Why Google Sidewalk failed, and a better future for smart cities

What will a smart city do to make everyone’s lives better? That’s the big question.

Many cities have already thrown a lot of public resources at smart city technology — and it should have helped us through the COVID crisis. But it’s hard to see a clear-cut case where all that expensive technology made a difference.

Urban governments were, and still are, starved for data to help them grapple with the pandemic at street level. Yet some of the thinking about smart-city infrastructure — the detectors and collectors and sensors and so on — were wrongheaded from the start.

A significant exception was in South Korea. That’s where a different model of smart cities, enabling contact tracing, government alerts over smartphones, coordinated with nightclubs where people got sick, helped contain infections.

But in most cases, the people who run cities (and especially the citizens who live there) just aren’t seeing a big benefit from all the technology — especially if it means trading away their privacy. The Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs found this out when privacy concerns killed its Toronto waterfront smart-city plan.The public wasn’t happy knowing their every move would be monitored and recorded.

But here’s the thing. You don’t need to build an expensive, intrusive framework to collect urban data. There’s a better way, where citizens opt into a system using apps on our smartphones.

By promoting public-private partnerships using apps and data, at far less cost, we can have the smart cities of our dreams — hopefully, in time for the next big crisis.

Like what you just read?

• Get the Recurrent Patterns newsletter in your inbox.
• Get a paid membership on Medium to access all articles. Subscribe today