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A languishing brownfield site. A developer’s visions of castles in the sky. Corporate partnerships to build cutting-edge smart city infrastructure. And the promise of luring tech giants prepared to invest billions.
The hype could have easily described Sidewalk Labs’ now-aborted Toronto venture, but this story actually played out near Boston, on a decommissioned air base in Weymouth, about half an hour southwest of a city known for its Ivy League colleges and the booming tech industry spawned by MIT.
When LStar Ventures, a North Carolina developer, began building Union Point in the mid-2010s on that base, it looked a lot like many generic master-planned edge-city projects. But a partnership LStar established with General Electric in 2017 promised much more: not just a fully wired community, but intelligent lighting, autonomous vehicles, green energy ‘micro-grids,’ and streets fitted out with sensors that would gauge traffic, locate parking spots, and even alert police if gunshots are detected.
As the New York Times noted in a 2018 profile of the project, ‘General Electric will use Union Point as a laboratory for testing new products and as a showroom for working systems.’ It could have been describing Sidewalk.
LStar and Weymouth officials were so bullish they felt Union Point was a shoo-in to be chosen as Amazon’s second headquarters, a strange urban beauty contest that drew bids from cities across North America, including Toronto. As Kyle Corkum, LStar’s managing partner, told the Boston Business Journal, ‘I feel sorry for the rest of the competition in the United States, because, honest to God, I have a hard time imagining another site that can score the way we’re going to score.’
Amazon, of course, ended up choosing New York (which promptly changed its mind), and the rest of LStar’s Union Point vision soon collapsed in a cloud of recriminations, lawsuits, and complaints from residents who couldn’t even buy a cup of coffee in their cutting-edge smart city because there were no cafés. Weymouth authorities took desperate measures to push out LStar, even blocking sewer hookups. In January 2021, Toronto office developer Brookfield was chosen to take over the languishing project.
As a critical McGill University study published in the journal Cities concluded, ‘Union Point represents an example of how smart city rhetoric seduced local officials who were dazzled by the possibility of having an instantly lucrative, tech-focused “smart” city, with little awareness of the underwhelming antecedents and the many potential costs to their constituents.’
While much of the public and media attention focused on smart city technology tends to involve data, privacy, and space-age applications, the Union Point saga hints at a larger story, about the proliferation of tabula rasa, master-planned smart city development projects. These are typically promoted by national or regional governments in partnership with tech multinationals like Cisco and IBM, as well as global consultants, such as McKinsey, Accenture, and the Big Four accounting giants.
Sidewalk Labs, Union Point, and a Bill Gates–backed venture in Arizona known as Belmont are among the handful of North American examples. Many more have sprung up or are being proposed in the Global South, where national governments, besotted with the prospect of foreign direct investment and public-private partnership, have promoted explicitly utopian smart city strategies intended, in some cases, to end-run the messy and often anarchic world of the developing world’s teeming megacities. China, for instance, is planning to build five hundred smart cities in coming years (Das 2020). According to Ayona Datta, a University College of London geographer who has researched India’s one hundred smart cities ‘mission,’ ‘[s]mart cities are part of the dreams and aspirations of “success” of a young urban population who are … “[p]roducts and promoters of globalization.”’
Sarah Moser, an associate professor of geography at McGill, is one of the leading experts in the emergence of these new cities, which have also cropped up in places like Ecuador, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Many share key traits: state-of-the-art security, management contracts with private firms, and intensive sales efforts meant to woo property investors and tech firms. At least one – King Abdullah Economic City, in Saudi Arabia – is a publicly traded company. International consulting firms like McKinsey and Deloitte are involved in the promotion and planning of these places. Some tabula rasa smart cities in Africa are part of China’s ‘new silk road’ strategy. ‘We’re seeing it all over the global south,’ says Moser, noting that government officials often fall for the glitzy sales presentations because their digital literacy is ‘shockingly low.’ ‘These are private cities being developed for a million people.’
The master-planned smart city industry is being driven by a number of factors, including investors’ search for profits and the tech sector’s drive to secure new markets. ‘Like other trending labels used to promote urban developments such as “green” or “eco,” the “smart” city tag is fluid, ambiguous, and intimately tied to the rise of entrepreneurial urbanization,’ Moser has observed (Rebentisch et al. 2020). But as she and other researchers have found, many fall well short of the utopian hype, take far longer to build than anticipated, and sometimes need to be scaled back or simply fail. Still, she adds, the emergence of this development-plus-technology-plus-data model has raised tough questions about the emergence of heavily monitored and quasi-privatized new cities in the twenty-first century.
