Who Should Hold the Keys to Designing a Smart City?
“I really think there’s opportunity for governments to use technology well. It’s a question of how you get the confidence built up in government… to make them realize, ‘you’re in charge! You’re the ones driving!’” -Bianca Wylie
Bianca Wylie is an open government advocate who keeps the technocrats in check. With a background in tech and public engagement, she’s worked in a myriad of different positions in the tech industry — from operations and infrastructure to corporate training and project management. In the public engagement/policy sector she’s advised on various public consultation processes for government and government agencies. All of this on top of founding Tech Reset Canada as well as being a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation — you could say she’s a bit of a badass. And she advocates for cities that are designed by the people who live in those cities. A cause we can get behind!
Wylie has led much of the conversation when it comes to government and technology. She has become so powerful of a voice that Anthony Townsend coined her as the Jane Jacobs of Smart Cities. If you’ve ever seen Citizen Jane: Battle For The City, you can attest to the sheer gladiatoresque qualities Jane possessed in order to pick a fight and win against a master builder like Robert Moses. Bianca is taking a similar path in her work with Block Sidewalk — a grassroots movement to put a halt to the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto.
Is it fair to equate Wylie’s fierce opposition to Sidewalk Labs’ to the same monumental fight that Jacobs previously fought? Maybe not, but it’s so tempting to want to characterize her in that role and hope that she rides that train to the very end of the line. She has the passion and the organizing power to do it. Bonus, who doesn’t love a whip-smart superhero saving the ordinary folks from their corporate overlords?
So, you, dear reader, are a citizen of some place. A country, a state, a city, or maybe a province? Presumably, you pay taxes. If you had to pick one group to design your smart city who would you pick?
a. A Silicon Valley-based technology corporation that has enough money to do almost anything they can dream of.
b. Your local government that may be encumbered by the chasm between staff and electeds, lackds financial resources and imagination, but makes up for it in knowledge of infrastructure, history, and process?
c. The citizens. The people who live and work and walk and shop in the city.
Sidewalk Labs — a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google ‘s parent company — the most controversial data hoarders on the planet) announced their plan on how they were going to spend $100 billion dollars in February of 2019. This intention to create the most epic smart city on the planet has caused more than a few urban design nerds’ ‘spidey senses’ to go up.
They’re designing it to solve some of the most complex problems of our day — affordable housing, walkability, income-equality, an amazing culture.
In a Fortune article from February of this year —
As for what it looks like, Sidewalk Labs will be a dozen towers in the neighborhood which will include 3,000 units for housing, a third of which are designated “affordable.” All of the city’s buildings will be modular, so they can adapt as needed and the town will be run on solar power, geothermal heat and have 5G internet for everyone. Underneath the city a series of tunnels will accommodate delivery drivers and garbage trucks, all operated by robots rather than humans.
Geesh. It’s beginning to feel like they are trying to boil the ocean.
Building Cities is Hard
Just to be clear, building cities is hard. So many stakeholders, so little consensus. It’s tremendously complex and it requires expensive and difficult to attain infrastructure like water, land, electricity. Building a city from scratch is quite literally one of the most ambitious activities one could possibly take on. Reforming a city that has already been built is already darn near impossible. Creating it from scratch? Forgive me if you just noticed that my eyes rolled into the back of my head like cherries on a slot machine. Adding technology and smart cities elements to the plan and execution of said city, makes it exponentially complex.
Let’s go back to our dear friend, Bianca, for a second. She’s been keeping tabs on the Sidewalk Labs project and documenting the progress they’ve made on her medium blog.
She claims, part of the problem with this project, does not lie in Sidewalk Labs alone, but rather, how the city set up the RFP for the project in the first place.
In the Sidewalk Toronto case, some of the core issues with this project stem from how the RFP was designed. In the name of innovation and economic development, the power to frame the narrative for neighbourhood development was handed over in full to a corporation. The definition of governance for data in the space was handed over as well.
The project was designed without people in mind.
And this, this may sound like a future-driven, technologically advanced system, but it ignores the largest stakeholder group within a city. Smart cities let alone cities in general need to be bottom up, not top down. People first, not tech first.
The real reason all of these really expensive and cumbersome resources are needed in order to build a city is that cities literally die if they don’t have one thing. That one thing is people.
Ghost towns got their names the minute they became irrelevant to the people that lived there. Very quickly the question becomes more about how you keep people in the city, and less about the water, the tech, the various parts of the city and how they work.
massive cities in China where nobody lives.
So, if the city dies without people, the question remains, who will save the city from losing its most scarce resources— people?
Will it be a technology company, the cities, or the citizens themselves? Or is it some combination of these three groups? And who should lead? Who should follow, and who should get out of the way?
