What about the people factor?

Guilherme Louzada
Civic Analytics 2019
2 min readOct 22, 2019

We all know the potential benefits of a “Smart City”: less people working on manual jobs, problems solved quickly, crimes being prevented, reduction in waiting times in hospitals. However, we often forget to measure the pros and cons of the ubiquitous technology and how it can affect the life of a society.

When we changed Blockbuster for Netflix, the Newsstand for Google and a trip to downtown for Amazon, we optimized our time and money, but we lost in interaction. And people like to interact with humans when they have a problem. A recent study showed that 70% of people would rather speak to a human customer service representative than engage with a digital customer service rep [1].

To become a smart city, a large amount of money needs to be invested. Singapore, New York City, Tokyo, and London will each invest more than $1 billion in smart cities programs this year [2]. Cities in the developed world may have funds to invest in fancy technology and pay high salaries to new tech employees. Unfortunately, the reality elsewhere may be different, for example. many cities in Brazil are struggling on their budgets[3]. These funds are needed to make people’s lives better within the cities.

Bottom line is that cities can benefit from becoming smarter, this is not questioned. However, we should measure the costs of achieving this result, and we should take more than just financial and time benefits. Cities are made from people, for people. We should consider the people factor when changing our cities.

[1] https://www.retaildive.com/news/70-of-consumers-still-want-human-interaction-versus-bots/543324/

[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190130005075/en/IDCs-Smart-Cities-Spending-Guide-Expands-Coverage

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-24/brazil-s-cash-strapped-states-to-pressure-congress-on-pensions

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