The Smart City in a Digital World (SocietyNow) 1787691381, 9781787691384

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THE SMART CITY IN A DIGITAL WORLD

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THE SMART CITY IN A DIGITAL WORLD VINCENT MOSCO

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited. Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Author or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78769-138-4 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-78769-135-3 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78769-137-7 (Epub)

To my father Frank Mosco, whose devotion to the New York City he loved earned a new name for the Manhattan block we lived on: Mosco Street. To my grandparents Lucy and Vincent DiPilato. Immigrants to America. Driven out of the coal-mining town of Barton, Maryland by the Ku Klux Klan. Planned a return to Italy. Stopped off in New York City. Made a life.

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I’d got a bit o’ the brave by now an’ I asked our visitor why Prescients with all their high Smart’n’all want to learn all ‘bout us Valleysmen. What could we poss’bly teach her what she din’t know? The learnin’ mind is the livin’ mind, Meronym said, an’ any sort o’ Smart is truesome Smart, old Smart or new, high Smart or low. — David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas: A Novel

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CONTENTS

List of Tables

xiii

About the Author

xv

Acknowledgementsxvii

1.  The World is Urban

1

City–states2 Critical Social Science 3 Climate Change 8 Networks of Cities 10 What Makes a City Smart? 11 Smart City Patterns 12 A Trilogy 13 From an Urban Village to a Life in Cities 15 Overview of the Book 18 Smart City in a Bottle 24 2.  How to Think About Smart Cities Stop Using the Term The Smart City is About Technology The Smart City is About Citizens ix

27 28 28 30

Contents

x

The Smart City is a Space-Time Machine The Smart City is a Computer The Smart City is a Platform Time’s Twisted Arrow The First Smart City Architecture Without Architects Sedentary and Smart IBM’s Smarter City Computer Simulations and Urban Dynamics   in the Steel City Punch Cards in the City of Angels The 1964 New York World’s Fair From Progressland to Epcot The Wired City The Technological Sublime The Past Is Not Necessarily Prologue 3. City of Technology: Where the Streets are Paved with Data Technology: The Next Internet The Internet of Things Cloud Computing Big Data Analytics Smart Transportation, Smart Energy, Smart  Communication Big Savings Command and Control in the Smart City Google Toronto and it Comes Up New York Don’t Google This 4.  Who Governs? State-driven Smart Cities Three Types of Governance Government-led Smart Cities

32 33 34 38 38 40 41 44 46 47 47 48 50 51 52 59 59 60 61 64 65 67 68 71 85 97 97 98

Contents

Singapore: City-state, Smart Nation,   Surveillance Pioneer High-tech China: What’s Your Social   Credit Score? Modi’s India: Let 100 Smart Cities Bloom 5.  Who Governs? Private Smart Cities

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98 101 116 129

But First a Word About Disney 129 Amazon in Seattle: When a Big City Becomes   a Private Laboratory 132 Company Towns: As American as Apple Pie 134 Zucktown137 Y Combinator and the New Cities Initiative 138 No, Not Muskville, YarraBend 139 Peter Thiel’s Floating Cities 141 Bill Gates in the Desert 142 Blockchain USA 143 Will Big Tech Run Smart Cities? 144 6.  Who Governs? Citizens Citizens and Participation Barcelona en Comú: Democracy by Design Amsterdam: DECODE and FairBnB Ouishare Paris Sharing Services in Seoul Smart City Governance and the Inevitability   of Climate Change 7.  The Urban Imaginary: Myths and Markets The Machine in the Garden The Tower in the Park The Urban Dance: Eyes on the Street From the Creative Class to the Smart City

151 151 154 160 161 162 163 169 170 175 182 187

Contents

xii

The Panoptic City? Selling the Smart City 8.  Whose Smart City?

196 197 215

Why Create an Urban Imaginary? 216 Profit and Power 216 Livability 217 Surveillance and Privacy 219 Ownership of Data 222 Black Gold for Hackers 224 Normal Cities, Normal Accidents 227 Smart Distraction, Climate Change and the   Efficiency Trap 230 Resistance232 Municipalism239 A Manifesto for the Smart City 241

Further Reading

249

Index

251

LIST OF TABLES Chapter 1 Table 1. The World’s 50 Largest Urban Areas (Population in Millions).

4

Chapter 7 Table 2.  Top 20 Smart Cities. Table 3.  Top 20 Smart Cities by Performance Index.

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204 205

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus, Queen’s University, Canada where he held the Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society. He is also Distinguished Professor, New Media Centre, School of Journalism and Communication, Fudan University, Shanghai. He is the author or editor of 26 books and over 200 articles and book chapters on communication, technology and society including The Digital Sublime, The Political Economy of Communication, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World and Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to many people for helping to make this book possible. Catherine McKercher, my partner in life and in research, used her considerable skills as a journalist to improve my first book manuscript, published in 1979, and, 40 years and 25 books later, she was a source of intelligent comment and practical advice on this project. In fact, most of this book was written at one end of a sofa whose other end was occupied by Catherine, hard at work on her own book, keyboard taps interrupted from time to time with questions and advice. Catherine read and commented on drafts of the book proposal and offered valuable suggestions throughout. I am indebted to Patricia Mazepa, Ian Nagy, Alex Savulescu and Sandra Smeltzer, who also commented on drafts of the book proposal. My deep gratitude goes out to Ian and Alex, who also read and offered constructive criticism on a complete draft of the manuscript. Patricia and Enda Brophy also provided helpful suggestions throughout the writing. I have discussed cities with Ying-Fen Huang for many years and am grateful for her advice, particularly on urban development in China. Manjunath Pendakur, a dear friend and colleague for 40 years, offered insights on information technology in India. Thanks also to my childhood friend Lawrence Venturato, a fellow Mulberry Street kid, who shared his thoughts about a changing New York City. My projects often benefit from the experience and knowledge of family members and The Smart City in a Digital World is no exception. Not many people know more about xvii

xviii

Acknowledgements

Disney than my daughter Madeline Mosco and her partner Derek Morton. Visits with them to ‘the happiest place on earth’ and conversations about Disney’s vision helped me to understand the company’s significant impact on urban design and planning. Through numerous conversations over many years, my daughter Rosemary Mosco, a science communicator and author, schooled me on the significance of climate change, an issue that is all too often ignored or mentioned only briefly in discussions of smart cities. I owe a debt of gratitude to Gabriele Balbi and Paolo Bori of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. The occasion of a doctoral dissertation examination led to very interesting discussions on the history of technologyenabled cities and on the role of the imaginary in the culture of technological change. Thanks also to Paško Bilić of the Institute for Development and International Relations in Zagreb, Croatia, whose kind invitation to give a keynote address to a conference on communication, capitalism and social change provided an opportunity to address some of the issues in this book. Thanks also to Sid Shniad, a long-time friend and activist, who asked if I would write a vision statement on smart cities to help candidates running for city council seats in Vancouver, British Columbia. My response evolved into the manifesto for smart cities that concludes the book. This is my second book with Emerald Publishing and I am especially appreciative to my publisher Jenny McCall, who kindly reached out to ask about my interest in writing for the SocietyNow series. Her initial contact led to my 2017 book Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society and her continuing support and encouragement for a book on technology and cities significantly helped to bring this project to fruition.

1 THE WORLD IS URBAN

Projections suggest cities will swell at an astonishing pace – but whether that means our salvation or an eco-disaster is by no means certain. —John Vidal1

What makes a city smart? The Smart City in a Digital World takes on this question by describing, challenging and offering democratic alternatives to the view that the answer begins and ends with technology. In the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, corporations converged on cities around the world to sell technology, harvest valuable data and deepen the private governance of urban life. They have partnered with governments to promote what on the surface look like unalloyed benefits to city dwellers. These include safer streets, cleaner air, more efficient transportation, instant communication for all and algorithms that take governance out of the hands of flawed human beings. Another story lies beneath that surface. Technology-driven smart cities deepen surveillance, shift urban governance to private companies, shrink 1

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democracy, create a hacker’s paradise and hasten the coming of catastrophic climate change. The Smart City insists that human governance still matters, that people make cities smart, and that genuinely intelligent cities start with a vibrant democracy, support for public space, and a commitment to citizens’ control over technology. To make this happen, it is essential to understand the technologies, the organisations and the mythologies that power the global smart cities movement. It also means assessing the growing resistance to a technology-driven city. Drawing on case studies from around the world that document the redevelopment of old cities and the creation of entirely new ones, The Smart City offers a guide to the future of urban life in a digital world.

CITY–STATES In 2018, two-thirds of US cities were busy applying smart city technologies and yet the country is not the world leader in that field. China, which has been rebuilding older cities and creating new ones at an astonishing rate, tops the list for the number of municipalities under smart city development. Indeed, the smart city movement is genuinely international with every region of the globe from London to Singapore, Rio de Janeiro to Delhi and Cape Town to the Pacific island of Mauritius, actively displaying their smart city credentials. Given the speed of smart city development, it is troubling that so few people know about it. For example, a 2018 survey of 1,000 city residents in the UK determined that nearly 7 in 10 did not even know what a smart city is.2 According to the World Bank, cities accounted for 54% of the world’s population in 2017, and, at current rates of expansion, they will grow to 68% by 2050. Moreover, urban communities consume close to two-thirds of the world’s

The World is Urban

3

energy and account for more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.3 The largest encompass entire regions and are better viewed as modern-day city-states (Table 1). We live in an age of what The Guardian newspaper calls ‘overstretched cities’ where places like Lagos, Nigeria can go from a small coastal city of 200,000 people surrounded by a few villages in 1960 to today’s 1,000-miles-square megacity of over 22 million people. It is not alone. Once a sleepy Pearl River Delta town of some 30,000 people in 1980, the population of the Chinese market city of Shenzhen has zoomed to over 12 million. One result of these changes is that planners, developers and politicians are turning to technology to provide some hope of managing this seemingly relentless growth. In doing so, they frequently turn to big companies such as IBM, which hold out the promise that advances in information and communication technology can create a ‘smarter city’.

CRITICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE Understandably, most smart cities research concentrates on technology and highlights the benefits for residents and entire societies. This book adds to only a handful of publications that address the programme from a critical social science perspective, which questions the belief that creating smart cities is primarily about applying smart technologies to urban areas. In addition to describing the history, main characteristics and the significance of what has become the global smart cities movement, the book aims to enlarge debates by examining what the smart city movement means for governance. In particular, what does it mean for democracy, understood as the fullest possible control over the decisions that affect individual and collective lives in cities? This is especially important because technology companies that today feast on our

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Table 1.  The World’s 50 Largest Urban Areas (Population in Millions). Tokyo, Japan

42.80

Jakarta, Indonesia

31.69

Delhi, India

26.45

Seoul, South Korea

25.43

Mumbai, India

24.34

Shanghai, China

24.26

Manila, Philippines

24.20

New York, USA

23.69

Cairo, Egypt

22.97

Lagos, Nigeria

22.83

Beijing, China

21.72

São Paulo, Brazil

21.09

Mexico City, Mexico

20.88

Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe, Japan

19.78

Bangkok, Thailand

18.93

Los Angeles, USA

18.69

Dhaka, Bangladesh

18.52

Kolkata, India

16.68

Karachi, Pakistan

16.63

Chongqing, China

15.29

Tehran, Iran

15.26

Buenos Aires, Argentina

15.10

Moscow, Russia

14.93

Hyderabad, India

14.73

London, UK

14.61

Chengdu, China

14.53

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

13.65

Johannesburg-Pretoria, South Africa

13.40

Bengalaru, India

13.18

Baghdad, Iraq

13.03

The World is Urban

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Table 1. (Continued) Madras, India

12.90

Guangzhou, China

12.70

Paris, France

12.48

Lahore, Pakistan

12.33

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

12.14

Kinshasa, DRC

12.07

Ruhr, Germany

11.86

Nagoya, Japan

11.32

Tianjin, China

11.08

Surabaya, Indonesia

10.82

Bogotá, Colombia

10.76

Lima, Peru

10.69

Shenzhen, China

10.36

Wuhan, China

10.12

Chicago, USA

9.88

Washington, D.C.

9.66

Taipei, Taiwan

9.16

San Francisco-San Jose, USA

8.75

Bandung, Indonesia

8.50

Source: Dig. (2018, August 15). The world’s fifty largest urban areas, visualized. Retrieved from http://digg.com/2018/largest-metropolitanareas-mapped

data – Google, Facebook, IBM, Siemens, Alibaba and Cisco among others – are increasingly moving into cities to extend their power over urban infrastructure, to harvest the mountains of profitable data derived from monitoring every feature of daily life and to develop models for the private governance of public spaces. As Evgeny Morozov puts it: From transport to food delivery, from accommodation to energy consumption, the city

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The Smart City in a Digital World

also figures prominently in how digital technologies penetrate our life. That the city is also the primary target of big tech is no accident: if these firms succeed in controlling its infrastructure, they need not worry about much else.4 To stop or restrain this activity, critics and activists often turn to government regulation and especially to the nationstate, which historically has succeeded in widening access to essential resources such as water, energy and communication. The problem with this strategy for preserving democracy and maintaining control over digital life is that the nation-state is increasingly compromised by the power of business, especially information technology companies, by its own tendencies to foster a conservative nationalism and by constraints imposed by international organisations that promote corporate globalism. Nation-states are unquestionably important. However, it is increasingly cities that hold out the promise of democracy because they are generally more cosmopolitan than the nation-state and yet they remain closer to the interests of the typical citizen. Indeed, networks of the world’s cities, the regions that contain most of the world’s productive capacity and provide the lion’s share of its GDP, are best positioned to resist the pressures of big tech and big government. In one sense, this is a trip back to the future because cities have historically been places where people found spaces for democracy, freedom and individuality when authoritarianism, whether in the form of a feudal nobility or an authoritarian ruler, restricted these values. A critical social science perspective gives these values special attention and evaluates technology for its ability to advance them. It is undoubtedly the case that the application of computer communication can enhance the operation of cities. For example, traffic signals that adjust timing with the flow of

The World is Urban

7

vehicles can move people from here to there more smoothly, and connected thermostats can make more efficient use of energy in businesses and in homes. Some smart city experts expand the concept to include places that do not just deploy digital technologies; they also provide spaces to invent, develop and promote them. These high-tech districts not only manage information technology in cities; they also incubate the newest versions of places modelled after California’s Silicon Valley. Google’s proposal to turn a vast tract of old waterfront in Toronto into a model smart city – and build a major new Google facility on a piece of the property – is an example that combines both approaches. From this perspective, the ideal smart city is one that systematically develops new technologies in the context of a city that makes extensive use of them. The gleaming new technologies that are the face of the smart cities movement require a critical social science perspective because they tend to conceal a transformation in urban governance. Beneath the glossy exterior of sensors, data centres and algorithms that promise automated decision-making, lies a deeper transformation in urban governance, an insistence that private sector organisations (either alone or in partnership with government agencies) are best equipped to run cities by making use of private business principles. Smart cities are not just about the development and application of technologies that can improve urban life. They are also about who governs cities, who profits, and who is left out. The political battles over smart cities often come down to the ability of technology companies to expand their power by becoming real estate dealmakers and developers, who invest in digital technologies that offer new stores of profitable data on the behaviour of people and the performance of things. On the other side, we have urban citizens who fear losing democratic rights because governance is privatised, surveillance is expanding and data on their lives is becoming

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The Smart City in a Digital World

a marketable commodity. Governments, especially at the municipal level, often hold the balance of power but they do not always understand that the wonders of digital assistants, autonomous vehicles, street lights that look out for crime and parking lots that keep track of vacant spaces come with a price that requires constant vigilance and action to protect public space and the rights of citizens.

CLIMATE CHANGE The massive growth in the population and territorial expanse of cities does not take place in isolation. A book about smart cities must account for the looming prospect of massive climate change, something that smart city advocates either ignore or try to counteract with overrated technological solutions. That is unfortunate because cities are profoundly changing their relationships to nature. Human settlements require massive changes in the environment including the elimination of forests, grasslands and wetlands, the diversion of rivers and the emission of pollutants into the air and water. The changes are so transformational that they are having an impact on evolution. According to a study reported in Science, the beaks of house finches and other birds are growing larger to better enable them to eat from backyard feeders. Lizards called crested anoles are growing longer limbs and stickier toes for climbing tall buildings in tropical cities. A mosquito that lives underground is emerging as a new species from urban subway tunnels and sewers beneath cities around the world. It contains different genes and exhibits different feeding and breeding habits from its cousins that live on or above the surface.5 Nature is changing with the explosive growth in urban populations and cities have to deal with transformations in nature.

The World is Urban

9

While it pays too much attention to technology, smart cities research barely gives a nod to climate change, which is already influencing urbanites with more intense storms, flooding, record-breaking temperatures resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases and burning forests. As I write this in the summer of 2018, intense heat has made the season unbearable, and often life-threatening, for millions of city dwellers. Moreover, drought endangers the habitability of more of the earth’s surface, unprecedented fires are burning across California and British Columbia, monumental floods have drowned hundreds and made climate migrants of millions in India’s Kerala state, and a rare hurricane has pounded Hawaii. The first wave of what most experts believe will be catastrophic climate change appears to have arrived. Climate refugees are no longer just part of dystopian science fiction or ‘cli-fi’, as climate science fiction is now called. The United States has already had to face this challenge in 2016 when Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles received $48 million from the federal government to relocate every resident before rising seas make the island uninhabitable. Almost every expert on the subject expects things to get much worse, especially if the pattern of doing little to address the problem continues. In fact, the residents of Isle de Jean Charles will likely be remembered as the first of between 50 and 200 million climate refugees expected worldwide by 2050.6 Catastrophic or not, the impact on cities will be dramatic and smart cities will certainly not be immune. Applying technologies to manage urban resources better is a step in the right direction. However, such steps, celebrated for their ability to provide resilience, often end up encouraging more development, most dangerously in coastal areas and flood plains that climate change will likely render barely habitable. The Smart City in a Digital World integrates what we know about climate change into the core of the discussion about urban issues. It is

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The Smart City in a Digital World

not just a matter of rethinking what it means to be smart; it also means taking into account the arrival of climate change.

NETWORKS OF CITIES Not only do cities face a changing climate, they must also confront changes in the relationships among cities. The concept of the smart city is not only a category with specific characteristics, such as the level of advanced technology used to manage transportation and energy use – a topic that receives most attention in research on smart cities. Smart cities exist in a natural environment and in relationships with other cities. These urban networks help to determine how well individual cities can enhance their operations. Regional and national relationships among cities were once the rule. For example, San Francisco was once a ship-building centre, dependent on logging towns in the Pacific Northwest to build schooners. It was also reliant on steel towns in Pennsylvania to build merchant ships. In addition, San Francisco needed a host of other manufacturing towns such as Schenectady, New York; Lester, Pennsylvania; Tacoma, Washington; Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which formed what we would today call a supply chain network. With no ships to build and most of the factories that served the industry shut down, the once-tight regional and national networks that supported San Francisco have also disappeared. Now that the city has become a global centre for the information technology industry, it has much closer ties to cities in China, such as Shenzhen and Shanghai, and to London and Mumbai, than it does to most cities in the United States. Cities do not just become smart by their use of technologies; they are made smart by their supply chains and other trading relationships with cities around the globe.

The World is Urban

11

As Saskia Sassen has demonstrated in her classic research on global cities, New York, London and Tokyo, the three key centres of international finance, are more tightly connected to one another than they are to cities located in their immediate vicinities.7 As a result, big cities whose goods and services provide for what is now a global economy grow larger and richer, while smaller, provincial locations have suffered. But it is not just a matter of restructuring supply chains. San Francisco’s growth, for example, is vastly uneven. None other than Wired magazine, known for its technophilia, refers to Silicon Valley as ‘a caste system’ made up of big executives and venture capitalists at the top, followed by software engineers, gig economy workers and an ‘untouchables’ class of homeless people who face a long list of poverty-induced afflictions. There is practically no intergroup mobility. In fact, with the third highest level of income inequality in the United States, the City by the Bay actually trails another distinctly global city, New York.8 The acceleration of a global capitalist economy has restructured relationships among cities, leaving some in desperate straits and increasingly turning to smart city models for a rescue from potential oblivion. Reshuffling relationships has led cities all over the world to re-evaluate their purposes and positioning. Given the choice between becoming a global city with deep inequality and a regional backwater with few prospects for growth, it is little wonder that cities turn to technology and the smart city sales pitch.

