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Far from the disorderly world of big-city streets, Mart Suurkask, the CEO and founder of Bercman Technologies, demonstrated a working prototype of the firm’s ‘smart pedestrian crosswalk’ before a small crowd of onlookers gathered in a trade show booth in November 2019. The booth was hosted by the Government of Estonia at the sprawling annual smart city trade show that was held in Barcelona each year until the pandemic forced the event to go virtual.
I’d travelled to the Catalonian capital to spend the week talking to presenters, listening to smart city sales pitches and checking out demos. The event took place in Barcelona’s cavernous suburban convention centre, a three-hall affair with breakout rooms, snack bars, and theatres. Like most industrial trade shows, the floor felt a bit like a mini indoor city, the brightly lit aisles crowded with lanyard-wearing attendees carrying tote bags full of brochures. Like a modern-day souk, touts worked the edges of their booths, encouraging people to sit for a presentation, test some gadget, take a business card. The logos of the big sponsors – for 2019, Cisco and Mastercard – were festooned on walls and way-finding maps around the convention centre.
Given the particular focus of this event, the organizers and demonstrators had doubled down on the urban motif. The event had its own neighbourhoods, complete with ‘cafés’ and street furniture. Several regional and state governments had their own districts. Tel Aviv’s booth was designed to look like a bar, complete with pulsing EDM and free beer. I noticed that besides an appearance on one panel discussion, Sidewalk Labs was nowhere to be seen.
Bercman’s device looked exactly like crosswalk signs throughout Europe: a post supporting a square sign with the universal symbol of a pedestrian crossing a street. What makes it ‘smart,’ as he explains, is an assembly of digital devices stowed inside the sign: high-tech motion detectors aimed in all directions that are programmed to calculate the velocity of vehicles approaching the crosswalk to determine whether they are slowing safely when someone is crossing.
The software included a ‘machine-learning’ algorithm that allows the detector to learn and then anticipate traffic patterns so it can ‘optimize’ for cars moving through a particular location. Bercman’s smart crosswalk was also fitted with wireless transmission capabilities that will someday automatically send notifications to fast-moving, connected vehicles, alerting them to brake right away. When the crosswalk signal detects danger, it flashes and beeps.
The start-up, which is based in Tartu, Estonia’s second-largest city and a hub of tech development, wanted to find solutions to rising pedestrian fatality rates, as well as the eventual advent of self-driving cars. ‘We thought these vehicles might need some help from smart infrastructure,’ Bercman said in his presentation.
As of 2020, the smart crosswalk was still in development. Suurkash told me that in real-world testing, about a third of the warning signals turned out to be false alarms.
As it happens, the company’s device was also fitted with sensors measuring air quality, traffic flow, and pedestrian volumes, as well as digital cameras designed to identify licence plates. The sign, he said, ‘is just one part’ of a smart city ‘ecosystem.’
Since the 1960s, the ICT revolution – from early mainframe computers and cable TV to 5G smart phones and high-bandwidth fibre optic cable – have transformed cities into densely networked hubs where digital interactions are woven virtually into every facet of urban life.
Smart city technology, a by-product of the ICT revolution, is a broad and amorphous catch-all category. One common denominator is that these technologies are designed to gather and synthesize digital data generated by all sorts of urban activity – GPS-equipped transit vehicles, hidden patterns in huge databases of building inspection records, power consumption trends, online resident feedback to planning approvals, and so on. Some experts advocate for ‘intelligent civil infrastructure,’ which proposes extensive deployments of wireless sensors attached to everything from roads and bridges to water mains, and which are designed to detect system failures even before they can be noted by inspectors (Goldsmith et al. 2021). The ostensible goal is to put all that data to work to address a range of urban problems – ‘optimizing,’ as smart city tech insiders say.
One can think of smart city systems as technologies that watch or listen to what’s happening in urban areas and then transform those observations into action. However, while we live in a hyper-accelerated world of high-speed communication, smart city technologies, to be effective, must overcome both the so-called latency problem – the lag between gathering ground-level information and acting on it – and the bugs or viruses that invariably find their way into any computer-driven system.
These systems, Eric Miller, a professor of civil engineering and director of the University of Toronto’s Transportation Research Institute, tells me, ‘are about creating more and better feedback loops, on the assumption that it will lead to better outcomes.’ But, he adds, cities are highly complex ‘systems of systems’ filled with human beings who don’t necessarily respond rationally or predictably to the world around them. ‘The central question,’ Miller observes, ‘is the interaction between technological systems and people systems.’