Scholars of urban utopianism often point to a pair of places that exemplify the modernist – and post-colonial – impulse to build cities from scratch.
One is Brasilia, the national capital of Brazil, a master-planned city that was carved out of the western highlands and completed in 1960. Its modernist institutional architecture, much of it the work of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, as well as its meticulously geometric urban plan and slab apartments inspired by Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, were intended to reflect the country’s forward-looking political aspirations.
The other is an earlier Le Corbusier project – the City of Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, planned and built out in the years immediately following India’s independence. ‘Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was determined that this new city should project an image of modernity and progress,’ according to a history of the project published by Arch Daily (Fiederer 2018). After the two presiding architects quit, Le Corbusier was brought in, and he put his signature style on both the grid-oriented urban plan, with its wide boulevards, and the city’s bold, modernist architecture.
Diganta Das, an associate professor of geography with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, points out that post-independence India staked its social and economic future on urbanization. But in the neo-liberal climate of the 1990s, the national government rebranded its goal as ‘entrepreneurial urbanism, ‘which meant a much stronger emphasis on technology, modern infrastructure, and private investment.
In the early 2010s, when India emerged as an economic powerhouse in the Global South, a highly controversial regional politician moved to double down on these developments by pledging to create a smart city in Dholera, a village in a low-lying and predominantly agricultural region between Mumbai and Delhi in the state of Gujarat, in western India. Narendra Modi, then the chief minister for Gujarat, came up with a plan to build a state-of-the-art metropolis fitted out with a new airport, all the necessary information and communications technology, and newly constructed municipal services. The goal, according to the developer’s website, is to build ‘the most ambitious infrastructure development project which aims to make Dholera a global manufacturing hub.’ Datta says the government’s master plan for the region, which would be connected to both Mumbai and Delhi with modern transportation infrastructure, position it as a kind of ‘all-encompassing utopia of a future city.’
Despite his claims to be a modernizer, Modi had a deeply troubled political past. In early 2002, anti-Muslim rioting broke out in Gujarat after a train filled with Hindu pilgrims was set on fire, killing dozens. Thousands of people died in sectarian rioting, the vast majority of them Muslims, many killed in horrific ways by Hindu extremists. Modi, who rose to power as a Hindu nationalist and promoted privatization in office, ‘offered no consolation to the state’s Muslims and expressed satisfaction with his government’s performance,’ according to a New York Times report, which cited sources who described the rioting as a ‘state-sponsored pogrom’ (Dugger 2002).
While Western governments condemned Modi and many (including Canada) cut ties, he was never indicted by a court and went on to be elected prime minister in 2014. Soon after taking office, Modi extended his smart cities strategy beyond Gujarat to the entire country: he established a plan for India to build 100 such places, ostensibly to improve living standards, attract employers, and boost the economy.14 Some observers saw these moves as Modi’s bid to refashion himself as a visionary builder willing to act decisively, notes Datta. The decades-long program was estimated to cost $150 billion.
Needless to say, Modi did not dream up the smart cities program on his own. Global firms like McKinsey, IBM, and Cisco, the networking giant, were actively promoting smart city/big data technologies for transportation, security, and infrastructure to Indian officials. Their pitch was slick and compelling. ‘Through these corporate connections, advertisements, glossy images, and websites with captivating presentations and templates, governments and agencies could be seduced by neoliberal ways of looking for urban solutions through “best practices,”’ observes Das. ‘With “smart cities” being the jargon for an all-encompassing solution for the urban world and its increasing popularity in the Global South, developing 100 smart cities therefore became the ultimate panacea for India’s multi-pronged urban challenges.’
Cisco, in particular, had made a big bet on promoting smart city systems – which of course depended on the company’s fibre-optic networks and routers – elsewhere in the region: South Korea. In fact, the oft-cited prototype of the master-planned smart city has been rising from a former tidal flat just off the Yellow Sea port of Incheon, South Korea, since the mid-2000s. Known as Songdo, this corporate metropolis, now home to over 90,000 people and hundreds of businesses, is a multi-billion-dollar joint venture between a South Korean economic development region, the Boston-based developer Gale International, and Cisco. The Silicon Valley firm had begun promoting itself as a builder of ‘smart and connected communities’ in 2009, according to a detailed 2013 study on ‘test-bed urbanism’ published in Public Culture. (The four authors, Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch, study AI, management, architecture, and innovation history, respectively at universities in Canada, Spain, and Germany.)
