Smart Cities, Made in the USA?
Many of the world’s smartest cities, especially those that are fully pre-planned, are in countries that are changing rapidly, both in terms of urbanization and development. However, fully-smart cities — or at least communities — are also being planned closer to home, but have yet to prove their viability.
In Denver, Panasonic is building a new, fully-planned community in the exurbs near the airport, integrating smart technology from the start. The so-called Pena Station is modeled on a city outside Tokyo that opened in 2014 (and yes, “opened” is the term-of-art). The project’s success depends on old-school infrastructure, co-locating with the light rail expansion underway across the metro area, and betting on city’s large airport as a driver, but it is equally reliant on the more micro-level, smart city infrastructure to attract residents and maximize efficiency. Smart city tech includes sophisticated energy use monitoring, encouraging civic engagement through gamification, using cameras as “virtual gates” to protect kids, and even “a digital mirror that will brief residents on their weight gain and sleep patterns.”
As the article notes, Pena Station embodies a top-down vision of smart city planning — every element from homes and streets to solar panels and cameras are strategically laid out ahead of time to maximize data collection and efficiency. While Pena Station layers on sensors and smart tech, at its roots the planned nature and scale of the community hearkens back to the big infrastructure projects of the Robert Moses era and the sub-divisions of suburban sprawl. This seems to buck current American planning trends, with the desire for “organic” growth driven by the community itself, not to mention the movement toward more sustainable infill development.
Pena Station begs the question of what role — if any — community members should have in planning their own smart cities, and how to balance thoughtful planning with grassroots-driven growth in the age of smart, when we could theoretically use big data to know the “best” way to make so many planning decisions. And in what might prove a cautionary tale, just as Pena Station gets underway, the deal to build another large-scale, fully planned smart community — the Lakeside community in Chicago has apparently — fell apart before it could get of the ground. So can these planned, smart cities get off the ground in the U.S.? The jury is out.
For more information:
Henry Grabar. “Will Denver Embrace Sensor-Filled “Smart City” Community?” Next City. March 1, 2016.
