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One morning in October 2017, I was working on my laptop in a local coffee shop when I noticed a new follower on my Twitter account: @SidewalkToronto. When I clicked through, the Sidewalk Toronto website offered breezy watercolour maps and sketches of city street scenes, plus links to information about a new waterfront project for something called Quayside.
I’m not sure why this moment sticks in my memory, but I do recall thinking that the visuals and feel of the site suggested something savvy, urban, and not at all corporate, or at least not like the hard-sell dream-state renderings served up by preening condo and office developers. Even the name – Sidewalk Labs – felt fresh, a confection of Jane Jacobs (‘the ballet of the sidewalk’) and the serendipitous vibe of a more innocent time in the world of tech.
Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Over the next several months, Sidewalk and its coterie of Canadian lobbyists and advisors rolled out an impressively choreographed reveal, capped by a joint public appearance by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Google chair Eric Schmidt. The debut included ‘public consultations’ in large halls filled with ‘volunteers’ wearing blue T-shirts, stagey panel discussions, stage-managed media interviews, meticulously pre-negotiated endorsements from local luminaries, and slick multimedia presentations. As launches go, it could scarcely have been more corporate: a Silicon Valley take on street cred.
Among its other duties, Waterfront Toronto, the public agency tasked with revitalizing the city’s brownfield lakefront lands, regularly selects private-sector entities that have bid on the rights to develop parcels within its planning jurisdiction. But none had ever been welcomed with this kind of song and dance. What’s more, Sidewalk hadn’t even been selected as the winning proponent in a request for proposals (RFP); it had merely won the right to develop a so-called ‘master innovation and development plan’ for Quayside, a mostly vacant 12-acre site dominated by an abandoned grain silo. Even though its board would eventually be asked to sign off on the proposal, Waterfront Toronto officials were already talking about the company with terms of endearment like ‘joint venture’ and partnership, as if the whole thing was a done deal.
Though it ran to well over a hundred pages, Sidewalk’s preliminary proposal had two noteworthy details: first, that the company planned to fit out this new precinct with all manner of automation and sensor technology designed to cull as much data from the neighbourhood as it would yield. That information, in turn, would be made available to other software companies and start-ups intent on developing smart city applications – a process Sidewalk described as building a neighbourhood ‘from the internet up.’
The concept was not unlike the principle that underwrites the smart phone: the device itself is merely a technology ‘platform’ for downloadable apps that are created by other entities, from retailers to governments to coders who have invented an addictive digital game. In Sidewalk’s case, the platform would be a corner of the waterfront – Quayside – while the word ‘Lab’ was a nod to the open-ended and experimental nature of this novel approach to smart cities – a phrase, incidentally, that Sidewalk conspicuously avoided. Sidewalk’s explicit goal was to invite entrepreneurs, start-ups, and established software developers to find novel uses, or apps, for all the raw data the company planned to collect within Quayside’s borders.
The other noteworthy detail about Sidewalk’s pitch to Waterfront Toronto is that while the plan ostensibly focused on Quayside, a relatively small space, the company’s documents were filled with references to the much larger 715-acre brownfield site known as the Port Lands, a derelict and heavily contaminated corner of the waterfront built by lake-filling in the 1910s. The frequent mentions of what Sidewalk described as the Eastern Waterfront suggested the company’s ambitions extended well beyond Quayside – something Waterfront Toronto had encouraged the company to think about as it developed its long-term smart city plan. All told, Sidewalk’s proposal represented a huge land grab. The fact that the firm offered $50 million in no-strings cash, regardless of whether Waterfront Toronto eventually gave Sidewalk’s smart city plan the go-ahead, further underscored the scale of the company’s ambitions. That point, raised by various critics and reporters (myself included), turned out to be an exposed nerve.
Sidewalk’s gambit set off a highly polarizing political maelstrom that extended well beyond the confines of Toronto’s waterfront, or even the city itself. Its launch garnered global media attention, as could be expected of a company with deep ties to both Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The coverage of Sidewalk’s plans turned up in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Bloomberg, among others. Academics from around the world embarked on dozens of critical studies of the project. Anti–big tech grassroots activists from around the world sprang into action, as did deep-pocketed tech veterans like Blackberry co-founder Jim Balsillie, who, from his rural redoubt in Guelph, orchestrated a multi-front fight to jam Sidewalk’s gears.
