No City Is An Island
Understanding development of smart urban neighborhoods
Smart city infrastructure is almost never a case of developing a single city. It is an interplay between a city, its neighborhood and surrounding cities. At this point it is well understood that urban planning for our new cities is not just a technological issue, it is a wicked problem. What we can hope is to intelligently use our technological prowess to make the problem more tractable.
On May 02, 2020 the Sidewalk Labs announced closure of the project of developing a smart city on Toronto’s lakeshore¹. The fallout of the pandemic economy was blamed for the exit. On viewing the roundtable discussions² ³, the first impression was that the startup did in fact acknowledge the wickedness of urban planning. Was also impressed by the orderly discussion and was surprised to not find fierce public opposition in the round table discussions.
On the positive side, Sidewalk Toronto did bring the dialogue of urban planning to the forefront. On perusing the website⁴, I was happy to see that though a startup emergent from a tech behemoth (Alphabet Inc.), they did understand that this is not a technical problem. The focus on: climate resilience, affordable housing, sustainable transportation, job opportunities and even encouraging urban creativity; was indeed commendable. The idea to build a smart city from scratch with cutting edge digital infrastructure to complement the conventional does seem to be an experiment worth trying.
I do not profess to have completely understood the issues with Sidewalk Toronto’s proposal but it seems to have a dedicated resistance⁵. Wylie vehemently advocated against this project, but from the arguments it appears⁶ that the evaluation of Sidewalk was not objective. Wylie’s advocacy was deeply rooted in anti-technocratic and data privacy concerns. Both of those are sensitive topics but it should be realized that any top-down approach to a smart city is an experiment and it does take time to hash out all the variables. My personal opinion is that as long as the basic tenets of sustainability and privacy are addressed, it is plausible to pursue such projects. This will enable the society to attain a critical mass of “smartness” before the process could be steadily increased for the good of all. A more balanced approach was adopted by Grabar⁷ -What matters in city-building isn’t high-tech data — it’s boring old infrastructure. It is to be noted that this was published in 2017 when the project was initiated.
The Hudson Yards project is a very interesting case spearheaded largely by the same management as Sidewalk. This project began with unrelenting optimism in 2016⁸ but did not live up to the hype⁹. The major difference between Hudson Yards project and Quayside has been the vision- Quayside has been careful not to expound the commercial influence of Alphabet reliant technologies. Though there have been few commendable improvements in the conventional infrastructure, the focus was to have it interwoven with a strong digital infrastructure. This is where the project faced problems. I am still unclear about the exact reasons why it failed but it was pointed out that the development could not keep pace with the march of digital/ data tech advancements.
In contrast to the Sidewalk Toronto project, the approach used by Actuated Futures¹⁰ (the developer) at Leeds and Sheffield is indeed very smart. Though a for-profit entity, the developer selected the problem very intelligently. A very specific problem (improving energy efficiency) in a very specific neighborhood (residential projects) and actively involving the community with minimal changes to their established patterns of behavior. This is a very thoughtful and impressive approach to problem solving.
Though it is not as flashy as Sidewalk, the issue was masterfully executed with the blessing of both the government and the citizens. I gained the following insight from this:
- Flashy problems are not always the best for execution. Simplify the problem and make it so focused that the solution is palatable and executable.
- Though the smart city problem is wicked, each neighborhood has at least one major problem, the urgency/utility of which outweighs the wickedness. By addressing the current needs of the citizens and directing it a little towards sustainability is the path of least resistance.
- Intimately involving the community is the only way to make it happen with integrity in a first-world democracy. The neighborhood approach works. I think this is the main reason Sidewalk faced resistance as the community felt that a technocratic framework is being forced onto them instead of working backwards from the problem.
- Do not collect data that cannot be simply-justified with non-commercial interests.
[1]: Doctoroff, Daniel L. “Why We’re No Longer Pursuing the Quayside Project — and What’s next for Sidewalk Labs.” Medium, May 7, 2020. https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/why-were-no-longer-pursuing-the-quayside-project-and-what-s-next-for-sidewalk-labs-9a61de3fee3a.
[2]: First Public Roundtable (March 20, 2018), 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--w9rskB-94.
[3]: Roundtable 4 Breakout Session: Digital Governance, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9jHTJTDrfs.
[4]: Sidewalk Toronto. “Home.” Accessed September 28, 2020. https://www.sidewalktoronto.ca/.
[5]: McLeod, James, and Geoff Zochodne. “Sidewalk Labs Pulls out of Toronto Smart City Project after 3 Years, Citing ‘Unprecedented Economic Uncertainty,’” n.d., 4.
[6]: Bliss, Laura. “Meet the Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” n.d., 5.
[7]: “Grabar, Henry 2017 — Building Googletown.Pdf,” n.d.
[8]: Mattern, Shannon. “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019.” Places Journal, no. 2016 (April 26, 2016). https://doi.org/10.22269/160426.
[9]: Nonko, Emily. “Hudson Yards Promised a High-Tech Neighborhood — It Was a Greater Challenge Than Expected,” n.d., 7.
[10]: Viitanen, Jenni, Paul Connell, and Martine Tommis. “Creating Smart Neighborhoods: Insights from Two Low-Carbon Communities in Sheffield and Leeds, United Kingdom.” Journal of Urban Technology 22, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 19–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2014.971537.
[11]: “Sidewalk Labs reaches smart-city deal with Toronto”, https://www.ft.com/content/9cd15bcc-fbff-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d9b6
