Stop Saying 'Smart Cities'

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 8:28 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Stop Saying 'Smart Cities'
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Stop Saying 'Smart Cities'
Digital stardust won’t magically make future cities more affordable or
resilient.
By Bruce Sterling
Feb 12 2018
<
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/stupid-cities/553052/
>

The term “smart city” is interesting yet not important, because nobody
defines it. “Smart” is a snazzy political label used by a modern alliance
of leftist urbanites and tech industrialists. To deem yourself “smart” is
to make the NIMBYites and market-force people look stupid.

Smart-city devotees all over this world will agree that London is
particularly smart. Why? London is a huge, ungainly beast whose
cartwheeling urban life is in cranky, irrational disarray. London is a
god-awful urban mess, but London does have some of the best international
smart-city conferences.

London also has a large urban-management bureaucracy who emit the proper
smart-city buzzwords and have even invented some themselves.  The language
of Smart City is always Global Business English, no matter what town you're
in.

So if grand old London is smart, with its empty skyscrapers, creepy CCTV
videocams, and sewers plugged with animal fat, then we probably needn’t
fret about the Elon Musk sequins and stardust of digital urbanism. Better
to reimagine the forthcoming urban future as a mirror of Rome, that
“Eternal City,” where nothing much ever gets tech-fixed, but everything
changes constantly so that everything can remain the same.

* * *

Rome and London are two huge, sluggish beasts of cities that have outlived
millennia of eager reformers. They share a world where half the people
already live in cities and another couple billion are on their way into
town. The population is aging quickly, the current infrastructure must
crumble and be replaced by its very nature, and climate disaster is taking
the place of the past’s great urban fires, wars, and epidemics. Those are
the truly important, dull but worthy urban issues.

The digital techniques that smart-city fans adore are flimsy and flashy—and
some are even actively pernicious—but they absolutely will be used in
cities. They already have an urban heritage. When you bury fiber-optic
under the curbs around the town, then you get internet. When you have
towers and smartphones, then you get portable ubiquity. When you break up a
smartphone into its separate sensors, switches, and little radios, then you
get the internet of things.

These tedious yet important digital transformations have been creeping into
town for a couple of generations. At this point, they’re pretty much all
that urban populations can remember how to do. Google, Apple, Facebook,
Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent—these are the true industrial titans of our
era. That’s how people make money, that’s how they make war, so of course,
it will be how they make cities.

However, the cities of the future won’t be “smart,” or well-engineered,
cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy,
affordable, or resilient. They won’t have any particularly higher ethical
values of liberty, equality, or fraternity, either. The future smart city
will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on
gadgetry, deployed by City Hall, mostly for the sake of making towns more
attractive to capital.

Whenever that’s done right, it will increase the soft power of the more
alert and ambitious towns and make the mayors look more electable. When
it’s done wrong, it’ll much resemble the ragged downsides of the previous
waves of urban innovation, such as railways, electrification, freeways, and
oil pipelines. There will also be a host of boozy side effects and toxic
blowback that even the wisest urban planner could never possibly expect.

These smart cities won’t be a solutionist paradise that’s as neatly groomed
as the new Apple Headquarters. The cities that promulgate, and also suffer,
this new dynamic action will look more or less like Amsterdam, Singapore,
Tallinn, Dubai, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Toronto,  Shanghai, Sydney—and yes,
London—for the simple reasons that those are the people who are already
doing it. That’s where it’s at.

[snip]

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