The Problem with Smart Cities
Have you ever imagined living in a futuristic city, which is energy efficient, self-sustaining and where buses and cars are replaced with slick self-driving vehicles? Until today, the visions of fully self-sufficient, technologically driven cities have not been fully realised and past projects have encountered difficulties or have been abandoned largely due to a misalignment of interests between stakeholders and users. Wicked problems such as global warming, social unrest and inequality are taking centre stage, but are smart cities the best solution?
Smart city is a flexible term used to describe an urban area that is made more sustainable and efficient through the use of technology. There have been examples in the recent years of projects where entire cities or neighbourhoods were constructed to embody the future of city living, such as Songdo City in Korea or Masdar in the United Arab Emirates. Masdar City is a zero-carbon and zero-waste city project by the architecture firm Foster and Partners. In 2007, the firm launched the urban development in Abu Dhabi, which was backed by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company. The initiative was planned to be sustainable due to the surrounding wind and photovoltaic farms, a large photovoltaic power plant, research fields, plantations and the absence of cars. In addition, it was supposed to be an attractive place for research, business and inquiry by attracting commerce, students and experts to live in this multi-use walled city. However, today the six million square meter development stands unfinished and still is not carbon neutral, with only 1,300 inhabitants out of the intended 50,000.
At the moment, only the first phase is completed and features like the personal rapid transit system are being scaled back. Although the city is to be completed by 2030, many call the project a failure or question the motives for construction. The reason behind its location in the heart of the fossil fuel industry could be two-way. Masdar could be a strategy of diversification of energy sources due to the nation’s high reliance on petroleum and natural gas or a performative act of commitment to renewable energy due to the growing importance of sustainability and climate initiatives. Regardless of the true motives, it is questionable whether the project will live up to its grandiose plans. Masdar’s empty streets and unfulfilled promises bring into question whether smart cities are necessary at all given their need for huge investments and a lack of citizen support.
Meanwhile, Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project once again is an example of an unrealised smart neighbourhood, afflicted with citizen backlash and unprofitable investments. Sidewalk Labs collaboration with Waterfront Toronto for the development on the edge of Lake Ontario in Toronto has been dropped on the 7th of May 2020. The idea was first unveiled in 2017 to create a new sustainable development. The surreal plans for the neighbourhood were futuristic to say the least. Timber buildings would disperse through the area with mixed and modular programs, as well as intertwined public and shared spaces. Different features would adapt according to the climate for example pavements that would melt the snow. Sidewalk Labs’ ambitious agenda aimed to address issues like traffic, environmental problems and cheaper housing. The community would have robots that carry rubbish, driverless cars and a multitude of sensors. However, another main controversial aspect of the project was data. Since the development would focus on using the latest technologies to increase efficiency, concerns around the use and sharing of the residents’ data came under question. Furthermore, the contract between Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto was shrouded in secrecy. Sidewalk Labs is a subsidiary of Alphabet, which raised many data privacy concerns and worries around the incentives for Alphabet to collect personal data.
Although the official reason for the halting of the project is ‘economic uncertainties’ due to the pandemic, other possible reasons are numerous. It is plausible that the construction was not financially viable, especially due to the high cost of sustainable and high-tech materials. Secondly, Alphabet’s inability to monetise the data collected or even use it for the purposes of making the development more efficient could have made the project futile. Similarly to Masdar, the Quayside project lacked citizen support and had many other underlying problems relating to funding, data and the technological aspects that are expensive and can become outdated as the project drags on. In the case of Masdar, the plans for the transportation system became useless due to the fast advancements in personal self-driving cars. Thus, creating completely new cities that are unable to keep up with the speed of innovation and that are financially unsustainable undermines the concept of smart cities.
Secondly, the extent to which smart cities can address our problems is also limited especially due to the preconception that technology can fix anything. One concept, which relates to smart cities is ‘solutionism’. Evgeny Morozov, a Russian-American writer, addresses ‘solutionism’ as the issue behind imagined problems and imagined solutions. He questions the idea that technology can solve all our problems. According to Morozov, entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley innovators often consider problems that mainly matter to them. Thus, often issues are created to match their technological solutions rather than creating more viable and adapted ways of tackling existing pertinent social problems. In this article, he goes to the root of data-based governance and how this negatively impacts politics. City planning is a political exercise and high-tech solutions could be a source of both opportunity and exploitation, as seen with the Quayside project, which asks for a more inclusive approach.
Another aspect that may make such projects unattractive to citizens is the idea of being a testbed. No one wants to be part of an experiment, especially when the full motivations and consequences are unknown. Nevertheless, some cities are adopting more hybrid solutions, such as Hong Kong and Singapore. In a way, this could be a more efficient way to integrate technology into our already existing cities instead of creating imagined futures through the construction of completely new and unfamiliar urban environments. By adapting technological solutions to our existing ways of living, questioning the core of social and environmental problems and including citizen input, more feasible and valuable ways to address our problems could be found.
