5. Smart City Ideologies
There is tight tension between sustainability, surveillance, and technology imaginaries for smart cities. There is a need for very well balanced policies and goals to achieve a sustainable smart city with citizen-interests such as privacy. A smart city is one whose economy and governance are being driven by innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. The vision of smart cities is to stimulate and support innovation and economic growth and provide sustainable and efficient urban management and development through real-time analytics using big data. Big Data is useful for citizens as it offers insights and makes day-to-day life easy; for governments, it helps in efficiently and effectively managing and regulating cities through control centers, and for corporations, it is a long term business opportunity. But big data comes with its concerns. The politics of big urban data — data always comes with choices and decisions and we must have ethical considerations, the regulatory environment for any use of public data to reduce chances of bias and variances; Technocratic governance, and city development — All problems are not technical problems and we should not try to solve all the problems with data. Technocratic forms of governance are highly narrow in scope. The technologies must be complemented with policies and practices to solve the problems in a smart city. Citizens have the right to privacy, confidentiality, and freedom of expression; The corporatization of city governance and technological lock-in — The heavy influences of major software and hard companies to push their products are widely seen. Building relationships, putting forward favorable market conditions, diverting funding streams, and creating public-private partnerships should be the target to create open data and not give power to major corporations to design smart cities; Buggy, brittle and hackable cities — More the technology more is a chance for technologies to be prone to viruses, glitches, crashes, and security hacks that can cause havoc; The panoptic city? — The concerns over privacy and surveillance are evident and the level of monitoring must be checked. Although technology is important for being efficient smart cities, we should move from panopticon to oligopticon cities, and technologies like Array of things should be encouraged and supported. At least 10 US cities have banned facial recognition technology due to the risks to security and privacy. I also believe the agencies must be trained and must have strict guidelines to use similar technologies to safeguard public interests and protect from any racial discrimination. Our mission in building smart cities should be to improve equity by being responsible with technology, and not just sourcing cool new gear. Portland banning private as well as government use of technology for facial recognition is one step in the right direction but companies like Amazon, Oregon Bankers, Jacksons push back such regulations. A country cannot function without a government, but the government cannot solve every problem. Neither the public sector nor the private sector is always the answer. No single measure of a good society can drive every other aspect of its development. It’s not either/or. It’s both and it’s case-by-case. Strong policy from nations or states should be placed for use of such technology. Citizens must be educated rather than depend on the government to take decisions. Smart City PDX worked closely with the city’s Office of Equity and Human Rights to develop privacy principles for city use of technology. Similar groups must therefore be encouraged to work towards ensuring the privacy rights of the citizens are considered.
The smart city initiatives and the use of ‘big data’ must address sustainability challenges related to social and environmental justice and public participation. Major projects like The Crystal and Hudson Yards in New York City are test-bed for innovative technologies and are marketed as techno-political platforms. These are enclaves of the rich and have no social equity or social inclusion considerations. Some cities like Masdar, UAE, and Rio, Brazil have worked on smart systems and sustainability but don’t address any social equity or social inclusion considerations. Sustainability imaginaries are focused on energy efficiency, reduction of pollutants and carbon emissions, livability, mobility, reduced emissions, efficient resource use but miss on the increased housing prices, displacement of low income and minority groups, and gentrification. CUSP seeks to use the tools of urban science and modeling to generate knowledge that they believe will advance solutions.
Table 1: Case Study Comparison — Trends in Smart City Development
Policy domains of different cities trying to become smart cities are shown in Table 1. Different cities have different priorities on sustainability, open data policies, relationships with public-private entities, and universities. Cities should consider the outcomes they want to achieve and look for ways to partner with universities, non-profits, and the private sector. Cities should continue to look for best practices and frameworks for smart city development.
A hybrid vision that is a combination of political, cultural, social, ecological, normative, and technological imaginaries is required to address the concerns of smart cities. ”As Greenfield (2013) and Townsend (2013) argue, without critical interrogations the smart cities of the future will likely reflect narrow corporate and state visions, rather than the desires of wider society.”
References:
[1] T. Simonite, “Portland ‘ s Face-Recognition Ban Is a New Twist on ‘ Smart Cities,’” 2020.
[2] T. R. Miller, “Imaginaries of Sustainability: The Techno-Politics of Smart Cities,” Sci. Cult. (Lond)., vol. 0, no. 0, pp. 1–23, 2019, doi: 10.1080/09505431.2019.1705273.
[3] T. Shelton, M. Zook, and A. Wiig, “The ‘actually existing smart city,’” Cambridge J. Reg. Econ. Soc., vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 13–25, 2015, doi: 10.1093/cjres/rsu026.
[4] R. Kitchin, “The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism,” GeoJournal, vol. 79, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2014, doi: 10.1007/s10708–013–9516–8.
[5] National League of Cities, “Trends in Smart City Development,” Natl. Leag. Cities-Center City Solut. Appl. Res., pp. 1–23, 2016, [Online]. Available: https://www.nlc.org/sites/default/files/2017-01/Trends in Smart City Development.pdf.