About The Episode
Today we’ll be looking at another trend that hasn’t been brought up on the podcast before, namely Smart Cities. This is an important subject because by 2050, UN estimations picture our planet with 75% of citizens worldwide living in cities. Typically when thinking about Smart Cities notions of IoT, Big Data, resource efficiency, sustainability and overall efficiency pop into one’s mind and not necessarily jobs and the future of work. However, in today’s episode I’m going to be making the case that the opposite holds true, particularly when looking at what lies beyond Smart Cities. But for those that aren’t yet fully aware of this trend let’s look at what a Smart City is first.
Transcript
What is a Smart City?
One of the best ways to think of a Smart City is that it is the infusion of technology into every aspect of a city’s operations. This includes some of the more obvious or well known aspects like transportation or e-governance, but also the perhaps less obvious like waste management, power supply, and even water. One of the key technologies that enables this is the Internet of things, by placing sensors, cameras, vision systems etc in key parts of a city’s infrastructure, a city’s resources can be more efficiently allocated, citizens can be informed of opportunities to better their lives, and a city can function more harmoniously overall. To make this a little more tangible let’s look at Singapore which is often referred to as the world’s leading Smart Cities.
Singapore- as an island city-state, is challenged with high population density, limited geographical area, an aging population, and other factors which led it to adopt aggressive solutions decades ago, part of which was the implementation of a Smart City Strategy. For example, due to the population density, vehicle congestion is a real problem which led to the adoption of a network of sensors, cameras and GPS devices embedded in taxi cabs allowing for traffic to be tracked, predicting future congestion and informing all drivers of alternative routes. Surveillance cameras look out for road incidents and vehicle recovery crews are automatically activated leading tow trucks to arrive within 15minutes and clear most incidents. Smart, live electronic devices display the real-time speed of vehicles and alerts drivers if they are violating the speed limit.
Due to the aging population, wearable technologies such as fitness trackers, smart watches, and smart clothing have been heavily promoted. Recorded data from these sensors and in the houses of the elderly and from patients suffering from chronic diseases are sent securely online to healthcare providers allowing them to monitor individuals, receive alerts, and respond to any emergencies faster than usual.
As Singapore is an island nation, natural resources are limited. Utility usage messages are sent to citizens, which allows for people to monitor their home consumption and foresee overall usage and the associated bills. Smart sensors are also embedded inside office buildings and household appliances such as lights which can be automatically turned off when no one is at home. In 2015, smart waste bins were introduced as a part of a smart waste management program. The sensing monitors attached on bin lids collect information on contents and location and this is notified to a garbage team through a central server. This helps the waste collection team to optimize their route planning and at the same time, constantly keeps the public spaces clean. There are several other examples of how technologies are being used to make the city more resource efficient, livable, and connected, but this should give a decent introduction. Though Singapore is often at the top of the list there are a number of cities that have similar aspirations and already have numerous running applications. London, New York, Barcelona, Oslo, and Tokyo are just a few of the top names.
The implementation of this trend is growing every year and is creating tremendous cost and resource savings across the world. In a 2017 white paper, ABI Research estimated that smart cities could lead to cost savings of $5 trillion by 2022.
However, one can take the perspective that this is actually more of a large scale retrofit campaign of inefficient locations across the world. What would it look like if a more ambitious ground up operation were to take place?
Beyond Smart Cities, the Automated Cities of the Future
Over the last few years there has been some news about building entirely new advanced cities. You may have heard of Bill Gates in 2017 buying 24,000 acres for 80 million USD for a possible Belmont city outside of Phoenix Arizona. Or Toyota’s 175 acre hydrogen powered test city Woven at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, where construction started earlier this year. There is also Neom, the most ambitious city proposed by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince covering over 25,000 square kilometers and costing an estimated half a trillion dollars.
Though being built in different countries, at different stages of construction or planning, and facing different issues and delays, these cities that are being built from the ground up, have one significant thing in common: they will implement the latest smart city technologies to automate most services and jobs performed in traditional cities today.
For example, in the initial section of NEOM, called the Line, the planned 1 million inhabitant 170km city plans to exclude traditional forms of transportation. This means no streets, and no cars. Instead, a pedestrian focused perspective will connect community hubs via automated train services. Walkability will define life on THE LINE – with all essential daily services, such as schools, medical clinics, leisure facilities, as well as green spaces, being within a five-minute walk. Woven City however will include various autonomous vehicles but its homes will include robots to assist with daily living. In fact, in the initial press release, NEOM claimed that there would most likely be more robots than citizens in the city itself. Finally smart street lighting, waste and energy management, and healthcare will also be connected through a citywide network managed by AI.
This is where we see the next step of smart cities, the birth of something called the Cognitive city. With the implementation of AI into the city’s management system the city can steadily learn how to become more efficient, sustainable, and resilient. This can be done through constant analysis of the the interaction between residents, automated systems, and the city overall through the plethora of sensors gathering data on the interactions.
Needless to say, the bulk of city jobs today that offer employment opportunities to the lower skilled segments of the population will not be available in these cities of the future. In Barcelona alone, where I live, the city has some 5000 street cleaning and rubbish removal employees. Not to mention all the bus and taxi drivers, last mile delivery workers, etc. There is an argument to be made about the lowered preference of working these jobs compared to the more highly skilled jobs of data analyst, or remote operations monitor which will be in greater demand in these cognitive cities. But it is more likely that the sheer number of higher skilled jobs will not make up the difference. This can be a serious issue for large segments of urban populations that find their source of income to simply be non-existent in the cognitive cities of the future, and might lead to greater degrees of inequality where only certain groups of people can afford to live in these cities. Hopefully this transition occurs over enough time to allow the training and upskilling programs to make citizens relevant for these cities.
Finally, there is an even greater issue that is not very apparent when discussing these future cities.
The Problem with Smart Cities and the cities of the future.
Apart from the large price tag associated with either retrofitting traditional cities or building new ones from the ground up there is a serious issue that is often drowned out by the noise surrounding gains in efficiency, safety, and improvement in lifestyle. And this has to do with who is really pushing the smart city and cognitive city vision.
In his book, Against the Smart City, Adam Greenfield points to IBM, Cisco Systems , and Siemens AG as the three big corporations pushing municipal solutions under the smart city umbrella.
“When Siemens talks about a city’s autonomous systems acting on “perfect knowledge” of residents’ habits and behaviors, what they are suggesting in the first place is that everything those residents ever do — whether in public or in spaces and settings formerly thought of as private — can be sensed accurately, raised to the network without loss, and submitted to the consideration of some system capable of interpreting it appropriately.”
The information platforms projected to undergird Smart Cities are to be privately owned. No open source or free software here! “The smart city is a place where the technical platforms on which everyday life is built, are privately owned and monetized, and information is reserved exclusively for the use of those willing and able to pay for it.” As Greenfield notes in one chapter, the whole model is based on a neoliberal sensibility in which government is stripped down to its most minimal functionality (primarily policing and systems administration), while as much as possible of the surrounding society is privately owned. Most of what people might do with and for each other is to the greatest extent possible, monetized and commodified, to be packaged and sold to the residents (clients) of the new towns.
The assumption that human life should be subjected to a standard of technical efficiency is the root of the problem.
Additionally, the data infringement issues of companies like Facebook coming to the forefront through scandals like Cambridge Analytica made people think twice about using a simple online platform.
I think the question that people should ask as we move into these ever smarter cities is if the risks outweigh the potential benefits of living in a city that has the same potential issues, especially when leaving a city isn’t as simple as uninstalling an app.
