Common knowledge assures us that cities can’t be built in a day. Well, not if so-called geopolitical innovators have anything to do with it.
It seems that everywhere you turn, a new high-tech promised land is popping up. Last month, Chinese e-commerce conglomerate JD.com even opened a dedicated research institute specifically to “facilitate the development of ‘smart city’ construction.” This time, by promising hoards of use of AI and blockchain technologies of course, because 2018.
The goals of these smart-city programs, like most other development programs, is to create an urban area that provides a high quality of life for residents and generates increased economic growth. The “smart” part is that it does that with the help of data collection, using technology to move cities toward modern standards of transit efficiency, public safety, and overall convenience.
According to IESE Business School’s Center for Globalization and Strategy’s index, a city’s “smartness” is determined by nine major characteristics, such as technology-based infrastructure like digitally backed train times, environmental initiatives, a strong sense of urban planning, a highly functioning transit system, and actual humans to live and work there and use these resources (a more common problem than you might imagine).
“The fundamental concept of smart cities has to do with connectivity and functionality of basic public services, more so than flashy consumer-facing tech products,” explains Garry Golden, a consultant with the research group FutureThink, where he advises companies on the future of infrastructure.
In other words, it’s not so much about “disruptive” Wi-Fi-enabled shuttle buses, but how a metropolis promises to deal with evolving transportation and transit data, safety, sewage, traffic patterns and the like. “Part of the smart-city planning approach is local government seeing itself as a platform of sort to its residents, allowing others like start-ups or corporations to come in and provide everyday services, such as ride shares, to solve the last-mile problem or affordable housing infrastructure,” says Golden.
Golden says that typical smart cities will often depend on contractors to replace public services, for example, having Uber help solve the last-mile problem.
Even as far back as 2013, Smart Cities author Anthony Townsend told NPR that while there is concern over handing urban planning to the tech industry, a smart city’s success relies on a strong partnership between government (along with its bureaucracy and regulations) and the private sector’s innovation efforts. This is because the work to maintain digital, data-driven systems often happens outside of town hall. If a city is looking to improve its most congested streets, it might use cameras from one company, sensors from another, and a cloud server from a third. Contractors may be hired to analyze that data and report it back to the city, which then might hire an app-development company to come up with a solution. If that solution is something like traffic-light countdown clocks, that company is going to have to stay a part of the system for when its software needs updating. The path to “smart city” starts looking less like a single project and more like a web of partnerships.
“The way that these projects are structured is that these companies don’t just build a system like you would build a road, like a contractor would build a road, and then hand it over to the city to operate and maintain. They stay involved,” Townsend said to NPR. “Essentially, a city is outsourcing all its operations.”
And as with other tech innovation within the past few decades, smart cities’ effects go beyond their physical borders. Similarly, the surge in autonomous and electric vehicles’ rise has pushed their ramifications to spread wider than just decreasing car ownership.