WHAT MAKES A CITY SMART? The Smart City in a Digital World recognises the importance of these developments even as it aims to broaden how we think about smart cities by examining what contributes to the genuine intelligence of cities, in addition to the latest digital

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The Smart City in a Digital World

innovations. It maintains that one of the problems with the smart city movement is that it has co-opted the concept of ‘smart’ and identified it almost exclusively with technology – such as the sensors that monitor traffic flows and the streetlights that also keep an eye on the homeless. In numerous places, the movement has served as a way to make a big real estate play typically involving luxury condominiums, equally fancy offices and upscale retail establishments. The smart city can easily become the exclusive city, one that caters to the rich and does little or nothing for the working poor or for people looking for affordable housing. In their plans and policies, advocates of the smart city have made the case for a technological solution to the question of how to make an intelligent urban place. It is now time to address the issue of what makes a city ‘smart’ in all of its manifold dimensions, but especially in how to make it a place where a diverse collection of people can come together to enrich each other’s lives and live with a large degree of freedom to become whoever they want to be. How is it possible to create urban places that genuinely work for all, irrespective of class position or the use of the latest in communication and information technology?

SMART CITY PATTERNS While every plan for creating a smart city is unique, there are two general patterns. The first is to take an existing city and reconstitute its infrastructure with Next Internet technologies that change existing systems and create new transportation, energy and communication networks. The alternative to retrofitting old cities is to create entirely new ones that are, in the technological sense, born smart. In addition, some older and many of the new cities contain space for research and development of advanced information technology and

The World is Urban

13

telecommunications modelled after California’s Silicon Valley. Such post-industrial districts are not essential to win a municipality the smart city designation. However, these high-tech districts can help the city, as a whole, to attract a more diverse range of businesses and better enable it to carry out smart city projects. Finally, there are clear distinctions between cities whose prime drivers are corporations (especially technology firms), those that are government projects (typically combining local, regional and national authorities), and those that are citizen-driven, (i.e. that aim to promote public space, public ownership or control of data and full participation in the smart city development process). It is, of course, impossible to represent all facets of smart city development. In fact, any attempt to do so would most likely submerge the key distinctions and fault lines that need to be exposed.

A TRILOGY The Smart City in a Digital World is the third in a trilogy of books that began with To the Cloud in 2014, which described the transition from local computing to centralised storage and processing in giant data centres. This was followed in 2017 by Becoming Digital, which examined the convergence of cloud computing with big data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT), or from the Internet we have known for the last three decades to the Next Internet. I shall have more to say about how the Next Internet uses these converging systems and advanced telecommunications networks to power today’s smart cities. My primary aim is to provide a concise overview of the key issues, controversies and alternatives that explain the variety of meanings attached to the smart city concept, situate it in the material and discursive history of urban life and address policies intended to make cities better.

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The Smart City in a Digital World

In this respect, The Smart City follows Becoming Digital, and both are part of the SocietyNow book series, which offers short critical guides to major social issues in a widely accessible style. Trained as a sociologist, I am particularly sensitive to concerns raised by journalists about the reticence of many of my fellow academics to make their work available to the broad publics that need it. As a 2018 article written by an economics journalist put it: ‘Hey, sociologists! Speak up!’9 I wholeheartedly agree. This book is also the culmination of years of research on communication technology, including cities. I have been writing about what’s new in communication media since the 1970s, including my first series of publications that addressed what were then the new technologies of cable and ‘pay’ television. It is valuable to draw from this work because the first smart cities did not grow out of the research labs at IBM in this century, as some have suggested, but in part from proposals for ‘wired cities’, that sprang from optimism generated by the expansion of cable television in the 1960s. These were based on experiments with ‘interactive’ systems that anticipated the growth of online shopping, online education and the expansion of public participation, including electronic polling and even voting. One of the most fully formed proposals for a smart city emerged from the mind of Walt Disney, who announced in October 1966, just weeks before he died, a detailed plan for the smart city known as Epcot, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. As the book describes, it was to contain many of the features that smart city advocates boast about today. So too did the New York World’s Fair of 1964, where General Motors, Bell Labs and RCA provided a taste of smart city life. The modern history of the smart city began in the 1960s and I appreciate the value of having experienced and examined these beginnings. As a teenager in New York City, I often hopped on the subway to

The World is Urban

15

the 1964 Fair. I have made several visits to Epcot and Disney’s planned town of Celebration, which is all that is left of the scheme to make Epcot the utopian city of the future. Moreover, with this book, I am returning to a long-standing research interest in cities and technology, including the social impact of efforts to replicate Silicon Valley throughout the world. This has included research on the software design district, what was called Silicon Alley, in New York City and the first smart cities in Asia, Putrajaya and Cyberjaya (also known as the Multimedia Super Corridor) in Malaysia, a government project that created two new high-tech cities from scratch. I also carried out research on efforts to preserve a declining telecommunication and information technology sector in my adopted home city of Ottawa where the corporations Nortel, JDS Uniphase and Corel, once zoomed to prominence, only to crash when the bubble burst on what I have called ‘the digital sublime’.

FROM AN URBAN VILLAGE TO A LIFE IN CITIES This book also draws from my lifelong love affair with cities, which began when I was a young man in the 1950s and 1960s fortunate enough to grow up in what was at the time the world icon of urbanism, New York City and specifically Lower Manhattan. Although living in a crowded Little Italy tenement apartment on Mulberry Street and, later on, what is now Mosco Street (named after my father, a community activist), in what sociologist Herbert Gans called an urban village, I learned at first-hand what it meant to come of age in a city made smart by its commitment to public services and public space. It was a world of good public transportation, public education, public hospitals, public libraries and museums, all within the reach of working families. It was also a

16

The Smart City in a Digital World

city of trade unions that defended the rights of working people to a living wage, good health care and a quality education. There were well-kept public parks and playgrounds that did not require a private trust or public-private partnership to be built, maintained, or kept safe. It was also a city of interconnected industrial districts that provided working-class fathers like mine, a lithographer who worked in the printing district, with steady work in unionised factories and offices. There were certainly problems, including the racism, sexism and class divisions that continue to plague cities, but New York taught me that a commitment to public institutions, to public space and to a robust democracy were the qualities that made a city smart. New York was also the place where I learned early on, from the window of our fourth-floor apartment, what it meant to keep my ‘eyes on the street’ long before the brilliant urban observer Jane Jacobs made the phrase popular. Coming of age in the 1960s, I was fortunate to live in a city where progressive forces could still make a difference, a city where my father could be called on to represent our neighbourhood in federal government-funded anti-poverty and education programmes. It was a city where, during my university years, I could spend summers earning a good salary working in a series of city, state and federal programmes that provided much-needed help to inner cities. With this experience, I developed a strong interest in the value of grass roots organising and the genuine intelligence that resides in the masses of people who call cities like New York their home. This lived understanding greatly informs this book and especially the concluding chapter. My good fortune to live in great cities continued into my adult life. After leaving the commercial capital of the world, I attended university in the political capital Washington, DC, and later returned there as a professor. Before my return. I attended graduate school in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

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arguably the educational capital of America, if not the world, and later went back as a scholar to write about cities and new technologies. My first teaching job was in Lowell, Massachusetts, a struggling city but one that, more than any other, gave birth to the industrial revolution in the United States. I still recall the many empty textile mills and the near universal response of my students when I asked them what they thought of proposals to turn them into upscale housing. Almost to a person, they wanted the mills torn down. There was nothing romantic associated with the factories that their families had worked in. The first industrial city came to be gifted with America’s first urban national park, which, among other things, turned one of the mills into a museum that replicated conditions in early industrial America. On a visit there, my daughters received a valuable lesson when they had to punch a time clock to gain admission and get a taste of what the young ‘mill girls’ of Lowell experienced on the factory floor. Later I would move to Philadelphia, the city that gave birth to the US Constitution, but which had not recovered from the urban upheaval of the 1960s. It was a city, like many others in the 1980s, that saw its historic commitment to public life in tatters, with factories relocating to states with weak labour laws, and eventually to China and Mexico. With free market politicians entrenched in Washington, Philadelphia would be my last home in America. In 1984, my family and I headed north and crossed the border into Canada to live first in the original capital of the country, Kingston, and then in its permanent capital, Ottawa, where I have resided since 1987. To learn about cities, there is no substitute for making them your home. Travel is also very instructive and I have been privileged to visit, lecture and carry out research in cities around the world, including across America and Canada, as well in a host of international locations, many of which now boast of their smart city status, including Oaxaca, São Paulo,

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Havana, London, Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, Geneva, Madrid, Barcelona, Stockholm, Oslo, Turku, Moscow, Johannesburg, Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Penang, among others.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK Following this chapter, The Smart City in a Digital World takes up the question of how to think about smart cities. With no single, widely accepted definition, Chapter 2 offers a range of meanings along a spectrum from narrow, technology-driven concepts, to those that incorporate social forces and view the smart city through the lens of citizenship and finally to definitions that see smart cities as revisioning the social construction of space and time. The chapter then turns to the history of the smart city concept, beginning with the widely accepted view that it originates with a 2009 IBM report calling for a ‘smarter city’. The company, like most US corporations, took a big hit during the 2008 financial crash, and the call for creating technologydriven municipalities was one way to create new markets. This is a useful starting point, but there is a great deal to learn from earlier false starts on the road to creating smart cities. To that end, the chapter examines five important examples, including Pittsburgh’s experiment with computer simulations developed by defence contractors, the city of Los Angeles’s proposal to ‘computerise’ its record keeping and analysis, the construction of an urban technology imaginary at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Walt Disney’s 1966 announcement that his company would build an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot), and the movement to create ‘wired cities’ through the widespread deployment of coaxial cable in the early 1970s.

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Chapter 3 begins with an examination of the technologies that comprise the infrastructure of smart cities. It concentrates on the IoT, which refers to the scanning devices embedded in objects and living things that contain sufficient processing and transmission power to monitor activity, examine usage and deliver data over digital networks. It also addresses cloud computing, the system for storing and processing information in distant data centres. Next, the chapter takes up big data analytics, which uses applied statistical measures to analyse large data sets that assist human decision-making and increasingly automate it with algorithms. Wired and wireless telecommunications systems are increasingly deployed to connect these systems in powerful networks. In Becoming Digital, I referred to the IoT, cloud computing, big data analytics and advanced telecommunications as the constituent pieces of the Next Internet. They have now become essential tools for the construction of smart cities. Chapter 3 proceeds to consider how these Next Internet systems are increasingly integrated into urban life, serving to regulate key functions such as transportation, communication, energy, education, policing, elections and commerce. The chapter also takes up a key change in the ontological nature of the current wave of communication systems. Next Internet systems comprise the first practical application of ubiquitous or ‘everywhere’ computing, whereby the material components disappear into the woodwork of urban life even as they grow in power and ubiquity. It is essential to consider the implications for cities of communication systems that are almost seamlessly integrated into the structures of everyday life. To accomplish this, Chapter 3 draws from a political economy perspective, which examines the social relations, particularly the power relations that mutually constitute the production, distribution and exchange of resources. Specifically, it takes up one of the most contentious smart city cases today.

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Sidewalk Labs, a division of Alphabet, the parent of technology giant Google, with deep roots in New York City, is attempting to create a smart city with the most valuable undeveloped property in Toronto. The case reveals the power of dominant technology firms in urban areas, the expansion of massive surveillance in municipalities and the growing value of data gathered on every aspect of city life. Chapters 4–6 examine governance by viewing the smart city as a space of power, including the formal authority of the state authorities that create and manage urban areas and the pressures imposed by economic forces (especially big tech companies), which are increasingly designing and building their own cities. Finally, there are social movements that resist concentrated state and corporate power and aim to create what is increasingly called municipalism, or social democracy in and through citizen-led smart cities. Specifically, Chapter 4 provides an overview of three forms of smart city governance: those led by the state, those directed by private business (especially technology firms) and those that are citizen-centred. The chapter proceeds to assess the first form in case studies that examine government-controlled smart cities in Singapore, a perennial leader in smart city rankings, China, which tops the world for the number of its projects, and India, where the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made a special commitment to developing technology-enabled municipalities. Chapter 5 draws primarily from US case studies to consider what happens when corporations, especially the leading technology firms, create cities of the future. A ‘who’s who’ of high-tech leaders, including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Bill Gates believe, as did their predecessors Henry Ford and Walt Disney, that their market victories justify the disruption of established institutions, especially cities. For these corporate leaders, simply because governments have a history of

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running cities does not mean they should continue to do so. Business titans almost universally insist that the market is better at meeting the challenges of a turbulent world than the ageing bureaucracies of the public sector. Backed by decades of deregulation, privatisation and liberalised trade that have given unprecedented legitimacy to private sector rule, entrepreneurs have accelerated the pace of private urban development and governance. Against this view, Chapter 6 focuses on a different type of smart city, one centred on democratic governance and the needs of citizens. It departs from government- and corporate-controlled cities by placing the emphasis on public participation in decision-making, on social equality and on the protection and expansion of public institutions and public space. Prime examples include by far the leading exemplar, Barcelona, as well as citizen-led experiments in Amsterdam, Paris and Seoul. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what the arrival of catastrophic climate change would mean for smart city governance. Chapter 7 turns our attention from the political economy way of seeing developments to a perspective that starts with culture. Specifically, it takes up the city in discourse, by addressing the myths, imaginaries and ideologies that capture the spirit of a particular urban configuration and help to power the support necessary to carry out the difficult job of changing the city. To accomplish this, I draw from a cultural studies perspective, which aims to understand the stories we tell that help to constitute individual and social meanings and identities. It takes us from the power of political economy to the power of discourse, by addressing how myths or imaginaries are aestheticised, that is, turned into attractive forms that help forge a link between city dwellers and idealised visions of urban life. Most of the dominant urban discourses developed first in response to massive industrialisation, then to the automobile, and now to digital systems.

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The smart city is only the latest narrative in a long line that includes the garden city, the modernist vision of a Radiant City (including its monumental, Brutalist and neo-baroque variations), the organic urban village, the creative city and its immediate successor, the smart city. In addition to capturing the spirit of particular forms of urbanity, the chapter explores their wider social, political, economic and cultural significance. This includes demonstrating how dominant visions of urban life are used to sell both the lofty visions of smart cities and the material technologies that power them. All proposals for major upheavals in cities must be sold to a variety of constituents. The smart city is no exception. The process is as much political as it is technical and involves a variety of private and public participants. These include corporations, especially technology companies, governments, urban design firms, civic activists, public and private research institutions and investors. How do the ideas behind smart cities get translated into projects for urban redevelopment, how are they marketed to those who matter, and how are they ultimately completed or shelved? The book concludes with Chapter 8, which addresses first the problems and then the potential of our smart city futures. The former includes the deepening of the power of corporations, especially firms with a stake in marketing technology and data, and governments eager to extend their control over growing urban populations. The implications for democracy and the sheer livability of urban lives are enormous. Smart cities also require urbanites to give up massive amounts of personal information and to trust the algorithms that increasingly set the rules for life in the city. With clear dangers from hacking, from commercial exploitation of private data, and from government and corporate surveillance, citizens take major risks when they put their trust in algorithm-driven cities. Such an environment seriously erodes the prospects for civic democracy and transparency. Moreover,

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smart cities depend on technologies and services primarily provided by digital giants. As a result, cities are giving up their governance responsibilities to commercial enterprises, whose control over the technology and the terms and conditions of its use, help them make profitable use of data gathered on smart city residents, workers and visitors. Furthermore, by relinquishing oversight, whether to companies that have a stake in technology or to governments primarily interested in control, cities risk deepening technological complexity and inviting what Charles Perrow called the ‘normal accidents’ that inevitably result when big institutions place big bets on complex technical systems. In addition, the focus on smart cities tends to distract attention from more serious challenges, foremost of which is the need to address climate change. Smart city proposals often also provide false hopes for addressing environmental issues because they typically minimise the costs associated with running urban areas with millions of devices that consume energy and that also add to the growing mountains of e-waste. Chapter 8 also addresses resistance to the singular reliance on corporations, governments and their technologies to manage modern cities. In taking up the need to restore public accountability and democracy, the chapter considers hopeful examples of alternatives, like the movement toward a new municipalism embodied in Barcelona’s proposal for an open, agile and participatory approach to urban development and digitisation. The chapter concludes with a manifesto identifying core principles that should guide efforts to create genuinely smart cities. It starts from the assumption that what makes cities smart is the collective experience and intelligence of its citizens and visitors. The primary goal of smart city technology should be to enhance the lives of urbanites and not to expand the profit and power of businesses, nor to deepen the control of governments over their citizens.

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SMART CITY IN A BOTTLE In 1958, Action Comics introduced Superman fans to Kandor, the capital city of Krypton, the Man of Steel’s home planet. Once a thriving high-tech city of six million people, Kandor was shrunk by the android evil genius Brainiac and encased in a bottle. The cover of this book nods to Kandor with its icon of a smart city sealed in a cyberspace enclosure. Before Krypton was destroyed in a catastrophic explosion, Superman, playing out the fantasy of a deus ex machina, rescued the bottled city from its evil master. But in a twist on the standard tale, Superman fails to restore the city to its former glory. It turns out his technology was flawed and could only expand organic matter. This was fine for the people of Kandor, but the entire infrastructure failed to enlarge and was destroyed. The story resonates because it follows a pattern familiar to those who track smart cities. There are many Brainiacs around today, some of whom are described in this book, eager to remake cities with technology and create entirely new, eversmarter cities. Some are tempted to locate them in out-of-theway places distant from an increasingly dark world. There are also many urbanites who put their trust in superheroes to rescue cities from evil master builders and from the inevitable fragilities of metropolitan life. The lesson from today’s smart cities is that neither Brainiac nor Superman will deliver an urban sublime. Only the people of today’s Kandors can make a city smart. The question is how?

ENDNOTES 1.  John Vidal, The 100 million city: Is 21st century urbanisation out of control? The Guardian, March 19, 2018, https://www.

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theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/19/urban-explosion-kinshasa-elalto-growth-mexico-city-bangalore-lagos 2.  ATG Access, Smart cities: Turning the dream into a reality, 2018, https://www.atgaccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ ATG_SmartCitiesNov18.pdf 3.  The World Bank, Urban development, October 5, 2018, http:// www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview 4.  Evgeny Morozov, There is a leftwing way to challenge big tech for our data. Here it is. The Guardian, August 19, 2018, http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/19/there-is-aleftwing-way-to-challenge-big-data-here-it-is 5.  Marc T. J. Johnson and Jason Munshi-South, Evolution of life in urban environments, Science, November 3, 2017, http://science. sciencemag.org/content/358/6363/eaam8327 6.  Coral Davenport and Campbell Robertson, Resettling the first American ‘climate refugees,’ New York Times, May 3, 2016, https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/resettling-the-first-americanclimate-refugees.html 7.  Saskia Sassen, Cities in a world economy, 4th edition, London: Sage, 2011. 8.  Antonio García Martínez, How Silicon Valley fuels an informal caste system, Wired, July 9, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ how-silicon-valley-fuels-an-informal-caste-system/ 9.  Justin Fox, Hey, sociologists! Speak up! Bloomberg News, August 20, 2018, https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/hey-sociologistsspeak-up-1.1126076

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2 HOW TO THINK ABOUT SMART CITIES

A smart sustainable city is an innovative city that uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social, environmental as well as cultural aspects. —Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities, United Nations International Telecommunications Union1

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. —Bruce Sterling2

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STOP USING THE TERM Bruce Sterling is a well-known science fiction writer and the inventor of the popular genre cyberpunk at the dawn of the Internet. In addition to offering the sceptic’s view of smart cities, he made waves when he called on the technology community to ‘Stop Saying “Smart Cities”’. It is a worn-out phrase, he insisted, and stands for too many things, most of which are mired in banality. Unfortunately for Sterling, his plea went unheeded. Smart cities live on and continue to dominate debates about urban life, design, planning and policy. Smart cities may or may not be resilient, but the term certainly is. Since it appears that Sterling will not get his wish any time soon, it would be good to give the concept some clarity and substance. This chapter does so by offering a range of definitions, images and historical contexts that can at least deepen thinking about smart cities. Unfortunately, there is no internationally accepted definition of a smart city. For example, while the US National Institute of Standards and Technology provided a clear and widely accepted definition of cloud computing, one of the key components of smart city design, it offers no such clarity for smart cities. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) task force definition that began this chapter is so broad as to suggest that a smart city is one that does what all successful cities should do. It also reads like a definition formulated by a committee.