The company, in turn, lined up an impressive cheering section of local ex-politicians, planners, architects, lawyers, consultants, academics, local advocacy groups, and think tanks in an effort to ingratiate itself to the city’s powerbrokers and, ultimately, the Waterfront Toronto board of directors. It held numerous town halls and ‘consultation’ sessions that felt more like somewhat patronizing discussions of urban issues than focused presentations on aspects of Sidewalk’s plan. The company hosted open houses in a funky former warehouse space located near the Quayside site. But when Sidewalk’s top officials encountered media coverage they didn’t like, they pushed back hard, an elbows-out stance that had the feel of New York’s pugilistic street politics.
Along the way, Waterfront Toronto, a generally well-regarded public sector agency founded in 2002, found itself in the crosshairs of Sidewalk’s growing contingent of critics, who accused its senior officials of getting into bed with a tech giant well before the board and city council had had a chance to weigh in. As the controversy spread, Waterfront Toronto was forced to appoint an independent advisory panel to vet Sidewalk’s evolving plans. As the months passed, a top Waterfront Toronto official was forced to resign, a Sidewalk privacy advisor quit, a damning auditor’s report surfaced, and secret documents were leaked to the press. Members of Toronto council, increasingly uneasy with allegations that the city was allowing one of the world’s richest companies – Alphabet at the time had cash reserves in excess of US$100 billion – to help itself to a swath of waterfront, began pushing for more oversight, as well as veto power over Sidewalk’s final proposal.
It was not a coincidence that the blowback coincided with revelations about Cambridge Analytica, the political data-mining consultancy that gained access to huge tranches of Facebook user information and passed it along to Donald Trump’s campaign.
By the time Sidewalk pulled the plug on its Toronto plans, in the spring of 2020, there could be little doubt that the bright aura of progressive digital innovation that clung to the so-called FAANG giants – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google – had completely vanished. The platform plays (Airbnb, Uber, etc.) had become demonstrably toxic, while the extraordinarily potent algorithmic surveillance capabilities embedded in the commercial foundations of the search and social media giants could no longer be ignored or dismissed.
Sidewalk’s plans on Quayside, and the opportunity to use this one project to test-drive all sorts of emerging urban data technologies, collided head-on with this late-2010s tech-lash. The details of the company’s plans, what’s more, exposed critical gaps in federal and provincial privacy regulations, as well as shortcomings in Canada’s intellectual property laws. Revelations about extensive National Health Service patient record breaches in the U.K. involving another Alphabet/Google subsidiary, DeepMind, provided a bracing case study of how much can go wrong when public sector agencies get into bed with the world’s most voracious data-miner.
One can reasonably ask, however, why Sidewalk’s scheme turned into such a lightning rod, and not just in Toronto. After all, most of us have pawned off our privacy, knowingly or not, through our use of social media platforms, e-commerce sites, streaming services, and so on. Our smart phones constantly transmit precise location information – anonymized data that is fed to navigation apps or used to push online promotions. Our computers are clogged with cookies. While search engines hoover up intimate personal data and sell it to advertisers, we’ve become so utterly dependent on the utility and convenience that the trade-off seems reasonable. Few people can claim that they don’t leave a trail of digital bread crumbs wherever they go, either online or off.
It’s possible that many Torontonians recoiled from Sidewalk’s plans because their ‘solutions’ appeared to have surpassed some kind of digital tipping point, beyond which the intrusive nature of these technologies becomes untenable. The dystopian prospect of panoptic urbanism suggested not only the consolidation of a surveillance society, but also a future in which cities are problematically dependent on the use of sensors, data analytics, and prediction engines to automate or at least drive decisions about civic life, public space, and infrastructure.
The problem wasn’t just about whether Sidewalk’s many sensors would impinge on the privacy of the people who would eventually live, work, or visit Quayside. Sidewalk, to be fair, made numerous public statements about its intention to respect Canadian privacy laws and make use of anonymization technologies. Rather, the company’s longer-term goal lay in aggregating the raw data gathered within Quayside’s public and private spaces, and then inviting software developers to come up with novel ideas for manipulating all that information – ideas that could then be transformed into business models and scaled up globally. A lab.
With or without the adjective ‘smart,’ cities are innovation- saturated spaces teeming with creativity, experimentation, and serendipitous social encounters that spark new ways of thinking and being. So why did Sidewalk’s notion of hiving off one small corner of Toronto and turning it into an urban technology sandbox expose a raw nerve?
