2. The Story of Smart Cities

Technology is at the forefront in defining smart cities. Smart cities and governments use IT to foster the learning required to keep pace with IT development within government and across society. A smart city has emerged to describe a set of ideas that has invaded the domains of urban management and planning. Different companies have different definitions of smart city development based on their interests and ideologies. The common goals are effective city services and efficient city systems. The cities are the site for innovation, production, distribution, and consumption of products and services. The scale of smart city markets ranges from individual, buildings or home, community or neighborhood, city or campus or enterprise, city-region, or metropolitan area [Clark]. According to Sadowski and Bendor, the first step in “how smart cities are developed and sold?” is we are told about the catastrophes such as population, environmental disasters, economic realities of fiscal austerity, and fierce competition, etc. that current cites face now and in the future. Then provided with anecdotes of cites transformed into smart cites by instrumentation, interconnection, and intelligence, and Internet of Everything (IoE) thrive, and later about the interventions, systems, and services that are provided as smart cities and how they bring in real change. Finally, we are told the implementation strategies that are used to develop a smart city. For existing cities that are retrofitted and renovated with upgrades comes with its challenges as it's not a blank slate. In this situation, rather than removing all legacy systems and replacing them with new systems, incremental upgrades are performed over the existing infrastructure. A shock therapy implementation where a quick, large-scale integration of smart urbanism ideas, technologies, and policies are employed to the existing cities. Here the transformation happens over a greater degree and short time frame but is more financially and politically demanding. The most idealist approaches are built from scratch, these showcase the full potential of smart city development.

Smart cities are a collective idea with motivations and goals rather than discrete ideas and initiatives which main the existing sociopolitical systems. Companies like Cisco and IBM coexist and offer services that don’t deviate from the vision of smart urbanism. Their approaches to smart cities are generally complementary and they excel in their aspects, for example, Cisco is good at hardware and works on maintaining and installing new networks whereas IBM works on software such as data collection, data analytics, planning, and development of different models.

The subject of urban planning, they argue, is wicked problems, which have no definitive description, involve value judgments, and take place in unique contexts that make it difficult to accurately test solutions. The local municipal innovation and the incorporation of IT into collaborative urban planning are strategies to solve wicked problems. collaborative planning seeks to integrate technical analysis into a discussion among stakeholders. IT artefacts can play a role in social change, they do not eliminate the social and political dimensions of cities. purely social consensus is not enough and policy discussion must involve computer models, databases, sensors, and other IT artefacts.

The issue with security and who owns the data? raised by Clark is an important one as the data can be used for tracking the behaviors through the use of software, gather and analyze to understand the behavior and characteristics used to improve the software or for future products and services, and finally, by third-party products and services this leads us from “for who the smart city?” to “who owns the smart city?” Other issues like housing affordability, gentrification, displacement, homelessness, environmental racism, and residential segregation must be addressed. The alternative imaginaries such as urban social justice, urban commons, or civic hacking and openness do exist over the common corporate model. These imaginaries are dwarfed by the ideas, scale, and influences of companies such as IBM and Cisco. We need to work on different contingencies for the corporate model of smart cities so that we can scale them to a larger model even with issues such as technological momentum and technological lock.

Alvarez and Rosen discuss a theoretical framework discussing how to restructure cities and the governance process, priorities, and outcomes. The ideal concept is where the political and technological ideas align with the impacts, regulations, governance practices, and economic interests. Technological ideology has reshaped urban governance and decision making and excluding the problems faced by the people. Community ownership and empowerment should be the key factors to drive technology changes. In the urban entrepreneurship effort, we plan to sell the city itself to the citizens and firms as a place of production and as a development partner. This significantly subsidizes both the platform and information generated from it. The ideology operates along the dual dimensions of tech attraction and technological solutionism. This can be achieved by tax breaks and other policies to attract new high technology industries such as in San Fransico. Urban governance comes to privilege tech sector growth enabling the conversion of cities into digitized landscapes optimized for capital accumulation. A critical role in the development of emerging industries and enabling technologies is having technical standards and regulations by formal agencies [Clark].

References

1. “SMART CITIES AS EMERGING MARKETS.” Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities, by JENNIFER CLARK, Columbia University Press, New York, 2020, pp. 57–94. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/clar18496.7. Accessed 9 Nov. 2020.
2. León, Luis & Rosen, Jovanna. (2019). Technology as Ideology in Urban Governance. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 110. 1–10. 10.1080/24694452.2019.1660139.
3. Goodspeed, Robert. (2014). Smart cities: Moving beyond urban cybernetics to tackle wicked problems. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. 8. 10.1093/cjres/rsu013.
4. Sadowski, Jathan & Bendor, Roy. (2018). Selling Smartness: Corporate Narratives and the Smart City as a Sociotechnical Imaginary. Science, Technology, & Human Values. 44. 016224391880606. 10.1177/0162243918806061.