Making the Spaces of Cities Smarter: Why cities should embrace the digital public realm
Smart cities have long been discussed as conceptual ideas for how cities should be and what they could do. Rarely is the concept broken down into something that provides substantive meaning to the average city-dweller. Indeed ‘smartness’ for many, is far removed from their everyday life, rather just a hidden network of sensors and connectors.
Despite now being a central part of urban development, underground networks of cables; a series of masts; and the overhauling of local government IT systems continue to bed the bedrock of smartness, preventing it from feeling as tangible as other city development catalysts such as master-planning or regeneration projects. Here it’s asked how this might change when the public realm — parks, streets and civic spaces — become the experienced spaces of smartness?
The digital public realm brings the concept of smart into the reality of day-to-day life, providing a physical and lived manifestation of smartness. However for many, the digital public realm is still something to be cautious of, and there are important questions about the implications of ubiquitous private devices on the publicness of space, or the erosion of civic life through a dependence on digital technology. But done right, the digital public realm is the perfect antidote to the failures of the ‘smart city’ that has come before, encouraging dwell time in public places and spaces, supporting engagement and civic participation, improving public service delivery and bringing about tangible benefits for a city’s people.
Connecting people to places Improved connectivity is one way in which digital technologies in the public realm can improve people’s experience of cities. High quality — and where possible, free — public Wi-Fi can create opportunities for urban residents far beyond those that had existed before. And where those connections are precisely in the public realm, rather than coffee shops or private businesses, space becomes repurposed for contemporary urban life, whilst increasing the inclusivity of digital connectivity.
One example of this repurposing of public space is in Havanawhere, two years ago, the Cuban state telecoms provider introduced Wi-Fi hotspots to public spaces. In a place almost wholly offline for so long, public connection has transformed communications and contact with those off the island, whilst also increasing the publicness of spaces, bringing tens even hundreds of people into the city’s parks.
Yet connectivity as part of a digital public realm is not just a benefit reserved for places without widespread connection. In New York City, the fifth most connected city in the world, LinkNYC has created connectivity corridors across five boroughs. The connectivity provided by more than 1700 Links has allowed more than 5 million users to connect for free to the country’s fastest, most robust public fibre network. Through this service, LinkNYC has supported people in accessing charities, using council services, and even applying for jobs.
In the cases of both New York City and Havana, the public spaces in which these new activities can occur take on new, more prominent meanings for residents. And this is a mark of great public spaces — adapting and responding to the changing needs and desires of communities.
Having high quality connectivity in the public realm enables more sophisticated digital public realm interventions to emerge, many of which provide ‘connection’ to place in a softer sense. Calvium are one organisation taking advantage of improved connectivity with their app-based experiences that draw on AR, 3D sound, and haptic technologies. Calvium have harnessed these technologies to bring communities into regeneration processes for example at Porth Teigr in Cardiff, or build a sense-of-place through digital-physical journeys of history and heritage, such as in Battersea Power Station in London.
