Thinking about smart cities

How should we think about ‘smart cities’? This issue brings together a set of articles that examine current debates around the goals, ethics, potential and limitations of a concept that has become a metaphor for urban modernity. We also include an unusual addition, a short intervention that surfaces some of the controversial issues related to smart cities, as a conception and as a practical undertaking. Some of the seeds of today’s smart cities can be found in a series of conversations among scholars and practitioners in the 1980s, reflecting on the future of cities. In a book review, Phil Harris, describes a particularly significant intervention by Sheridan Tatsuno of NeoConcepts, a consultant connected to the Institute for Constructive Capitalism at the University of Texas at Austin, a think tank founded in the 1980s by George Kosmetsky, an entrepreneur turned academic. Like others at the conference, Tatsuno was writing at a time when Silicon Valley was the place to emulate and ventures such as the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina served as alternative examples of successful future industrialisation. He, like many others, was propagating the idea that any and every place could be Silicon Valley-like, if they simply followed a prescription: As Harris (1992) describes: Tatsuno calls out “the age of technopolis and the metamorphosis of traditional cities and even high-tech parks. One alternative is the global network city of dispersed, highly interactive economic nodes linked by massive networks of airports, highways, and communications. Another metaphor is the “intelligent city” featuring advanced information/communication technologies, complexes wired for satellite and fiber optics. These network cities are inhabited by “knowledge processors” engaged in rapid information exchanges (Harris, 1992). As Rob Kitchin lays out in his article in this issue, however, the origins of the smart city are not found solely in the search for technological utopias (Kitchin, 2015). They also originate in the 1980s prescriptions for managed, entrepreneurial cities—whose speed and flexibility in adapting to global markets make them more efficient and competitive (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Kitchin also raises the provocative question of whether another model of ‘smartness’, the digital or wired city, belongs in the ‘smart city’ genre. The wired city in fact offered a somewhat different vision, that of inclusiveness in access to digital technologies. These two competing visions of cities transformed by technologies have not been reconciled despite the recognition that the Internet and particularly, the Internet of things, is a central feature of smart city models. Although the ‘smart city’ concept has emerged from long-persisting ideas about urban technological utopias and the perfectly competitive city, it also differs from these urban visions in some important ways. What is new about the contemporary smart city narrative is the emphasis on places transformed by the application of technologies rather than, as in the case of Silicon Valley, places where sectors such as microelectronics and computers drive the urban economy. Smart cities are not just where new technologies might be born. They are the receptacles for technology, the target of its applications. Although saturated as consumer markets, cities present opportunities for firms seeking markets for modern sensing, forecasting and management technologies. Although 1990s city policymakers sought to replicate the job base and innovative milieu of high-tech centres, the contemporary purveyors of smart city technologies see city governments as markets for the products of the last 40 years of technology development. At the same time, ambitious politicians and civil servants are ever on the search for the next ‘big idea’ to move their city to the top of the rank of attractive places. The race to get on the bandwagon and become a smart city has encouraged city policymakers to endogenise the process of technology-led growth, directing municipal budgets toward investments that bestow smart city status. The public investments that confer smart city status are impressive. A recent report from a large Australian development company puts a dollar figure on the expected growth of smart cities. According to Ivan Fernandez, Industry Director for Frost Kirby, 2013). An important takeaway from this list of smart cities is the tailored nature of their approach. The objective is not just as technology users but as shrines of economic development practice. Some are using the smart city title to gain status by offering annual events to newcomers wishing to take up the mantle of smart city development (http://smartcitiesportugal.net). There is frequently an alliance between the prototype smart city builders and scholars discussing the phenomenon. Their perspectives come together under the umbrella of cities as machines for living. Both promote at least somewhat utopian visions based on technological fixes for those aspects of urban settlement and the concentration of human beings that make for human frustration and slow the flow of goods and services. The authors in this special issue are all aware of this perspective although some emphasise it more than others. A special issue on such a nebulous topic can never be comprehensive, but authors in this issue place the smart city in historical context, provide concrete examples of smart city applications and point to arenas where the concept and practice differ from prior urban technological fixes. The authors also indicate where the urban technological fix, in both its historical and contemporary forms has failed—for example, in addressing equity concerns. They demonstrate that there is a difference between what we can measure and what we need to know. The limits of the smart city are created both by the absence of data applications that could drive collective rather than individual solutions and by the inability to address intangible qualities of cities that both improve and detract from the quality of urban life for city residents. These critiques have been part of the discussions on the closely related topic of ‘big data’. Although the authors in this issue approach the subject of smart cities from very different angles, they generally agree that smart city technologies are ill-suited to solving the problems that lie at the heart of improving the quality of urban life. Poverty is not on the agenda of smart city planners. They may solve traffic problems, but it is not clear how they will regenerate failing schools or find ways to include neighbourhoods facing disinvestment. The contradiction between the promise of smart cities and its limited policy scope is aptly demonstrated in one of the most celebrated smart cities, Rio de Janeiro. The city, with its control centre filled with wall size computer monitors, can perhaps use forecasts of threatening weather to send out warnings of storm intensity thus leading to speedier evacuation. 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