A New Smart City Model Is Emerging

IBM got the ball rolling a decade ago when it began suggesting that emerging technologies could dramatically change the way cities served their populations. A new wave of sensors, meters, data collection and data processing tools: All these would come together to radically change the urban landscape, to create what came to be known as the “smart city.”

It was a grand vision, a sweeping ambition. “From a technology perspective it was about everything being interconnected and intelligent,” said Jennifer Belissent, principal analyst with Forrester. “Everything would be sensor enabled, there would be data generated by everything around the city and that would make everything smart.”

That vision continues to play out, but not as first formulated. The biggest technology vendors of smart city systems have followed their customers in a trend toward more modest goals. Instead of the sweeping overhaul first envisioned, today’s smart city initiatives are evolving on a far more modest scale. How did all this change come about, where are smart cities today, and where are we heading?

City managers had good reason to believe they could radically reshape their processes. Resources had emerged in the IT world unlike any seen before. “The assumption when we started out was that, with unlimited compute and storage and bandwidth — would you run a city the same way? Would you run education and water and waste management the same? No you wouldn’t,” said Anil Menon, president of the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities program.

It was all going to happen at once. Parking management, highway traffic flow, water management. Toxicity sensors would alert for water gone bad. Capacity sensors would tell us when it was time to empty the trash.

It is perhaps not difficult to understand why city managers would have been drawn to a smart city program that offered sweeping changes. We had advanced analytics available as needed, enough to reroute traffic on the fly or to guide emergency response. We had the tools to achieve a new level of collaborative decision-making.

At the same time, changes in the social fabric were pushing city leaders to take action on a big scale, with a growing demand for transparency and accountability. Citizens meanwhile were tapping into a rich vein of technology in their own lives, as they came to understand the potential of the new tools. As they began to see what the technologies could do, they started to expect improvements in the way the urban ecosystem was run.

Some IT vendors were ready and willing to encourage what has been called the “boil the ocean” approach. “We already had expertise in our organization around government administration solutions, around public safety solutions, health care and education,” said Kathryn Willson, program director for the Microsoft CityNext initiative. While technical people across departments were still seeking stovepipe solutions, Microsoft encouraged them to seek bigger things.

When Microsoft launched CityNext on a modest scale in 2013, the press was still predicting big things. “This sort of efficiency could not only save lives during an emergency but also drive day-to-day savings that total millions, and perhaps even billions, of dollars over time,” read one news report.

Today few cities are talking about savings in the billions. Projects have been scaled back. The scope of potential change no longer sprawls across the urban landscape, but rather is limited to more targeted ambitions. What has changed?

The scaling back of the grand vision began, as so often happens, with money. “With the financial crisis, we were seeing businesses closing, we were seeing foreclosures, and for most municipalities that meant a sharp reduction in the budget,” Belissent said. The capital-intensive IT infrastructure projects needed to launch smart city investing suddenly seemed less viable.