Is the World Ready for Smart Cities?

In our third and final instalment of our smart cities series, learn about the technologies powering a sustainable and connected future in urban development, as well as the responsibilities that come with the territory.

This is the final instalment of our 3 part series on Smart Cities. Part 1 can be read here. Part 2 can be read here. Follow us for more content here.

In part two of our Smart Cities series, we explored the dark realities behind moving full-steam ahead with smart cities and the technologies that could end up altering our society to our detriment. Our final instalment will weigh our responsibilities moving forward, and turn our anxieties about the future of urban development into worthy causes to fight for.

Privatization & Responsibility

Within the smart city concept is the mission to “aggregate data from previously remote spaces, automate processes, incentivize efficiencies, and limit human oversight.”

As discussed in part two, these mission statements are often nestled between language of innovation and autonomy, but usually as a marketing strategy to position your current stack of data systems in your daily life as outdated.

This strategy leverages capitalist ideas and is truly about doing more with less, while also squeezing profit from public assets for private benefit. But in privatizing these systems that are constantly monitoring us and studying our every move, the smart city concept can become dystopic and predatory.

Maybe our future is more likely to replicate this dystopian Orwell classic, and not the Spike Jonze film Her after all.

The prison-industrial complex and the public education system are two other public structures that are being leveraged for the gain of private corporations by way of constantly surveilling and guiding human interaction. We are familiar with the flaws in these systems by now and their staying power rooted in an influx of corporate dollars, so perhaps it is worth pondering weather the trajectory of these smart cities will materialize in building our own metropolitan, digital prisons.

As previously mentioned, smart cities are defined by their processes that leverage digital technology across government functions using sensor-based data to regulate public services. This comes with a high cost of installing these networks, monitoring data, and maintaining high levels of security encryption to deter hackers from compromising the entire infrastructure of a city.

Social Impact

This lends itself to a larger opportunity for private companies, as social impact investing will likely be a major piece of the smart city puzzle. Investments in technologies that emphasize and monitor efficiencies and saving costs will become projects of the utmost importance and be profit streams for venture capital players.

So, while impact investing will see companies rooted in efficiency and sustainability be rewarded, our privacy and ownership will be leveraged and compromised at the hands of privatization. Is this still responsible urban development?

The meta-narrative of smart cities exists as the perfect canvas for many private agendas to be splattered, and puts classes that cannot afford to participate as “smart citizens” at risk. The boutique urbanism that participating cities are striving for run the risk of increasing efficiencies that will only result in more consumption which will undermine broader social, economic and environmental progress.

The Devil is in the Data

Estated is a property data provider, and a pretty damn good one at that. However, in the face of smart cities and the collection of new data points and insights by the second, it is important to ponder who will own this data, where it will exist and if it will be sold and exploited in any way.

A large part of Estated’s data collection process is utilizing sources of open data, which is of course meant to contribute to innovative practices by providing local, regional and national businesses with access.

Now, the shift of public to private sector ownership of this data will mean that this access will become more guarded, or offered for purchase at a premium.

Data companies like Estated offer APIs that offer access to data systems, which is a function of offering a level of free access but also a tiered pricing system for full, expansive data sets and insights.

While we currently apply this to property data that includes things like demographic data, tax history, and crime data, it is not anywhere close to the potential invasiveness with APIs of the future that will be sold to anyone willing to pay the price.

The Future of Real Estate

Cisco, Microsoft and Google have all inserted themselves to being involved in the development of smart cities to get a head start on the speculative capital. These big fish companies are determined to be the founding fathers of smart cities and accumulate the data in their systems, rather than leaning on city designated planners, designers and policymakers.

In this space, money from the tech sector converges with the real estate — a match made in shareholder heaven. Capital in these spaces has a reproducible quality, and will regenerate in spite of any global crises in climate, the economy and socio-economic inequality.

Now, pair this alluring economic stability in selling data with cash-strapped municipalities, and you have a recipe for disaster. Under what circumstances is it ethical for cities to monetize data of taxpaying citizens for the gain of the private sector?

Thanks for reading our series on Smart Cities. If you have any thoughts, questions or responses, please engage with us on Twitter and follow us on Medium for more content.