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As metropolitan areas across the globe embark on “smart city’ initiatives, new research points to areas of concern ‘” and provides recommendations to move forward. MIT Sloan Management Review blog published an article that summarizes the latest critic about Smart Cities movement.
The article mentions a recent paper, The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism developed by Rob Kitchin, a researcher at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland and an essay on smart cities by Anthony Townsend, research director at the Silicon Valley-based Institute for the Future, and senior research fellow at New York University’ s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.
Rob Kitchin raises three concerns regarding managing smart cities:
- Technocratic governance: Smart-city proposals are based on an approach that is narrow in scope, reductionist and functionalist, derived from a limited set of particular kinds of data. They fail to take into account the wider effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital that shape city life and how it unfolds. At the same time, command systems centralize power and decision making into a select set of offices and make elements of data publicly available.
- Corporatisation of city governance and a technological lock-in: Smart-city agendas and associated technologies are being heavily promoted by a number of the world’ s largest software services and hardware companies. This creates several concerns: that public services are administered for private profit; that it creates a technology lock-in that shackles cities to particular technology platforms and vendors; and that there will be “one-size-fits-all smart-city-in-a-box’ solutions that take little account of the uniqueness of places, people and cultures and straitjackets city administrators.
- Panoptic cities: Big data and data-control centers that integrate and bind data streams together work toward moving various systems into a single, panoptic vantage point. This single vantage point raises “the specter of a Big Brother society based on a combination of surveillance and ‘˜dataveillance.’ ‘
Anthony Townsend writes:
Smart cities are almost guaranteed to be chock full of bugs, from smart toilets and faucets that won’ t operate to public screens sporting Microsoft’ s ominous Blue Screen of Death. But even when their code is clean, the innards of smart cities will be so complex that so-called normal accidents will be inevitable. The only questions will be when smart cities fail, and how much damage they cause when they crash.
Both, Kitchin and Townsend aren’ t recommending the abolition of smart cities. Rather, Kitchin suggests a balance: that smart city technology be complemented with a range of other “instruments, policies and practices that are sensitive to the diverse ways in which cities are structured and function.’ He argues for citizens’ rights to privacy in the face of unrelenting data and image surveillance.
In a similar way Townsend also provide suggestions for moving forward:
We need to question the confidence of tech-industry giants, and organize the local innovation that’ s blossoming at the grassroots into a truly global movement,’ he writes. “We need to push our civic leaders to think more about long-term survival and less about short-term gain, more about cooperation than competition. Most importantly, we need to take the wheel back from the engineers, and let people and communities decide where we should steer.
More info
MIT Sloan Management Review blog – Smart Cities and Economic Development: What to Consider