Smart cities are decades away: but open cities are within reach

Cities are being sold a vision of ‘smart’, but the reality is that truly interconnected, data-driven, technology-enhanced cities are likely to still be decades away. We are, therefore, at a crucial stage: an opportunity to change course to a more open future

We are going to start with a disclaimer: ‘smart cities’ do not yet exist. Cities may be described as smart, or make self proclamations of their smartness. They may have run or implemented individual pilots and projects – as 51% of European Union cities (with 100,000 residents or more) have – but no city has yet demonstrated that they have managed to connect these projects together.

Cities are complex. City authorities are responsible for managing an elaborate ecosystem of sectors and people – in transport, planning, energy, emergency services and more – while balancing economic, political and societal pressures. They face problems such as providing housing, stimulating business, increasing jobs, tackling climate change, reducing crime, keeping the streets clean and managing the transport system.

This complexity is precisely what makes cities so appealing to big companies – such as IBM, Huawei,Philips, Nokia, Siemens. They are contributing to the growing tide of hype-ridden information being published encouraging cities to become smart by revolutionising their ‘nervous system’; selling the idea that tech, data and connection can solve cities’ most fundamental problems.

Cities are therefore expanding their use of data – across the data spectrum – about everything from transport to movement of people, energy usage, crime, infrastructure, weather etc. The collection, storage, analysis and use of this type of data is not new, but smart technologies (such as internet-of-things (IoT) sensors, apps or tech-enabled services) enable it to happen at a far greater speed and scale than ever before.

This may sound great, but in reality the goals of tech companies and city authorities, and the needs of citizens, do not always align. As author Ben Green stated in ‘The Smart Enough City’: ‘…contrary to the fables told by smart city proponents, technology creates little value on its own—it must be thoughtfully embedded within municipal governance structures’.

Without an alignment of priorities, the implementation of tech solutions may fail to address underlying issues in society which can make their usage unfair, unequal and sometimes unethical. It also raises questions related to issues of privacy, surveillance, ownership and control of data, digital rights, solutionism and power structures. We need only look at the ongoing and very live debate in Toronto about Sidewalk Labs to see what happens when all of these issues come to a head.

The reality is that truly interconnected, data-driven, technology-enhanced cities are likely to still be decades away. We are, therefore, at a crucial stage: where there is the opportunity for a more open future.

To be clear, smart cities are not automatically bad – this is not the conclusion you should draw from this blog.