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The global smart city narrative gained tremendous momentum during the 2010s, only to be derailed, as was so much else, by COVID-19.
The crises set in motion by pandemics cast very long shadows. The Black Death – a bacterial infection spread through fleas on rats – ravaged European towns and cities in the mid-fourteenth century, killing tens or even hundreds of millions of people and decimating rural communities. According to Mark Bailey, a professor of medieval history in England, the pandemic of 1347 to 1353 stands ‘unchallenged as the greatest catastrophe in human history.’
As Bailey wrote in his 2021 history of the aftermath of the Black Death, ‘The tenth to the thirteenth centuries represented a sustained period of efflorescence and expansion, which first slowed, then halted and decisively reversed, during the first half of the fourteenth century due to an exceptional combination of catastrophic events: famine, warfare, bovine disease, human disease, and an unstable climate. Population levels across Europe collapsed in the mid-fourteenth century, and did not recover for two to three centuries’ (Bailey 2021, 17).
Over four centuries later, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–20 – an H1N1 virus that may have started in the trenches of France at the end of World War I and spread rapidly around the globe – infected an estimated half billion people worldwide and killed at least 50 million over the course of three waves. Young, healthy adults turned out to be especially susceptible (‘1918 Pandemic [H1N1 virus]’ 2019). The Spanish flu, compounded by the war’s horrific casualties, gutted a generation in its prime, leaving countless families struggling to survive without breadwinners.
Post-pandemic eras, in turn, are often marked by the emergence of far-reaching societal changes. As plague survivors relocated to towns that had been almost wiped out, the generations following the Black Death saw improvements in labour productivity, accelerated urbanization, and a hastened decline of the feudal system of landownership. The waves of infectious disease outbreaks in nineteenth-century industrial cities accelerated and focused scientific research first on the vectors of contagion and then on solutions ranging from handwashing to disinfection technologies and improved infrastructure. The devastation of Spanish flu pushed some countries, including Canada, to establish national health bureaucracies, invest in research that led to early antiviral drugs and antibiotics, and enact sweeping social welfare reforms.
As I write this in early 2022, it is far too soon to draw any meaningful conclusions about the long-term, or even medium-term, impact of the pandemic. But from the earliest days of the outbreak, one fact became abundantly clear: that a range of digital, network, and electronic technologies played a profoundly important role in the ways in which societies responded, both positively and negatively, to the coronavirus that surged out of Wuhan in late 2019.
COVID-19 could, in fact, be described as history’s first technology pandemic.
That label deserves parsing. Social media allowed for the rapid dissemination of critical public health information, but it also proved to be a chillingly effective accelerator of lethal misinformation – so much so, in fact, that some epidemiologists regarded the proliferation of anti-vaxxer/anti-masker propaganda as one of the key drivers of infection rates.16
Quite apart from the tsunami of digital conspiracy theories, the story of technology’s role in the pandemic focused on the ways in which we adapted rapidly by massively scaling up certain digital systems, such as video-conferencing, document-sharing, electronic funds transfer, streaming, e-commerce, automation, 3-D printing, and secure cloud-based computing, among others. All of these technologies existed prior to the pandemic. However, the pandemic restrictions significantly amplified their take-up and importance in a range of sectors, while spurring waves of innovation and billions of dollars in investment in other pandemic-related technologies, such as small-scale battery-powered mobility devices.
The seemingly exponential expansion of information and communications technology applications was transformative. What’s more, these emergent digital services were not just crisis workarounds; rather, they became as integral to modern economies and labour markets as Excel spreadsheets are to accounting, and likely to leave their mark on all sorts of other domains, from culture and education to health services and the media.
But in the context of urban regions, this big family of pandemic-adjacent innovations can be understood as a kind of rebuttal to much of what the smart city industry was promising as it gained momentum during the 2010s. While smart city tech encompasses a diverse array of applications, the common denominator is that these systems are meant to respond to the concentration of twenty-first-century city regions. They were created specifically to manage the complex tangle of problems that arise in dense, rapidly evolving city regions. Adapting computing applications designed either for military uses or sprawling multinationals, smart city firms contended that big cities had become so large and so overcrowded that their particular issues – housing, traffic, pollution, the management of public space, goods movement, etc. – could be tamed only by potent new forms of software, hardware, and connectivity.
