The Smart City—Technocratic or Democratic?
A debate has been brewing in the smart city movement about who exactly makes the smart city a reality. Will it be the people—those who innovate on the ground, organize their communities and networks of friends, and who commit their spare time to improving people’s quality of life? Or will it be the technocrats—the presidents and vice presidents of corporations with billions of dollars in capital, the policy-makers in Washington D.C. and city halls, and the negotiators at international bodies?
Anthony Townsend, whose book I summarized in this post, sides with the ICT-empowered activists on the ground. It’s the do-it-yourself, crowd-sourced start-up, friends-through-Meetup folks who are going to usher in the smart city. Governments need to simply ensure that the [anonymous] data is available to everyone, and local innovators will mobilize that data, creating new culture (dinner with strangers), new businesses (ride-sharing and house-sharing), and new ways to navigate cities (crowd-sourced travel guides). These are bottom-up, democratic approaches to the smart city, and they matter a whole lot. As I say in my blog summary of Townsend’s Book Smart Cities, it is the,
powerful operating systems of our handheld devices — our iPhones, for example — will revolutionize citizen-driven urban development and networking. Indeed, Townsend, as seen in his other interviews, is enamored by the power of the smartphone, a device that has 10X the computational power of the 1976 supercomputer built at Los Alamos (introduction). He argues that smartphones hail from the “situated software” movement, which privileges local needs as informed by a group of users (234). This speaks against the corporate likes of Cisco and IBM, who think that smart city initiatives are scalable to any other city.
BUT, there is a problem with this smart-phone-empowering, citizen-led movement. Its inventions and networks are often diffuse and therefore ineffectual on a larger scale beyond the city where they work. Furthermore, as of yet, these citizen-led, ICT-empowered apps and tools and trends have not really addressed the primary drivers of people’s carbon and ecological footprints. Using “heat map” data to pinpoint the hippest bar or underground jazz venue in your city is a great use of ICT. It helps to forge fascinating relationships and experiences in a meandering urban labyrinth that simply cannot be contained in a tourist pamphlet or a chamber of commerce website. But the citizen-mobilized data that we’ve seen thus far does little to address the systemic failures of our urban form—failures that have instigated our looking to the smart city in the first place.
Defending the need for technocratic initiatives is not that popular in a country that likes to root for underdogs. Many academics are especially quick to romanticize the famous strikes of the past, where everyday people decided to stick it to their bosses or to their governments. Facing gruesome labor conditions or systemic racism, they said “enough is enough,” got together, and formed a formidable force that sometimes secured got its demands. Think of Cesar Chavez, the Vietnam War Protests, the Wobblies, and Martin Luther King.
But note that these lessons from the past do not apply to the environmental movement. It is proving very difficult “to face” environmental threats. Chavez showed starving day-laborers working for pennies a day. The Vietnam War Protests had gruesome battle images and personal stories. The Wobblies had horrendous workdays that lasted 15–20 hours and proof of corporate gangs killing them when they went on strike. Martin Luther King could point to everyday instances of racism that one had either received, witnessed, or committed.
How do you courageously protest rising CO2 emissions in a meaningful way if we haven’t even figured out how to “show” the danger of high CO2 levels to the public? What’s the point of a sit-in at City Hall if you cannot even galvanize our coastal cities to act and demand national and international interventions against rising sea levels? How do you raise alarm about the Anthropocene, and all the species humanity has made extinct, when your average American might only interact with a few species at most in their suburban life? Rob Nixon makes me doubt that we can have an effective, global bottom-up approach to the environmental crisis. In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon notes that most environmental degradation, climate change included, is slow violence,
or violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all (Nixon 2)
And this is why the smart city movement must be more than democratic, bottom-up, citizen-led innovation. It must be more than that. If the industrialized nations — the ones either responsible for past emissions or current emissions — really wish to meet the IPCC recommendation of temperatures rising no more than 2 degrees Celsius (keeping in mind that we’ve already passed 1 degrees Celsius), then they must institute sweeping, top-down, regulations and/or incentives now. People’s power works wonders on a small scale, in communities, cities, and regions. Let people devote their energies there, working together to innovate according to their local needs and context. But for larger matters that warrant coordinated action nationally and internationally, let’s also empower the technocrats and push them to radically alter our governmental and economic institutions. In the end, democratic and technocratic initiatives need not be mutually-exclusive. They are rather simply alternative, complimentary tactics for addressing the same concern: creating a sustainable world that improves quality of life for all beings.
Before closing, we should ask “what could these technocratic interventions be that will make the smart city a reality?” I will briefly list 5 technocratic responses to one facet of the environmental crisis: climate change. Again, recall from my last blog post (Who Owns the Smart City?) that per capita CO2 emissions sit just above 17 tons in the United States, and that the UN says we need to have 2 tons of per capita emissions by 2050. I make these suggestions with that in mind.
- Carbon Tax: Naomi Klein makes a strong case for a carbon tax in her book This Changes Everything. A carbon tax would “level the playing field” for renewables, and the proceeds from this tax could be entirely devoted to modernizing infrastructure.
- Smart Grid: I’ve explained the smart grid in a previous blog post, but remember this: we cannot reach 100% renewables unless we update the electric grid.
- Public Ownership of all Utilities: You simply will not meet those 100% renewable energy targets in a meaningful time frame if your utility is privately owned. The energy producers do not need to be publicly owned, but the means of distributing and selling that energy to consumers should be done by public, not-for-profit governments. If you are skeptical of this proposition, then consider this: how does a private company make a profit if households consume less energy year after year?
- District Heating & Cooling and Water Pipes: Now that sounds boring, but it’s true. What if I told you that cities could produce heat to warm your room just by capturing “waste heat” from businesses and nearby industries? ICT sensors can help make that happen. And what if I told you that up to 50% of water consumption is actually due to leaky pipes? ICT sensors can fix that.
- Sharing (& Protecting) Public Data: Publicly shared data could be a treasure trove for local innovators who develop city-specific services that improve governance. Consider the possibilities if ride-hailing services knew every worker’s commute route . . . Consider the possibilities if composting businesses knew where all gardens were and where all food waste was produced . . . and I could go on and on.