Perhaps the answer has something to do with our understanding of cities as self-governing places, certainly subject to the vicissitudes of market forces, immigration, and other powerful influences, but not explicitly curated, much less administered, by private entities with opaque accountabilities.
Although Toronto’s rocky ride with Sidewalk Labs, not to mention the overhyped smart city megaprojects in countries like India and South Korea, raises doubts about the political viability of large smart city schemes, there’s certainly evidence that more focused and better regulated initiatives can deliver the desired city-building goals.
In Hamburg, after a Green/Social Democrat coalition won control of the state parliament in a February 2020 election, the new government moved quickly to launch an ambitious transportation strategy for the fast-growing urban region of 5 million people. ‘We need to change the way mobility is organized in our city,’ Dennis Heinert, a government spokesperson, told me. (The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg has long enjoyed state status in Germany.)
The coalition’s goal was ambitious, and informed by a strong climate imperative: 80 per cent of trips within the city will be via transit, walking, cycling, or other shared modes by 2030 in order to cut private vehicle use and carbon emissions. The plan called for better transit service without fare hikes, a major expansion of the cycling network, and a strategy to load up transit hubs (known as ‘switch points’) with a range of mobility options, such as e-bike rentals, that cover the so-called last mile between transit stations and home or work.
A central feature of the strategy was the concept of an intelligent transportation system, using various smart city technologies to knit all the pieces together. The elements include self-piloted subway trains and autonomous minibuses, and, eventually, a mobility-as-a-service system that allows travellers to book bike or scooter rentals, car pooling trips, or ride shares from a single app.
How will city officials evaluate the components of the ITS? ‘Very easy,’ replied Heinert. ‘Will it help our political goal of the transition of mobility?’ State officials, he continued, will vet the portfolio of mobility technologies in terms of how they promote safer, greener, and more efficient movement within the region. ‘There is no project within this whole ITS which is not working towards those goals.’
The oversight of Hamburg’s mobility-technology game plan isn’t difficult to discern: an election brought in a sustainability-minded coalition, which wants to advance a program that includes a range of technologies, as well as a bureaucratic framework for evaluating those systems. In other words, voters in coming years will be able to judge the coalition’s success.
Governance is a somewhat nebulous term that orbits around the politics of smart city technology, frequently cited but rarely defined with any degree of precision. At the most abstract level, governance is or should be about accountability. How can ordinary people – and the public institutions that act on their behalf – be assured that these emergent technologies deployed in and around cities will do more good than harm? With the dramatic acceleration of pandemic-related service digitization, as well as the continued rapid growth of platform companies, that question has taken on even more saliency.
When Sidewalk Labs revealed its master innovation and development plan for Quayside in June 2019, the hefty four-volume document included a range of governance proposals for how this new smart neighbourhood would be managed. They included several specially created entities – ‘Open Space Alliance,’ ‘Waterfront Transportation Management Association,’ ‘Urban Data Trust’ – with real regulatory power and nebulous financing arrangements and ties to Sidewalk Labs, but unclear relationships to the municipal agencies (i.e., the public) that perform core tasks like waste or transportation management. The proposals drew sharp criticism, with the city and Waterfront Toronto swiftly shooting down any notion that Sidewalk’s experimental community would be allowed to write its own rules.
So what are we talking about when we talk about smart city governance?
One way to think about this problem is to unpack the layers of governance baked into two very common categories of objects in the public realm: bridges and buildings. Like many of the data or digital devices discussed in this series, both can be seen as systems of engineered technologies, reflecting generations of innovation.
Bridges and buildings designed and constructed by architects, planners, engineers, and contractors who are professionally trained and accredited, as well as legally accountable for the projects they construct. Both are subject to a range of municipal and provincial policies and regulations, from procurement processes to development approvals, zoning bylaws, design codes, budget expenditures, and transportation plans.
These structures typically involve public consultation and political approval. The decision-making processes, in turn, are mostly transparent, thanks to routine disclosure policies and access to information laws. Provincial and federal building codes regulate the materials used and the minimum standards for their assembly. Inspectors monitor construction prior to completion, and then upkeep and structural integrity afterwards. Moreover, the fact that a building is privately controlled doesn’t exempt the owner from most of these governance systems, nor their obligation to pay taxes and adhere to relevant laws and regulations.