In other words, if smart city technologies were all about managing the pressures of proximity, then pandemic technologies addressed the opposite, providing pragmatic solutions that enabled part of society and the economy to function in a condition of enforced dispersion.
Obviously, the grind of urban life never came to a halt, even during the strictest lockdowns. Only a portion of the labour force had the luxury of working from home, and there was plenty of anecdotal evidence that traffic worsened as many commuters avoided transit. Yet for just about everyone, the wide sweep of pandemic virtualization touched all aspects of life, from the precipitous rise in e-commerce17 to the ways in which schools, universities, and colleges, cultural institutions, and health care providers pivoted from in-person to online during the most severe lockdown periods. Mental health care in particular saw a dramatic surge as providers and patients shifted to online sessions, which proved to be more convenient, flexible, and accessible to underserviced communities, as well as less hampered by the stigmas that still cling to in-person counselling (e.g., being seen by an acquaintance entering a psychologist’s clinic). Numerous mental health care companies, in fact, raised hundreds of millions of dollars through initial public offerings during the pandemic as remote service delivery took off in response to the demand for counselling and heightened incidence of depression and anxiety.
The earliest video-conferencing systems surfaced in the 1970s but only began to mature in the late 1990s, with improved digital video and connectivity. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, video conferencing was primarily used in office contexts, typically for virtual gatherings of team members scattered in different cities. The ‘consumer’ version, Skype, gained some traction as a free alternative to long-distance phone calls, but couldn’t shed its reputation as a buggy application.
Some of today’s most commonplace technologies – email, cellphones, smart phones, etc. – began as office or business tools and then spread far beyond the world of work. With video-conferencing, the pandemic dramatically telescoped this process: Zoom became a verb, as the use of video-conferencing exploded into almost all spheres of life via every major digital platform and device.
Complaints about virtual meetings and online classes were one of the most common subjects of discussion during the pandemic, and their use in contexts like K–12 classrooms ebbed with the end of lockdowns. Yet the take-up of this technology isn’t going to snap back to pre-pandemic levels: during the pandemic, many people, professionals, and organizations also found novel and productive ways to adapt video-conferencing for use in entirely unanticipated contexts, and none of that will go away.18 What’s more, major tech firms continually invest in the development of such applications, making them more user friendly and less painful to use.
The near ubiquity of video-conferencing, streaming, and other lifeline connectivity tools turbocharged the ways in which digital technology is uncoupling experience and place – a trend that has both negative and positive implications. Virtual anything lacks intimacy, atmosphere, the opportunity to collectively participate in a live event, and any sense of occasion. However, the potent combination of necessity, technology, and entrepreneurialism enabled people to take cooking or fitness classes virtually, attend lectures in distant cities or partake in previously overpriced or physically inaccessible live theatre performances. Some of these are extensions of the pre-pandemic online world, but others represent entirely new ways of leaping over the constraints of geography and cost to reach new audiences.
One example: film festivals, which went online during the first year of the pandemic and then sought to navigate in-person versions during later waves. In many ways, film festivals, their brands so heavily associated with specific cities, were emblematic of the type of cosmopolitan experience that characterized global cities: a major elite draw that generates media attention, spinoff economic activity, tourism, business network, etc. But the rise of the major streaming services, with their giant production and acquisition budgets, had begun to erode the importance of film festivals to the industry’s professionals in the mid-2010s.
The post-pandemic version, predicted pop culture journalist Angela Watercutter in Wired, would be hybrid festivals that take place both in person and virtually. ‘[F]ilm festivals have always struggled with accessibility issues that can be mitigated by allowing people to attend from home,’ she observed. ‘So perhaps hybrid festivals are the future even in the best of times. Cinema culture exists on multiple planes; it’s time film festivals did too’ (Watercutter 2022).
Not too many people go to film festivals, although many stream movies. The noteworthy point here is the projected future of these events as ‘hybrids’ – a term that may come to define the way in-person and virtual/live-streamed experiences or events coexist in the future. These may include trade shows, professional conferences, and other smaller events – e.g., board meetings – that migrated online during the pandemic and may return in a more circumscribed form that involves less travel and permanent options for virtual attendance.
