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. 

Citizens

Citizens 

I've been listening to a learned podcast about the future of the world and humanity: politicians, scientists and others seem to agree not just on the challenges that face us but also on the way forward. Either mildly pessimistic or moderately optimistic, they tend to focus on the citizen. Their argument is that if the citizen is aware of the problems and the effects of their choices, then improvement should be expected - even salvation.
I'm filled with doubts. Even if we managed to agree on a common approach, are we powerful enough as citizens? We're far from equal in any society. The one is a fearful employee and the other a powerful employer. Each has their own impact and between the individual citizen and the abstract group of society there are intervening layers composed of interests and hence related to power. How can we ignore them and believe that citizens as voters, consumers, taxpayers and the like can achieve enough just by their choices? Our choices are shaped by the intervening layers, either on purpose or by accident. It's the reciprocal relations between the individuals and these layers (which include ideologies, lifestyles, ethnicities etc.) that I'd focus rather than passing buck directly to citizens.

Citizens

Citizens

In research and policy circles, one often hears of citizens or even "the citizen": dear, vulnerable, oppressed human beings that must be protected and helped. In historical studies, however, e.g. of what happened in Nazi German or communist countries, one also gets a different side of the citizen: people taking advantage or manipulating a system for personals reasons; thousands of denunciations by neighbours, colleagues, friends, even family. Most of the damage is done by citizens, not the relatively few agents of the secret services. It wasn't the Gestapo or the Stasi who kept everyone under observation; it was the citizens doing it to each other; the secret police often had a hard time just processing all the anonymous and eponymous denunciations they received.

What we also often see is a distinction between two kinds of citizens: on one hand, the active, well-educated initiators of actions and protectors of their rights and privileges, and on the other, a largely inert mass of low-income, poorly educated people who must be protected but can become surprisingly powerful and effective once brought into actions. This arguably suggests that citizens can achieve a lot if bothered to do so. The problem is that one cannot be certain why citizens may spring into action and what they will try to do. That's why places like the Internet can be wonderful and terrifying at the same time.