THE SMART CITY IS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY As a result, we are left with a range of ways to think about smart cities from a variety of sources. Because technology is almost always included in conceptions of the smart city, an especially good way to begin is with a set of meanings at the

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narrow end of a spectrum with a technology-based definition. Two prime examples of what amount to a techno-fundamentalist conception of the smart city come, not surprisingly, from companies that are deeply invested in smart city technologies. According to IBM, which some claim got the smart city ball rolling in 2009, a smart city ‘makes optimal use of all the interconnected information available today to better understand and control its operations and optimise the use of limited resources’.3 For IBM’s chief smart city rival Cisco, it is an urban area that adopts ‘scalable solutions that take advantage of information and communications technology (ICT) to increase efficiencies, reduce costs and enhance quality of life’.4 These definitions are echoed by the think tank McKinsey, which has done well advising companies and cities on smart city applications. In one report touting the potential of Asian smart cities, the company measures ‘smartness’ by the availability of smart city technologies, by how well cities adopt technology-intensive infrastructure, and by how thoroughly urbanites embrace smart city applications such as real-time public transit information and remote medical diagnosis.5 For these smart city advocates, it is about gathering as much data as possible and using it to manage cities more efficiently to save on costs and accomplish goals. While all make it clear that smart cities are about technology and data, the simplicity of their definitions is deceptive. No one would object to enhancing understanding, control and optimisation, but to what ends? From this definition, a smart city could include an urban area that uses technology to deepen inequality as well as one committed to the opposite. This is far from an academic question. Three of the urban areas typically listed among the most successful smart cities, London, Singapore and New York, are also places with a significant and growing problem of inequality. Similarly, focussing on information technology, Cisco identifies efficiencies, cost savings and an

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enhanced quality of life. But it too begs the questions of to what end and for whom? Singapore uses smart technologies to identify and remove homeless people from its streets. San Diego, like some other cities, has surveillance cameras in its street lighting. But who benefits from these efficiencies? Who loses? What makes this smart? San Diego’s business partner General Electric undoubtedly benefits, but who else? Not the homeless, who are increasingly kept away from public spaces.6 Business definitions that highlight technology have also made their way into academic discourse. According to scholars writing in The Journal of Strategy and Management, smart cities are those ‘that use information and communication technologies in order to increase the quality of life of their inhabitants while contributing to a sustainable development’.7

THE SMART CITY IS ABOUT CITIZENS The limitations of technology-based definitions have led some to broaden the scope. Setting aside the techno-fundamentalism that governs so much of the smart city discourse, the UK government’s British Standards Institution adopts a citizenfocussed concept: ‘the effective integration of physical, digital and human systems in the built environment to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens’.8 This remains vague, but at least it recognises that smart cities are not just about data and technology. They also include human systems. Others offer a more robust citizen-focussed definition that avoids reference to technology: a city can be defined as “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic

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development and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance.9 This definition expands the scope of smart cities to encompass people and technologies, development and sustainability, quality of life and shared governance. It does a better job of broadening the parameters for deploying the smart cities idea. However, in doing so it also raises more questions, foremost among them: What is actually meant by participatory governance? The term can encompass as little as keeping citizens informed or as much as involving citizens at every level of decision-making and requiring their approval before going forward. Most smart city projects either ignore the general public or consider it participatory just to keep citizens minimally informed. Can smart cities provide opportunities to expand participatory democracy? Chapter 6 explores this potential by considering citizen-driven smart cities. It is understandable that one would want to expand the meaning of the smart city beyond the narrow technological focus. However, attempts to be socially inclusive can also, ironically, lead to the exclusion of those most in need of smart city services. As one designer put it, It’s far too easy to make assumptions about how ‘everyone’ fits into our ideal ‘smart’ environment. It is easier still to assume that the people we are designing for are able-bodied, digitally literate, and financially stable. As a result, ‘a lot of smart city development ends up helping those who need it the least’.10 Upgrading transportation networks, automating bin collection, installing intelligent traffic controls and creating 5G wireless networks can be useful and can make the city more efficient. But people with disabilities

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are not likely to care about pop-up stores and smart buses if they are not made accessible and if they do not provide the space for their mobility equipment. What good is 5G for the many people who do not have a clue about how to use it? Of what value is a fully automated grocery store for the millions who do not have the economic savings to replace a broken kitchen appliance? From this point of view, the intelligent, inclusive city should not necessarily be built with absolutely everyone in mind, but rather should aim to close gaps in public services through the analysis of data and constant consultations with citizens. Specifically, a broader vision means using smart city technologies to increase accessibility for the disabled, lower transportation costs for the poor and make low-cost, nutritious food available to more people.

THE SMART CITY IS A SPACE-TIME MACHINE At the other end of the spectrum from technocentric definitions is the broadest of meanings, the vision of smart cities as ‘space-time machines, with networked infrastructure and smart city technologies significantly disrupting temporality as well as spatiality to produce a new set of space-time relations’.11 With this conception Rob Kitchin offers us key reasons to develop smart cities and accept their disruptive consequences. Smart cities can overcome space with time to produce economic development, accumulate capital and create efficiencies in the delivery of public services. Smart cities can turn urban areas into densely interconnected, interoperable, resilient and sustainable systems that can reshape what it means to live and work in cities by turning them into always-on, hyper-mobile places. Kitchin’s visionary analysis raises the stakes beyond technology and participation, to incorporate fundamental transformations in the experience

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and use of urban space and time. The nature of that transformation, who gets to shape it, and for whose benefit, remain central questions in this high-stakes field of social contestation. Smart city technologies increase the elasticity and hence the value of space and time. Will they be used to enhance public space or deepen private control and market rule? Will the management of time in smart cities expand popular control over temporality or centralise that control by giving priority to its commodification and commercialisation?

THE SMART CITY IS A COMPUTER The city has become a primary field on which the social conflicts arising from the expansion of communication and information technology play out. In fact, it is increasingly common to use computer discourse to describe cities. According to one programmer who also writes about the tech scene, The city is a computer, the streetscape is the interface, you are the cursor and your smartphone is the input device. This is the user-based, bottomup version of the city-as-computer idea, but there’s also a top-down version, which is systems-based. It looks at urban systems such as transit, garbage and water and wonders whether the city could be more efficient and better organised if these systems were ‘smart’.12 Following on from this line of thought, the tech giant and smart city developer Siemens makes reference to turning cities into ‘open-air computers’.13 Another describes his company’s work in making Kansas City smart, as changing the place into a smartphone: ‘We’ve used the analogy quite a bit of, we turned the city into a smartphone’, said Blake Miller of Think

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Big Partners. ‘We have the connectivity, we have sensors that collect data, now what are the apps and solutions that can be built on top of that, à la the iTunes store?’14 For Miller and numerous others, the city is one big startup that technology companies can remake. This shift to computer discourse carries with it the language and the expectations of optimisation, with the goal of making urban systems and their residents and workers operate as efficiently as possible. This begs the question of whether cities actually work best for their people when they optimise, when they set, in the tech parlance, the right key performance indicators and stick with them. Are cities more like machines that can be built from a plan or do they better resemble trees that grow, adjust and live organically, based on changing conditions and needs? In an uncertain world, one where climate change is likely to create profound disruptions for most cities, one is tempted to favour the resilience of the tree.

THE SMART CITY IS A PLATFORM There is an image from the digital world that works better as a smart city metaphor than the computer or the phone and that is the platform. The digital world once used the term operating system, as in Windows, macOS or Linux, to describe the foundation of computing. With the rise of social media, we speak less of operating systems and more about platforms. Facebook and Google operate platforms or their own digital spaces in which people can carry out several different tasks: posting, liking, searching, emailing and so on. Now the term is used widely, especially by service companies, such as Uber and Airbnb, to describe and brand the business. Uber describes itself as a peer-to-peer transportation service and Airbnb is an online marketplace and hospitality business.

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Materially, platforms are defined spaces with starting points and directions to get from those points to others within the platform. Discursively, they are forms of branding, or a means to lend a favourable, in this case, hip, aesthetic to a corporate image, one that executives hope visitors to the platform will most associate with the company. Facebook makes friends, not surveillance. Google finds answers, not advertising customers. Uber provides convenient rides, not cheap labour. Airbnb makes communities, not transient housing. Platforms are not limited to cyberspace. They can also occupy material spaces and the city is a likely candidate for the term because it occupies a defined space that provides a starting point (your home, your workplace, your hotel) and markers that take people wherever they need to go in the city. As a concept, the platform is less rigid an image than that of a computer or smartphone. It suggests that the city is not just a thing but is also a process, with characteristic markers and ways of getting from one place to another. Platforms have boundaries, but they are not rigid. They are material, but they also occupy a discursive space. New York is a physical field upon which people play, live and work; it is also the Big Apple, a phrase that gives the city an imaginary existence in the universe of brands. By this definition, a smart city is a platform located in physical space that meets the needs of citizens. Nations, neighbourhoods and continents can be viewed as platforms too. However, cities are more likely candidates these days because their size enables them to deliver a wider range of services than does a neighbourhood and they are seen as more manageable than a nation or a continent. For one expert on smart city platforms, The idea of the smart city platform encompasses both the technical aspects of the platform concept and an emerging vision of the city as a service,

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enabling an innovative ecosystem of urban service providers from a diversity of industries.15 It is anticipated that cities will spend about $4 billion on platforms over the coming decade in the hopes of becoming the take-off point for a market of $1.5 trillion in smart city services. One of the key developments in the competition over smart cities is the expansion of big technology companies from their dominant positions in cyberspace platforms to the physical places that make up smart city platforms. More specifically, the moves involve taking over, some say colonising, urban spaces that can be used as material data platforms. This enables tech firms to gather information on residents, workers and visitors, and use the data to improve their own digital platforms and also sell it to third parties. Examples are everywhere. Google reached a deal with city officials to develop a portion of the Toronto waterfront with plans to install sensors in sidewalks, street lights, along fencing, throughout offices, in parks, shops and, where possible, in homes, to monitor the activities of people and the performance of objects. Similarly, an investment company associated with Bill Gates has announced plans to build the smart city of Belmont in the Arizona desert. Other projects bear a resemblance to company towns, like Lowell, Massachusetts, America’s first planned industrial city, whose workers lived in company dormitories and where it is said the clocks slowed down during the day to extend work time and sped up overnight. A modern-day example is Facebook, which is building 1,500 apartments on a 59-acre residential site called Willow Village adjacent to its expanding offices in Menlo Park, California. The place has not been completed, but it has already been dubbed Facebookville or Zucktown by its critics, who fear a return to

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the company towns of the industrial era, if not the dystopian world of the company WorryFree, featured in the film Sorry to Bother You, where people give up their lives in return for the promise of a job, food and a place to sleep. Google’s parent firm Alphabet is building 5,000 homes adjacent to the company’s headquarters, the Googleplex, which will feature a new 600,000-feet-square building complete with stores, cafes, gardens and even a performance space. Elon Musk of Tesla and another tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, have also gotten in on the act, as has the startup investor Y Combinator. All of these are addressed in more detail later in the book. For now, it is important to observe how the developers of major online platforms are turning cities into their material embodiments. Cities are the hot new platform and the digital world is eager to profit from their potential. These moves, however, raise as many questions as they answer, especially about the relationship between public and private space and about who actually owns the data produced by people walking along sidewalks, playing in parks or working in offices and homes. Disney pioneered this form of urban development when it opened Orlando’s Walt Disney World Resort in 1971. Wanting total control, the Disney developers sought and received power over infrastructure, roads, security, policing and other traditional government functions. What was traditionally public space would become Disney space. Today, that model has reappeared in many smart cities, especially those built by tech entrepreneurs. It should come as no surprise that Walt is now hailed as the ‘father of the smart city’.16 The tension between technology and citizenship, private control and public space comes up again and again in the research on smart cities. The World Bank went as far as to conclude that one definition was impossible and so offered two: one sees smart cities defined by technology and the

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other views them as serving the best interests of citizens. While addressing the tension between technology and citizenship, I tend to give greater weight to the latter in determining what makes a city smart. It is no doubt important to take into account changes made possible by applying Next Internet systems, including cloud computing, big data analytics, the Internet of Things and advanced wireless networks, to the urban world. But what is actually done with these technologies and the data they generate is determined by the balance of forces in the political arena, especially by the extent of democratic governance and respect for citizens’ rights.

TIME’S TWISTED ARROW The First Smar t City Before turning to Chapter 3 and the technologies that help make the smart city possible, it is important to provide some temporal perspective. Some urban historians have made the case that the designers, builders and inhabitants of ancient cities were not very different than their twenty-first century counterparts in attempting to create smart cities. In fact, the historian Monica L. Smith has documented the case of Sisupalgarh in India as a prime example of ‘the antiquity of the smart city concept’.17 Built 2,500 years ago and excavated in 1948, Sisupalgarh is located in the eastern Indian state of Odisha near the Bay of Bengal. According to Smith, it enjoyed several of the characteristics featured in descriptions of today’s smart cities, including ‘intelligent traffic management, innovative use of open spaces, risk mitigation, and citizen management’. Admittedly at a much simpler level of technological development, Sisupalgarh and other ancient

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cities demonstrate that the ideas emerging in today’s smart city debates have been around for a very long time. More than anything else, it is the commitment to intelligent planning and building to meet important urban functions and the needs of residents, which are key factors in making a city smart. To that extent, the first smart cities predate today’s by over 2,000 years. Interestingly, the rise of the smart cities movement has increased the motivation of historians to examine the smart city values contained in the urban life of antiquity more closely. One of the reasons why Sisupalgarh has attracted attention is because the Government of India has launched an expensive and polarising proposal to develop smart cities across the country. An important consequence of the smart cities movement is a growing effort to reassess, rediscover and recontextualise urban history in light of the functions the movement emphasises. In addition to a focus on efficiency, this work also calls attention to the intelligence of the ordinary urban dwellers, who helped to build ancient cities. Unfortunately for our understanding of urban life, they have received little recognition by historians. This is a focus of Smith’s edited collection on the subject, The Social Construction of Ancient Cities. As she puts it, In both ancient and modern cities, the vast majority of urban dwellers are not elites. Their production and consumption patterns form the basis of the city’s economy; their participation in ceremonies affirms the effectiveness of an organizing authority; their labor permits the manifestation of an urban ethos as constructed through both fanciful monuments and practical infrastructure.18 Ordinary people make cities, and they also make them smart.

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Architecture Without Architects Those who write about cities are not only rediscovering the intelligence of early urban dwellers. They are also returning to earlier research that has received too little attention for recognising that cities are not just the products of architects, designers and builders, however much of the historical canon they occupy. One such example is the 1964 book by the engineer, architect and critic Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, which was based on his exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For Rudofsky, the history of architecture and also of cities tends to concentrate on a few cultures, mainly in Europe and in parts of Egypt and Anatolia. It is, he concludes, as if in writing the history of music, one began with the symphony. Even more importantly, the story is told as if it amounts to a little more than a who’s who of architects who commemorated power and wealth; an anthology of buildings of, by, and for the privileged – the houses of true and false gods, of merchant princes and princes of the blood – with never a word about the houses of lesser people.19 Rudofsky calls on historians as well as designers and urban planners, to recognise as architecture what, for lack of better terms, can be considered vernacular, anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous or non-pedigreed. Architecture Without Architects followed on the heels of Jane Jacobs’s 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities to deliver a one-two punch to modernism, the reigning champion of design in elite circles throughout the world. Perhaps because he wrote about ancient architecture, Rudofsky did not receive nearly the recognition that Jacobs won with her masterful critique of the then current state of

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urban planning. However, it is important to return to Rudofsky’s work, because Architecture Without Architects reveals a variety of forms and spaces constructed by builders, who took time to understand the people who actually needed and used them. Whether monumental or simple, the ruins of villages or contemporary dried-brick row houses, cliff buildings or arcades, the book documents what it means for a place to grow organically through time and without the external imposition of forms by builders who care little about people and even less about the environment. They provide exemplars that enrich the concept of ‘smart’ to include the local, the lived and the human. It is particularly important to appreciate this research on the complexity of early cities, because we live in a time when many technology advocates would have us believe in a disjunction between the contemporary era of digital technologies and a primitive past when cities were far from smart. Throughout their histories, cities have carried on a dance with technologies. Briefly highlighting key dimensions of the citytechnology relationship helps us step back from ‘presentist’ and exceptionalist visions of the smart city.

Sedentar y and Smar t Technologies have been central to the development of cities, from the earliest concentrated settlements that arose in the transition from hunting and gathering to agricultural societies. Recent research has demonstrated that hunter-gatherers made extensive use of technology to bring down prey, to collect plants that generations of experience identified as nutritious and to build temporary settlements. In fact, contrary to much of what once passed as common knowledge, huntergatherers became sedentary long before the development of

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agriculture. According to James C. Scott in his extraordinary book Against the Grain: It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared.20 It is nothing short of remarkable and certainly makes these ancestral people genuinely worthy of the term ‘smart’ to recognise that, with little change in the nature of their material life – killing and eating prey; using plant life for food, medicine and building – they were able to establish settlements long before agriculture and the state arrived. We now know that it was the presence of abundant wetlands that gave rise to sedentism and the first towns. Over generations, secure in the knowledge that such special places could meet their needs, hunter-gatherers were able to experiment with planting first to supplement their diets and then to turn their harvests into the primary source of food. In addition, they could try out new technologies that led to irrigation systems that strengthened the food supply. Ultimately, success in agriculture opened the potential for complex settlements, and gave rise to elite classes of religious and secular rulers. While technologies spurred the rapid growth of urban settlements, they also contributed to the damage and destruction that new urban dwellers experienced. Permanent settlements, production surpluses and technological advances made these early cities easy and lucrative targets for increasingly betterarmed neighbours. Throughout the history of urbanism, whether in agricultural, industrial, or in today’s information societies, the relationship of cities to technologies has been dialectical, with developments in one direction giving rise to

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opposing forces that turn the mythical arrow of progress into a bent, if not twisted, marker. Technologies were, and still are, used for both positive and negative ends. For the residents of early agricultural cities, the same intelligence, acumen and technologies that created agricultural surpluses also produced parasitic rulers who took advantage of their power to exploit their own people and make war on competitors. To cite a contemporary example, the digitised drones that are beginning to deliver packages to residents of smart cities are also delivering weapons that kill combatants and citizens alike. The city-technology dance also often produces unanticipated consequences, including centralising authoritarian control in pre-industrial cities, fouling the air and sharply reducing life expectancies in early industrial cities, and shrinking public space and personal privacy in today’s technology-rich smart cities. The spectre of climate change growing out of the very technological progress that helped reduce poverty, disease and hunger worldwide, is today a defining feature of what it means to understand social life and the urban world dialectically. A case can be made that the communities that have enjoyed the greatest longevity are those that have understood the antimonies of rapid growth in both technology and social structure, and chosen stability, and what the scholar James Suzman calls ‘affluence without abundance’. Referring to the Khoisan people of southern Africa, also known as the Bushmen, who have lived in the region for most of human history, Suzman writes: In many ways the secret of their success, and the endurance of their way of life, was based on their having reached a form of dynamic equilibrium with their environment, a balance between its relative stability and harshness. The evolutionary success

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of the Khoisan, in other words, was based not on their ability to continuously colonise new lands, expand and grow into new spaces, or develop new technologies, but on the fact that they mastered the art of making a living where they were.21 It is useful to remind ourselves that the cities we deem smart today have been with us for a fraction of the 150,000 years spent by the Khoisan and their direct ancestors in southern Africa. Our smart cities are part of a social system known as capitalism that is less than four centuries old and faces survival threats from catastrophic climate change and nuclear war, both of its own making. At the very least, this should lead us to wonder a bit about what it means for a person or a place to be considered smart.

IBM’S SMARTER CITY Although there is no universally accepted definition of a smart city, there is some agreement that the term originates in a report produced by IBM in 2009 (although it used the term ‘smarter’ more than it did ‘smart’). ‘A Vision of Smarter Cities’, was the opening salvo in the company’s attempt to develop new markets in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown. In the report, IBM makes clear the range of things that cities might do with the correct mix of advanced information technologies. For people: fighting crime and improved health; for transportation: overcoming traffic congestion and better accident response; for communication: providing businesses, citizens and ‘systems’, with high speed connectivity; for water: improving the location of supplies and integrating delivery; for business: raising quality and efficiency; for energy: improving market performance

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by enabling consumers to send price signals better. As is typical of smart city accounts, especially those coming from business, there is no discussion of the climate or the environment. For IBM and the many others who continue to produce reports like this, smart cities are about applying technology to cities facing manageable challenges.22 The concept of cities facing climate catastrophe rarely registers. While no specific date can easily fix the birth of a concept, there is some value in arguing that the smart city movement began with this IBM report. If nothing else, it offers a place to start a discussion and anchors what most movements need: a myth of origins. The problem is that it also obscures significant, earlier points in the timeline that deepen our understanding of smart cities. As the scholar Paolo Bory has documented in his analysis of the 2002 attempt to turn Bologna into an early version of the smart city with its Iperbole Civic Network, there is much to learn from failed case studies.23 They demonstrate that even when precursors do not succeed in their specific goals, they do matter because, as the writer Joshua Sperling maintains, ‘the past is in the present, its story is alive’.24 Even the most strenuous efforts to create historical amnesia through the latest ‘end of history’ myths, cannot eradicate the consequences of past efforts. Specifically, five examples from the period 1950 to 1975 offer more than just a glimpse at the smart city movement to come. These are Pittsburgh’s experiment with computer simulations developed by defence contractors, the city of Los Angeles’s proposal to ‘computerise’ its record keeping and analysis, the New York World’s Fair of 1964, the 1966 announcement by Walt Disney that his company would build an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and the early movement to create ‘wired cities’ in the early 1970s.

