Creating Smart Cities

Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy, Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy, Rob Kitchin

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351182386
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Business General

In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, to govern urban life, to solve urban issues and to drive local and regional economies. While "smart city" advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism – increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security – critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatization of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms and vulnerability to cyberattack.

This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable more equitable and just smart cities, reaping the benefits of smart city initiatives while minimizing some of their perils.

Included are case studies from Ireland, the United States of America, Colombia, the Netherlands, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom. These chapters discuss a range of issues including political economy, citizenship, standards, testbedding, urban regeneration, ethics, surveillance, privacy and cybersecurity. This book will be of interest to urban policymakers, as well as researchers in Regional Studies and Urban Planning.

1

Creating smart cities

Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans and Liam Heaphy

Introduction

Many cities around the world are presently pursuing a smart cities agenda in which networked ICTs are positioned and utilized to try to solve urban issues, drive local and regional economies, and foster civic initiatives. Regardless of whether cities have formulated and are implementing smart city visions, missions and policies, all cities of scale utilize a number of smart city technologies (e.g., intelligent transport systems, urban control rooms, smart grids, sensor networks, building management systems, urban informatics) to manage city services and infrastructures and to govern urban life (see Table 1.1). In this sense, we are already living in the smart city age, with assemblages of networked technologies being used to mediate many aspects of everyday life (e.g., work, consumption, communication, travel, service provision, domestic living), with the trend moving towards ever more computation being embedded into the urban fabric, previously dumb objects and processes becoming ‘smart’ in some fashion, and services being shaped by or delivered in conjunction with digital platforms (Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Smart city agendas corral the development and use of these technologies into a rhetoric and agenda in which digital technologies are championed as commonsensical, pragmatic solutions to all the ills of city life.

TABLE 1.1 Smart city technologies

Domain	Example technologies
Government	E-government systems; online transactions; city operating systems; performance management systems; urban dashboards
Security and emergency services	Centralized control rooms; digital surveillance; predictive policing; coordinated emergency response
Transport	Intelligent transport systems; integrated ticketing; smart travel cards; bikeshare; real-time passenger information; smart parking; logistics management; transport apps; dynamic road signs
Energy	Smart grids; smart meters; energy usage apps; smart lighting
Waste	Compactor bins and dynamic routing/collection
Environment	IoT sensor networks (e.g., pollution, noise, weather; land movement; flood management); dynamically responsive interventions (e.g., automated flood defences)
Buildings	Building management systems; sensor networks
Homes	Smart meters; app-controlled smart appliances

Source: Kitchin (2016)

The smart city agenda builds upon and extends a longer history of computationally networked urbanism that has been in progress from the early 1970s and variously labelled ‘wired cities’ (Dutton et al. 1987), ‘cyber cities’ (Graham and Marvin 1999), ‘digital cities’ (Ishida and Isbister 2000), ‘intelligent cities’ (Komninos 2002), ‘networked cities’ (Hanley 2004), ‘sentient cities’ (Shepard 2011), among others (Kitchin 2014; Willis and Aurigi 2018) and overlap with other popular, current city framings (e.g., resilient cities, sustainable cities, safe cities, eco-cities). In contrast to earlier formulations of networked urbanism, smart cities as a concept, an aspiration and an assemblage of products, rapidly gained traction in industry, government and academia from the late 2000s onwards to become a global urban agenda (see Willis and Aurigi 2018). In large part, this is because it has been actively promoted by a well-organized epistemic community (a knowledge and policy community), advocacy coalition (a collective of vested interests) and a cohort of embedded technocrats in new governmental roles (chief information officers, chief technology officers, chief data officers, data scientists, smart city policy specialists, software engineers and IT project managers) (Kitchin et al. 2017). Beyond city administrations, many consultancies are offering specialist smart city services, tech companies have created new smart city units/divisions and universities have founded smart city research centres. In just a handful of years, a number of smart city consortia of aligned actors have been formed at different scales (global, supra-national, national and local), each claiming to provide authoritative, neutral, expert advice, resources and partnerships that can cut through the complexities of managing cities by using digital technologies to solve difficult issues/problems (Kitchin et al. 2017).

