Can Smart Cities be a dystopia?

Smart Cities are seen by city governments as a major task in their future. A smart city can adapt to people’s needs in an easier way while wasting fewer resources and being more efficient. But what is a smart city?

First of all, in a smart city, a wide range of technology is applied in order to uplift the life of the inhabitants. Use cases can be very different here: intelligent traffic and public transportation systems are one of the biggest topics. Imagine an electronic train ticket, where you don’t have to care anymore about forgetting your ticket and ticket inspections. Imagine intelligent traffic management, that distributes traffic over the city in a way that there are as few traffic jams as possible. Imagine integrated mobility concepts, where there are many possible means of transportation to get from one place to another, while smart city systems tell you which to choose, so you take the fastest way. Smart homes, e.g. systems, that control heating or shutters in a way that it is as comfortable as possible while staying environmentally friendly, are hot topics as well. Or have you ever thought about intelligent waste disposal systems which reduce smell and improve efficiency?

A smart city works in a way, that sensors detect changes and the city reacts to that. For example, rubbish disposal can be triggered, if the container is full. Automated ticket inspections of users of public transportation systems can be implemented via face recognition or other systems without the need for a physical ticket or device. Although the age of smart cities is only about to begin, many cities call themselves smart cities or have created smart districts. So, Barcelona implemented a variety of systems that cover smart city topics to solve the modern problems of a city. Those include intelligent underground rubbish storage, which sucks rubbish in to avoid bad smell and to improve the rubbish collection, but also e.g. sensors on public places to protect inhabitants from to much noise, pollution or just measure the presence of people to optimize future city developments.

All of those systems can make the life of the inhabitants easier, better and more comfortable on a big scale. And if it is designed to help people — how can it be a dystopia? How exactly can a smart city restrict personal freedom?

For all of these topics, data (of the inhabitants) is needed and needs to be collected. A smart city completely based on sensor data collection. And when there is data collection, there is also the problem of misuse of the data. Complete profiles of the inhabitants may become a big problem and images of dystopias like in the book “1984” by George Orwell arise when a government has enough power to control the lives of people completely. In its worst extent, complete surveillance leads to a massive restriction of individual liberty. Sensors collect various data and a big part of it is connected to individuals (like information about the usage of public transportation) or can be traced back together with other information. Some systems could also be designed in a way that the traceability to an individual may not be needed for the functionality of the system, but is still implemented to make surveillance of the inhabitants possible. But even if the city doesn’t completely surveil the inhabitants, it could still sell the data. So, in the new smart city of Songdo in South Korea, there are plans to sell the gathered video data from surveillance cameras, the measured building temperatures, etc. Uncontrolled usage of the data could be possible.

On top of the prevalent collection of data, a social scoring system could be implemented, with which individuals are rated how well they behave and how much usage they bring to society. The Chinese government already planned such a system and tests it currently in multiple cities. With a bad score, you are not able to receive credits, live in specific areas, are not allowed to travel and are only treated like second-class citizens. “Bad” actions could be prevented or punished, while the government determines what is good or bad. (Jones 2019)

Also, the smart city could determine your life by not letting you a choice in doing specific things. Even nowadays, we have a lot of recommendation systems. In online shopping, everyone knows the recommendations that the shopping site gives you about similar products or things that could be interesting for you. In a fully-developed smart city, the city knows more about you than yourself. If it knows better, what is good for you than yourself, why can’t the city decide for you? Everything you need may directly be delivered to you, decisions to buy a cinema ticket for a movie in the evening could be made by the city. The freedom of choice may be replaced with a system that decides for you.

Many of those aspects sound pretty much like science fiction and it seems to be far away from the current society. Although the systems may not come exactly how it is described here, the danger that a smart city determines instead of improves our lives is real. But this text is not meant to be against the concept of smart cities since there are techniques to prevent a massive bad influence on all our lives. Transparency and control through the inhabitants are important. Barcelona for example, as one of the first cities, focuses a lot on the usage of open source technologies and on ownership and control of data to build a smart city which only supports, but not determines, the life of the people. (urban-hub.com 2018) So, there are solutions to the problems explained here. It’s about their implementation and if they are designed in a human-centered way. But this is another topic for itself and can be discussed in a follow-up article.

References:

Jones, Katie. “The Game of Life: Visualizing China’s Social Credit System.” Visual Capitalist, 18 Sept. 2019, www.visualcapitalist.com/the-game-of-life-visualizing-chinas-social-credit-system/.

urban-hub.com. “Smart City 3.0 — Ask Barcelona about the next Generation of Smart Cities.” Smart City 3.0 — Ask Barcelona about the next Generation of Smart Cities., 2018, www.urban-hub.com/cities/smart-city-3-0-ask-barcelona-about-the-next-generation-of-smart-cities/.

Huge, Katie, and Justin Pau. “Songdo: The World’s Smartest City?” UNC Institute for the Environment, 8 June 2019, ie.unc.edu/clean-tech-post/songdo-the-worlds-smartest-city/.