Smart city systems are built with a diverse and ever-growing range of technological building blocks: hardware, software, cloud-based data warehouses and cellular networks, artificial intelligence algorithms, etc. The components run the gamut from smart phone apps and cheap sensors to multi-million-dollar transportation control hubs. Some observers have used the term everyware to describe their ubiquity.
While a lot of smart city tech is designed for and purchased by local or regional governments seeking to digitize a wide range of services, these systems can also be found in health care, education, and utilities, as well as private sector environments, such as smart office buildings.
Many are focused on security and urban mobility applications, while others – e.g., mapping, short-term rental, or recommender apps – aren’t geared at the municipalities per se but turn out to have farranging implications for the ways in which cities actually function. Still others are built using various forms of information released by municipalities through open data portals – everything from zoning bylaws and property lines to the GPS signals on transit vehicles.
Sensors
The building blocks of smart city systems, these very inexpensive, compact (fist-sized or smaller) devices can be installed on all manner of objects, ranging from utility poles and buses to water mains and bridges. They can be designed to gather readings on air quality, vibrations, passenger loads, traffic volumes, or leaking pipes.
Sensors are fitted with small radio transmitters to send readings wirelessly, with the signals ultimately shunted to control centres that monitor water systems or local utilities and use this real-time data to manage problems.
For example, in 2009 Philadelphia installed ‘BigBelly’ waste bins equipped with GPS-enabled sensors that detect when they need to be emptied. Carlton Williams, Philadelphia’s street commissioner, told me the devices allow the municipality to route garbage trucks more efficiently – i.e., they pick up only from full bins – and have slashed the number of crews on some routes, with a $650,000 per year savings. The reduction in the number of trucks has also reduced congestion. ‘We think it’s a huge success,’ he says in an interview.
Tiny sensors are now embedded in all sorts of privately purchased consumer goods and electronics, such as smart thermostats, wearable continuous glucose monitors, or fitness trackers in products like Fitbit or Apple Watches. These devices are creating entirely new types of data-driven relationships between the private realm of the home or a business and the wider public realm of the city.
The sensors in smart thermostats, for example, provide continuous temperature readings that are sent wirelessly to a central control device. But some smart heating systems are also tethered electronically to local utilities, which aggregate all this information and use it to manage their energy output or even remotely adjust heating or cooling levels in customers’ homes in response to peak-period demand.
Some health sensors wirelessly connect people with conditions like diabetes to medical practitioners as well as with smart phone apps that can predict changes in insulin levels. A 2018 research study of more than 33,000 diabetics, some with continuous glucose monitors and others without, showed lower health care costs and fewer hospital admissions among those fitted out with these wifi-enabled devices.
Fitness trackers, in turn, reveal another type of interplay between personal health and public amenities. The enormous popularity of the 10,000-steps fitness regimen has prompted many people to begin taking regular walks in their neighbourhoods or local parks. The additional pedestrian (and cycling) activity is unquestionably a positive development and could even serve as a prompt to local governments to build out pedestrian/cycling infrastructure, perhaps even, as some researchers have argued, by leveraging the GPS data generated by these trackers (and smart phones generally) to determine where they could be adding or expanding sidewalks or creating new trails.
Yet such applications also raise hard questions about privacy protections and the potential misuse of such sensors for surveillance or marketing purposes.
Digital Video and Facial Recognition
The presence of hundreds of thousands of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras on city streets around the world, as well as all sorts of buildings and other public spaces, is nothing new, but these devices have become smaller, cheaper, less static, and more prevalent in a range of settings. For example, digital doorbells with digital cameras, some made by Google and Amazon, allow homeowners to use their smart phones or even laptops to watch for porch pirates or keep an eye on what’s going on on the street.
The use of facial recognition systems, as well as related software that can identify an individual’s gait, has become increasingly prevalent in some regimes. In China, ubiquitous CCTV surveillance and advanced facial recognition software have been extensively deployed as part of the Communist government’s security and intelligence operations. Some of these are developed by private firms like Clearview AI, a smart phone–based facial recognition system, and SenseTime, a Chinese AI company whose investors include Alibaba Group and Qualcomm, a U.S. chip maker.
In many North American cities, police are equipped with bodyworn cameras and dash cams that record interactions and upload video for temporary storage. Drones, increasingly inexpensive and deregulated, are fitted out with high-res video. These can be used for everything from real-estate listings and the monitoring of cracks or energy losses on the outsides of high buildings to missing person searches. In the U.K., police drones use facial recognition software to assist with such missions.
