Smart cities

Smart cities

Last week I spent a couple of days mostly listening at a conference on smart cities. Some thoughts have lingered on; let's try to put them together.

Authorities

Many equate the city to the municipality or other local authority. That's surely not the case. Cities are complex ecosystems in which authorities certainly have a key role. Sometimes they lead, mostly they follow and generally they facilitate. The future of the city is not the content of a vision document by any authority. Such a document usually encapsulates ongoing developments and emerging trends. Its compilers naturally try to take credit for all that it contains and authorities use it to stipulate relevant policies. Still, the future may escape these constraints. 

Power 

Lots of talk about power, lots of assumptions about its structure and fixed character. A closer look at recent events suggests otherwise: the Dutch government had to make a U-turn on natural gas and it has been forced to reconsider policies with respect to CO2 and nitrogen emissions. In all cases, citizens and law courts suddenly came into the picture and caused the change. So much for power structures …

Citizenship

Cities are not just complex. They are also aspirational places, full of opportunities for social mobility and personal improvement. The effects go beyond individual lives - just witness the transition from cities as collection of slums to places of comfortable, gracious living. Citizens learn from each other, copy each other, envy each other. Citizenship should therefore cover all aspects of city life, not just the relations with authorities. Citizen action can have many goals and a varied scope. 

Smartness

Some claim that cities haven't really changed much for a number of centuries. This seems certainly true if one looks at e.g. buildings. Many modern cities include parts that were constructed even in the middle ages. Other aspects have changed a lot. Roads, for example, are completely different to what they used to be before the invention of motor vehicles or electric lighting. Physically they may have changed little but culturally they are quite different. Pavements, zebra crossings, traffic lights etc. make us behave differently to earlier users of the same environment. 

One could argue that the old cities are covered by overlays of new technologies and other cultural innovations. In this sense, mart technologies are the latest overlay to be added, still in development. There is, however, a difference between smart technologies and their predecessors (see https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-fourth-revolution-9780199606726?cc=nl&lang=en&), which becomes clear when we go beyond the gadgets of the smart technologies. There we see the data they produce and process, and that these data in turn drive the gadgets. The scale and detail of the data presents unprecedented opportunities for holistic, coherent descriptions of what takes place in cities. These descriptions could help understand and explain cities, explore scenarios more reliably than ever and predict the outcome of our actions with the specificity one has come to expect from modern science. 

Epilogue

So, does the smart city matter? To a large extent it doesn't. As any novel term, it tries to standardize rather diverse developments without being able to control them. The combination of social and technical disciplines it entails poses interesting questions but the answers are less so. Perhaps this is because each question is approached in isolation and with rather limited means, cutting the city phenomena into manageable but unconnected chunks. If there's one thing I've learned about smart cities, buildings and things is that they require considerable effort, persistence and transparent connections to their context.