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COMPUTER SIMULATIONS AND URBAN DYNAMICS IN THE STEEL CITY As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, defence contractors like the RAND Corporation, McDonnell Douglas and TRW sought out civilian markets that might be interested in their military applications, especially those making use of information technology. One of the more intriguing IT applications was a computer simulation that built on a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study led by Jay Forrester, who had pioneered the use of systems engineering and simulations to improve military targeting and the co-ordination of complex radars. Forrester’s book, Urban Dynamics, applied these tools to solve urban problems. It supported proposals for the mass clearance of low-income areas, including doing away with public housing, giving a scientific veneer to the work of urban planning powerhouses such as Robert Moses and Philip Johnson. As the urban scholar and head of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT, Jennifer Light, has described in her ground-breaking book, From Warfare to Welfare, cities began to draw from the military’s use of computer simulations to predict the outcomes of different courses of actions. How would a decision to promote public housing affect land use? What would be the unintended side effects of building a new highway versus constructing more public transportation? The city of Pittsburgh, among others, adopted the approach, built the models and ran the simulations. However, as one might expect, simulating the complexities of a city is not easy at any time and certainly was not in the early days of computer simulations. Instead of dropping the idea, modellers tended to simplify their questions and define their problems to fit the capabilities of their models. Some saw the irony in dumbing down an issue to make the city smart but went along anyway because the technique had the blessing of successful

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corporations and elite universities and often led to federal funding. The results were nonsensical to anyone with common sense, leading to scathing criticism of the Pittsburgh approach, and the experiment ended in the early 1970s, but not before it was applied to New York, with disastrous effects.25

PUNCH CARDS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS In the early 1950s, Los Angeles proposed to use an IBM computer with its data-filled paper punch cards to analyse the city’s operation. A decade later, the city called for a data storage facility that would ‘use electromechanical and electronic data processing systems’ to carry out the daily job of operating a city. This led to the creation of an agency that brought together computer databases and aerial photography to analyse neighbourhood demographics and assess the quality of housing. The formal goal was to deal better with the growing stock of substandard, low-income housing. In addition to housing, Los Angeles explored using computer data for climate and air pollution control, thereby laying the groundwork for making the city more efficient through data gathering, analysis and application. While L. A.’s Disneyland is often identified with foreshadowing the future of entertainment, it is important to recognise that the city itself was also an early pioneer in the more prosaic but equally significant process of attempting to create a ‘smarter city’ with computer technology.26

THE 1964 NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR The year 1964 stands out as a magical time in my life. Of course, to be 16 years old and living in the richest country in

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the world was itself a reason to be optimistic, but that year was particularly special because it marked a political highpoint. The civil rights movement was growing, US voters completely rejected conservatism at just about every level of government, and it was the last year for over a decade that Vietnam was not in the headlines. Moreover, my hometown, New York City was hosting a World’s Fair that, along with the Space Program, gave many of us a sense that the future would be magical. The Fair was about more than cities, but the future of urban life was a major feature, especially the expected transformation of cities with new technology. Today’s smart city movement features autonomous vehicles, universal high-speed connectivity, artificial intelligence and immersive video. Each of these was on display in exhibition halls at the Fair created by General Motors, Bell Labs, IBM and RCA, respectively. There were monorails to represent the future of transportation and picturephones that anticipated today’s indispensable smartphones. There was even an enormous scale model of New York City that today fills a large museum space, to give visitors a closer look at where all of these big changes would play out. The World’s Fair made New York the smart city of the future. There had been utopias modelled on a grand scale in earlier times, including at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. What distinguished the 1964 event was an explicit incorporation of communication and information into the fabric of life of the future city. What also distinguished it was the strong presence of Walt Disney, who used the Fair to try out ideas and technologies for his own smart city.

FROM PROGRESSLAND TO EPCOT Given the success of Disney’s California theme park, it should come as no surprise that big corporations lined up to create

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exhibitions with Disney for the New York extravaganza. With an eye on his next big venture, Disney agreed to create four attractions starting with Progressland, a General Electric pavilion featuring the Carousel of Progress, a celebration of American technological ingenuity. Its designer would go on to apply the Progressland model to Epcot. Disney also teamed up with the Ford Motor Company to create the Magic Skyway, a trip through prehistoric times in the automaker’s latest cars, a concept to be used in the plans for Epcot’s autonomous ‘PeopleMover’. In addition, there was a paean to international harmony through globalisation in the Pepsisponsored exhibition ‘It’s a Small World’. Finally, Disney gave the Fair its own Abraham Lincoln using state-of-the-art animatronic technology that had the former president delivering ‘Great Moments’ from his life, the centrepiece of the State of Illinois exhibition. One year after the Fair closed and just weeks before his death, Walt Disney stood before a camera to introduce another precursor to today’s smart city, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, widely known as Epcot. But since its opening in 1982, it has come to be just as widely known as a theme park, despite what Disney intended. Epcot was to be the centrepiece of Project X, the rather clandestinesounding name for the company’s master plan for Florida. The plan did call for a park (now Walt Disney World) to the north, with a nearby airport and an industrial research and development park that would focus on innovation. Epcot itself, however, was designed to house 20,000 people, most of them living in the outer ring of a set of concentric circles. The downtown would be domed, and traffic, including trucks, cars and autonomous vehicles, would be layered respectively in underground highways. A high-rise hotel was to be located at the centre, surrounded by commercial businesses and apartments. Most residents would move on monorails

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and always-available people movers. Influenced by the garden city movement that provided the template for much of suburban development, most people would live outside the downtown core but could easily commute into work without their automobiles. Disney’s concept combined what are today considered smart city principles: the intense application of technology to automate daily life and the vision of an innovation district that, in its focus on research, resembled today’s Silicon Valley. Considering the underdeveloped state of information technology at the time, there was not much detail on how all this would work in the city of tomorrow. That would arrive a few years later with the concept of the wired city.27

THE WIRED CITY Between the time Disney revealed plans for Epcot and the calls for building wired cities, there were significant advances in cable or broadband communication, leading to the first major alternative to broadcast television. Originally developed as a means to deliver over-the-air television signals to communities with poor broadcast reception, cable television companies began to sell the potential for vastly more channels in the 1970s, a feature that would turn an ancillary technology into a genuine national competitor in a market that had long been controlled by the big networks of NBC, CBS and ABC. It would not take a major leap to imagine that a system delivering more programming might also provide essential information and social services. This gave birth to the wired city concept, which provides another early vision of today’s smart city. In numerous government and industry reports, as well as in books (especially Ralph Lee Smith’s 1973 work The Wired Nation), discussions turned to the social and economic benefits

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of wiring cities, with the need for urgent action heightened by the urban upheavals of the 1960s. There was no clearer statement of cable’s potential to build better, today we would say smarter, cities than a 1969 report by the Electronics Industry Association, an industry lobbying group, which was submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission: Broadband communication is the tool not only to provide the means for new styles in human settlements, but also to rebuild, in a sociological sense, the crowded inner core of major cities. Broadband communications systems using cable can be structured to promote small, selfdetermining communities within the massive metropolis. Through these, citizens find order, identifiable territory, community pride and opportunity to participate and vote on matters that can be of local option: education, cultural pursuits, recreational interests, etc.28 A half-century before IBM announced the arrival of the smart city, proponents were lining up to imagine its potential benefits. Instant communication, online education, community building, voting from home and distant medical diagnosis were just a few major examples among the many suggestions offered for using the ‘cable revolution’ to create the 1970s’ versions of smart cities.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL SUBLIME The Pittsburgh experiment with urban planning through computer simulation, Los Angeles’s efforts to modernise with punch cards, the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Epcot and the wired city demonstrate that the concept of the smart city

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predates today’s incarnation by 50 years or so. They are also cautionary tales about what to expect from displays of boosterism that constitute what David Nye has called ‘the technological sublime’. Believing that one can simulate the dense thicket of urban life with computer code or punch cards anticipated a future filled with algorithms. But it also raised questions about over-reliance on technology-generated systems. Imagining a computer search concept at the IBM pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair or the picturephone on display, thanks to Bell Labs, might have prepared people for Google and the iPhone, but it provided little in the way of advance notice about mass surveillance, hacking, digital divides, electronic waste, drone weaponry, or the gig economy. Epcot became just another amusement park with fewer rides and more alcohol than at other such parks. Millions continue to flock to Epcot and it has been an enormous commercial success, but for none of the reasons its creator had planned. A modest version of Epcot’s garden city project lives on in the nearby town of Celebration. However, except for the application of ‘new urbanism’ design concepts, Celebration would be just another suburban town right down to the closed movie theatre on Front Street. Broadband technologies have delivered instant connectivity and companies worth billions, but the promised solutions to urban problems did not arrive. They were victims of market priorities and deregulation.

THE PAST IS NOT NECESSARILY PROLOGUE One might argue that the wired city failed because it took longer than anticipated for technologies to arrive that could deliver the promised changes. Indeed, some reports at the time recognised the economic and technological barriers to provide universal broadband connections. For example, the

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Sloan Commission on Cable Communications, made up of government, business and academic experts, reported in 1972 that universal broadband services would not be economically feasible for some time. By comparison, delivering cable television access from central facilities to homes, was not very difficult. Turning the low-bandwidth telephone system that connected homes and businesses over switched networks into our contemporary broadband wired and wireless services was much more challenging. But even back then, advocates recognised that it was not the technology that was hindering the wired city. As one Canadian business leader put it in 1975, The Wired City has yet to be plugged in. The more I examine the concept, the more I become convinced that the reason is not technological, but rather a question of political decision and economic common sense.29 That statement can apply to any of the technological systems that led up to, or now comprise, the smart city. There is no questioning that the world is better prepared technologically to deliver on the promises of twentieth century smart city advocates. But in many respects, the political and social challenges are greater today than they were half a century ago. In the earlier period, Western governments were much more open to developing public applications of information technologies. Market considerations were important but not the singularly dominant force they are today. In fact, there is a quaint, almost bygone-era feel to the proposals for governments and citizens to make use of new communication technology to improve schools, libraries, public health and support local communities with job boards, information about welfare, job training, low-income housing, summer programmes for youth and other opportunities. In 1966, US President Johnson signed the Demonstration Cities and

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Metropolitan Development Act (also known as the Model Cities Act), which provided major funding for ‘new and imaginative’ proposals to rebuild America’s cities, including through the application of communication and information technology. Today’s governments at every level are more likely to claim poverty when it comes to social programmes. When government does invest, it often can only do so in public–private partnerships that benefit companies more than the citizens they are supposed to serve. In fact, smart cities provide opportunities for businesses to take over basic urban functions including security, traffic management, housing, education and community development. Cash-strapped cities are increasingly outsourcing services to private companies that claim to offer ‘smarter’ solutions. These businesses benefit in numerous ways, including by gathering valuable data that they can use internally and also sell to third parties. For example, Google’s plan to develop the Toronto waterfront with housing, parks and community facilities will provide the company with massive amounts of fine-grained data, as sensor-equipped objects monitor, record and process data on practically all activities in the project area. From the early days of the smart city movement, Singapore was targeted as a source of business investment for infrastructure and social services. In 2012, a Dutch report on the city-state offered a list of areas for businesses to profit from the project, including through city planning, energy provision, building construction, water, education, health care and transportation.30 The context for smart city development today, a world largely committed to market solutions for social and political problems, makes it more difficult than half a century ago to address problems that the market cannot solve or that affect people who lack their own power in the marketplace. As Anand Giridharadas documents, it is particularly

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those who propose to use the neo-liberal world order based on market power, privatisation and deregulation to create a better world, that are in reality making the world, especially its cities, considerably worse for the vast majority of the people.31 The smart cities movement is one of the most important examples of how liberal elites expect to improve the world. The evidence raises doubts about whether this is possible.

ENDNOTES 1.  United Nations, International Telecommunications Union, Report of the Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities, 2018, https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/focusgroups/ssc/Pages/default.aspx 2.  Bruce Sterling, Stop saying ‘Smart Cities’, The Atlantic, February 12, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/ stupid-cities/553052/ 3.  IBM, IBM offers smarter city assessment tool to help cities prepare for challenges and opportunities of unprecedented urbanization, June 24, 2009, https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/ pressrelease/27791.wss 4.  Gordon Falconer and Shane Mitchell, Smart city framework, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, September 2012, p. 2, https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac79/docs/ps/motm/ Smart-City-Framework.pdf 5.  Maggie Zhang, Asian cities poised to carry the torch for the smart city movement, South China Morning Post, June 13, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2150636/asiancities-poised-carry-torch-smart-city-movement 6.  Winnie Hu, New public spaces are supposed to be for all. The reality is more complicated. New York Times, November 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/nyregion/public-spaces-nyc. html

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7.  Ignasi Capdevila and Matias I. Zarlenga, Smart city or smart citizens? The Barcelona case, Journal of Strategy and Management, 8(3), https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JSMA-032015-0030 8.  Paul Clennell, Business matters: Creating the right environment for smart city initiatives, Insider Media Ltd, October 24, 2018, https://www.insidermedia.com/blogs/northwest/business-matterscreating-the-right-environment-for-smart-city-initiatives 9.  Andrea Caragliu, Chiara Del Bo, and Peter Nijkamp, Smart cities in Europe, Journal of Urban Technology, 18(2), pp. 65–82, 2011, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10630732.2011. 601117 10.  Andrew Ross, Designing for ‘everyone’ is not the path to the inclusive smart city, Information Age, August 24, 2018, https:// www.information-age.com/inclusive-smart-city-123474406/ 11.  Rob Kitchin, The timescape of smart cities, The Programmable City Working Paper No. 35, p. 3, November 27, 2017, https://osf. io/preprints/socarxiv/y4e8p 12.  Paul McFedries, The city as system, IEEE Spectrum, 51(4), April 2014, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6776302 13.  Sandra Zistl, How data is transforming cities into open-air computers. Silicon Republic, October 25, 2017, https://www. siliconrepublic.com/machines/smart-cities-siemens-singapore 14.  Jenny McGrath, Sensor-studded Kansas City is like a giant smartphone. Digital Trends, July 17, 2017, https://www. digitaltrends.com/home/kansas-city-smart-city-technology/ 15.  Eric Woods, From transport to street lighting: The emergence of smart city platforms, Euractiv, September 18, 2018, https://www. euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/tue-from-transport-to-streetlighting-the-emergence-of-smart-city-platforms/ 16.  The Say Team, Walt Disney: The father of the smart city, August 14, 2008, https://www.saycomms.co.uk/blog/2018/08/waltdisney-the-father-of-the-smart-city/ 17.  Debraj Mitra, Smart city 2,500 years ago, The Telegraph India, January 13, 2018, https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/westbengal/smart-city-2-500-years-ago/cid/1408383

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18.  Monica L. Smith (ed.), “Introduction,” In The social construction of ancient cities, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2003, p. 1. 19.  Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without architects: A short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964, p. 2. 20.  James C. Scott, Against the grain: A deep history of the earliest states, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017, p. xi. 21.  James Suzman, Affluence without abundance: The disappearing world of the Bushmen, New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 29. 22.  Susanne Dirks and Mary Keeling, A vision of smarter cities, IBM Institute for Business Value, 2009, https://vdocuments.mx/avision-for-smarter-cities-ibm.html 23.  Paolo Bory, Imaginary networks. A socio-historical analysis of the imaginaries of the Web’s birth and the Socrate Project. PhD Dissertation, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland, 2018. 24.  Joshua Sperling, A writer of our time: The life and work of John Berger, London: Verso, 2018, p. 2. 25.  Jennifer Light, From warfare to welfare: Defense intellectuals and urban problems in cold war America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 26.  Mark Vallianatos, How LA used big data to build a smart city in the 1970s, Gizmodo, June 22, 2015, https://gizmodo.com/ uncovering-the-early-history-of-big-data-in-1974-los-an-1712551686 27.  Steve Mannheim, Walt Disney and the quest for community, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. 28.  Vincent Mosco, Broadcasting in the United States: Innovative challenge and organizational control, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1979, p. 85. 29.  George Fierheller, The Wired City concept: As it stands today, A talk given to the Canadian Industrial Communications Assembly, Ottawa, Canada, March 14, 1975, http://www.gfierheller.ca/thewired-city-concept-as-it-stands-today/

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30.  Ministry of Economic Affairs, Government of the Netherlands, Business opportunities in Singapore as a smart city, 2012, https:// www.rvo.nl/sites/default/files/Smart%20Cities%20Singapore.pdf 31.  Anand Giridharadas, Winners take all: The elite charade of changing the world, New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2018.

3 CITY OF TECHNOLOGY: WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH DATA

These companies – IBM, Cisco, Siemens, among others – have crafted a seductive pitch. The same technology that fueled the expansion of global business over the last quarter-century can compute away local problems, they say. —Anthony Townsend1

TECHNOLOGY: THE NEXT INTERNET Most descriptions of smart cities identify several key technical systems that provide their foundation. Among the many ways to describe their configuration, I think it is most useful to view them as comprising the Next Internet, which brings together the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, big data analytics and advanced telecommunications systems.

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The Internet of Things The IoT refers to a system that installs sensors and processing devices into everyday physical objects and living organisms, including people. For the city, it means embedding monitoring and data-gathering technology into roads, sidewalks, buildings, streets and their lighting, as well as throughout homes, schools and workplaces. Wherever they are located, these sensors form a network of things that accumulates vast amounts of data and delivers it to cloud computing systems for storage and processing with big data analytics. The result is real-time monitoring of transportation, communication and energy use. Advocates hope the IoT will enable faster response times to everyday problems and major disasters. One outcome is the development of algorithms or decisionmaking rules that enable autonomous action. Software powers artificial intelligence (AI) systems that use data to create ‘if … then’ rules triggering responses based on changing data. For example, drawing from crime statistics and facial recognition technology, law enforcement has developed algorithms that follow some variation of ‘if you spot a face that looks like this, raise or lower your suspicion level’. Since databases are social constructions that categorise and label with all the subjectivity and prejudice found in society, it is not surprising that algorithms embody racist, sexist and class-based biases. Consequently, algorithms need to be assessed critically and with a keen eye on the social structural conditions that give rise to AI-based decision rules. The IoT is made possible by advances in the ability to miniaturise scanning devices and provide them with sufficient processing and transmission power to monitor activity, analyse usage and deliver results over digital networks. In one sense, the IoT realises an old vision, once featured

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in ads for General Electric products, of ‘bringing things to life’, by giving them AI capabilities. These objects – what the philosopher of science Bruno Latour calls actants – in his actor-network theory, can form relationships with other objects and with living things. As one New York City smart city advocate put it: can your payment at a parking meter tell the street light that you’re there and accomplish some action? Can we have trash cans interact with other pieces of street furniture that is responsive to what is happening around it?2 The Internet that we have known for 30 or so years mainly connects people to other people. The IoT adds a universe of things to the network of networks. There are those who would go as far as to say that the smart city is nothing more than ‘a large-scale example of applying IoT concepts into a practical, socially dynamic application’.3 At this point, only a tiny fraction of objects, about 1%, are digitally connected in IoT networks in a world where only 40% of the population makes use of the traditional Internet at least once per month. Consequently, as the numbers inevitably climb, there are high expectations for enormous growth, especially among business organisations.