Given this step change in activity and the embracing of smart city rhetoric and the formulation of associated policy and funding programmes by governmental bodies, the emerging market for smart city technologies, and the potential consequences with respect to urban living, management and governance, not unsurprisingly the concept of a smart city and the drive to create ‘actually existing smart cities’ (Shelton et al. 2015) has attracted much media, scholarly (including fundamental and applied research), policy and corporate attention. However, the focus, intention and ethos of smart city ideas, approaches and products remain quite fragmented and often quite polarized across and within these domains.

On the one side are those that seek to develop and implement smart city technologies and initiatives, often with little or no critical reflection on how they fit into and reproduce a particular form of political economy and their wider consequences beyond their desired effects (such as improving efficiency, productivity, competitiveness, sustainability, resilience, safety, security, etc.). Typically, this grouping is composed of scientists, technologists and technocrats working in universities (in disciplines such as Computer Science, Data Science, Civil Engineering), companies and government. When challenged about some of the underlying assumptions used in developing their technologies, or the problematic ways in which their inventions are being used, they try to side-step the critique by claiming that: they employ a mechanical objectivity in their work, thus ensuring that it is neutral and non-ideological; they are developing what society, the market and city administrations want or need; and they are not responsible for how their products are used in practice. Their role is to create technologies that solve instrumental problems, such as how to make a process more sustainable, efficient or cost-effective, not to evaluate whether it is the most appropriate solution or to address wider social, political and philosophical issues of fairness, equity, justice, citizenship, democracy, governance and political economy (though they may try to utilize these notions in promoting/marketing their solution); those are the remit of practitioners, policy-makers, politicians and social movements.

On the other side are those that critique such initiatives from political, ethical and ideological perspectives, focusing on issues of power, capital, equality, participation, citizenship, labour, surveillance and alternative forms of urbanism, but provide little constructive and pragmatic (technical, practical, policy, legal) feedback that would address their concerns and provide an alternative vision of what a smart city might be. Much of this critique has emerged from the social sciences (especially Geography, Urban Studies, Science and Technology Studies, and Sociology) and civil organizations. They contend that smart city technologies are never neutral, objective, non-ideological in nature, both with respect to how they are conceived and developed, and how they are promoted. Smart city technologies, they argue, prioritize a technological solutionist approach to issues (Morozov 2013; Mattern 2013), rather than solutions that are more political, fiscal, policy, deliberative and community development orientated, and they inherently have certain values embedded in them which produce particular kinds of solutions (Greenfield 2013). The smart city, they contend, facilitates and produces instrumental, functionalist, technocratic, top-down forms of governance and government (Kitchin 2014; Vanolo 2014); is underpinned by an ethos of stewardship (for citizens) or civic paternalism (what is best for citizens) rather than involving active citizen participation in addressing local issues (Shelton and Lodato, this volume; Cardullo and Kitchin 2018); and often provides ‘sticking plaster’ or ‘work around’ solutions, rather than tackling the root and structural causes of issues. With respect to how they are promoted, smart city initiatives often leverage from neoliberal arguments concerning the limitations of public sector competencies, inefficiencies in service delivery and the need for marketization of state services and infrastructures. Public authorities, it is argued, lack the core skills, knowledges and capacities to address pressing urban issues and maintain critical services and infrastructures. Instead, they need to draw on the competencies held within industry and academia that can help deliver better solutions through public–private partnerships, leasing, deregulation and market competition, or outright privatization (Kitchin et al. 2017). In turn, the logic of a reliable, low-cost, universal government provision in the public interest is supplemented or replaced by provision through the market, driven in part or substantively by private interests (Graham and Marvin 2001; Collier et al. 2016). Luque-Ayala and Marvin (2015: 2105) thus argue there is ‘an urgent need to critically engage with why, how, for whom and with what consequences smart urbanism is emerging in different urban contexts’.