From the beginning, Songdo was envisioned as a state-of-the-art city that would be fitted out with high-speed digital networks and a range of sustainability features, including LEED-certified green buildings, bike paths, rapid transit access, and a pneumatic waste-disposal system linked to a high-tech incinerator and recycling facility that eliminates the need for garbage trucks. As the developer boasted, it’s an approach to ‘future proofing Asian cities the smart way.’
Today, satellite campuses of four international universities are located in Songdo. But the streets have a generic corporate feel one finds in many rapidly developing high-rise districts, among them Mississauga City Centre and Toronto’s South Core. The early buzz around Songdo has abated, as media reports have surfaced in recent years quoting residents complaining about the area’s seeming emptiness. ‘More than a decade on from its inception and the city is less than a quarter full,’ observed a 2018 report in This Week in Asia.
Aesthetics and investment aside, perhaps the most notable element of the Songdo experiment involves its governance. As the Public Culture authors noted, the area’s services are managed through a public-private partnership that includes Cisco, various Korean municipal agencies, and other firms, with residents and businesses purchasing services on a pay-as-you-go model. ‘Cisco hopes that this will make for both a more profitable and a more effective way of developing new technology around its smart and connected communities projects.’ The municipality, they add, sees this business model as a way of financing services.
Sarah Moser, at McGill, also explains that the Korean government has positioned Songdo as a kind of integrated export product for other regions thinking about building smart cities from scratch. Government officials from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America regularly come to Songdo for ‘policy tours,’ she says. ‘Korea is selling their model of smart cities to places that can’t do it on their own.’
Some 4,500 kilometres to the south, Forest City, a strikingly similar master-planned enclave, is rising on four man-made islands just off the coast of Singapore, which has also branded itself as ‘a smart nation.’ (The island city state ranks first in the world in a Smart City ranking published by a consortium of universities.) The venture, launched in 2006 and described in its sales materials as a ‘smart and green futuristic city,’ is backed by the Chinese government and Chinese developers. It is meant to someday become home to 700,000 people. Moser describes Forest City as something of a high-tech gated community – a ‘neocolonial outpost’ situated on a strategically critical shipping route linked to China’s ‘Belt and Road initiative’ (‘Forest City Overview’ n.d.).
Though Forest City is nominally part of Malaysia, Moser says the national government has ‘granted extraordinary and unprecedented concessions of sovereignty’ to the co-developer, Country Garden Group, a Chinese mega-builder that generated sales of US$67 billion in 2021. ‘[It] is a completely private city with no publicly provided services,’ she concluded in a 2018 paper. ‘Education, health care, securities, utilities, management, and so on are all privatized and cater to Chinese nationals.’
Songdo and Forest City are long-term development plays, with a build-out horizon measured in decades. But despite aggressive marketing to potential investors, both have suffered from sluggish sales, a trend exacerbated by the pandemic (Liu 2021). What’s more, Forest City, characterized by one recent academic study as ‘speculative green urbanism,’ has become a kind of lightning rod, as some accounts laud the developers for getting off to a quick start and others dismiss it as a ‘useless megaproject.’ (Recent photos and Google Street View images depict dense clusters of high-rise buildings and luxury resorts, but very few people (Koh et al. 2021).)
However, the delays facing Songdo and Forest City pale in comparison to the problems that have dragged down India’s smart city plan. Early on, in Gujarat, the Dholera smart city venture – estimated to cost US$9–$10 billion, with contributions from the government and several large Japanese corporations – became tangled in India’s archaic land laws. Even though the government passed new legislation intended to exempt Dholera’s smart city and rclassify it as a ‘special investment region,’ lower-caste rural farmers, worried they’d be muscled off their land without compensation, successfully challenged the project in the courts (Das 2020, 70).
Datta points out that Modi’s grand plan for building a globally connected Gujarat turned on simply circumnavigating the region’s congested urban areas, with all their entrenched social pressures and inadequate infrastructure. She also notes that the tactic of dispossessing poor rural residents can be traced back to the colonial era and British land-acquisition laws. Other experts who have scrutinized India’s smart city ambitions have noticed similar ironies, but note that the new colonialists are tech corporations and giant developers whose boosters in state and national governments are more than happy to preside over the creation of quasi-privatized new cities where traditional municipal authorities have been shunted to the sidelines.15
‘India’s [smart city mission] intends to move forward with its trusted corporate partners at the city level, while adopting technology to solve city crises,’ concludes Das. ‘However, not much deliberate effort has been made in citizen engagement at various levels and tackling the existing range of inequalities; instead, efforts are redirected towards making smarter citizens’ (Das 2020, 74).