Specialized cameras are also being affixed to vehicles for use in mapping applications that go well beyond Google’s Street View. For example, Mobileye, a publicly traded Israeli firm owned by Intel, works with vehicle manufacturers to install specialized cameras on the front windshields of trucks and buses. The cameras record whatever is on the street, with the streaming video continuously uploaded to a cloud-based mapping database. These maps can be accessed wirelessly by autonomous vehicles that need real-time information about what is on the road.
But a rapidly spreading backlash against surveillance-oriented technologies, including those embedded in popular social media platforms, has prompted some global technology firms to halt or discontinue their facial recognition programs, among them IBM, Microsoft, and Meta/Facebook, which deleted facial data on a billion users in late 2021. ‘The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,’ a senior Meta artificial intelligence executive wrote of the decision on the company’s blog.
The Internet of Things
The collection of objects and sensors with wireless connections to the internet constitutes the ‘internet of things’ (IoT) and includes devices as diverse as Bluetooth-connected electric toothbrushes with accompanying app, electric water heaters, smart fridges, etc.
In recent years, tech giants like Cisco and IBM have estimated the number of such devices, which includes cellphones. The figures, according to Barcelona-based IoT privacy and information policy researcher Gilad Rosner, are staggering: 8.74 billion globally, as of 2020, although the numbers vary widely depending on what’s included. The actual figure, he tells me over Zoom, ‘is difficult to pinpoint.’
Smart city systems are increasingly built on a digital foundation that includes an extensive deployment of wifi-enabled sensors that are connected to the IoT. These networks may allow works officials and structural engineers to remotely monitor vibrations on major bridges or property managers to track mechanical systems in smart office buildings.
According to an August 2020 survey of fifty global cities by IoT Analytics, the most prevalent urban applications include connected public transit, traffic, flood, and weather monitoring, video surveillance, street lighting and air quality sensors.
Yet IoT in public space raises critical issues about security – are these tiny and inexpensive devices linked wirelessly to extensive digital networks vulnerable to hacking? – as well as privacy, or what Rosner describes as the ‘right to obscurity.’ ‘The issue is surveillance,’ he says. The more sensors, the more surveillance.’
Enterprise-Wide Platforms
Global tech giants like IBM and Cisco were among the first to use the ‘smart city’ branding as a pitch when they marketed their enterprise systems, notably to the hundreds of thousands of local and regional governments around the world.
While these large firms promised their customers more cost-effective operations or outsourced technical services like payments processing (e.g., Mastercard), their messaging often seems like a confection of progressive urbanism and ominous warnings about the pressures of mass urbanization, from congestion to pollution.
In some cases, the pitch to municipal IT managers is that if they have invested heavily in the backbone system, it then makes good sense to get the most out of it by adding functions that cut across a range of city divisions. The payback improves if customers invest in multiple applications, such as a smart lighting network and a street parking app, Del White, Cisco’s then global managing director for smart and connected communities, told a small audience at the firm’s Smart City Expo booth in Barcelona. ‘Every time you add a use case, your ROI gets better.’
Other firms go even further, telling municipalities how these enterprise systems will enable core urban functions, from traffic control and transit to energy consumption and air quality, to operate at peak efficiency. ‘There are ways we can optimize a city going forward,’ said Roland Busch, president and CEO of Siemens AG, the German engineering giant, which promotes the creation of a centralized city ‘operating system’ capable of integrating all sorts of urban infrastructure into a single ‘ecosystem.’
Some cities have made this leap. The northern English municipality of Hull invested in an AI-driven ‘smart city platform’ that included parking space detectors, air quality sensors, smart trash bins, traffic counters, and digital video to track road quality, with the data travelling over a 5G network. Furqan Alamgir, CEO of Connexin, which was contracted to install and operate all this technology, describes the firm as an ‘enabler.’ ‘We’re not data owners. The data belongs to the people and the city.’
Yet some critics have warned that so-called ‘vendor lock-in’ provisions in the service agreements have made some smart city companies’ proprietary systems difficult to remove or augment with open-source software. ‘The basic concern is to avoid cities or districts becoming self-contained, “locked-in” islands, captive of a single company that holds all the enabling technology,’ a European Commission urban regeneration think tank cautioned in a 2016 blog post.
Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence
Smart city technology generates extensive collections of raw data that can be analyzed in different ways to generate insights and detect patterns.