Smart city protagonists then are largely divided into those that advocate for the promise or warn of the perils of smart cities (see Table 1.2). That said, we would acknowledge that this division is somewhat of an over-simplification. Over time, many of those promoting smart cities have come to recognize that they need to be more mindful of critiques, often trying to reframe smart city interventions in ways that are more citizen-centric and complementary to other approaches for tackling urban issues – though often it is the discursive framing that is recast, rather than the fundamental principles and implementation of technologies/initiatives (Kitchin 2015a). Moreover, they have come to realize that implementing a smart city initiative/strategy consists of a complex set of tasks and politics that are difficult to resolve in practice and require multi-stakeholder negotiations, policy changes and investments to address. For example, beyond the concerns that critics typically focus on (as set out in Table 1.3) the 42 interviewees – from local government, state agencies, business, universities, civic bodies active in smart city initiatives in Dublin – that were interviewed in a sub-project of The Programmable City project ¹ discussed over 60 different issues that can be characterized as ‘critique, challenges and risks’ with regards to Dublin becoming a smart city. Nearly all of these are practical, pragmatic, organizational and institutional in nature (concerning issues such as personnel capacity/competency, funding/procurement, processes and procedures, structures, coordination, priorities, strategy, leadership, policy/law, competing interests, etc.), rather than being political or ideological (see Table 1.3). Similarly, many critics have recognized that smart city technologies do provide workable solutions for some urban issues, are often well-liked by citizens, and such technologies are not only here to stay but are going to become more entrenched in the future. Their focus of attention is thus on modifying the formulation and ethos of smart city initiatives and implementing them in ways that minimize perils, rather than seeking their abandonment.

TABLE 1.2 The promise and perils of smart cities

Promises ^2	Perils ^3
Will tackle urban problems in ways that maximize control, reduce costs, and improve services, and do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways through technical solutions.	Treats the city as a knowable, rational, steerable machine, rather than a complex system full of wicked problems and competing interests.
Will create a smart economy by fostering entrepreneurship, innovation, productivity, competitiveness, and inward investment.	Promotes a strong emphasis on technical solutions and overly promotes top-down technocratic forms of governance, rather than political/social solutions and citizen-centred deliberative democracy.
Will enable smart government by creating new forms of e-government, new modes of operational governance, improved models and simulations to guide future development, evidence-informed decision making and better service delivery, and by making government more transparent, participatory and accountable.	Solutions treat cities as ahistorical and aspatial and as generic markets, promoting one-size fits all technical fixes rather than recognizing local specificities.
Will produce smart mobility by creating intelligent transport systems and efficient, inter-operable multi-modal public transport, better and dynamic routing and real-time information for passengers and drivers.	The technologies deployed are positioned as being objective, commonsensical, pragmatic and politically benign, rather than thoroughly political, reflecting the views and values of their developers and stakeholders.
Will make smart environments by promoting and creating sustainability and resilience and the development of green energy.	Promotes the corporatization and privatization of city services, with the developers of smart city technologies capturing city functions as market opportunities which are run for profit rather than the public good, and potentially create proprietary technological lock-ins.
Will create smart living by improving quality of life, increasing choice, utility, safety and security, and reducing risk.	Prioritizes the values and investments of vested interests, reinforces inequalities, and deepens levels of control and regulation, rather than creating a more socially just and equal society.
Will produce smart people by creating a more informed citizenry and fostering creativity, inclusivity, empowerment and participation.	The technologies deployed have profound social, political and ethical effects: introducing new forms of social regulation, control and governance; extending surveillance and eroding privacy; and enabling predictive profiling, social sorting and behavioural nudging.
	The technologies deployed potentially produce buggy, brittle and hackable urban systems which create systemic vulnerabilities across critical infrastructure and compromise data security, rather than producing stable, reliable, resilient, secure systems.

Source: Based on analysis in Kitchin (2015b), see endnotes 2 and 3 for specific sources of promises and perils.

TABLE 1.3 Critique, challenges and risks in seeking to become a smart city

Antagonism/conflict/misunderstanding between stakeholders Best practice Business case issues Capacity issues/staffing City complex systems City requires stability/risk adverse Communication to public Competing interests Competitiveness Creating impact Cultural mindset Data dumps/quality/governance Data protection/privacy Data security Digital divide/inclusion Drift in roles Endless experimentation/pilots Future proofing How to prioritize/assess proposals Ignores planning system/process Internal politics/inertia IP, NDAs and legal issues Lack of clear route to engagement Lack o...