It’s also worth noting that with both bridges and buildings, the interface to the public realm isn’t left to chance. Local bridges, needless to say, are never off-limits to general traffic. As for buildings, municipal regulations dictate their aesthetic and logistical relationships to the outside world, even if those connections may be limited by practical necessities such as fences, secured perimeters, and so on. Governance, in other words, is about the wider context as well as accountability.
Smart city technology, clearly, poses very different questions about the nature and form of governance. The devices, software and data, in many cases, are neither tangible nor easily understood. One system may have the potential to do many tasks, some of which have yet to be determined. Data, in turn, is amorphous, fast-moving, and malleable. It may be stored not only outside the city but beyond our national borders. Yet some common themes emerge: an expectation of technical robustness and reliability; the existence of professional standards; and the role of policy and regulation in determining how these systems function, including those that have nothing to do with local government but impact urban spaces. Finally, adequate governance entails some measure of public engagement and approval, which confer on such technologies and their creators the social licence to operate.
As Rutgers’ Ellen Goodman has commented, cities face a crossroads in their ‘embrace of the Internet of Things and “smart city” agendas. Will they do it in ways that give control over city functions and citizen information to private companies and impenetrable algorithms or will there be public control and accountability?’
Many experts point to Barcelona as a model for progressive smart city governance that balances the Catalonian capital’s desire to attract tech investment with other goals, like citizen engagement, privacy, and sustainable development. Barcelona officials began talking about smart city tech in 2011, and the municipal council in 2016 adopted a sweeping ‘Digital City Plan’ designed to ensure that all public services are provided through digital channels. The strategy established a specialized smart city directorate within the municipal government, funding schemes, citizen engagement processes, and a range of technical policies aimed at procurement, data standards, and network architecture.
But Barcelona’s outlook is grounded in values, according to Josep-Ramon Ferrer, the former deputy chief information officer and director of the program. Chief among these is preparing the city for rapid twenty-first-century urbanization while recognizing technology ‘as a facilitator, not a goal in itself.’
Other cities, of course, have adopted these kinds of high-level governance visions, and a growing number have also signed on to even broader pan-urban efforts to ground rapid technology deployment in ethical or humanitarian principles. The Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, launched in 2018 by Barcelona, Amsterdam, and New York, includes metros around the world that have signed on to a declaration calling for improved privacy policies, more accessible internet access, and measures to ensure that residents have the ability to question artificial intelligence or automated decision-making-based systems to ensure they don’t discriminate or perpetuate hidden data biases.
The City of Toronto, in fact, belongs to this coalition (as of June 2019) and began creating its own smart/digital city governance policies, largely in response to the controversy generated by Sidewalk Labs. Municipal officials developed a Digital Infrastructure Plan, which laid out five core guiding principles, including equity and inclusion; effective local government; social, economic, and environmental benefits; privacy and security; and democracy and transparency.
Other GTA municipalities have been working on their own strategies. Mississauga’s smart city master plan, developed in response to a federally sponsored ‘smart city challenge’ competition, includes elements such as ‘living labs’ for showcasing new technologies, parks with free wifi, smart LED street lights, air quality sensors, and the deployment of an AI-powered chatbot on the city’s 311 website. ‘It’s my job to make them stick,’ Anthea Foyer, a sculptor and former digital curator and former lead for Mississauga’s smart city program, told me.
She cited one proposed initiative that bobbed to the surface: the deployment of outdoor digital touch screens with parks-and-recreation listings or other municipal information. The devices, however, come with an additional feature: a built-in facial recognition camera that scans eye movement to determine if users appear to understand the content and how the screens function. Foyer has found herself talking to plenty of vendors. ‘It feels like such a game changer for me,’ she said, noting that the inner workings of such technologies are ‘esoteric and hard to understand.’ She insists, ‘I would want to make sure residents feel comfortable with it.’
The crux of the smart city governance riddle, in fact, has to do with what happens between the lofty vision statements adopted by municipal councils like Barcelona’s and the day-to-day choices made by civil servants like Anthea Foyer.
To get to the point where smart city technology is subject to the type of robust governance that applies to buildings and bridges, governments need to establish a range of policy, legal, and regulatory reforms that allow cities and metropolitan regions to make these investments safely. Such changes, moreover, should also apply to technology vendors and platform companies that provide systems or digital services that impact urban regions.