Cloud Computing The brilliance of the original Internet was figuring out how to get a decentralised, distributed world of servers to communicate and connect users through simple, universal software standards. This began to change with the growth of cloud computing, symbolised best by the enormous data centres that have sprung up, seemingly overnight, all over

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the world. These are huge, windowless buildings housing thousands of digital servers. Before there was an IoT, cloud computing began the process of transitioning to the Next Internet. The cloud, as it is called, is a system for storing, processing and distributing data, applications, and software using remote computers that provide digital services on demand for a fee. The term ‘cloud’ originated in the diagrams of network engineers responsible for designing telecommunications systems. The nodes or switching points in their diagrams were typically designated by icons that resembled clouds and, before long, distant data storage came to be described as cloud computing. This is distinguished from storing and processing data locally, such as on a personal computer or in a data centre located on the premises of an office. Because of growing data storage and processing requirements, accelerating with the application of IoT devices throughout cities, organisations are increasingly moving their data to distant data centres linked through high-speed telecommunication systems. The transition is not always easy or comfortable for the individuals and organisations contemplating moving to the cloud. Loss of control, including the spectre of making valuable data more easily available to hackers, among other security threats, raise significant commercial and privacy issues that can slow the migration of data to the cloud. More attention to security, including the expansion of blockchain, and perhaps even the adoption of quantum computing, as it emerges from years as little more than a laboratory curiosity, might help address some of these issues. But there is too much uncertainty about both blockchain and quantum to think that they will provide a comprehensive resolution to security concerns any time soon. It is also uncertain that distant cloud data centres can provide the response times necessary to operate IoT devices

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properly, particularly when connectivity inevitably grows from the single-digit percentage of objects currently networked. As a result, there are those who believe that smart networks will need to include some processing power located closer to devices, for example, within the sensors of autonomous vehicles. These so-called edge computing systems will be especially important when telecommunications connectivity is spotty. This wrinkle in the cloud does not diminish the importance of data centres and has certainly not yet slowed data migration to the cloud. For example, Apple is so confident that we are only in the early stages of data centre expansion, that between 2017 and 2018, it purchased 7,000 acres of land to build a new generation of data centres. Cloud computing also comes with a cost to the environment that will only grow as more data centres are built and as climate change reaches into everyday life. Server factories require large tracts of land and depend on massive supplies of water to prevent servers from overheating. Data centres put intense pressure on electrical supply grids and add massively to electronic or e-waste. All of this belies the image of an immaterial cloud. Some cloud companies have been responding with growing reliance on sustainable energy sources, but competitive pressures lead others to choose the least cost and that often means the most environmentally unfriendly alternatives. The rise in popularity of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, whose massive data-processing requirements require significant cloud server capacity and acres of data centres, has created some of the ugliest environmental impacts. This reality leaves utilities caught between a critical public and a voracious new sector looking for nearly unlimited power. For utilities to reject the industry’s demands inevitably invites expensive legal battles. As one utility executive put it, ‘If you can afford 100 megawatts, you can afford a lot of attorneys’.4

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Big Data Analytics Data may not be the new oil, as some have suggested, but its value distinctly depends on what can be done with it. Sure, IoT devices accelerate the amount of digital information and cloud data centres expand the capacity to store it. But data becomes genuinely valuable only when it is packaged in a form that enhances the value of existing products and services or makes possible the development of entirely new ones. For this, we turn to the third leg of the Next Internet, big data analytics, which refers to how experts, increasingly with titles like ‘data scientist’, make use of the data gathered by IoT sensors and store and process that in the cloud. Specifically, data analytics involves taking a large and, almost always, quantitative data set, and it examines the specific ways the data does or does not correlate, in order to draw conclusions about current behaviour and attitudes, and to make accurate predictions. It is one thing to gather data on cars travelling down highways or city streets and quite another to process it in a form that leads to adjustments in the timing of traffic lights or in the efficient use of high-occupancy vehicle lanes. It is one thing to put cameras on street lights and quite another to deploy the images gathered so that police can better monitor locations where violent crime is a serious problem. It is relatively easy to collect data on how users surf the Internet, but more difficult to package it for companies who want to improve targeted advertising. The general aim of big data analytics is to process vast new stores of data and make sense of it all by producing algorithms or rules that specify conclusions to be drawn, or actions to be taken, under specific conditions. Given the limitations of quantitative correlational analysis, especially the absence of historical context, conceptual clarity and subjectivity (qualitative data is ignored or poorly translated into numbers), such analysis is not always accurate. Incidents of

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big data failures are mounting, on such projects as seasonal flu forecasting and building models for economic development. Privacy concerns are also growing. Almost every IoT device gathers usage information. As a result, it came as no surprise to those who follow big data analytics when a 2018 report noted that ‘smart’ thermometers send data to drug companies so that they can deliver customised messages about their remedies to users.5 There are also many opportunities to make mischief with data, as we learned most alarmingly from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Nevertheless, smart city advocates believe that these problems can be managed so that big data analytics can be deployed to provide real-time analyses of city functions to help make municipalities operate more efficiently and effectively. These three converging technological systems, literally connected through wired and wireless high-speed telecommunications, provide the IT infrastructure for what is anticipated to be the leap to smart cities. The smart city movement is spawning an entire industry comprised of engineers developing technologies and applications, as well as tech-savvy city planners and designers responsible for integrating these into existing or entirely new cities. Reports on the economic prospects for smart city technologies tend to agree that this is an industry about to hit explosive growth. One study concluded that the smart city market will be worth $1.2 trillion by 2019 and $2.75 trillion by 2023.6 By 2020, forecasts call for 600 smart cities throughout the world.7

SMART TRANSPORTATION, SMART ENERGY, SMART COMMUNICATION Among smart city applications, increased efficiencies in transportation, energy and communication receive a great deal

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of attention. Smart city advocates like to talk about cities clogged with unmanageable traffic and demonstrate how, in the words of one, ‘a smart city moves past all that’ with autonomous vehicles, traffic signals that respond to current demand, lanes that change size and direction with congestion patterns, and kerbside parking that is informative and responsive to changing demand.8 Parking garages that identify the number of spaces available and also guide cars to vacant spaces are part of the smart transportation equation. In addition, sensors serve a policing function, with constant surveillance to spot and record traffic violations, thereby enhancing road safety. They also strengthen the public transportation system by enabling flexible scheduling and routing of buses, trains and aeroplanes. Supporters also focus on the efficient production and distribution of energy resources made possible by Next Internet technologies. As with transportation, much of the benefit is associated with constant surveillance. In the home, this means programmable Wi-Fi thermostats, lighting that is not only energy-efficient (as much LED lighting as possible) but also manageable through a smartphone, and smart metering of energy use. Some cities, mine included, also provide monthly alerts to customers on energy use in their city, their community and on their street, in order to encourage customers to use heating, cooling and lighting more sparingly. Smart street lighting adjusts to environmental changes and monitors street activity. Increasingly, as residents of San Diego and a handful of other cities have come to learn, the ‘eyes on the street’ are embedded in street lighting. Smart buildings, offices and factories operate on the same principles: 24-7 monitoring, data collection and management through algorithms that regularly adjust to changing conditions. Smart city proponents round out the trio of essential elements by calling for universal access to high-speed

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communication, particularly through the deployment of 5G telecommunications services. This may take place through private telecommunications carriers or public Wi-Fi systems, such as one pioneered in New York City. The basic idea is that the more communication there is, the better a city is able to understand the needs of its residents and build a smart community. Relatedly, citizens need to have access to information and opportunities to participate in civic affairs. Opinions vary on precisely what participation means, with some believing that online communication helps overcome democratic deficits and with others fearing that an excess of participation may undermine effective decision-making.

BIG SAVINGS Notwithstanding these concerns, there are enormous expectations for cost savings. According to a report produced by ABI Research, the typical smart city government in the United States could save as much as $4.95 billion annually with upgraded smart buildings and street lighting leading the way. Repair and maintenance costs are expected to decline by 30%. Businesses in the smart city will be able to save an additional $14 billion in areas that include smart manufacturing plants, as well as more energy-efficient freight transportation using drones, semi- and fully-autonomous vans and trucks. Finally, smart city advocates expect that citizens can save another $27 billion per year by deploying smart meters and microgrids, and even save on school costs through hybrid systems that make extensive use of online technology. In total, the think-tank expects worldwide savings of $5 trillion yearly by 2022 for the 75 largest smart cities.9 Moreover, looking at the period from 2018 to 2026, the report sees smart cities achieving incremental growth of over 5%, and smart

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technologies driving more than $20 trillion in additional economic benefits.10 Shifting from financial to time savings, the technology pioneer Intel produced a report that examined 20 cities across four types of Next Internet applications: mobility, health care, public safety and productivity. It concluded that such things as improved public health and safer streets could save citizens an average of 125 hours per year, thereby adding a little over 5 days to each person’s year.11 Such reports are used to justify big spending on IoT technologies, particularly retrofitting urban infrastructure such as street lighting (increasingly referred to as ‘digital infrastructure beacons’), roads, schools, health care facilities and offices. In a 2018 report by the think-tank IDC, such spending was expected to reach $80 billion worldwide, rising to $135 billion by 2021.12

COMMAND AND CONTROL IN THE SMART CITY Managing the vast array of urban technology applications that make up smart cities is an enormous challenge. To do so, big technology companies have urged civic officials to build centralised monitoring and decision-making facilities. IBM was the first to succeed, constructing one for Rio de Janeiro that has become the model for many smart cities. Called the Rio Operations Center and resembling a military ‘war room’, it started up at the end of 2010. As is so often the case, a crisis precipitated an opportunity for the authorities to centralise monitoring and control in the region. A massive storm had led to flooding that killed 70 Rio residents and many more outside the city. In the wake of this tragedy, the city’s mayor teamed with IBM to integrate the data-processing and monitoring activities of some 30 municipal and state agencies as well as utilities, in a single structure. The official aim of the

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Rio Operations Center is to enable the city to run more efficiently especially during emergencies. The Center integrates key departments, such as police and fire, and makes possible centralised monitoring of emergency situations, as well as surveillance of weather, traffic, electricity, trash pickups, recycling, disease outbreaks, gas and water. The facility also contains a ‘crisis room’ that permits the mayor to meet with advisors and make executive decisions when faced with security threats. The Center’s staff of some 70 analysts, all dressed in white jumpsuits, sit before banks of screens. An enormous wall monitor is divided into grids containing live video feeds from surveillance cameras, along with other data. Google satellite and Street View maps are integrated into the system, enabling analysts to overlay additional data and get closeups. The facility has the capacity to locate and identify every public vehicle, such as a city bus, at any time. Centralisation has its merits, but the Rio Operations Center is notable for its tall gates, tight security and near complete lack of transparency. Data from monitoring devices, including video cameras stationed all over the city, enters the facility and feeds into a centralised decision-making process that has practically no citizen input. The Center was used to monitor protests against the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, both held in Brazil. The former mayor of Rio de Janeiro, who has promoted the project on the TED lecture circuit, boasted in a promotional film about these surveillance capabilities: ‘the operations center allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city 24 hours a day, 7 days a week’.13 A research assessment of the Center raised serious concerns: While the use of these systems in Brazil is quite recent, it would appear that smart-city technologies are not being used to solve problems of radical

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inequality, or systemic poor governance, or compromised urban planning agendas – all of which continue to be the ‘dumbest’ elements of Rio de Janeiro.14 The Rio government responded to criticisms with a few modifications (it subsequently built an accessible website). Nevertheless, the first fruit of IBM’s ‘smarter city’ initiative, a $4 billion urban surveillance operation, is still shrouded in controversy. In addition to the concern about surveillance, there are those who worry that the Center is more flashy than functional. According to smart cities expert Anthony Townsend: Urban security experts with whom I have spoken are sceptical that it will have any significant impact on law enforcement and technology experts point out that beyond the video streams there has been little investment in new infrastructure to feed realtime data to the Center.15 It appears to Townsend that looking smart is often more important to civic officials than actually being smart and that this need to appear smart was driving the mayor and other elected officials ‘into the arms of engineers’.16 The idea of a centralised command centre for smart city applications has spread to other locales. The German tech company Siemens, which has invested heavily in urban technology, built a City Cockpit for Singapore and bragged that it enables ‘real-time government’: Here, state-of-the-art information and communication technology (ICT) enables the mayor and other decision-makers to track and analyze processes in their city in real time. All of the

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important information flows into a central system that processes the data for convenient display and indicates to what extent specified objectives are being met.17 According to the company, the launch of the City Cockpit was followed by 200 groups of visitors from around the world looking to learn about the best ways to integrate the vast stores of data produced by their growing monitoring systems. This step was followed up by another joint SiemensSingapore project that produced a ‘Digitalization Hub’. Launched in 2017, it centralises the development of smart city applications for the city-state and the entire Southeast Asia region. Like Rio, Singapore has raised alarm bells about surveillance and centralisation. As a result, not all such efforts have succeeded. When, in 2014, technology companies, including Google, convinced the city of Oakland, California to create a centralised facility to coordinate police and other surveillance operations in the eerily named Domain Awareness Center, mass protests led to cancellation of the project.18 Chapter 8 takes a closer look at these concerns. At this point, it is important to understand that the key technical systems providing the foundation for smart cities, primarily the IoT, cloud computing and big data analytics, create significant surveillance opportunities. These provide enticing opportunities for governments interested in deepening control, corporations that want to market technologies, services and data, and hackers looking to make mischief.

GOOGLE TORONTO AND IT COMES UP NEW YORK One of the phrases I began to hear with surprising frequency when I moved to Canada was ‘world-class’. Living in the

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United States for the first 36 years of my life, it was rare to hear the term used. To speak of New York, Washington, DC or Los Angeles, as world-class would be considered redundant and hence unnecessary. Canadians, I quickly learned, were not satisfied to have the Canadian best. It had to be world-class. For Canadians, references to New York-style anything, the Harvard of the North, or the Paris of North America were far from unusual. This remains especially the case for Toronto where aspirations to world-class stature, which would see it join the ranks of global cities like New York, London and Tokyo, are a regular feature of public discourse. As the saying goes, watch what you wish for. The most recent Toronto–New York entanglement, this time over their similar smart city makeovers, reveals a great deal about the political economy of technology enabled urban areas. The coming of the smart city has brought Toronto and New York together in more ways than one and each provides important insights into the problems and the potential for a smart city future. Both places exemplify the ageing metropolis that is open to urban renewal with smart city technology. Enter Google, which wants to lead the remake in both cities, and, in the process, win control over prime real estate and the data generated by those who use its redevelopment space. The company has been in Manhattan since 2010 when it paid $1.8 billion for a 2.9-million-feet-square building that has served as the company’s headquarters in the city. In 2018 Google expanded across the street by purchasing the iconic Chelsea Market, a 1.2-million-feet-square building for $2.4 billion. According to one Manhattan tech executive, The modern tech sector began on the West Coast when it was about developing new technology and programming. It’s now about the implementation and application of technology. And that’s presented

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an opportunity for New York, the business capital of the world. The talent pool is here.19 Shortly after it was revealed that Amazon would locate one half of its second headquarters in New York City (the other is to be built in the Washington, DC suburbs) to house 25,000 employees, Google announced that it would be doubling the size of its New York City staff for a total of 20,000 employees, most of whom will be located in Manhattan. Amazon’s decision to cancel its incentive-laden deal with New York, in the face of massive opposition, leaves Google’s presence in the Big Apple all the more significant. In addition to making New York the company’s first engineering centre outside of Silicon Valley, Google assisted in the creation of Cornell Tech, a new academic campus in the city focussing on technology and entrepreneurship. In 2015, the company established a new unit called Sidewalk Labs to promote urban redevelopment and it immediately took to developing a free public Wi-Fi system for the city as well as incubating a handful of companies that aim to extend its digital ecosystem in the provision of social services like health care. At about the same time that Google was expanding in Manhattan, the company set its sights on Toronto, promising to turn a valuable parcel of land in the downtown waterfront, long gone to seed, into a model smart city. Specifically, Sidewalk Labs travelled north and proposed to create a futuristic community of apartments and condos, offices, schools, roads, parks and entertainment venues, all equipped with the latest in Next Internet technology to gather and use data on just about everything. To acknowledge this ‘world-class’ moment, the Google launch in Toronto featured speeches by Canada’s Prime Minister, the premier of Ontario, the mayor of Toronto and the chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. All hailed the project as an opportunity for Toronto to join

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the ranks of the world’s elite smart cities and provide a model for cities around the globe. The specific plans for the Toronto project have changed over time and will likely continue to evolve. What is clear is that Sidewalk Labs, with the agreement of Waterfront Toronto, a quasi-governmental body created by the federal, provincial and city governments, and comprised of developers and public figures, received approval to build on land near the city’s downtown and fronting on Lake Ontario. It is, in the New York Times description, ‘the closest thing anyone has seen to a tech company that takes the reins in a major city’. As such, Toronto fulfils the dream of Eric Schmidt, a Google founder and executive chairman of Alphabet, to demonstrate what ‘we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge’.20 There have also been discussions about developing a much larger adjacent area. In all, the city has about 800 acres of waterfront land available for development. While the focus has been on building a model smart neighbourhood, the goal is to expand on this in Toronto and make Canada’s largest municipality a model for smart cities around the world. In February 2019, Google proposed to collect a share of property taxes and development fees that normally go to the province of Ontario, in return for building its ‘world-class’ smart city.21 Resisting any restraint on hyperbole, the company proposes to construct what it calls ‘the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up’.22 Sidewalk Labs provides examples of what this means: • Modular buildings that can shift from housing to retail and back again. • Monitors that track noise and pollution (likely through sensor-equipped traffic lights). • Adaptive traffic lanes and traffic signals.

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• Self-driving private and public vehicles. • Underground tunnels that accommodate delivery trucks and keep them off the streets (reminiscent of Disney’s original plan for Epcot). • Packages delivered with the aid of drones. • Ride-sharing autonomous taxis (taxibots). • Heated bicycle paths and sidewalks that melt snow. • A carbon-neutral thermal energy grid. • Sensors that monitor and enable the separation of waste from recycling. • A digital infrastructure that provides ubiquitous connectivity for all. Sidewalk Labs also plans to create an innovation centre that will incubate technology companies developing applications for the Toronto neighbourhood. Toronto’s smart city connection to New York extends to more than a similar corporate blueprint for technology-rich redevelopment. The cities also share the project leadership of a man who opens his book about transforming the Big Apple, Greater Than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback, with the words: ‘I vividly remember my first visit to New York City; it was hate at first sight’. For Daniel L. Doctoroff, the man who would lead Sidewalk Labs in New York and in Toronto, this was more than just a catchy opening. Although not very clear about why, there is little doubt that he really hated New York. All he recalls is a view of high-rise apartment towers and a young boy’s shout from the back seat of the family car: ‘I am never going to live in this city’, followed by a happy return to his suburban Michigan home.23 One can forgive a 10-year-old for feeling a bit of terror when seeing the city for the first time. Although, frankly,

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I cannot help but recall how much I loved the city in 1958 when I was 10 and I have continued my deep affection for New York in all the years thereafter. It was a magical place for a working-class kid growing up in Manhattan where everything was just a walk or a 15-cent subway ride away. I loved the diversity that later enabled a teenager to walk to the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village to hear Richie Havens sing ‘Here Comes the Sun’ on one weekend, then go to a repertory theatre a few blocks away to see a performance of Euripides’s Trojan Women on another weekend, or to Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden for the best in sports. I knew, or felt like I knew, practically every museum, bookstore, and Manhattan street. Admittedly, there was dirt, crime, noise, corruption and worse, but I cannot imagine a richer place for a tenement kid to grow up. I never fully appreciated the contrast between hate for the city and the feeling of interconnected freedom that New Yorkers and those who love the city experience so much of the time, until I heard it described by the novelist Zadie Smith. She wrote on the subject immediately after coming to terms with a terrorist shooting near Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan. Smith speaks of New York’s fair weather friends, the kind who celebrate us in our tragic moments but affect to despise us in our everyday mode. The same people who claim to believe that the only meaningful societal bonds are fixed and solid and unbroken – blood, nation, faith – and so can never truly comprehend a city like New York in its everyday mode, in which bonds gather and dissipate with a dizzying fluidity and yet, for the brief duration that they are in place, can display a mighty strength.24

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I have felt that strength many times over in New York and other big cities. It is what makes cities great and, with or without mediating technologies, it is the ‘dizzying fluidity’ that helps makes them smart. Foregoing his childhood promise, Doctoroff returned to New York City, albeit reluctantly, but for the same reason millions of other people ‘from away’ come to the Big Apple: to make money. So even though, after graduate school, he and his partner agreed that ‘New York was the last place we expected to end up’, a job offer at Lehman Brothers, then one of the most prestigious investment firms in the world, proved too tempting to pass up. Renting a spacious Gramercy Park apartment down the street from Park Avenue, Doctoroff complained about the tawdry state of the neighbourhood, particularly the prostitutes and drug dealers. Years of investment banking made Doctoroff rich and when Michael Bloomberg was elected Mayor of New York in 2002, not long after the 9/11 attacks, he tapped Doctoroff to become deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. The new deputy mayor brought with him many of his associates in the financial industry and, in addition to the job of rebuilding Lower Manhattan, he worked on a plan to reshape New York so that it might win a bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, a dream of his dating back to 1994. Doctoroff held the deputy mayor position until 2008 when Bloomberg engineered a change in the city charter enabling him to eliminate term limits and run for a third term as the city’s mayor. The deputy mayor was rewarded with the position of president of Bloomberg’s business information company, aiming to expand the firm from a lucrative, if small, provider of economic data to subscribers of Bloomberg’s terminals, into a news organisation that served companies worldwide. Doctoroff left Bloomberg in 2015 to become the founding CEO of Sidewalk Labs.

