As Smart Cities Become Our Norm, We Must Be Smart About a Data Strategy

Canadians’ attention has been drawn to the issue of smart cities by the public debate over the merits of Sidewalk Labs’ proposed Quayside development in Toronto. The project brings home a vision of cities embedded with sensors that continuously harvest data about infrastructure and human activity alike.

The intense discussions that have broken out around the Quayside project give the impression that smart cities are something new in Canada. They aren’t. Although a from-the-ground-up smart development is new, municipalities across the country have been adopting, on an incremental basis, a range of technologies that gather data about infrastructure and about human activity. Cities or their private sector partners may also use sophisticated analytics to draw meaning from these data.

Today, GPS systems on public transit vehicles give planners insights for route management while at the same time allowing for the development of tools for riders that predict transit vehicle arrival times. Tap-and-go transit cards collect data that provide insight into ridership patterns; at the same time, the data may be shared with law enforcement officials seeking to trace the movements of specific individuals. Police services have been adopting predictive policing technologies to enable them to anticipate where crime is likely to occur and when.

These are only a few examples of smart technologies that have found their way into our cities. While these technologies are not as seamlessly integrated with one another as in the vision for Quayside, they are manifestations of the apparently irreversible trend to use big data and analytics both to identify urban problems and to solve them. This trend will only be amplified by the spiralling growth of artificial intelligence. Because of their incremental adoption, these initiatives have not attracted the governance debates that enfold Quayside—but perhaps they should.

The evolving vision of the smart city sees urban data as a resource that can be used by many actors, including all levels of government, the private sector, and researchers.