Privacy Legislation Reform
As critics of the Sidewalk Labs proposal argued, Canada’s privacy laws weren’t equipped to respond to many of the data-gathering and surveillance technologies that fall under the smart city rubric. The federal Liberals in late 2020 introduced legislation, dubbed the Digital Charter Act, that meant to reform national privacy laws with measures to provide individuals with more rights over personal information gathered by companies. (As of early 2022, the legislation had yet to receive royal assent.)
But information technologies such as artificial intelligence tend to advance far faster than public policy, observes Markus D. Dubber, a University of Toronto law professor and director of the Centre for Ethics. For example, even though the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation is seen as the world’s most expansive privacy law, it wasn’t robust enough to halt the use of facial recognition technology. In fact, even before the Clearview controversy broke, a 2019 analysis by Orla Lynskey, a London School of Economics law professor, warned that ‘the protection offered by [the EU] legal framework to those impacted by predictive policing technologies is, at best, precarious.’
Regulatory Procedures
In the way that significant public sector projects, from transit lines to new gas distribution networks, are subject to detailed environmental assessments and public consultation, it seems reasonable to expect that smart city technology ventures be subjected to similar scrutiny. These could include requirements that municipalities undertake privacy impact assessments, which are evaluation procedures used in other parts of government, as well as versions of the new federal directive on automated decision-making systems (discussed in Chapter 8) if the smart city system uses AI or machine learning software.
A critical element of this kind of oversight involves testing the durability of so-called ‘data anonymization’ measures. Municipalities release ever-larger tranches of digital information through open data portals, and it is standard practice that any personally identifying information (PII) is stripped away.
But a study published in 2019 in Nature Communications itemized many examples of successful de-anonymizing efforts that cross-reference multiple data sets in order to identify individuals in databases considered to be shorn of PII. (An April 2019 New York Times investigation came to similar conclusions by identifying pedestrians caught on a CCTV walking through Bryant Park in Manhattan using internet searches.) The findings, the authors of the Nature Communications paper note, ‘question whether current de-identification practices satisfy the anonymization standards of modern data protection laws’ in places like the EU and California.
Data Governance, Ownership, and Standards
In June 2020, the City of Toronto published an seventy-seven-page consultant’s report on ‘data governance and digital infrastructure,’ prepared by a Montreal-based tech policy research non-profit called Open North. A detailed and far-ranging assessment, the document offers what amounts to a 360-degree survey of the largely unresolved policy, legal, and tech management issues facing Toronto as it undertakes the kind of transformation cities like Barcelona have pursued.
It’s a long list that covers everything from approaches to the ownership of data (a hot button topic while Sidewalk Lab’s plans were still on the table), ethical uses, gaps in federal legislation, and technical standards. While the smart city industry has been roaring along for years, the report offers a caution: ‘[D]ata governance in the smart city context is still an emerging field. Therefore, tracking and measuring the outcomes of specific initiatives will require future research.’
A case in point involves a pair of arcane concepts – data interoperability and open standards – that come up constantly in debates about digital technology. The concept of open standards refers to the use of widely accepted technologies, such as electrical outlets. When you buy an appliance, you don’t worry whether it can be plugged into a socket because the standards for electrical wiring and plug size are open. But when Apple abandoned standard USB ports on its Macs for a proprietary version meant to drive sales of Apple devices, millions of consumers learned a hard lesson in the importance of open standards.
For government officials, the importance of open standards in the context of smart city governance is that they prevent technology suppliers, especially very large multinationals, from making themselves indispensible (and therefore entrenched monopolies) because no other company’s systems or software can be added on to existing ones.
(Sidewalk Labs attempted just that with a subtle proposal to deploy outdoor mounts dubbed ‘Koalas,’ into which its public space sensors could be plugged. These were ostensibly designed to make it easy to upgrade equipment, but the devices are proprietary to Sidewalk/ Google, and trademarked, instead of standard USB ports.)
Mark S. Fox, a University of Toronto professor of computer science, is leading an effort to establish common standards for ‘city data’ through the International Organization for Standardization. It is a work in progress that tends to be overlooked in smart city debates because the subject is seen as dauntingly technical, he told me in late 2020: ‘The adoption of standards is a governance dimension that has received little or no attention in the media, yet it represents the Achilles heel on the path to smart cities.’
Institutional Capacity
Cities employ engineers, planners, architects, public health experts, and a range of other professionals who have the expertise to devise and evaluate policies, deliver services, and provide technical input on procurement.