The largest post-pandemic hybrid environment seems destined to be the realm of the office, and the ways in which these whitecollar workplaces begin to reassemble themselves, both physically and socially. The emergency shift to telework, or ‘WFH,’ in March 2020 represented a dizzyingly swift response to a crisis, enabled by a set of fairly mature technologies, including, but not limited to, video-conferencing. By mid-2020, 42 per cent of the U.S. labour force was working from home, while in Canada the numbers were slightly lower.
For many years, urban planners have talked about the future of telework in big cities, in part as a means of easing rush-hour traffic. ‘The phenomenon of working at home rather than in an office – often called “telework” or “telecommuting” – is expected to increase greatly in the years ahead,’ a columnist for the Dallas Morning News predicted in 1985. ‘Working at home has become more practical in recent years because new electronic technologies make it possible for people to perform most office tasks effectively, easily and cheaply over electronic networks between their home and remote offices.’
According to a 2015 Gallup survey, the proportion of U.S. employees who had worked remotely rose from 9 to 37 per cent between 1995 and 2015; most were college educated, higher-income, and white-collar. But ‘telecommuting remains much more the exception than the rule,’ the pollster concluded, with people working from home a few days a month, typically. Though Gallup’s survey found teleworkers were highly productive, the study also noted that some tech firms were moving in the opposite direction, requiring all employees to be on-site (Jones 2015).
The pandemic revealed just how large a proportion of the workforce could, in theory, work from home, and that happened initially because of public health edicts. The adjustment for many was very difficult, carving out a workspace in small apartments shared with partners or children, figuring out how not to be on call all the time, and learning to live without the social environment and habits of the workaday world, from staff meetings to office gossip.
Yet the WFH transition offered as many positives as negatives: no grinding commutes and the associated costs (including environmental), additional time for chores or exercise, and new forms of engagement with colleagues, such as the people who would call in to morning meetings while out walking. And, as Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom observed, ‘The stigma associated with working from home prior to COVID-19 has disappeared’ (Wong 2020).
Employers, meanwhile, invested heavily in technology to enable WFH, from remote security systems to monitors, as well as all sorts of home office equipment. They also began scrutinizing their real estate expenses and the amount of space they were renting to house employees who were working as productively if not more from home. As of 2022, it seems increasingly likely that many large organizations will move to hybrid work arrangements and ‘hotelling,’ i.e., desks that are booked instead of permanently assigned to an individual. The emergence of the hybrid workplace has also attracted a rush of entrepreneurial activity and investment, in everything from hybrid office design to scheduling software and management advice on how to optimize these arrangements.
The transition to hybrid work is very much in its infancy, and what the eventual equilibrium, or at least common practice, looks like remains to be seen. Yet some early indicators offer clues to the ways in which the geography of work has changed. While some employers will insist on a return to the office, others will make it optional, or offer flexibility as a perk. The latter have already begun to cast their recruitment nets wider, hiring from beyond their own commuter sheds. In national and multinational firms, this practice wasn’t uncommon pre-pandemic, but it is now available to many more organizations, including some in the public sector. Even for large companies, the separation of office from employee opens up new vistas for hiring people content to work remotely as a permanent condition of employment.
During COVID-19’s first year, some pundits and urbanists engaged in a largely speculative and mostly fatuous debate over whether the pandemic would kill cities – a discussion fuelled by empty subway cars, abandoned downtown streets, and darkened office towers. In previous eras, from the Cold War to the out-migration of back offices in the 1980s, the demise of cities has been forecast, incorrectly. The pandemic, similarly, didn’t kill the city, although census data reported in 2021 indicated that larger-census metropolitan areas saw a net decline in population and population growth, while rural areas were picking up new residents. In Toronto and Montreal, for example, the populations dropped in the year ending July 2021 by 16,600 and 46,700 residents respectively (Lundy 2022). In the U.S., population growth in major metros fell from a decade-high of 1 per cent in 2013–14 to .39 per cent in the first year of the pandemic, although other factors also contributed, such as slower immigration and higher death rates (Frey 2021).