In the urban regions of the Global North, the smart city industry has tended to focus on more surgical interventions, with large tech firms and start-ups alike aiming to sell systems and hardware that can replace older gear, such as traffic control centres, with digital, wireless solutions. However, the speculative megaprojects involving land reclamation or sprawling greenfield tech hubs situated well away from existing cities are much less common.
Perhaps the most notable can be found on the west side of midtown Manhattan, the gleaming cluster of glass high-rises known as Hudson Yards. Constructed during the 2010s on top of an 11.3-hectare rail yard in a long-neglected industrial zone, the US$25 billion megaproject has been characterized as America’s first fully ‘quantified community,’ a collection of ultramodern structures that are fully wired, fitted out with extensive networks of digital sensors, and operated by hidden infrastructure systems, including pneumatic waste chutes and an on-site co-generation plant. All of it is intended to produce torrents of data that can be analyzed in order to do everything from improving the energy efficiency of buildings to developing apps for people who live and work in the area.
Architectural giant Kohn Pedersen Fox created the project’s master plan; the firm, not coincidentally, drew up the Songdo blueprint. The complex serves as the head office for Sidewalk Labs, whose now-retired founder, Dan Doctoroff, was heavily involved in the development approvals when he served as New York deputy mayor. In many ways, Hudson Yards can be seen as the most direct inspiration for Sidewalk’s plans for Quayside in Toronto – another brownfield site situated at the edge of downtown, waiting to be massively intensified.
It was initially pitched as a self-financing development project. But Hudson Yards’ builders, Related Companies and Oxford Properties, benefited greatly from direct and indirect subsidies served up by New York City under former mayor Mike Bloomberg, according to a 2015 evaluation by Bridget Fisher, an economist with the New School for Social Research. The project also reaped hundreds of millions from the proceeds of a federal visa program intended to direct offshore investment to low-income areas, according to investigative reporting published by Bloomberg CityLab.
Smart city scholar Shannon Mattern, who has scrutinized Hudson Yards, observes that the project’s ‘embedded’ data infrastructure meshed well with Bloomberg’s outlook. ‘[His] belief in the power of data shaped his initiatives,’ she commented in Places Journal, adding that the mayor’s signature moves included building a science and engineering campus and establishing the Center for Urban Science and Progress, a Brooklyn-based think tank dedicated to exploring city data. Indeed, as she notes, CUSP forged a partnership with Related/Oxford that would allow its researchers to slice and dice Hudson Yard’s voluminous data as a way of testing ‘new physical and informatics technologies and analytics capabilities.’
The finished product, for all its size and glitz, is underwhelming as a new part of a city that embodies the idea of urban sense of place. The architecture is monumental, antiseptic, and, in the case of the giant sculptural object known as the ‘Vessel’ situated in the middle of the Yards, weird. Apart from a few hundred affordable rental apartments, the entire project is skewed toward the highest of the high-end – brand-name luxury shops, the offices of corporate behemoths, and luxury condos.
New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman offered a scathing review of what he deemed to be little more than a very expensive suburban office park designed by global-trotting starchitects: ‘With its focus on the buildings’ shiny envelopes, on the monotony of reflective blue glass and the sheen of polished wood, brass, leather, marble and stone, Hudson Yards glorifies a kind of surface spectacle – as if the peak ambitions of city life were consuming luxury goods and enjoying a smooth, seductive, mindless materialism.’ The entire undertaking, he concluded, ‘gives physical form to a crisis of city leadership’ (Kimmelman 2019).
Nor does it seem to be especially smart. As with other such megaprojects, the quality-of-life benefits from Hudson Yard’s heavily hyped investment in data gathering have yet to be realized. ‘We’re thinking about that digital infrastructure, then data and sensors as a way to collect information about how the neighborhood functions and the environmental surroundings,’ Constantine Kontokosta, the New York University planning and engineering expert leading CUSP’s work with Hudson Yards, told Metropolis Magazine. ‘There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to connect the two … The reality is, nobody has demonstrated on the ground that they’ve used technology in such a way that the average person has actually benefited’ (Nonko 2019).
14. Interestingly, the worldwide peak for Google searches of the phrase ‘smart city’ occurred not long after India announced its one hundred cities plan.
15. Many parts of Africa have witnessed similar speculative real estate activity in recent years as state and national governments have sought to attract investment to modern satellite cities, some of which are branded as innovation hubs, such as Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, a greenfield project southeast of Nairobi that markets itself with sales claims and visuals that are indistinguishable from large-scale development plays at the edges of any North American city. Chinese state and private investors are also very active in these ventures.