-democratic ideology — from the unwieldy awkwardness of rallying the entire people, and toward the semi-covert vanguard of the revolution. Throw in some engineering degrees and a whole lot of police software, and this is the basic model for modern Chinese cyberspace sovereignty. The new Chinese smart-city model isn’t London at all, but rather “Baidu-Macau,” where the state-approved social-media giant shows up in the sleepy ex-Portuguese gambling town, and offers to ramp up the local action. For instance, embedding Chinese AI facial recognition into all the town’s police security cameras.
Wait, is the article saying that a path to smart cities will take us down the road of authoritarian and autocratic rule? Are we already there? Recognizing that the statements above may be incendiary, the article then says:
These aren’t the “best practices” beloved by software engineers; they’re just the standard urban practices, with software layered over. It’s urban design as the barbarian’s varnish on urbanism. People could have it otherwise, technically, if they really wanted it and had the political will, but they don’t. So they won’t get it.
What I take away from the last sentence above directly relates back to using technology for automated enforcement of basic traffic safety laws — the lack of political will. I’ve already written about the opposition to traffic law modifications by organizations representing police and public safety officers. In my experience, I’ve run into arguments against the outsourcing of basic traffic enforcement — writing parking tickets, etc.- based on the fact that it would “take away jobs” from police and public safety officers. If a city is going to develop policies and laws about everything from basic traffic safety on up, the “smart” cities will also have the political will to enforce those laws. All the time and consistently.
What About the People?
The article is attempting to highlight facts also made prominent in Deneen’s book — our liberal culture is both the result and cause of our challenges. Cities are complex in terms of the vast diversity of people, ideas, problems, and solutions. In our American Democracy, addressing these problems becomes even more complex.
I repeat that how we use technology to both implement and enforce the policies and laws of our cities will define a truly “smart” city. This will require an active and engaged populace — something we rarely see in Los Angeles and other US cities. Is there a way to use technology to activate and engage citizens? Of course this has been tried numerous times, with webcasts of city council meetings and online petitions. It isn’t working.
The big tech firms are trying to figure out how to leverage technology to activate and engage citizens, right? The Atlantic article posits a different purpose:
If you look at where the money goes (always a good idea), it’s not clear that the “smart city” is really about digitizing cities. Smart cities are a generational civil war within an urban world that’s already digitized. It’s the process of the new big-money, post-internet crowd, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft [GAFAM] et al., disrupting your uncle’s industrial computer companies, the old-school machinery guys who ran the city infrastructures, Honeywell, IBM, General Electric. It’s a land grab for the command and control systems that were mostly already there.
That’s right. The command and control of city infrastructure and services already exists. The basic framework of societly was developed over eons. Making cities smarter means tackling the complexities of local beaurocracies head on. The Atlantic then article calls out some of the tech firms who appear to be attempting to address these complexities:
The GAFAM crowd isn’t all that well suited to the urban task at hand, either. Running cities is not a good business fit for them because they always give up too easily. America’s already littered with the remnants of abandoned Google Moonshots. Amazon kills towns by crushing retail streets and moving all the clerks backstage into blind big-box shipping centers. The idea of these post-internet majors muscling up for some 30-year urban megaproject — a subway system, aqueducts, the sewers — seems goofy.
Yup, tech giants give up too easily. Why try to make public transportation more efficient when you can simply dig tunnels under a City to whisk people around? No, these tech giants are not really doing anything to make cities smarter. And why not? Because it is too difficult and involves too many people.
Can We Get Smarter?
The Atlantic article closes with a few points about smart cities, saying that they “merely want to be perceived as smart, when what they actually need is quite different.” The article says that “Cities need to be rich, powerful, and culturally persuasive, with the means, motive, and opportunity to manage their own affairs,” and that this is not a “novel situation for a city.” In a very eloquent statement, the article closes by saying that cities “may be dumb, blind, thorny, crooked, congested, filthy, and seething with social injustice, but boy are they strong.” I believe that the way to do that is to follow some of the advice provided by Deneen in his book:
“What we need today are practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life.”
From reading both the Atlantic article and Deneen’s book, it is clear to me that the key element of a smart city lies in the engagement and activation of local citizens. This means people working together towards a common goal. This means improving the management and reporting structures of everything we do. This will mean excersising our liberty in the most classical of definitions, as described by Deneen as “to involve discipline and training in self-limitation of desires, and corresponding social and political arrangements that sought to inculcate corresponding virtues that fostered the arts of self-government.”
The next time I get involved with anything relating to “smart” anything, I’m going to keep this in mind.