Increasingly, that analysis involves artificial intelligence and the use of highly sophisticated algorithms trained to make predictions. AI, which can be traced to the 1950s and research by computer scientists with ties to the U.S. military, has many non-urban applications, from Siri and other voice recognition systems to recommender engines on movie streaming or e-commerce sites and even apps that can identify skin cancers. AI algorithms are ‘trained’ on large collections of labelled information – e.g., images – by predicting what the image is and then comparing that guess to the label. Coders continuously refine the algorithm until each prediction has a high degree of accuracy. At that point, the algorithm can be used to make predictions on new data.
In the case of smart city applications, AI has been used, for example, to identify and predict traffic patterns, so city officials can use the algorithm to optimize traffic signals. There are many other emerging applications in fields like planning.
In 2017, for instance, a Harvard-MIT research team published a study about an experiment using Google Street View, itself a vast trove of urban data. Using 1.6 million images of street scenes in five U.S. cities, taken first in 2007 and again in 2014, the researchers amassed a database of paired photos of the same places, from the same perspectives, at two different points in time. The investigators then developed an algorithm to assess ‘perceptions of safety’ based on a ‘crowd-sourced study’ of street scenes in New York and Boston, and used this formula to rate the perceived safety of the images they had gathered. Finally, they cross-referenced the street-level safety scores with census and other socio-economic data and concluded, not surprisingly, that denser areas populated by more affluent residents were less likely to experience physical and social decline.
Open Standards, Open Source Software, and Open Data
The principle of technological openness can be viewed as a kind of holy grail for smart cities, and not just those applications that relate to municipal services. With open standards, software, and data, the core idea is that the benefits of emerging technologies and other smart systems don’t just flow into private coffers, as has been the concern about vendor lock-in.
The concept of open standards is often used to characterize a democratizing approach to networks and software platforms, but can also be understood when applied to some of the most basic features of daily life, such as ordinary light bulbs, electric plugs, or USB memory sticks. Regardless of who manufactures them, these objects are designed to satisfy common publicly available standards, and therefore they are interchangeable. A bulb works in any ordinary light socket, a thumb drive works in any USB port. (When Apple altered its ports and made them proprietary, there was an outcry because that interoperability had suddenly disappeared.)
In the world of hardware and software, there are open standards, or specifications for languages such as HTML mark-up code and digital images, like JPEGs, as well as protocols for the architecture of digital networks connected to the internet. Advocates of progressive smart cities say that municipalities, regions, or other institutions must employ an open-standards approach to provide interoperability – the light bulbs – and ensure that tech vendors don’t create monopolies for themselves.
The use of open-source software is also regarded as an essential principle in the development of democratic smart cities. In Barcelona, which has been a pioneer in progressive smart city policy, municipally designed software used for various smart applications is intended to be open source and available for other cities to use.
Finally, open data describes government information that is released to the general public through so-called ‘open data portals.’ The information, however, isn’t just the boilerplate that governments routinely produce: reports, documents linked to public education campaigns, etc. Rather, the data in open data repositories is typically raw, complex, and constantly updated – for example, streams of GPS readings showing the precise location of transit vehicles, or databases showing the frequencies of parking tickets written in certain locations. Public sector institutions sit on vast storehouses of such data, and open-government advocates have, for a number of years, argued that when such information is collated and made publicly available, it will provide the raw material for citizen-driven innovations for identifying, analyzing, and solving local problems, e.g., apps that provide up-to-date water quality readings on local beaches.
High-Speed Fibre Optic Cable and 5G Wireless Networks
In big cities around the world, the utility tunnels beneath streets are filled with the kind of broadband fibre optic cable that enables data-heavy applications, from multi-player online gaming to real-time streaming video.
As well, telecommunications giants are installing so-called 5G (or fifth generation) wireless networks in a growing number of large urban regions. 5G technology – which has produced both geopolitical tensions (over Huawei) and pandemic-fuelled conspiracy theories – uses lower radio frequencies, allowing networks to accommodate far higher data volumes than currently possible. The trade-off is that 5G networks need a much denser concentration of cell towers and transmitters.
For many smart city applications, 5G will be a game-changer because these networks enable huge volumes of raw data to move rapidly across wireless networks with what’s called ‘low latency,’ meaning very little time elapses between the detection of a signal and the response to it generated in a remote computer system.
