Whose Smart City?
Open Sustainability & Innovation
Whose Smart City?
Whose Smart City?
"Plaza del Torico, Teruel, HDR" by Marc (marcp_dmoz) CC BY NC SA
The proliferation of 'smart' solutions to a deluge of political and economic problems in today's cities may well serve to reinforce urban inequality at a time when new radical alternatives are in desperate need.
As a student of cities, I am very much interested in the diffusion and circulation of buzzwords, global slogans and global ideas about cities and their development strategies. In the last decade, I have observed the shifts from debates on technological and information cities, to cultural cities, creative cities, sustainable, green and resilient cities, to our current conjuncture with the rise of the 'smart' cities. But what does it mean for a city to be ‘smart’? What are the implications and rationales behind smart urbanism? Is smart urbanism as positive as the term suggests?
As a student of cities, I am very much interested in the diffusion and circulation of buzzwords, global slogans and global ideas about cities and their development strategies. In the last decade, I have observed the shifts from debates on technological and information cities, to cultural cities, creative cities, sustainable, green and resilient cities, to our current conjuncture with the rise of the 'smart' cities. But what does it mean for a city to be ‘smart’? What are the implications and rationales behind smart urbanism? Is smart urbanism as positive as the term suggests?
The
concept behind smart cities is actually rather vague, there is
no common definition of what a smart city is, most commonly the idea
relies on the implicit assumption that urban infrastructures
and everyday life can/should be optimized and ’greened’ through the
technologies
and innovations of global IT companies. So, what’s the problem with
smart cities?
Who wouldn’t want to live in a smart city anyway?
As
I have written elsewhere,
the
emergence and dominance of smart city rhetoric, should be extremely
worrying for most. One must always be suspicious, constantly critical of
technocratic slogans and easy solutions for what
are overwhelmingly political problems. There
are two current conjectures on the role of cities, which inform the
deluge of “smart urbanism” in today’s policy environment. On the one
hand, in the current
ascendancy of neoliberal governance under the stewardship of
international
institutions, the World Bank and OECD, cities have
become engines of
national/regional/global development, cities are forced to engage in fierce
competition with each other for the attraction of investments, tourists, “creative
people”, global events, etc. On the other hand, in the framework of a growing global urbanization, cities
are considered strategic sites for coping with and challenging, global
change and key environmental problems.
The
recent and popular discourse on smart cities can be located at the crossroad
between these two different narratives. A great deal
of the smart city discourse is disseminated from the US, and in particular from
MIT laboratories. The
smart city concept has also become a popular option in Europe, frequently
forming part of European calls for projects, the EU
itself assigning large amounts of funds to smart city projects all over Europe.
To quote an example, Milan has
received money in order to implement smart mobility management projects and to
enhance the energy efficiency of public administration buildings. However, this
is not just a Euro-American phenomenon: China has
announced various smart city pilot projects; while in India, BJP presidential candidate
Narendra
Modi recently pledged to build 100 smart cities if elected this year. Indeed
smart city projects can be found in Africa, Latin
America, and all over the world.
The
idea of smart city is largely indebted to previous debates on smart
growth and intelligent
cities. The role of academic literature in smart city development, has
however been marginal, the bulk of discourse produced since the 1990s has come
from ‘smart’ enterprises themselves, such as Cisco, Siemens and IBM. It should
be noted that the ‘smarter cities’ trademark was officially registered as
belonging to IBM, in 2011. More recently, a number of enterprises –Schneider
Electric, Hitachi, Accenture, Toshiba, General Electric, Microsoft, Oracle,
Capgemini and SAP – have heavily promoted (and sold) ‘smart’
technologies to cities.
The
goal of transforming our cities in green, efficient and sustainable ways
by
implementing new technologies is persuasively desirable, impressing as
it does
a kind of conventional wisdom. The semantic construction of the term
‘smart
city’ implies a dichotomist distinction between ‘intelligent’ (smart)
cities, and ‘stupid’ (non-smart) Luddite cities. There are nevertheless a
number of critical issues connected to
‘smart’ urban development projects.
Firstly,
the production of smart cities is overwhelmingly in the hands of private
enterprises, the smart city is an extremely profitable business. In Italy, for
example, there has been a proliferation of public-private partnerships formed
to brand cities and formally pursue city-development through the smart city
model, take Fondazione
Torino Smart City or Agenzia Smart Milano for
example.
Of course private enterprises by their nature, pursue profits, and generally seek
evasion of democratic procedure, rules, regulations and oversight to that
pursuit. If recent history is anything to go by, the provision of urban
infrastructures (as “smart” as they might be) by private companies has the
potential to further enhance urban splintering, mimicking the PPP-global trend to promote well-endowed
technological enclaves functionally separated from non-profitable spaces.
Secondly,
the vision of the smart city is largely matched to the aspirations and
world-views of a very particular, minority section of the population; namely, a
well-educated middle class that uses (and can afford) new technologies. In the
smart city there is apparently little space for people at the margins, and this
is particularly evident in cities of the Global South, where there is the risk
of increasing the distance between the smart city and areas which exist off the
map, off the grid, the so-called ‘informal city’. Consider, for example, the
recent construction of the ‘smart’ gondola
air elevator running across Rio de Janeiro, just above the favelas of Alemão,
the poorest neighbourhood in the city, home to around 200,000 inhabitants and largely
lacking in basic infrastructure. The project cost about 74 million dollars, and
it is of little use
for local residents. Traffic is of course not as much a priority for the area, as the lack of
sanitation, waste management services and security. But, above all, local
communities have not been in any way been involved in the planning of the
project, which now appears to be as much a project of spectacle than
‘smartness’, likely connected to the forthcoming FIFA World Cup and Olympic
Games events. Examples like the Rio’s ‘smart’ gondola bring forward
serious questions as to who has the right to produce and legitimize urban
visions?
Thirdly,
the smart city implies an oversimplified and stereotyped vision of technology,
close to that of old modernist ideologies. Smart city practise nurtures the
idea that technologies
can and will provide the solutions to all of our multiple problems
without fundamentally changing our lifestyles or challenging the structures
which enforce and maintain such problems. In the smart-city mantra, the total complexity
of our urban ecosystems are reduced to a bunch of data that can be monitored
and controlled. The urban question is not considered a social or political one,
but as a basic technological one, that may be solved thanks to the
technological solutions provided by private enterprises. This technological
saviourism is often assumed to be a mobile, global ‘social technology’ that can
be dropped into any environment with minor adaptations. The heterogeneity of
cities is barely considered, in favour of a single linear vision of the
evolutionary path of cities toward technological development.
It
may be argued that it is not a coincidence that smart city discourse has
grown hand in hand with the outbreak of the global economic crisis in
2008. In a time of
a deluge of urban problems, severe cuts to
urban financial assets and provisions of social welfare, the smart city
operates as an instrument to integrate the private sector in the
provision
of erstwhile public urban services under the moniker of ‘progression’
and
‘smartness’. The strategy amplifies the role of private actors and
private
capital in the management and in the transformations of cities, with all
the
risks widely discussed. From this perspective, the smart city project
may
not fuel a radically new urban vision for the future, but rather may
well reiterate
old logics of urban boosterism and urban
entrepreneurialism, at a time when new urban
alternatives based on radical changes in lifestyles, cultures and economic
practices are in desperate need.
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