The shifting patterns of work may have farther-reaching consequences for cities, urban economies, and labour markets, although how these look is not yet clear. For example, transit ridership in some cities may take many years to return to pre-pandemic levels. Indeed, if hybrid work arrangements remain commonplace, then some of the core business assumptions of transit agency planners – like peak period volumes, the take-up of monthly passes, etc. – may fall away, prompting difficult decisions about schedules, fares, and new routes. In the private sector, the business-travel-dependent hospitality sector, already smarting from a decade of Airbnb, seems likely to contract permanently, as will bricks-and-mortar retail of all scales.
Tech-enabled hybrid work could also shift the customers of service businesses – restaurants, after-work bars, gyms, etc. – away from office districts and into neighbourhoods with larger numbers of remote employees. Some office tower owners may seek to convert their assets to residential condo towers as a means of recouping lost revenues due to stubbornly high vacancy rates. And there may even be a boom in new forms of office/commercial development – e.g., smaller-footprint office complexes designed specifically for company gatherings, or shared workspaces in neighbourhood or suburban locales that have been selected by calculating the most convenient location for a gig or hybrid workforce that increasingly chooses to live away from core areas. Such changes, if they happen, won’t kill cities so much as loosen them up, decanting some people away from centralized business districts that were once dense and lively, but also congested and overpriced.
It’s also clear that some non-smart city technologies played a significant role in shaking up metropolitan labour markets during the pandemic. While automation and robotics have been a presence in manufacturing for many years, the pandemic, combined with the rapid diffusion of AI-driven technologies (e.g., advanced 3-D printing or automated customer service chatbots), significantly accelerated automation, according to several analyses.
Business investment in automation was accelerated by pandemic restrictions, labour shortages, absences due to illness, and a host of other factors. A January 2021 economic assessment by the International Monetary Fund confirmed that COVID factors triggered the surge of investment in automation, and went on to warn that the resulting displacement of low-skill workers will exacerbate income inequality in extended urbanized regions where businesses are investing heavily in robots. ‘Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified,’ the IMF study concluded (Sedik & Yoo 2021).
Those concerns layer on top of another facet of the interplay between technology, cities, and the pandemic, which involves the issue of access to digital connectivity. As in pandemics past, COVID ruthlessly exposed festering social divisions, which, in this case, manifested themselves in the form of high infection rates in low-income or racialized neighbourhoods, high-rise apartments with poor ventilation and crowded elevators, and industrial/agricultural workplaces managed by companies that were indifferent to workplace safety standards.
While only a portion of the workforce had the option of working from home, every school-age child had to learn from home for extended periods, regardless of the profession or socio-economic status of their parents or caregivers. The reliance by educators on virtual classrooms shone a spotlight on the extent to which critical technologies – laptops or tablets, smart phones, and high-bandwidth internet/wifi – were available in low-income households.
In Canada, the market penetration rate for smart phones is almost 93 per cent, but the availability of high-speed internet is considerably lower. According to Statistics Canada, only three-quarters of households in census metropolitan areas had access to broadband (the proportion is far lower in rural or northern areas), while almost half a million Canadians had a mobile data plan but no home internet (‘Access to the Internet in Canada’ 2021). In the U.S., meanwhile, broadband access is significantly correlated with income, race, and education levels (‘Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet’ 2021).
The fact that basic and universal education, government, and health services were suddenly being provided virtually – and were therefore either unavailable or difficult to access for some segment of the urban population – raised critical questions about the technological infrastructure of cities and the so-called digital divide. Many school boards, for example, distributed devices to children in low-income families that didn’t have laptops. Some cities sought to provide free wifi to apartment buildings that were home to marginalized tenants. These measures, however, simply underscored the reality that digital access has become a basic, essential form of infrastructure. Despite its central role, broadband is still a commodity distributed by the market and subject to market forces, which means the most vulnerable members of society, i.e., those with the least ability to pay, become that much more isolated from core services and vital information.
