Smart cities: For dummies
Issue 94 - 29 March 2022 (9-min read)
Imagine having everything you need being only a 15-minute walk away. Your office, your grocery store, your kids’ school, your bookstore and your favourite cafe. That’s the big promise of smart cities and, as someone who braved two hours each way on the school bus, I see the lure. Not to mention the additional perks of never having to take the trash out or queuing up at a fuel station.
Join us in this week’s The Global Tiller as we look into the concept of smart cities and the promises of future living. What do they offer in principle and where do they fall short? What are some sacrifices its residents are required to make?
What makes a city smart is not the collective intelligence of its residents but the extent to which technology plays a role in the life of its inhabitants. Everything from transportation, water supply, waste management and electricity is designed with the help of digital solutions that, in theory, make it more efficient and sustainable.
The allure of this design is global and we can find smart cities being pitched in many different parts of the world. South Korea launched its smart city project in Songdo in 2002, promising a city designed to eliminate cars. There are also no trash trucks —a network of tubes connect each housing unit to the citywide waste sorting facility. India delved into designing a city from scratch modelled after Italy’s Portofino. And Canada hosted Google’s attempt at city planning with its Quayside neighbourhood in Toronto.
But perhaps the most ambitious of these plans is Saudi Arabia’s Neom Smart City — an AI-powered city complete with flying cabs, robot maids and an artificial moon. Announced in 2017, Neom promises to be an economic hub spanning over 26,500 square kilometres extending along the Aqaba Gulf and the Red Sea coastline. In 2021, Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman pitched the even more ambitious idea of The Line — a 170-kilometre-long linear urban development of communities in Neom connected by an underground public transport network.
How smart these cities are may fall on a spectrum, with Neom being a utopian outlier, but they all attempt to solve our current challenges of urban living: congestion, traffic, pollution, etc. And that’s why they all share similar characteristics: bike lanes and mass transit, instead of highways; natural temperature control, instead of air-conditioning; green spaces, instead of crowded buildings.
In reality, however, many smart cities have failed to deliver on these promises. Songdo’s International Business District managed to attract only 70,000 residents compared to the 300,000 the government had envisioned. Residents admit that, while they enjoy controlling the lights and temperature in their apartment from their phones, human connections are few and far between. India’s Lavasa has turned into a ghost town with incomplete structures, sporadic garbage collection and non-existing maintenance. And as for Quayside in Toronto, the project has since been shelved entirely. Even other smart cities in Abu Dhabi, Kenya and Portugal have had to scale down their grand plans when actual construction went underway.
A big part of the reason why smart cities fail to take off has to do with the sacrifices that its residents are asked to make if they want to enjoy living in the future. The success of smart cities rests predominantly on how much data it can harvest from its residents, in order to provide customised services. If you really want to have optimal electricity usage, you should be prepared to give your city access to shut down your toaster and television when not in use. If you want to be saved immediately in case of a medical emergency, you should be ready to let your city surveil all your movements.
If existing smart cities use 1% of data from residents and smart infrastructure, Saudi Arabia’s Neom wants to collect 90% of it. The potential of mass data collection explains why authoritarian governments, especially, love smart cities. But, rest assured, even the world’s best (self-proclaimed) democracy has built in smart city surveillance technology in its $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.
Does this mean that the price to pay for the perks promised by these smart cities is our privacy? Is there a way to achieve the utopia shown in the smart city brochures while also protecting our future privacy and safety? Will future gentrification take place at the expense of those not rich enough to buy the best surveillance package? The Saudi authorities have killed a villager who vowed to resist the government’s eviction order to clear the way for Neom. Do we really want to build our future homes on bloody soil…again? Since most smart cities are designed by the same handful of international consultants, will all cities eventually look and feel the same?
We’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a chance to visit any of these smart cities.
Until next week, take care and stay safe.
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig deeper
While researching for this theme, I came across Carlos Moreno’s concept of The 15-Minute City, where inhabitants have access to all the services they need to live, learn and thrive within their immediate vicinity. He shares ideas for making urban areas adapt to humans, not the other way around.