A case in point: Verizon and TomTom, the digital mapping and navigation giant, are testing 5G for busy intersections. The idea is for traffic cameras and connected autonomous vehicles to be in constant communication, via 5G, as a means of reducing the risk of collisions. ‘If each vehicle passing through an intersection is able to relay and receive information from other vehicles and streetlight-mounted cameras, that information can be used to notify connected devices when lights turn red or vehicles ahead come to a sudden stop,’ explained Traffic Technology Today, a trade magazine, in October 2019.
Widespread arrival of 5G also provides less benign applications, such as facial recognition cameras that have been deployed in many Chinese cities as part of the state’s security policies. According to a report in Foreign Policy Magazine, China is home to sixteen of the top twenty most surveilled cities in the world. Shanghai, which achieved full 5G coverage in its downtown area and 99 per cent fibre-optic coverage across the city, is blanketed by a veritable thicket of video surveillance. ‘Identity collection devices are commonplace, having exploded across public and private spaces … A combination of satellites, drones, and fixed cameras grab over 20 million images a day. The bus, metro, and credit cards of local residents are also traced in real time’ (Muggah & Walton 2021).
Video Conferencing
When the World Health Organization declared a global public health emergency in March 2020, forcing millions of people to work remotely, video-conferencing platforms, once used almost exclusively for business meetings, saw a dramatic surge of traffic, with countless new users creating accounts.
As we all know, the heavy reliance on platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams wasn’t limited to work/office uses and is likely to trigger long-lasting changes – both good and bad – in the way cities look and function.
Local governments, for example, took to streaming video from not just council meetings but also a range of other public meetings and consultations, thus increasing accessibility, at least to those with computers. Arts companies pivoted away from live performances in front of audiences to livestreaming performances in front of cameras. Schools and universities also had to transition to online learning, a pivot that saw the emergence of new pedagogical techniques and a boom in education tech. Yet for all the innovation, the depersonalized experience of virtual learning left much to be desired for both teachers and students.
Health care, however, has been a very different story. Telemedicine, long seen as a service mainly of use in remote communities, enjoyed a massive resurgence as a wide range of medical appointments transitioned to secure video links, especially in the mental health field. Even as they dealt with a sharp increase in demand for services, some psychiatrists and therapists reported a decline in missed appointments, suggesting that video conference sessions produced a more consistent course of treatment.
‘The pandemic has dramatically sped up the slow adoption of telehealth visits, and increased knowledge of what technology can offer,’ concluded a 2021 literature review conducted by University of Saskatchewan researchers and published by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (Li et al. 2021). ‘This forced uptake has clearly demonstrated the potential in virtual healthcare service delivery during COVID-19 and the future. Telepsychiatry has been shown to be feasible and appropriate for supporting patients and healthcare providers during COVID-19. Furthermore, geographical barriers to delivering mental health services have been broken in terms of physical distance and its associated financial burdens.’ Not surprisingly, many start-ups and wellness tech firms have raced into this burgeoning field, including several that managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in equity through initial public offerings in 2021.
Yet the convenience of work-related video-conferencing, combined with the persistence of some pandemic distancing practices and the reluctance of many people to return to their workplaces full-time, produced short-term and possibly medium-term implications for cities and their suburban satellites. Office districts, largely abandoned during the worst parts of the crisis, have been slow to rebound, and that dynamic has produced a domino effect for transit usage and the viability of retail and restaurants located in the vicinity of office districts. Some companies also moved to downsize the amount of office space they lease, anticipating that many people will continue to work from home either full-time or part-time. Other companies, especially in tech-intensive sectors, widened their recruitment net in the expectation that there will be newly hired people who will never need to come into the office.
Smart Energy Systems
Smart cities advocates have long argued that one of the key benefits of these technologies involves improving urban sustainability, and reducing and shifting energy consumption from carbon-intensive sources to renewables. A growing number of utilities use technologies, such as smart meters, peak-period pricing, and load management systems, that allow large consumers, such as office buildings, to automatically make slight adjustments to heating and air conditioning levels as a means of reducing overall energy consumption.
Many municipalities, in turn, are investing in centrally controlled smart street lights. These devices, mounted on utility poles, use low-energy LED instead of conventional bulbs. They have lower maintenance costs because they last longer, and some systems are programmed to adjust automatically to ambient light, which also reduces energy consumption. Some commercial models have other sensors and even video built in, transforming them from static emitters of nighttime illumination to disbursed data-gathering tools.
In regions that promote the use of photovoltaic solar panels, two-way electricity meters allow energy generated on a rooftop to flow into the grid. Growing numbers of homeowners are installing smart thermostats that use sensors to continually readjust heating or cooling levels. These devices are wifi-enabled so they can be managed from a smart phone app. Smart thermostat firms like Ecobee also allow users to wirelessly ‘donate’ their energy-use data to scientists studying building performance.