Many types of urban infrastructure trace their roots to the market, and to entrepreneurial responses to problems people will pay to fix. With piped access to fresh water in eighteenth-century London, the service was initially targeted at affluent homeowners – a far cry from the way municipal water is now distributed. Firefighting services traced back to the early markets for fire insurance. Waste management is still a service that straddles the public and private sectors. And in many places, electrical grids were never publicly owned, although, as monopolies, they are almost always regulated, if not operated, by the state.
Proponents of smart city tech frequently advocate for faster and more ubiquitous connectivity. Yet the goals for continuing to build out all that digital infrastructure don’t necessarily include closing the digital divide or confronting social justice issues.
In a typical op-ed in Smart Cities World, a B2B publication, one British Telecom manager expounded on the range of benefits of expanding 5G coverage, yet stopped well short of suggesting it should be a public service. ‘By using technology to optimise the city or town, authorities will see benefits across a range of different aspects – from better transport and eased congestion to smart refuse and recycling points and saving electricity. Therefore consistent connectivity is absolutely vital to the functioning of smart cities’ (Hayes 2020).
Others have expressed skepticism about the promise of smart city tech in the post-pandemic world. ‘In many cities the sky-rocketing expectations about smart city effects have not materialised,’ Columbia University urban sociologist Saskia Sassen and Karima Kourtit, a Dutch professor of management, commented in a 2021 essay entitled ‘A Post-Corona Perspective for Smart Cities: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”’ ‘Chicago calls itself a smart city, but does it excel in urban safety or income inequality? Athens is another smart city, but is it able to solve its congestion and air pollution problems? How is it possible that a city such as Beijing, which is able to control the movements of its citizens, is paralysed when it comes to coping effectively with the smog during the summer? Apparently, there is a significant gap between the myth of the smart city and its actual performance as a healthy or happy city’ (Sassen & Kourtit 2021).
Indeed, in other discussions about the post-COVID incarnation of smart cities, the deep divisions exposed by the pandemic may have shifted thinking about the point of these ambitious and costly tech investments. ‘How can you become a smart city when thousands of your residents can’t connect to the Internet to participate in online learning, to participate in remote work, to do online job training in order to even qualify for unemployment benefits, or to participate in interviews remotely?’ wondered Jordan Davis, director of Smart Columbus, in a 2020 interview with Government Technology magazine, a U.S. trade publication (Descant 2020).
Davis’s question points at something much more fundamental, which has to do with what twenty-first-century cities should aspire to become. In the aftermath of a once-in-a-century health calamity, and with another even more drastic climate crisis looming in the middle distance, the notion of ‘smartness’ seems not just limiting but blinkered – a utopian brand fuelled by the profit motive and engineered solutions that don’t properly address the human challenges of city life while downplaying the crucial role of urban governance in the adoption of transformative systems (Joss et al. 2019). Perhaps we need a better label – one that accounts for inclusiveness and social justice, as well as the most enduring qualities of cities: resilience, adaptability, ingenuity, diversity, serendipity, endurance, and, critically, a sense of place. One size doesn’t fit all, and indeed never has.
City-building has always leaned heavily on the problem-solving skills of engineers and inventors. But urban life, with its complicated energy and potential, is about so much more than technical innovation. ‘Smart’ may be necessary, but it will never be sufficient.
16. A 2020 paper in Scientific Reports analyzed the social media ‘infodemic’ and concluded, presciently, given the publication date that ‘[t]he case of the COVID-19 epidemic shows the critical impact of this new information environment. The information spreading can strongly influence people’s behavior and alter the effectiveness of the countermeasures deployed by governments’ (Cinelli et al. 2020).
17. In Canada, seasonally adjusted e-commerce sales rose 34 per cent between March 2020 and November 2021. A StatsCan survey of online shopping found that 82 per cent of Canadians made online purchases in 2020, up from 73 per cent just two years prior. Among twenty-five- to forty-four-year-olds, the proportion is 95 per cent. Almost one in eight ordered groceries online for the first time in 2020 (‘Online Shopping by Canadians in 2020’ 2021).
18. An example I heard from some professors – most of whom detested online courses – involved virtual office hours, which turned out to be a highly constructive and efficient virtual form of instructor/student interaction.