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There are conflicting views of the Bloomberg-Doctoroff impact on New York, including the efforts to use information technology to join the ranks of established smart cities. Doctoroff’s book concludes that the city made a ‘big comeback’ and is ‘better than ever’. For Jeremiah Moss, whose popular blog Vanishing New York was turned into a book by that name, the opposite is true: ‘The spirit of the city as we knew it has vanished in the shadow of luxury condo towers, rampant greed and suburbanization’.25 Moss and others cite changes in zoning that permitted more high-rise luxury housing and the growth of private governance through the increased power of corporate Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). These are areas controlled by local companies that, in return for paying an additional tax levy, are given power over a range of activities from sanitation to culture. In fact, one analyst looks out over the now 75 BIDs and worriedly concludes that they have become the ‘cultural programmers’ of New York City streets, replacing the public art of the city’s diverse communities with business approved and tourist-friendly kitsch.26 Then there are the public–private partnerships that tend to be public in name only, or only when the partnership fails and the city is left responsible for a mountain of debt. There is a case to be made that New York’s zoning regulations were arcane and needed upgrading. The massive loss of its manufacturing base left the city with areas zoned for industry that would never again be home to manufacturers. However, instead of taking advantage of an opportunity to restructure zoning and related planning tools to promote affordable housing and support small businesses, the city government fell into the laps of big developers who clamoured for high-end/high-return investment. As a result, skyrocketing housing prices have driven the working class out of Manhattan to the outermost reaches of New York’s other boroughs, or out of the city entirely. At the

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same time, high rents made it impossible for small and independent retailers to survive and many of these were replaced by stores marked with the names and the merchandise of global brands. Builders of luxury towers receive big tax breaks and the evictions of residents who stand in their way have accelerated. For these reasons, a place once characterised by the diversity of its residents, is increasingly a city for the rich and for tourists. For example, the ‘Little Italy’ neighbourhood in Lower Manhattan, where I spent my youth and which helped generations to enter the American middle class, no longer supports an Italian American community. Although branded Little Italy, with restaurants and shops that sell Italian food and products, hardly any Italians actually live in the neighbourhood anymore. The 2000 census recorded 8.25% of residents claiming Italian ancestry, the same as in the entire City of New York. The 2010 census recorded no one living there who was born in Italy. Today, like many other neighbourhoods in the City, Little Italy most resembles a theme park, similar to those in Disney’s Epcot, a branded commercial replica of what used to be an actual community. Neither hyper-gentrification nor deepening inequality began with the Bloomberg administration but there is little doubt that these problems accelerated during the city’s ‘comeback’. No less a supporter of the urban creative class than Richard Florida ranks New York City second only to Los Angeles in his New Urban Crisis Index, a measure that combines economic segregation, wage inequality, income inequality and housing unaffordability. Remarkably, much of New York’s major redevelopment under Bloomberg is an extension of the failed bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. This includes positive developments, like the creation of middle-income housing in the borough of Queens that was earmarked for construction of the Olympic Village. On the other hand, the plans for an Olympic stadium on the far west side

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of Manhattan became the site of the largest private real estate development in the United States when the city approved the Hudson Yards project containing 28 acres of mainly luxury housing and office space, and the creation of a subway line extension linking the area to the rest of the city. It is hard to justify the development since Manhattan has very little affordable housing and the subway system throughout the city is in the worst condition since the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the city is providing private developers with significant tax incentives. In total, according to a 2018 account that unpacked the dense thicket of money flows, taxpayers will have poured $5.6 billion into the development and will receive very little, if anything, in return. Public investment includes $2 billion for a subway extension to provide those living and working in some of the most expensive real estate in the world with convenient public transportation. The city also earmarked $500 million in funds for the most expensive park per acre in New York.27 Once again it was Daniel Doctoroff, who led the project from its inception in 2004 until he left the Bloomberg government in 2008 to run the mayor’s business information company. It is striking to compare this Hudson Yards project with one proposed back in 1967 when addressing inequality, supporting pubic services and keeping the working class in Manhattan mattered to those with the power to make a difference. Chelsea Walk, as the earlier proposal was called, would include primarily middle-income housing, as well as units subsidised to make them affordable for poor and working-class residents, along with schools, a park and other civic amenities. Ironically, the project failed to get off the ground because some opponents felt it did not contain enough low-income housing and others wanted to see more job-producing industrial development. Even though the current Hudson Yards development is much larger, it makes no

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room for middle- and low-income New Yorkers.28 Moreover, and quite significantly, the Hudson Yards development will collect voluminous amounts of data on how people make use of the space, leading one analyst to refer to the project as the creation of a ‘quantified community’.29 The main partner is New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), a public–private research institute focussing on the relatively new discipline of urban science. The Center has received significant funding from the city, ostensibly in the hope that data gathering and data analysis will benefit future development projects. Critics view the massive surveillance of people, objects and the environment as a prime example of the over-reliance on and fetishisation of data. There is undoubtedly social value in the detailed monitoring of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions. But for private sector participants, it is an opportunity to turn data on social and physical processes at a brand-new luxury development into marketable commodities. In many respects, it foreshadows what Google has in store for the Toronto waterfront. A related West Side development, the elevated linear park known as the High Line, constructed in 2009 out of an old rail spur and expanded over the years, has attracted widespread praise as a great public space. Having walked the High Line many times, I can easily understand its popularity, particularly for anyone who knew the rough state of the old Meatpacking District it now anchors. However, the park has suffered because of the very zoning changes that were put in place to promote development. Rising above the street, the High Line once felt open and airy, with expansive views of the Hudson River. Now it is more like walking through a tunnel, as high-rise condos and office towers, built to take advantage of the High Line location, block much of what once made the park attractive. It appears that the High Line is serving a similar function as do the communities of artists who move

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into rundown neighbourhoods and end up advancing gentrification because they provide a cachet attractive to tourists and developers. Eventually, the artists are pushed aside by the very process they once enabled. The High Line offers the cachet to attract not only tourists, but big developers too. Now, their high-rise towers are contributing to the demise of one of the gems of early twenty-first century New York. Contrast this to Paris, where strict zoning has protected the Promenade Plantée, a 3 mile long elevated park created in 1993 from an old viaduct connecting the Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes. I walked both parks in 2018. The High Line was cavernous and downright claustrophobic, with high-rise buildings on both sides; the Promenade Plantée was the same bright garden in the sky it has been for a quarter of a century. Notwithstanding that ‘smart’ is a subjective term, it nevertheless felt obvious to me which city had made the smart choice. Doctoroff’s Olympic blueprint for New York City contributed significantly to other big development projects, including the construction of Citi Field, home of the New York Mets baseball team in the borough of Queens, on the understanding that it would be used for the 2012 Games. The Olympic bid also led to the redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg whose gentrification was subsidised with zoning changes and tax relief justified by the expectation that it would be the location for Olympic aquatic sports. The waterfront park planned to woo the International Olympic Committee was never built. What did go up was luxury housing and, along with it, a 300% increase in neighbourhood property values between 2004 and 2014. It is testimony to the power of Doctoroff that his Olympic dream, which he began to develop in 1994, ultimately had such a profound and, for many New Yorkers, negative impact on the city. The promise of a genuinely smart city, where cars zip through automated tollbooths and police use instant access to

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crime and mapping data to anticipate illegal activity, helped to build support for the city’s transformation. So too do the growing number of sewer and air quality sensors, police and traffic cameras, taxi tracking, sound sensors installed on rooftops, sensors that monitor radiation and chemicals, infra-red cameras, as well as garbage cans equipped with Wi-Fi. Moreover, New York is one of nearly 100 cities worldwide that use the ShotSpotter system of microphones located in public places that instantly detect and locate gunshots. Two of the most important innovations in New York were the development of a concentrated technology research, development and innovation area and the commitment to construct a free, citywide, public Wi-Fi service. Smart cities often include a technology research centre and New York is no exception. It is also no newcomer to this type of activity. In the 1930s, a time when New York was a city of industrial districts, Lower Manhattan featured Radio Row, a centre of electronics businesses that serviced the telecommunications and burgeoning broadcasting companies. AT&T was headquartered in the Radio Row district and Bell Labs was not far away. Ironically, just before Silicon Valley emerged as the world’s information technology capital, Radio Row was torn down to make way for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Two decades later, New York gave birth to a software development district extending from Lower Manhattan up to Madison Square Park. Silicon Alley, as it was called, held out great promise for returning the city to its dominant position in communication and information technology. But the businesses making up the Alley withered in the dotcom bust of 2000, and especially after the city shifted to reconstruction in the wake of the attacks of September 11. Google took a major step towards reviving the industry when it set up an East Coast headquarters in an Art Deco building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood and agreed

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to expand by purchasing the Chelsea Market building across the street. Of equal or greater significance for smart city advocates is the development of Roosevelt Island, the site of Cornell Tech, which was created in 2011, when it won out over competitors in a Bloomberg government contest to develop a high-tech education, research and innovation centre. Occupying 12 acres on the island, it operates a graduate education programme in technology, and carries out research in partnership with New York-based companies, including Citi Ventures, the venture capital arm of the banking conglomerate Citigroup. Citi Ventures plays a significant role in the new tech district with its own 10,900 feet square facility that brings to the island researchers from university, business, technology and design programmes to work on development projects. In keeping with a focus on development projects tailored to New York’s elite, it was not until late in the third term of the Bloomberg administration that New York began experimenting with public Wi-Fi. In 2012, it started installing routers at payphone kiosks whose use diminished with the spread of cell phones. The programme expanded in 2014 when Bill de Blasio took office as mayor and a contract was awarded to the company CityBridge to set up Wi-Fi kiosks throughout the city. Doctoroff’s Sidewalk Labs entered the picture when it became a major investor in the project, through a subsidiary firm. It was not until 2016 that the system achieved widespread use and it continues to expand. Although WiFi use is free, Sidewalk Labs benefits in several important ways. The company sells advertising, which appears on large, high-­ definition screens inside each kiosk. It also gathers data on kiosk patrons, which can be used by the company itself, by any other company in the Alphabet organisation, or sold to third parties. CityBridge’s privacy policy claims

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that personally identifiable data is not sold, but the American Civil Liberties Union has raised concerns about the vague language. Finally, the system serves as a laboratory and a gateway for expanded smart city systems, such as connected street lighting, smart utility meters, traffic-monitoring networks, connected cameras and the installation of 5G wireless services. Although media coverage of problems with the system has focussed mostly on homeless people downloading pornography, and drug dealers using it to complete deals, there are serious questions about surveillance (including through front facing cameras on the Wi-Fi devices), hacking and the sale of publicly generated data. Critics have also complained about the slow rollout of kiosks, citing specifically the city’s grant of an extension on delivery dates despite the lower than expected funding flowing into city coffers.

DON’T GOOGLE THIS Sidewalk Labs is using its New York experience to expand into Toronto and beyond. This is an important development because it raises significant policy issues that, as the smart city idea continues to spread, should concern every city dweller. Governments are dependent on private sector technologies to make good on smart city promises. That leads municipal and other authorities to develop partnerships with Google, IBM, Cisco, Siemens and other big technology firms supplying Next Internet technologies to make smart cities run and build the command centres to manage them. These public–private partnerships, or P3 arrangements, make it easier to transfer political authority to unelected private entities. ‘Just give us a city and put us in charge’, Eric Schmidt once suggested. Google’s founder, former CEO and the first CEO of Alphabet is beginning to get his wish.

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The spectre of private governance over cities did not originate with the smart city concept. In the computer era, the prospect of automated cities that deliver services to customers with the promise of freeing them from municipal bureaucracy is just another manifestation of Bill Gates’s 1996 promise to run the world through ‘friction-free capitalism’.30 However, it is not simply a matter of handing the keys to the city over to the company making the shiniest offer. When New York City was concerned that citizens might balk at big redevelopment schemes that would raze entire neighbourhoods, the city government expanded the power of a minor agency, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, initially charged with handling common harbour issues. Operating at arm’s length from government departments and therefore from public oversight, the Port Authority became the fiefdom of Robert Moses, known to his friends as the Master Builder but dubbed the King of Concrete by those who opposed him. Operating primarily behind closed doors, the organisation enabled Moses to raze entire communities and make the automobile the dominant mode of transportation in New York. Without recourse to oppose such schemes through traditional democratic means, only those citizens who were able to mobilise powerful resistance movements had any chance of success. The most often-cited example is one led by Jane Jacobs that stopped a Moses highway project cutting through Lower Manhattan. Canada’s version of the Port Authority concept is Waterfront Toronto, a creation of the federal, provincial and municipal governments that serves as the intermediary between the public and the private sectors, in this case, Sidewalk Labs. While it claims representativeness and transparency, the agency’s board of directors contains a ‘who’s who’ of big developers and corporate leaders, along with civic officials. Moreover, following the lead of other such exemplars of the

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P3 approach, Waterfront Toronto conducts some of its meetings behind closed doors. It is little wonder that with such a ‘public advocate’, as the agency likes to call itself, Google was able to win the right to shape the city’s most valuable real estate before vital issues were settled, including who actually governs the neighbourhood, who owns the mountains of data to be gathered on practically everyone and everything, and what, if any, measures will be deployed to protect privacy, stop hackers and prevent commercial and governmental abuse. Waterfront Toronto was given the authority to select a developer with little public participation and practically no oversight. Moreover, neither the agency nor Sidewalk Labs provided citizens with access to details of their deal. The only public official in a position to actually read the documents was the city council’s representative to Waterfront Toronto. Not even the mayor had access. Like other smart city projects, the plan for Toronto is also very light on details about who is responsible for maintaining the technological apparatus that Sidewalk Labs will install. It is not clear who will oversee and pay for upkeep, updates and prevent abuses of the hardware and software that will give Torontonians a smart waterfront. Moreover, climate change is forecast to have profound effects on the Great Lakes and particularly on cities with highly developed waterfronts. There is little to no preparation in Sidewalk Labs’ plan for the inevitable disruptions to come for Lake Ontario. What makes this all the more remarkable is that Google, arguably the most substantial information distribution company in the history of the world, cannot see fit to inform the people most affected by its plans about a project that the company hopes will shape the future of the world’s cities. This has raised serious concerns throughout Toronto, including among startups and other companies that might support the project. This is primarily because there is a widespread

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belief that Google plans to retain control over all data, from design plans to software to data generated by the many uses of the Quayside site. Mark Pavlidis, Chief Technology Officer of the Toronto digital image company Flixel Photos Inc., said he is concerned ‘it wasn’t clear how much access those startups would have to that wealth of data that would be collected through this project’.31 Benjamin Bergen, Executive Director of the Council of Canadian Innovators, said that his group of more than 100 Canadian companies remained concerned about Sidewalk’s IP ownership requests. ‘There is still no strategy in place to see wealth generation for the Canadian economy’.32 None of these criticisms matches the attack levelled by one of Canada’s leading technology executives, James Balsillie, founder and former co-CEO of Research in Motion, the company that created the first successful smartphone, the BlackBerry. Having commercialised Canadian intellectual property in 150 countries, Balsillie has some standing when he asserts that ‘Smart cities’ are the new battlefront for big tech because they serve as the most promising hotbed for additional intangible assets that hold the next trillion dollars to add to their market capitalisations. At the heart of his criticism is that Waterfront Toronto violated the first rule in negotiations over smart city development: establish control over intellectual property and data. By leaving this key point unresolved, Balsillie insists, control over both defaults to Sidewalk. His conclusion that ‘Waterfront Toronto executives and board are too dumb to realize they are getting played’, might be too strong or might actually underestimate the complicity of Waterfront Toronto, but it is hard to take issue with the view that the Toronto project is

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a big data victory for Doctoroff, for Sidewalk Labs and for Google. Years of experience also give credence to the tech executive’s concern about all three levels of the Canadian government fawning over a foreign company ‘whose business model is built exclusively on the principle of mass surveillance’. It is ironic, but also quite significant, that one of the most successful private sector technology leaders in Canadian history has recognised better than most what it means to create a private smart city: A privately controlled ‘smart city’ infrastructure upends traditional models of citizenship because you cannot opt out of a city or a society that practises mass surveillance. Foreign corporate interests tout new technocratic efficiencies while shrewdly occluding their unprecedented power grab. It is rare for business executives to chide even their competitors for promoting ‘a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism’, and even rarer for them to criticise the absence of genuine public participation in planning, save for the ‘sham’ of a consultation process run by the company.33 Also concerned about this apparent Google power grab and frustrated with Sidewalk Labs’ failure to engage the Toronto community on privacy and data control issues, a member of Waterfront Toronto’s Digital Strategy Advisory Panel for the project resigned in protest in October 2018. In her resignation letter, Saadia Muzaffar, the founder of the Toronto group TechGirls Canada, cited the failure of Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs to communicate its plan to the public. She gave special attention to the danger of embedding surveillance technology throughout critical city infrastructure.34 Fearing a collapse in support for the project, Google quickly put together plans for a Civic Data Trust that would strip data of identifying characteristics and make it

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available for free to those seeking to use it for research or for product development. This did little to resolve serious issues that critics have with the company’s data policy. As Bianca Wylie, an advocate of open data and the co-founder of Tech Reset Canada put it: ‘This is a desperate, panicked and rushed move. It’s not a process for a vendor to be leading and framing’.35 In essence, Google presumes the right to dispose of the data, including location information, gathered on those who use a public space. It believes that allowing the very people from whom it gathers data to use it for free constitutes a concession. Google reserves the right to profit from the data in any of its operations, including cell phones using the company’s apps, by selling it to businesses interested in modelling social behaviour in cities, including advertisers.36 Moreover, the company makes no commitment to store the data in Ontario or even in Canada. As a result of its action, Sidewalk Labs lost one of its most valuable advisors when former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian resigned as a consultant. One of the world’s foremost authorities on privacy and surveillance, Cavoukian provided important legitimacy to the Google project. However, concerned that the company was not doing enough to keep data gathered at its smart city location anonymised, she resigned. Specifically, Cavoukian stepped down over an issue that is significant for all smart city development projects, especially those that promise to de-identify data or eliminate the ability to match a specific person with the information gathered about their activities. Although Google promised to de-identify data gathered at Quayside, it could not promise that third parties with access to the data would also comply. The only solution is to de-identify data at the source of its collection and Google refuses to do so. Explaining why, in her words, ‘this is unacceptable’, Cavoukian states:

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If personally identifiable data are not de-identified at source, we will be creating another central database of personal information (controlled by whom?), that may be used without data subjects’ consent, that will be exposed to the risks of hacking and unauthorised access. As we all know, existing methods of encryption are not infallible and may be broken, potentially exposing the personal data of Waterfront Toronto residents! Why take such risks? Her disappointment was evident in an interview conducted shortly after announcing her departure: ‘I wanted this to become a smart city of privacy – not a smart city of surveillance’.37 The Auditor General of Ontario, Bonnie Lysyk, appeared to agree with the critics in her December 2018 annual audit, which concluded that Waterfront Toronto gave Google’s Sidewalk Labs preferential treatment and rushed the approval process with insufficient government oversight. In bureaucratic language, the audit concluded that even before Sidewalk revealed any details, including its plans for privacy and data ownership, governments at every level jumped the gun to support the technology giant.38 The smart city movement means more than whether or not parking garages will alert drivers to the number of available spaces. It raises fundamental economic, political, social and environmental issues that present challenges to citizens and governments everywhere. The next chapter takes up different ways in which the world’s cities are responding.

ENDNOTES 1.  Anthony M. Townsend, Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new Utopia, New York, NY: Norton, 2013, p. xiii.