Municipalities, like other large government and private sector organizations, also employ IT staff – programmers, systems engineers, cyber security experts, etc. Yet if local governments intend to invest in smart city technology and infrastructure, they must also be recruiting professionals from disciplines like data analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, data visualization, and digital anthropology, all with the goal of creating the kind of bench strength found in other city departments.
The City of Toronto since 2015 has had a big data innovation team, which is primarily focused on transportation applications. But smart city tech cuts across many other departments, so it will be important for municipal officials to ensure that these skills are present throughout the organization.
Communication
In the fall of 2020, Julia Stoyanovich, a New York University assistant professor of computer science, engineering, and data science, and Falaah Arif Khan, a research fellow and artist-in-residence at NYU’S Center for Responsible AI, published Mirror, Mirror, the first of a series of ‘scientific comics’ entitled ‘Data, Responsibly.’
Although AI might not seem like an obvious topic for a graphic novel, Khan and Stoyanovich (who sat on New York’s Automated Decision-Making Systems task force) have a clear-eyed view of their project. Their aim is to use relatable metaphors to explain AI (e.g., either rule-based recipes or cooking by trial and error) in order to make the concepts accessible to people without college degrees or those who live with disabilities that exclude them from accessing technology or other facets of urban life. ‘This is the population that is most likely to be hurt by AI and algorithms,’ says Stoyanovich, who points to New York City’s recent attempt to regulate employers’ use of AI-enabled screening software in hiring practices. The idea isn’t to side with either the ‘techno-optimists’ or the ‘techno-bashers,’ she adds. ‘Our goal is really to create a nuanced understanding.’
At U of T, meanwhile, the Centre for Ethics hosted multidisciplinary and open-ended public sessions about the applications and implications of the use of AI. As with ‘Data, Responsibly,’ the goal is to yank the subject out of the hands of computer scientists. ‘[AI] is not a narrow technology-specific issue that should be defined and solved by technical people,’ says the Centre’s director Markus Dubber, a professor of law and criminology who organizes these dialogues. ‘The more people who participate from different backgrounds, the more they realize there’s no single answer.’
While neither of these projects explicitly targeted smart city tech, the overlaps are substantial as AI becomes increasingly integral to a wide array of digital and data-driven systems, including those used in AVS, traffic control, and policing. Both examples also serve as a prompt for municipal officials to find innovative and inclusive approaches to citizen engagement when it comes to developing smart city systems.
Consultation on matters such as planning is deeply embedded in our civic culture. But the city’s long-established outreach practices can be rote, exclusionary, inconvenient, or just dauntingly bureaucratic. Yet, as Stoyanovich makes clear, the power of these technologies demands, if anything, a far higher degree of public engagement to head off unintended consequences never envisioned in the slick and upbeat presentations of technology companies.
In early 2020, I interviewed a Dutch academic, Albert Meijer, who has published extensively about smart city technology, data infrastructure, digital governance, and other related topics. Despite the Netherlands’ pragmatic and upbeat outlook on smart cities, his research has turned up mixed results.
Meijer had developed a systematic way of assessing the success of such investments. He concluded that there isn’t much evidence that smart city technologies generate value for money – an intriguing result, given the size of the smart city tech sector. Smaller, more focused systems can deliver results, he told me, but the more ambitious ones have a way of falling short. ‘It is technology looking for a problem rather than the other way around,’ he said.
In a pointed assessment published in the Journal of Urban Technology, Meijer and three other Utrecht University scholars turned their attention to ‘smart governance,’ which they describe as urban governments that had been set up to solicit citizen participation using various digital technologies – online public meetings, social media, etc. – to guide policy decisions.
Despite the proliferation of digital communications channels available to anyone with a smart phone or a wifi connection, Meijer and his colleagues found that many residents still preferred to engage in person, while those who participated remotely had a tendency to drop out or lose the plot. ‘The wide net of online activities of many people breeds shallow attention … and transitory involvement,’ they observed. ‘Our review demonstrates that there is certainly no reason for having blind faith in smart governance.’
Their conclusion was clear. Cutting-edge digital infrastructure can play a role, either positive or negative, in determining how twenty-first-century urban regions evolve and function. But as has been true for millennia, cities will also remain defiantly social spaces, populated by human beings messily, and often sub-optimally, going about their business.
Indeed, this singularly implacable fact of urban life became impossible to ignore during the pandemic.