‘Smart Cities’: the contested concept of our future
‘Smart Cities’: the contested concept of our future

Chances are, it is getting smarter by the year as many governments around the globe are racing to infuse technology into just about every aspect of its city’s operations. And I mean every aspect. From public transportation and power supply to citizen participation and e-governance. It does this using every buzzword imaginable, from Big Data to the Internet of Things.

Cities are growing very quickly and are experiencing many challenges. Challenges around our climate, how to build our cities more sustainably, around mobility, how to reduce congestion and challenges around affordability. It is predicted that by 2050, the world’s urban population will nearly double, as it is expected to increase from 55% in 2018 to 68% and by the end of the century reach 9 billion. With 80% of global GDP generated in cities, Smart City technology is essential in meeting the growing demand for speed and efficiency in services, as Radu Belciu states in his DigiSoc3 report.

Exactly what is a Smart City?

The concept of ‘Smart City’ first appeared in the 1990s and has become extremely popular in scientific literature and international policies. It is a contested concept as there is a plethora of definitions of what it is and does. In simple terms, a smart city is the redevelopment of an area that incorporates information and communication technologies to enhance the quality and performance of urban services. The Internet of Things, allows anything and anyone to be connected at any time, and also aims to enhance the quality of life.

‘The smart city of the future will be a complex, interconnected network of autonomous vehicles, smart buildings and data-driven infrastructure. It will bring the Internet of Things to life on an impressive scale.’ Len Calderone

Implications

The definition of urban infrastructure is changing from mere physical assets to embrace data and technology. Big Data, stored and analysed daily through the abundance of sensors and digitisation of governments, is being held by companies looking to increase their profits and is largely inaccessible. Endless opportunities could be made if this data was open, from reducing pollution to minimising crime. The introduction of 5G can lead to new and unanticipated technology trends, as AI will be used to analyse the large amount of data generated. But, does 5G pose health risks?

Automation is another element of smart technology, affecting all sectors. The World Economic Forum suggests that by 2022, automation will displace 75 million jobs globally — but create 133 million new ones. Automated vehicles, for example, have the potential to reduce traffic and pollution and increase safety. However, they can cause a great loss of jobs and arise an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality — how should the vehicle act in the event of an accident?

San Diego

David Graham, Deputy Chief Operating Officer of San Diego, aims to make it the largest ‘smart city’ in the U.S. It has long been known as a tourist and military city, but now it is a hub of innovation. The city saved $2.4 million in energy costs and illuminated a future of endless possibilities when it began to replace its street lights with LED’s five years ago. For San Diego, ‘smart city’ means using data and technology to improve decision making and create better lives for people. In 2018 San Diego installed Current by GE sensors in the city’s street lights. These CityIQ nodes have three sensors in each light with a cellular connection and aim to increase mobility while decreasing emissions — they count pedestrians and cars and even monitor climate conditions like temperatuer and humidity.

But, it is easy for many people to have the feeling that ‘Big Brother’ is watching over them, just like the CCTV infrastructure does in Rio de Janeiro. However, ‘the rewards card you swipe at the store and the search that you do on the Internet, is telling people a whole lot more about you and your preferences, than a street light ever could and would’ says Graham. Erik Caldwell, Deputy Director of Policy, explained that the installation must acknowledge the concept of curtilage. The cameras cannot capture any data/activity associated with private property. The precise longitude and latitude for the point on a surface from which the camera would capture each pixel of data must be determined to avoid such issues.

freeimages.com license / Jack Sanders

But, while privacy concerns are not going away, neither is technology.

Toronto

Smart Cities can be found all over the U.S. — for example the city of Atlanta has installed smart sensors along its North Avenue Corridor and Columbus Ohio won the department of transportation ‘smart city challenge’. Toronto is working with Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, on an ambitious project to build a smart city neighbourhood. The Sidewalk Toronto project aims to create 44,000 direct jobs, affordable housing, an ecosystem where urban innovations can flourish and cut greenhouse gases by 89%. The company says the data it will collect will be used to improve public life, but they have failed to answer questions about who is going to hang on to that data.

In 2018 the company’s key advisor, Saadia Muzaffar, resigned from the project because of key concerns over how the personal data will be protected. She believed Waterfront Toronto evaded questions about privacy and showed “apathy and a lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust.” In the same year, Ann Cavoukian, wrote in her resignation letter from Sidewalk Labs “I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance.” Currently in 2020, the unprecedented economic uncertainty resulting from COVID-19 drove the final nail into the Quayside plan, having been troubled for years with challenges around privacy and cost. Even BlackBerry founder Jim Balsillie called it “a colonising experiment in surveillance capitalism,” while venture capitalist Roger McNamee called it “dystopian.”

Data security

freeimages.com license / Gustavo Molina

The above examples make us realise the ethics of online information use. Ethics are the ‘moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity’.

As ‘digital citizens’ living in a ‘digital society’, it is our responsibility to use technologies in an appropriate way. Information has always had value and our private lives have never been more public. With the overgrowing use of Smart TV’s and electronic gadgets such as Alexa, every move we make and every word we say is being stored and analysed. As smart cities begin to take over, the issue of privacy becomes ever so prominent.

Reflection: My Development Through The Digital Society Course

As a Geography student, I chose this Digital Society UCIL course as technology is used throughout my subject, from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which can store, edit, analyse, and display the data collected through to GPS, RS and other technologies. I wanted to do something different and learn about something which I have never had the opportunity to before. I wanted to challenge myself by taking a module which was not Geography and I chose Digital Society, as technology is taking over every aspect of our lives.

What surprised me the most was the variety of topics that I hadn’t considered would play a role in a Digital Society, as I have learnt about issues around interconnectedness, the Internet of Things, Smart Cities, online identity, ethics, and engagement. I had never before thought about my online identity and engagement in such a way, and so the course was more than what I had expected it to be, as it made me think differently about how the online world operates. The topic on identity and ethics was very interesting as it is so relevant today, being aware of how we each present ourselves online. The look into the ethics of data breaching also made me think about what I consider morally right and wrong. I was interested in deepening my knowledge on the ethics of new technologies and the way in which they are incorporated in smart cities, hence my choice of theme in this report.

A specific turning point during the course for me personally was when we learned about the Internet of Things, as I had never heard this phrase before. I would like to learn even more about the Internet of Things and I will achieve this by further researching around the topic in my own free time. At the start of this course my knowledge about digital society was constructed around social media, but now I realise that was just a small part of the digital world we live in.

One challenge that I overcame was learning how to use Medium and writing in the style of a blog, as I had never done this before. For the first time in my life I was producing something that was being published online. By the end of this course I was able to reference images properly and write in blog style, something which I found challenging at first. I will now use these skills in the future, as I found I really enjoy this style of writing.

The whole course has broadened my understanding beyond the usual issues of oversharing on social media and now I am able to see how hackers work and how my data is being analysed and stored. I am excited to see how smart cities will develop in the future and how the world will adjust to automation and other technological advances. Through exploring these themes I have developed my analytical and writing skills, something which I will be able to utilise in future work.
['Anastasia K']
['Smart Cities', 'Digisoc3', 'Digisoc']