Intelligent Transportation Systems
Some of the earliest smart city systems were traffic control centres developed by IBM and other firms for municipal customers. These computer systems combine video, traffic flow readings from weight detection ‘loops’ built into the pavement, and, more recently, GPS information about public transit vehicles to generate a real-time view of road conditions and congestion.
These so-called ‘intelligent transportation systems’ – e.g., the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System, which was developed in New South Wales, Australia, in the early 1970s and has since been deployed in gridlocked cities around the world – automatically control traffic signals in a dynamic way that responds to conditions on the road.
Many start-ups have flocked into this market. Miovision, a Kitchener, Ontario, firm, in 2015 raised $30 million to develop and deploy automated traffic counters, which are installed in boxes near signalized intersections to measure vehicle movements. Using digital cameras that can interpret road conditions, the devices are fitted out with AI algorithms designed to automatically adjust signal intervals and coordinate with adjacent traffic lights, based on a municipality’s road policies. Co-Founder and CEO Kurtis McBride tells me that improved efficiency in traffic flow can cut travel times and reduce emissions related to idling.
Other transportation-oriented technologies have also proliferated in recent years, and include everything from transit smart cards (e.g., London’s Oyster) to licence-plate readers, apps showing transit routes and real-time schedules, parking and navigation apps, demand-based micro-transit, and a wide range of vehicle-sharing systems for cars, bikes, and scooters, all of them accessible via smart phones.
A 2018 analysis by McKinsey Global Institute concluded that transportation-related smart systems yielded the greatest gains for cities. ‘We found that these tools could reduce fatalities by 8 to 10 per cent, accelerate emergency response times by 20 to 35 per cent, [and] shave the average commute by 15 to 20 per cent.’
Visualization
While architects have long used sophisticated modelling software to design buildings and public spaces, urban planners are turning to related applications that use data visualization tools developed by smart city start-ups. Some firms have created software that aggregate a wide range of big data sets gathered by sensors and other sources to generate so-called ‘digital twins’: highly detailed 3-D representations of an urban region that allows users to zoom in and out, pivot images, and drill down to find even more detailed data – for example, about the zoning rules that apply to a given location.
The simulation tools permit planners, politicians, businesses, and residents to visualize various future planning scenarios. For example, AugmentCity, a fifteen-year-old Norwegian firm, has created a simulator that looks at how Ålesund, a city of about 70,000 in the country’s north, can reduce emissions using a range of strategies, from introducing more electric vehicles to altering the mooring practices of the cruise ships that stop in the harbour. The simulator is designed to graphically depict how different planning decisions impact the city’s carbon emissions overall. ‘Humans understand data in visual formats,’ CEO Joel Alexander Mills said during the 2019 trade show. ‘We need humans to interact with technology to make decisions.’
Although some smart technologies – video-conferencing, for example – have solved practical problems and seem to have become permanent fixtures in our society, others are still in development, promising easy solutions that don’t quite fit the untidy reality of busy cities.
Shoshanna Saxe, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto, cites an infrastructure monitoring system developed jointly by NASA and the University of Bath. The idea is to use remote wireless sensing devices on satellite radar to detect subtle structural vibrations on bridges that could indicate the presence of worsening weaknesses. Officials and control systems can monitor the sensors for signs of trouble. But, as she notes, the problem with this idea is its reliance on digital devices, wireless networks, and the electrical grid. What would happen, she asks, if the power goes out or the sensors fail to pick up the vibrations created by a potentially catastrophic crack? Other smart city watchers have also warned about the risks of what Anthony Townsend describes as ‘buggy and brittle’ technologies.
Smart cities, Saxe wrote in a widely shared 2019 New York Times column, ‘will be exceedingly complex to manage, with all sorts of unpredictable vulnerabilities. There will always be a place for new technology in our urban infrastructure, but we may find that often, “dumb” cities will do better than smart ones.’
She observed that ordinary consumer electronics – e.g., cell phones or kitchen appliances kitted out with some kind of digital functions – become obsolete rapidly, and smart city tech will be no different.
‘Rather than chasing the newest shiny smart-city technology,’ Saxe warns, ‘we should redirect some of that energy toward building excellent dumb cities – cities planned and built with best-in-class, durable approaches to infrastructure and the public realm … Tech has a place in cities, but that place is not everywhere.’