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2.  Dan Patterson, How New York City plans to become a smart city leader, TechRepublic, March 1, 2018, https://www.techrepublic. com/article/how-new-york-city-plans-to-become-a-smart-cityleader/ 3.  Saeid Malaki, The connected reality of a smart city, Mass Transit, December 17, 2018, https://www.masstransitmag.com/technology/ article/12412867/the-connected-reality-of-a-smart-city 4.  Paul Roberts, This is what happens when bitcoin miners take over your town, Politico, March/April, 2018, https://www.politico. com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-pricessmalltown-feature-217230 5.  Sapna Maheshwari, The thermometer tells your temperature, then tells firms where to advertise, New York Times, October 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/business/media/feveradvertisements-medicine-clorox.html 6.  Aaron Hurst, What are the elements of a smart city? Information Age, August 2, 2018, https://www.information-age.com/elementssmart-city-123473906/ 7.  Teena Maddox, Smart cities: A cheat sheet, TechRepublic, July 16, 2018, https://www.techrepublic.com/article/smart-cities-thesmart-persons-guide/ 8.  Saurabh Hooda, Five technologies that every smart city needs to cater, BW Smart Cities, July 19, 2018, http://bwsmartcities. businessworld.in/article/Five-Technologies-that-any-Smart-CityNeeds-to-Cater/19-07-2018-155290/ 9.  Nick Ismail, Smart cities could lead to cost savings of $5 trillion: Report suggests, Information Age, December 5, 2017, https://www.information-age.com/smart-cities-lead-cost-savings-5trillion-123469863/ 10.  Nick Ismail, Smart city tech could drive millions in economic growth, Information Age, January 24, 2018, https:// www.information-age.com/smart-city-tech-trillions-economicgrowth-123470508/ 11.  Sandra Vogel, Intel: “Smart cities give every person back 125 hours a year,” Internet of Business, March 14, 2018, https://

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internetofbusiness.com/intel-smart-cities-give-every-person-back125-hours-a-year/ 12.  IDC, Investments in technologies enabling smart cities initiatives are forecast to reach $80 billion in 2018, according to a new IDC spending guide, February 20, 2018, https://www.idc.com/ getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS43576718 13.  Anthony M. Townsend, Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new Utopia, New York, NY: Norton, 2013, p. 67. 14.  Cited in Eric Jaffe, 4 lessons from Rio’s ‘flawed’ smart cities initiative, Medium, May 11, 2016, https://medium.com/sidewalktalk/4-lessons-from-rios-flawed-smart-cities-initiative-31cbf4e54b72 15.  Anthony M. Townsend, Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new Utopia, New York, NY: Norton, 2013, p. 68. 16.  Anthony M. Townsend, Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new Utopia, New York, NY: Norton, 2013, p. 68. 17.  Bernard Bartsch, Real-time government, Pictures of the future, Spring 2011, https://www.siemens.com/digitalization/public/pdf/ collective-intelligence-city-dashboard.pdf 18.  Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The secret military history of the Internet, New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2018, pp. 1–6. 19.  Charles V. Bagli, $2.4 billion deal for Chelsea market enlarges Google’s New York footprint, New York Times, February 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/nyregion/google-chelseamarket-new-york.html 20.  Emily Badger, Google’s founders wanted to shape a city. Toronto is their chance, New York Times, October 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/upshot/taxibots-sensors-andself-driving-shuttles-a-glimpse-at-an-internet-city-in-toronto.html 21.  A. J. Dellinger, Sidewalk Labs outlines how it’ll make money from Toronto, Engadget, February 15, 2019, https://www.engadget. com/2019/02/15/alphabet-sidewalk-labs-toronto-tax-revenue/ 22.  A. J. Dellinger, Sidewalk Labs outlines how it’ll make money from Toronto, Engadget, February 15, 2019, https://www.engadget. com/2019/02/15/alphabet-sidewalk-labs-toronto-tax-revenue/

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23.  Daniel L. Doctoroff, Greater than ever: New York’s big comeback, New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2017, pp. xi–xii. 24.  Zadie Smith, Under the banner of New York, The New York Review of Books, November 4, 2017, https://www.nybooks.com/ daily/2017/11/04/under-the-banner-of-new-york/ 25.  Jeremiah Moss, Vanishing New York: How a great city lost its soul, New York, NY: William Morrow, p. 6. 26.  Zachary Small, How paparazzi dogs and rabbit girl conquered New York City streets, January 6, 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/03/arts/design/gillie-marc-schattner-sydney-australiaart-paparazzi-dogs.html 27.  Bridget Fisher and Flávia Leite, The cost of New York City’s Hudson Yards redevelopment project, New York, NY: Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School for Social Research, 2018, https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/ research/political_economy/Cost_of_Hudson_Yards_WP_11.5.18.pdf 28.  See Mark Lamster, The man in the glass house: Philip Johnson, architect of the modern century, New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018 and Katy Cornell, 50 years in the making, Manhattan West finally takes shape, City Realty, September 6, 2016, https://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/market-insight/features/the-newskyline/50-years-making-manhattan-west-finally-takes-shape/5683 29.  Ryan Boysen, Hudson Yards’ smart city initiatives could provide glimpse of NYC’s future, Bisnow, February 22, 2016, https://www.bisnow.com/new-york/news/commercial-real-estate/ hudson-yards-smart-city-initiatives-could-provide-glimpse-of-nycsfuture-56252 30.  Bill Gates, The road ahead, New York, NY: Viking, 1995, p. 182. 31.  Josh O’Kane, Quayside project will benefit Canadian companies, says former Alphabet chair Eric Schmidt, The Globe and Mail, September 25, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ business/article-quayside-project-will-benefit-canadian-companiessays-former-alphabet/ 32.  Josh O’Kane, Quayside project will benefit Canadian companies, says former Alphabet chair Eric Schmidt, The Globe

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and Mail, September 25, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ business/article-quayside-project-will-benefit-canadian-companiessays-former-alphabet/ 33.  Jim Balsillie, Sidewalk Toronto has only one beneficiary, and it is not Toronto, The Globe and Mail, October 5, 2018, https://www. theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-sidewalk-toronto-is-not-asmart-city/ 34.  Josh O’Kane, Tech entrepreneur resigns from Waterfront Toronto advisory board over Sidewalk Labs concerns, The Globe and Mail, October 4, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ business/article-saadia-muzaffar-resigns-from-waterfront-torontoadvisory-board-over/ 35.  Josh O’Kane, Sidewalk Labs to make Toronto Quayside data publicly available via trust, The Globe and Mail, October 15, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-sidewalk-labs-tomake-data-publicly-available-via-trust/ 36.  Ava Kofman, Google’s Sidewalk Labs plans to package and sell location data on millions of cellphones, The Intercept, January 28, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2019/01/28/google-alphabetsidewalk-labs-replica-cellphone-data/ 37.  Josh O’Kane, Privacy expert Ann Cavoukian resigns from Sidewalk Toronto smart-city project: ‘I had no other choice,’ The Globe and Mail, October 20, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail. com/business/article-privacy-expert-ann-cavoukian-resigns-fromsidewalk-toronto-smart-city/ 38.  Josh O’Kane, Ontario auditor-general warns Waterfront Toronto to slow down project with Google-affiliate Sidewalk Labs, The Globe and Mail, December 5, 2018, https://www. theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ontario-auditor-generalwarns-waterfront-toronto-to-slow-down-project/

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4 WHO GOVERNS? STATE-DRIVEN SMART CITIES

Smart cities go hand in hand with this idea of smart policing. With facial recognition, you can easily follow a citizen step by step using a city’s cameras and sensors – where they’re going, with whom they’re meeting. Tracking an individual becomes extremely easy because it’s impossible to escape the gaze of the state.1 —Eva Blum-Dumontet, Privacy International

THREE TYPES OF GOVERNANCE There are many ways to govern a smart city and most form a mix of approaches. However, three stand out as major tendencies that help to sort out the mix. They provide both descriptive and aspirational insight into how cities are or should be run. One approach is to make government, especially the nationstate, the primary authority responsible for managing smart cities, with the power to determine how the private sector and 97

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other levels of government carry out projects. Another course, as Chapter 5 illustrates, is to make private corporations the principal decision-makers. This includes projects initiated by technology executives whose dissatisfaction with existing cities leads them to build their own from scratch. Finally, as Chapter 6 describes, there are cities that place citizens and a commitment to democracy at the forefront of their plans. These are all tendencies, not absolutes. Every city caught up in the smart city movement is a contested terrain with ongoing tensions between governments, companies and citizens. Nevertheless, it is useful to explore the range of tendencies in these ideal types of governance because current typologies of smart city developments have tended to focus on the extent of investment in and deployment of technologies. It is time to examine how political economic arrangements make use of Next Internet technologies to develop smart cities.

GOVERNMENT-LED SMART CITIES Singapore: City-state, Smar t Nation, Sur veillance Pioneer I spent a semester as a visiting professor at a university in Singapore in 2009 where I lived in a hotel on campus. It did not take me long to observe that busloads of government bureaucrats from China regularly arrived for short-term stays. Having carried out research in China and Malaysia, my interest in Asia led me to inquire about the visitors. I was told that they were here to learn about the ‘Singapore way’. This amounted to intense training in how to maintain a strong authoritarian state, support the private sector when it serves state interests, and create an acceptable veneer of citizen participation and

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democracy to achieve widespread, if not universal, legitimacy. China was still fairly new to state capitalism and Singapore offered a direction, admittedly on a small scale, for the next step in the country’s restructuring following the Maoist era. It is therefore no great surprise that Singapore provides the model for countries eager to create smart cities under centralised national government control, especially in Asia. The city-state regularly appears at or near the top of the many rankings of leading smart cities in the world. It is no exaggeration to describe Singapore as the envy of smart city enthusiasts. As one such observer from Great Britain concluded in an analysis of the country’s success: Singapore’s pioneering spirit can act as a tutorial for other nations embarking on their own journeys into the unknown, but for many countries around the world – Britain sadly included – it’s so wildly unattainable that it might as well be science fiction. I can only dream of the day when Britain is as forward-thinking as Singapore when it comes to building a truly digital nation of the future.2 Singapore has especially influenced the course that both China and India have taken, as each has embarked on massive programmes of urban renewal and city building with heavy injections of information technology. It has also served as an exemplar for big smart city projects in the Middle East such as the United Arab Emirates’ plan to make Dubai, a similar authoritarian city-state type of location, an IT-enabled smart city, complete with robocops and widespread adoption of blockchain technology.3 Singapore launched its smart city initiative – officially called the Smart Nation programme – in 2014 with a plan to massively increase monitoring of its infrastructure and people. From the start, it also planned to create a centralised

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operation centre to manage and use the increasingly voluminous quantities of data gathered on citizens and visitors. This would build on the city-state’s existing reputation for widespread surveillance and tight regulation of personal behaviour, including massive fines for littering and zero tolerance for homelessness. With the arrival of Next Internet technologies, the country is now known for what the Wall Street Journal calls ‘the most extensive effort to collect data on daily living ever attempted in a city’.4 Since 2016, the Singapore government has contracted with private companies to place sensors practically everywhere. These enable the government to monitor the entire city, from the amount of litter in public spaces to crowd densities in Singapore’s many shopping malls, as well as to determine the precise movements of every vehicle registered in the country. Some places are intensely monitored, such as publicly run senior homes where residents’ activity levels and even bathroom use are under constant surveillance, ostensibly so that families can know immediately when something goes wrong. Data are fed into an online platform, called Virtual Singapore, that gives the government both a macro and a close-up view into how the country is working in real time. This facilitates the development of algorithms, which the government expects will enable forecasting of the spread of disease, the response of crowds to a terrorist attack, and, more importantly, will help the government to ‘nudge’ citizens into practising what the state defines as good behaviour. The government also shares data with the private sector, to stimulate economic development and commercial success. Following the lead of Rio de Janeiro, the city-state has developed a centralised operations centre, the City Cockpit, built by Siemens, to facilitate online decision-making. All of this is done without public consultation and with no restrictions on the government’s use of data. Programmes

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are centralised out of the office of the prime minister and no costs are revealed. It helps that state-owned enterprises own or control most aspects of daily life, especially the transportation, communication and housing infrastructure (80% of the population live in government housing). This is not meant to suggest that the Singapore government is unaware of potential problems. The minister in charge of Smart Nation admits that ‘the big, big elephant in the room is protection of privacy and ensuring security’ and he promises to anonymise data to the greatest extent possible.5 It is hard to know precisely what this means, but it is not surprising that the Minister would make this promise because significant security breaches have already taken place; one of the latest, in 2018, was also the largest ever in the country’s history when hackers stole data on 1.5 million patients enrolled in the national health care service. This included 160,000 people, among them Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and a few ministers, who also had their medication information hacked.6 Singapore sharply defines the smart city trade-off in countries whose projects are driven by dominant central governments. In return for more efficiently run cities, with clean streets, little crime, few visible homeless people, efficient transportation and widespread access to broadband communication, citizens pay with unprecedented surveillance that manages, polices and commodifies nearly all aspects of everyday life. They must also be prepared to encounter regular costly attacks from hackers.

High-tech China: What’s Your Social Credit Score? The problems of Singapore, a city-state of 5.6 million, are magnified many times over for the 1.4 billion people living in China, a nation that has made the development of smart

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cities a centrepiece of government policy. There are about 1,000 smart city projects in the planning or development stage worldwide and half of these are located in China. The importance of the country’s smart city strategy was established in 2011 when it was made a part of the 12th Five-Year Plan that identifies the central government’s economic priorities and initiatives. The commitment was made specific in the 2011–2013 plan for turning Shanghai into a smart city: Innovative and transformational development requires an international-level information infrastructure system, an effective informationsensing and intelligence application system, a nextgeneration IT industry and a trusted and reliable regional information security system.7 China’s programme covers older cities like Shanghai, including both large and small urban areas, as well as a staggering 100 or so entirely new cities. Shanghai is home to Citizen Cloud, a cloud-based platform doubling as a mobile app that aggregates and eases access to most government services for the city’s residents, including health care records, drivers’ licence applications and renewals, and additional community programmes. By the end of 2017, one-third of Shanghai’s residents had already used the platform. The city has pioneered with telecommunications equipment giant Huawei to enable motorists to locate available parking and pay for it in advance with an app. The city also collects data from cameras and sensors and makes it available to companies to develop information tools that they can offer, with advertiser support, to individual users. Older cities like Beijing, Guangzhou, Xi’an and Hangzhou provide notable examples of smart city applications. China’s capital has rolled out a mobile payment system that enables users to ride public transit without purchasing tickets, tokens,

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or cards. A Huawei smartphone app is all that is required. With 140,000 technology companies, including 11,000 startups, Guangzhou has been designated a smart city of business innovation. In another example of a partnership with Singapore, it is building a ‘Knowledge City’, made up of hightech business parks, with housing and amenities for 500,000 residents. The city has also launched a regional health information platform that gathers patient records from the city’s municipal hospitals and grass roots institutions. By 2018, it was storing over 8 million electronic health records on Guangzhou residents. The system enables patients and hospitals to access relevant records easily. Furthermore, major hospitals in Guangzhou have launched a medical app, a one-stop online platform where citizens can make appointments, pay fees and access other health services. People can also have prescription medicines delivered directly to their homes after paying for them through the most used national online pay system. The city of Xi’an is using Next Internet technologies to keep track of the continuing migration of rural residents into the city and to develop public service programmes. Finally, Hangzhou is known for its eerily named ‘City Brain’, which was developed with the help of China’s largest technology/retail firm, Alibaba, a company that holds a similar level of dominance in the Chinese market that Amazon maintains in the United States. With the help of citywide sensors and surveillance cameras, the Hangzhou area collects data on real-time road conditions and feeds it to an AI hub that controls traffic signals at major intersections throughout the city.8 While these cities have received considerable attention for specific applications, the north central city of Yinchuan has attracted the most notice among older cities, because it is experiencing a near-complete overhaul with Next Internet technologies. Small by Chinese standards, this city of 1.5 million is also notable because one-third of the population

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belongs to the Muslim Hui people, whose influence is felt in the use of Arabic and in the 500 mosques located throughout the city. It has been suggested that the government’s enormous investment in Yinchuan is an effort to favour a minority group that has been more quiescent than others, especially by comparison to the rebellious Uyghurs of western China whose resistance has led to major government crackdowns on minorities. Among the many technology applications in use across the city, from the holograms that greet and guide visitors to Yinchuan’s City Hall to the solar-powered waste bins located throughout the city, Yinchuan is best known for the widespread use of facial recognition technology. In Yinchuan, your face is your credit card, your bus ticket and your key to gain access to some buildings and homes. Along with the massive use of sensor-equipped tags, particularly on automobiles but on many other objects as well, critics view Yinchuan as a model for the surveillance state in a city with a large minority population. Citing the city’s identification as a world-leading smart city, the government does not appear to be concerned about the criticism. In fact, it has enjoyed showing off the city as host for two years of one of the world’s major annual smart city conferences, TM Forum’s Smart City InFocus. TM Forum is an industry association whose members comprise the elite of the world’s telephone companies, cable operators, network managers and software developers. The event helps sell China’s approach to smart cities, especially by promoting ubiquitous surveillance and glossing over concerns about privacy.9 Along with investment in smart city technology, the Chinese government is building one of the world’s largest theme parks in Yinchuan, at a cost of $3.5 billion, formally known as the Hui Cultural Park. Intended to attract rich Muslim tourists to replicas of the Taj Mahal and the Blue Mosque, the park has received a tepid response. Meanwhile, in the north-west of China, where the Uyghur

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people challenge Han Chinese authority, the government has no interest in theme parks. Rather, it has built indoctrination centres and internment camps where hundreds of thousands of Xinjiang residents have been held until they are trusted to follow the government’s line, a process known as ‘sinicisation’ or the forcible remaking of identity. Specifically, this means requiring non-Chinese societies to conform to Chinese culture, particularly that of the Han majority, in everything from dress and religion to culture, politics and language. It is all enough to recall one of China’s most famous contemporary novelists and satirists Yan Lianke. Twice nominated for the Man Booker prize, his work banned in China, Yan once explained why he had to adopt a style variously known as absurdism or mythorealism: ‘The reality of China’, he said, ‘is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert’.10 China is also far ahead of the rest of the world in the construction of entirely new smart cities. Almost all have familiar characteristics: a plan developed by the national government in coordination with large technology firms, to meet the goals of infrastructure efficiency, especially in transportation and communication, policing and security. One of the modest exceptions is Xiong’an New Area, a city under construction about 60 miles south-west of Beijing. If there is any doubt that this is a state-directed initiative, this government announcement should wipe it away. The construction of Xiong’an, China’s ruling authority states, is ‘a strategic decision with profound historic significance made by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core’.11 While this is not particularly exceptional for new smart cities in China, what distinguishes Xiong’an is the formal commitment to building a city that is both green and smart. Additionally, as the announcement signifies, this is a project whose strong government backing signifies careful planning and a long-term vision. The plan calls for setting

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aside 10% of the total area of 530 square kilometres for permanently designated farmland. A portion of Xiong’an will also be reserved for cultural heritage, especially archaeological parks, museums filled with ancient ruins and exhibition space. Construction will include the restoration of sensitive ecological features, including bringing China’s largest freshwater lake back to life. The government also plans to address the serious issue of forest erosion by increasing the coverage rate in the region from 11% to 40%. The city will serve as a model for a low-carbon economy, making use of green building materials in hopes of creating a place where people can live and work in an energy-efficient environment. Whether or not Xiong’an and China’s many other smart city projects succeed will depend a great deal on how well the country addresses the nationwide crisis in resident vacancy rates. As a result of overbuilding and speculative investment, a 2018 report concluded that one out of every five residences in the country, a total of 50 million, are vacant.12 Much of what passes for smart city redevelopment of older cities and the construction of entirely new ones, amounts to building tower blocks with the latest technology, but without occupants. The persistence of high vacancy rates will have an increasingly negative impact on the economy. But as long as China’s people continue to ignore President Xi Jinping’s often repeated refrain that houses are for living, the crisis will only deepen. The plan for Xiong’an resembles a green version of an earlier model, the cities of Cyberjaya and Putrajaya in Malaysia, twin new cities dedicated by the Malaysian government in the late 1990s to anchor the country’s entry into the high-tech world, what it called the Multimedia Super Corridor, and to serve as a government administrative centre. It also resembles more recent attempts to create new cities including Songdo in South Korea, Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates and PlanIT Valley outside of Paredes, Portugal. These places are

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laboratories for testing the future of urban design, planning and governance, as well as the ability of cities to manage in the face of catastrophic climate change. While some suggest it is too early to pass judgement, these attempts at city building have not lived up to initial expectations. Songdo is a particularly worrisome case. Conceived in the offices of a major New York City design firm, which won a competition initiated by the South Korean government, it was to be a model green space, built from land reclaimed out of the Yellow Sea. It would also serve as a government centre and a showcase for new technologies, close enough, about 25 miles, but not too close, to the commercial and government capital in Seoul. The population of 70,000 is well below the 300,000 expected to move in by 2018. The vision of a carfree world, with 40% green space and miles of cycling routes is now described as a ghost town … an odd mixture of wastelands intermingled with random large-scale development. People aren’t coming and neither are businesses – fewer than 50 big brands have bothered – and public transport is a pain. It’s a laborious two-hour connection to downtown Seoul.13 For smart city technology enthusiasts, it is a major disappointment. In a country known for world-leading technology applications, Songdo was expected to attract newcomers wanting to experience a place where the Next Internet has already arrived. Ubiquitous technology automates everything from remote management of each residence to trash removal that pneumatically removes rubbish and recycles it to generate electricity. No need for trash trucks. Street sensors regulate traffic and everyone has access to online education. In a desperate attempt to save the project, a Korean firm is creating

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‘American Town’, a scheme that its local developers hope will replace the Koreans leaving Songdo and returning to Seoul with Korea-based foreigners, tired of the rat race in the capital, and native Koreans who left the country to settle in the United States. Expected to add 20% to the city’s population, American Town has attracted legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus, who has designed a championship course, and a number of American universities that make up the Incheon Global Campus. Construction is behind schedule, and critics are sceptical that it will solve the problems of what many see as a place that is too expensive, too sterile, and too distant from a genuine metropolis to succeed. China hopes Xiong’an avoids these problems by investing in its capacity to serve as both an innovation centre for private companies and a government centre serving Beijing. Specifically, the high-tech space is to specialise in green research, development and production for the biotechnology and agricultural industries. It will also house the administrative activities of the central government, which will be offloaded from Beijing, with its now legendary problems of air pollution and bureaucratisation. As if to anticipate criticisms of the Malaysian and South Korean models, as well as other new purpose-built smart cities, the plan calls for taking a long view, something China’s planners understand well. Specifically, it expects that Xiong’an will grow slowly, reaching its full potential by 2035, when the government hopes it will serve as a model for a world increasingly shaped by climate change. By 2050 it is expected to serve as a major contributor to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei city cluster, providing a refuge from the ills of traditional cities, as it carries out more and more of the government administrative functions that occupy Beijing today. The commitment to environmental quality is more than just a public relations tool. The Chinese government is genuinely concerned about the threats of