If you’re up for it, here is a super interesting, long-read on how ancient societies reimagined what societies could be and what are some ways to live alongside nature.
Mamta Chand on women's rights, representation and women's future in the Pacific
Don’t miss our latest Pacific Toks podcast episode in which Philippe sits down for a chat with Mamta Chand, a women’s rights activist in Fiji.
Here’s a note from Philippe: I’ve been following Mamta’s work and I’ve been amazed by her power, her strength, her ability to never give up on what is right, and on pushing for positive change. She has also been one of the many women who have helped me to continuously question my perspectives and to make sure that my ideas and views on women and women’s rights are based not only on what I think but on what is and what should be according to them. That’s why I wanted to talk to her and share it with you.
…and now what?
What makes a city smart? If you look at all the projects that Hira described, it’s all about data management to improve the delivery of basic services. Indeed, that’s a smart idea that helps us deal efficiently with all our urban challenges: noise, traffic, pollution, etc. But, as she hints, it might as well have been the collective intelligence of its people, managing together to create a cohesive, connected and well-organized place to live. And if they’re helped by technology, even better!
But, no! The smart cities of today are smart on their own, whoever may live in it or not. Whether it be regular citizens or billionaires, people from every walk of life and every ethnicity, somehow they are all deemed interchangeable. It’s about the tools, not those who benefit from them.
Decades ago, we saw the attempts to create perfect cities, the perfect urban areas in which everyone could be happy, in which everything was ready, efficient and perfect. One famous one that comes to mind is Brazilia, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer or, on a smaller scale, Cité Radieuse by Le Corbusier in France. Both of those projects had one thing in common: creating the perfect urban utopia. But, if it looked so on paper, in practice, these projects never worked out. Brazilia downtown may stay neat but its surrounding areas are crawling with inequalities and other social issues. As for Cité Radieuse, it stands almost empty of its inhabitants.
Why did they fail? Maybe, because those were never designed by the people who lived in it.
Let’s look at our real cities for a moment. An iconic one, New York, is a big mess! It’s loud, it’s dirty, and not that beautiful. But it has survived crises for decades and is still a living entity booming with life that we all love to visit. Many other cities around the world are like that. They have sustained time, wars, crises and all the daily grind, giving us vibrant spaces and communities that would never leave it for a kingdom. Why? Because they are organic entities that have become what they are today thanks to the people living in it who, beyond the sense of practicality, have developed a community within which everyone shares something.
This raises questions about smart cities. Can they still work if they are not the result of a social contract made by the people willing to share a space together? Cities are some of the most ancient form of space organisation in human history. They are places where people find shared interests, to do business, create marketplaces, protect from attacks, or even worship together and share a common identity.
As smart cities develop, we should make sure that they remain the result of collective thinking, collective sharing and collective will as history has shown us. What happened in Toronto is exactly that if you think about it: the collective didn’t recognise itself in Google’s vision so they took it down to maintain their own social contract.
We need to make sure that these new projects that will set the tone for the decades to come fit the values that we wish to put in our urban planning developments. It is, therefore, important to ensure that these “perfect” city projects, somehow similar to the kingdom of Farquaad in Shrek, are not monopolised by authoritarian regimes or self-centred billionaires.
We remember only too well, in Tahiti, how the dreams of certain Californian tech gurus and their libertarian floating islands have turned out to be. A project based on values of individualism and frenzied materialism that failed to spark a connection with our communities and our social contract.
Smart cities beg us to ask the same questions, as the TomorrowCity blog reminded us, referring to The Line in Neom:
the issue of whether such a state-of-the-art idea actually corresponds with the social reality of the country still needs to be resolved. Will it be impartial in the way it treats everyone, regardless of gender or religion? How practical are the city's projects and to what extent are the projects simply a propaganda exercise? And, in terms of smart cities, are the ambitions to create a green city in the desert really sustainable?
As our cities evolve, mostly due the pandemic, and as our collective spaces need to be rethought, we need to make sure that they remain spaces that are, first and foremost, created on the basis of why we choose to live together and what makes us a community, more than just the singular focus on how to make it work.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury