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climate change. The development of an inland location for technology research and national government management will offer some security and redundancy against the potential for catastrophic climate impacts on older cities. The central government is especially worried about coastal urban areas, such as Shanghai, which are in grave danger of inundation from rising seas. China’s massive investment in smart cities needs to be viewed in the context of the government’s overall strategy of rapidly developing from a primarily agricultural society to an industrial and, increasingly, an information society. This cannot be done without massive investment in infrastructure, including the retrofitting of older cities like Beijing, Wuhan and Chengdu and the construction of entirely new cities. Urban renewal throughout the country also helps to attract those for whom rural life is all their families have known for generations. Smart cities add to the attraction with the promise of jobs and a whole new way of life. The smart city promise also enables the government of China to justify controversial policies, including support for and control over the companies that make up its digital sector, close management of its population with ever more sophisticated tools and the drive to lead the development of a genuinely global economy. Reasonable as it is to concentrate on the Big Five tech companies in the United States – Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook – many people remain unaware of the extent to which new media businesses in China have risen to prominence. Although not household names outside of the People’s Republic, several of China’s big technology companies, including Alibaba in online sales, Baidu in search and Tencent in social media and messaging, are closing in on the US giants. China’s Huawei is the world’s largest supplier of telecommunication equipment and number two in

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the production of mobile phones. It is also a leader in nextgeneration wireless 5G technology. Specialty technology companies, like the smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi and the ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing, have achieved spectacular success. These firms have benefited most decisively from government contracts, including for smart city initiatives such as Alibaba’s creation of the City Brain for Hangzhou. With the leadership of China’s top insurance company Ping An (which is transitioning into a financial services business), Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei have organised a major smart city programme, dubbed PATH, which will provide hardware, software and services to smart cities all over China. While Alibaba has taken the lead, Tencent and Baidu are also extensively involved in their own smart city projects. In fact, Tencent, parent company of the popular texting app WeChat, is involved in a programme to redevelop the entire province of Jiangsu. The goal is to create smart transportation, health care delivery and business systems for 30 cities throughout Jiangsu, a province near Shanghai. Using WeChat’s ‘Tencent ride code’, users can pay for public transit from their phone and zip through toll-booths using WeChat’s Electronic Toll Collection system. Not to be outdone, Baidu is currently installing smart city systems in Xiong’an New Area, the government’s favoured start-from-scratch innovation region for technology and administration. Huawei has branched out from its traditional telecommunications supplier role to become an increasingly important provider of smart city systems. For example, with a contract worth $100 million, the company has built a massive surveillance system for the city of Lahore in Pakistan, including 8,000 cameras covering 1,500 locations, and a 1,700-kilometre dedicated optical fibre line, all for use by the police. Huawei also designed and constructed the command and control centre that manages the system, which is located in Lahore’s police headquarters and

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is supported by a staff of 800 mainly engineers and computer specialists.14 China’s tech firms also enjoy a clear path provided by strict government controls over foreign corporations, especially tech firms. With no access to Amazon, people shop on Alibaba; with almost no ability to use Google, online searching in China means Baidu, and with similarly restricted access to Facebook, people post through Tencent. Having dispensed with Uber by giving it a stake in Didi Chuxing, the Chinese know only one major ride-hailing firm. Relatively unimpeded near-monopoly access to a market of 1.4 billion people has established a rich foundation for China’s big tech enterprises to expand into international markets. Government relationships with these firms are not always smooth, as is evidenced by the sudden departure of Alibaba’s legendary head Jack Ma. But there is never any doubt about the national government’s firm hold on the ultimate authority over high-tech development. China’s brand of state capitalism has won the nation a leading role in developing Next Internet technologies, especially artificial intelligence, where China arguably leads the world. In fact, one of the major incentives behind China’s colossal smart city programme is the opportunity to gather massive amounts of personal and institutional data. Deploying a national army of low-wage data ‘taggers’, whose job it is to label photos, videos and text, China is giving its AI industry the resources to expand capacity and lay the foundation for developing autonomous vehicles, facial recognition systems and algorithms that will automate decision-making, including the management of urban areas. Nevertheless, this view must be tempered by the weaker position Chinese tech firms occupy in other key Next Internet technologies, such as cloud computing, where Amazon holds 52% of the world market in data centre services, and Alibaba, China’s leader, has only 4.6%.15

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With the close partnership of its leading technology companies, the Chinese government is also developing the digital tools to monitor and regulate the behaviour of its citizens closely. This project has crystallised in the development of a social credit score, which extends the Western concept of a financial credit score to take into account the full record of each citizen’s life as recorded by digital media. Since so much of China’s social activity, including shopping and banking, is done online, and since public space is under near-constant surveillance, especially in the country’s smart cities, the government and its private sector partners have access to nearly the full record of a person’s life. Get caught running a red light on a traffic camera, fail to make a mortgage payment, or post something critical about a government official and the score goes down, with consequences for securing a driver’s licence, a passport, or obtaining other government services. Do something the government likes, such as demonstrating patriotism or reporting on a scofflaw, and the score goes up, thereby increasing the likelihood that a requested visa will be processed quickly, or a child will gain admission to a good school. Given the complexity of big data analysis for a population of 1.4 billion, the authorities must resort to algorithms that are untested, and often flat-out wrong. Bad facial recognition software has led to the roundup of demonstrators who never actually appeared at an outlawed protest. Fuzzy licence plate photos have led authorities to pick up drivers incorrectly identified as violating traffic laws. Partly because of this, but also because of the massive complexity of its surveillance plans, China’s rollout of social credit is proceeding slowly and unevenly. Much of the action is taking place in trials and as pieces of a larger smart city plan. Suggesting that China is far ahead of the West in technology-enabled surveillance is an exaggeration that all too often minimises the extent of surveillance hatched by Silicon Valley companies. It is indeed

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safe to say that the surveillance capitalism pioneered in the Valley provided a solid foundation for China’s social credit system. The same need to manage a complex society more efficiently, which justifies the creation of smart cities, also legitimises unprecedented levels of surveillance everywhere.16 Smart cities are not just instruments to carry out China’s domestic policies. They are integral to the government’s global strategy of building and controlling trade routes and supply chains. Nowhere is this more evident than in the country’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which combines an infrastructure investment in a land and sea project that covers half of the world, including large parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. A twenty-first century version of the old Silk Road trade route that linked China to the rest of Asia and Europe beginning 2,000 years ago, the project was first called One Belt, One Road. Later changed to the BRI, it is actually a set of multiple projects, trade routes and supply chains covering six central corridors. Encompassing about 90 nations, the BRI draws on every economic sector, from investment banking to construction, transportation and communication. In addition to providing opportunities for Chinese businesses, the BRI also includes a list of prestigious foreign business partners such as Siemens, whose CEO calls it a landmark movement that represents a 1 trillion euro ($1.16 trillion) investment in infrastructure in about 90 countries and beyond; it’s a project that has the potential to improve the lives of 70% of the world’s population. It’s a project that creates opportunities in practically every sector.17 One of the BRI’s major beneficiaries is the smart city movement. No less a key figure than Chinese President Xi Jinping touted the benefits of smart city development in a 2017 speech at a global forum on the BRI: ‘We should advance the

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development of big data, cloud computing and smart cities to transform them into a 21st century digital silk road’, the Chinese leader stated, and he went on to say that ‘It is also fundamental for humanity that the development must incorporate “green” development…’.18 To carry out the goal of building a digital silk road, China is partnering with Malaysia to create a smart and green city under the BRI umbrella of projects. Two Malaysian and 10 Chinese companies are involved in the $900 million project which, when completed, will be a complete smart city containing AI-driven factories, hotels, universities and ‘smart’ housing, with technology provided by China’s leading technology companies. Fresh from its experience with its ‘City Brain’ project in Hangzhou, Alibaba has taken the concept to the BRI by making a deal with Kuala Lumpur to build a similar AI project for the Malaysian capital. Malaysia City Brain would use Next Internet technologies for traffic management, public safety and urban design. The world gambling centre of Macao appears to be next in line for an Alibaba ‘brain’. China is also joining up with the Philippines, a partner in the BRI, to build a new smart city on 407 acres of reclaimed land. The New Manila Bay City of Pearl is the largest BRI project in the country. Its network of automated railways, water taxis and AI-enabled road systems will take passengers to and from a central business district, powered in part by solar and tidal energy. China is active in smart city development at the other end of the digital silk road, in Eastern Europe. The most prominent example is St Sofia, a build-from-scratch smart city in Bulgaria that will transform a green space, mainly occupied by sunflowers and honeybees and turn it into what is being called ‘Europe’s first smart city’.19 It is a title that many Europeans would dispute, including those backing PlanIT Valley outside of Paredes, Portugal. Nevertheless, the project in Bulgaria is significant because it provides a major addition to

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China’s expansion into Europe, where it already owns and operates 10% of all port facilities, including some in Italy, Spain and Greece. As the EU member located closest to China, Bulgaria has been part of the BRI from the beginning, and St Sofia gives China a clear opportunity to demonstrate that it can connect to Europe through land acquisitions and urban development, as well as by sea and rail. Located 20 kilometres outside the capital of Sofia, construction began at the end of 2018. The Chinese government and a private developer are investing $1.25 billion in the project which, once completed, will feature exhibition centres, hotels, the largest aqua park in the Balkans, office buildings, shopping malls and entertainment venues, all tied together with made-in-China information technology. There are no guarantees that the BRI will meet with even modest success, let alone surpass expectations. The potential for a financial crisis has grown with rising tariff barriers and a general slowdown in China’s economy. The project depends on constant injections of capital and, in the event of even a slight slowdown in the flow, all of this will be jeopardised. Moreover, the government is hoping for little to no pushback from the installation of surveillance and data-gathering systems that top anything the world has seen outside of dystopian science fiction. The troubles facing Huawei, including charges of intellectual property theft from Western governments and competitors, are not helping China’s reputation in the international community. Additionally, no one can predict the specific consequences of catastrophic climate change, which is expected to inundate China’s long coastline, especially in the Shanghai region, and overrun the floodplains that millions of inland residents currently occupy. China may soon learn about the big risks that nations take on when they make such an enormous commitment to urban reconstruction. Smart? That remains to be seen.

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Modi’s India: Let 100 Smar t Cities Bloom India has succeeded in building a widely recognised presence in the world of information technology. Once viewed as little more than the global centre for low-wage Englishlanguage call centre work, India is now recognised as an information technology leader, particularly in the city of Mumbai. The growth of software engineering throughout the country has enabled the subcontinent to climb up the IT value chain to serve its own industry and compete in global markets, particularly against Western countries with considerably higher labour costs for similar work. To extend this progress, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Smart Cities Mission in 2015, a five-year project worth about $25 billion that will help create 100 smart cities and rejuvenate another 500. At the programme launch, Prime Minister Modi made it clear that the Mission would help those who needed it most because ‘if anything has the potential to mitigate poverty it is our cities’.20 This project is only one of several IT initiatives advanced by the Modi government; the most controversial of all is a national biometric identification programme. This collects information on the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens and uploads basic personal details and a photograph to a cloud database which is accessible using a 12-digit number. The system, called Aadhaar, for ‘foundation’, must be used to receive government benefits, such as to collect subsidised food from shops. The shops scan user fingerprints on inexpensive readers and seek clearance from Aadhaar. Although it does not yet envision anything like China’s citizen score, the Indian government faced serious protests by groups fearful of the privacy implications and the potential for hacking. For one US biometric expert, ‘It’s mind-boggling that a country like India pulled it off’.21

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Given the more decentralised parliamentary system of government in India, a government-directed smart cities policy takes on a different meaning than it does in China. While policy and much of the funding comes from the national government, politics made it practically necessary to solicit proposals from state and municipal authorities in what came to be known as the All India City Challenge. Prospective smart cities sent their plans to their respective state governments whose choices were passed on to the Ministry of Urban Development where, in the first round, 20 projects were selected and, in the next round, a full complement of winning cities was chosen. From the start, the process has been overshadowed by political controversy. As a result, several cities have left the programme, including Kolkata in West Bengal and the hightech centre of Mumbai. That still leaves a near-nationwide selection of cities which have received infrastructure grants for the standard applications of Next Internet systems in transportation, communication and environmental monitoring. One of these is the city of Bhopal, known worldwide for having suffered a catastrophic mass poisoning from a malfunctioning Union Carbide plant that led to thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries. It has partnered with Hewlett Packard to develop a smart city operation’s centre similar to those in Rio de Janeiro and Singapore. In spite of criticisms from residents, who understandably fear another calamitous partnership with a Western transnational corporation, the city is going ahead with a project that will monitor data from sensors throughout the city and create algorithms that it hopes will permit more efficient operations and cost savings. For example, sensors located on trash bins that provide information on when they are full enable variations from the standard once-a-week trash collection. However well or poorly the project works, Bhopal provides dramatic evidence of the power that Western tech companies

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and the smart cities vision continue to exert. Here is a city which suffered what was until recently the worst industrial disaster in history. Now it has agreed to partner with another Western firm, in return for the promise of becoming a modern, smart city. The consequences for the poor, even before the project approached completion, were deeply worrisome. Two low-income areas were razed and hundreds of residents were evicted to make way for new, technology-rich, gentrified neighbourhoods. School attendance declined significantly because 11 schools, mainly serving the poor, were demolished. In the name of efficiency, the government ceded operational decision-making to the Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation, a private authority that supersedes local government. This led to numerous complaints about the loss of all recourse to elected officials.22 India’s plan for Bhopal and 100 or so more cities across the country is not nearly as ambitious as China’s. The plan has received funding for only five years, with the total likely to reach somewhat less than the initial announced figure of $25 billion. It certainly pales by comparison to China’s, particularly when that nation’s funding includes the BRI, investment in which reached $20.1 billion in 2017 alone. It is also well below what the consulting firm McKinsey considers necessary for future urbanisation requirements. Specifically, over the next decade, India is expected to add 300 million people to its urban areas, a number that McKinsey concludes calls for about $1.2 trillion in investment just to keep pace. While important, money is not the only ingredient required to create smart cities. Careful planning with an eye on the needs of those lower class people, often excluded from programmes like these, is essential. However, according to planners and activists, there is insufficient attention to design and very little inclusiveness. As a result, the Smart Cities Mission is more likely to benefit the upper strata and deepen India’s existing

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crisis of inequality. After praising India’s smart city project as ‘good and necessary’, McKinsey’s partner in the country concludes that more ‘planned urbanization is required rather than the ad-hoc, unplanned urbanization that we have seen so far’.23 To stretch its funding and live up to the political requirement of including 100 cities from every region of the country, the Indian government is creating model districts within cities that might serve as beacons for entire cities and for the nation as a whole. According to the Housing and Land Rights Network, a New Delhi advocacy group, on average, the Smart Cities Mission covers only 5% of the city’s total area and the entire project will directly or indirectly impact only a quarter of the country’s urban population. As a result, for one district to expand to an entire city will require a scaling up of very significant proportions.24 One might argue that getting it right in over 5% of a city is better that failing on a citywide project. There is certainly something to be said for taking the time necessary to test alternatives in a relatively low-risk setting. It is, after all, easier to scale up than to scale down. But in order for the 5% solution to work and serve as a model for a better, more intelligent city, attention needs to be focussed on smart design and careful attention to detail. Critics worry that this is not the case for many of the Indian projects. According to a scholar at Ahmedabad University, they lack fixed targets, specific delivery dates and plans for assessment. He concludes: ‘A city can install 1,000 CCTV cameras or 100 solar-powered street lights and call itself smart. But that is not it’.25 The focus on technology is also deepening India’s age-old problem of inequality. Higher income buyers eager to move into neighbourhoods promising the latest in IT create the conditions for mass evictions, gentrification and greater social inequality. A 2018 report concluded that evictions of the poor have taken place in about one-third of all smart city areas. ‘It is a

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restrictive approach to urban development’, says one analyst, ‘with a limited focus on marginalized groups including indigenous people, women and other minorities’.26 All too often, it is the urban poor who suffer. Rather than make improvements in their housing, entire low-income neighbourhoods are razed to make way for modern, technology-rich, smart communities. It is one thing to building gleaming ‘islands of excellence’, as these are called, and quite another to create genuinely smart cities committed to equality. One alternative to the smart district within a city model is to build satellite cities from scratch, a plan that has many supporters in India. The state of Gujarat alone had plans for 24 such places before the Smart City Mission was announced. These purpose-built new urban centres would benefit from proximity to established municipalities, just as China hopes Xiong’an New Area will gain from its proximity and close ties to Beijing. However, supporters of the Smart City Mission fear that these will turn out worse than their project because new cities will tend to attract well-to-do people looking for gated communities. Those inside the gates of these new places have their own complaints, primarily because, once they are built, it is up to the residents themselves to take responsibility for maintenance, something that many did not know when buying into their new towns. Unless smart cities make an explicit commitment to environmental preservation and sustainability, developers typically see the natural landscape as an impediment to their plans for deploying technology. India is no exception. The country has one of the world’s worst records on basic environmental indicators. The 2018 Environmental Performance Index, an assessment of 180 nations produced by Columbia and Yale Universities along with the World Economic Forum, ranked India fourth worst in the world.27 According to the World Health Organisation, India has nine of the world’s 10 most

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polluted cities and urban smog is estimated to have killed 1.24 million people in 2017.28 The Smart Cities Mission appears to be doing little to improve the situation and there are notable examples of the harm it has done to the environment. This is primarily because green space and especially trees have been sacrificed in order to build the technological infrastructure needed to introduce smart city technologies. Consider Delhi, the national capital and a city of great beauty. It has suffered enormously from automobile emissions and other pollutants that have contributed to major health issues throughout the city, including numerous deaths. In order to create the space necessary for seven major housing and commercial developments as part of the Smart Cities Mission, the government approved cutting down 16,500 trees. It took an uprising by environmental groups, who mobilised a court case against the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs to obtain a stay and buy time for further action. Another area, Nauroji Nagar, was not as fortunate as Delhi. It lost 1,500 trees to a smart city project committed to the construction of a World Trade Centre. Social and environmental critics demanded that the national government address shortages of water and electricity, inadequate transportation, sewage, hospitals and schools. Environmentalists and other activists agree with the conclusion drawn by the head of the Delhi Science Forum that ‘With the proposition of building smart cities in India, Modi is merely selling an image; to make 100 showpieces that would match Western standards’.29 Cities that were made part of the Mission early on have experienced little actual environmental improvement and some have seen their pollution problems grow. In addition to accelerating pollution of Delhi’s Yamuna river, in Bengalaru, another candidate for smart city development, fires continue to erupt on its lakes as a result of ongoing debris dumping. Meanwhile Shimla, an early choice for the Smart City Mission, had to

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deal with one of the greatest water shortages ever recorded on the subcontinent.30 Facing elections in May 2019, the Modi government announced early in the year that it would spend $91 million over 2 years to fight air pollution, an amount environmentalists agree was far too little. It was also pointed out that in 2018 the government unveiled a statue, the world’s largest, to an independence leader, that cost $400 million to erect.31 One might easily conclude that among government-directed smart city projects, China has the advantage over India. Beijing has invested much more and can boast of several genuine success stories. However, unlike India, which has a thriving, combative press, it is rare for the darker side of China’s experience to surface in the media. In India, it is not unusual for research centres, including those sponsored by major Indian corporations, to carry out research and raise serious questions about the Smart City Mission. For example, in 2017 the School of Habitat Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences teamed up with the Pune-based Centre for Environment Education to examine the extent to which local residents were consulted before plans were drawn up and implemented for smart city projects. Sending researchers into the field, the joint study concluded that the same people who would most likely be displaced by the project, mainly slum-dwellers, vendors and hawkers, were completely ignored, and so had no idea that they would be pushed out to make way for redevelopment. One of the Tata research group scholars concluded: In almost all states, a major problem with the smart city plan is that the common people barely get a chance to put forth their demands and requirements. The presentations given to the people are often so technical that they fail to understand what exactly is being communicated.32

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Despite its position as one of India’s major corporations and a key participant in the country’s push to develop the IT sector, Tata nevertheless sponsored research questioning the extent of democratic planning. It is unimaginable that China’s Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, or any other business based in China, would do anything approximating such a public questioning of national government policy. Nor is it within anyone’s expectation that Beijing would feel compelled to respond, as the government in Delhi did, with promises to do a better job of including those people typically left out of the decision-making process. Given the Modi government’s commitment to the Mission, one might reasonably question whether reforms will be carried out. On the other hand, there is almost no prospect in China for genuine debate about smart cities outside the confines of national government officials and the Communist Party. Activists in India, like Mumbai-based Medha Patkar, who complained, ‘What is the use of a Smart City if people are being displaced?’ justifiably worry that the Modi administration is less responsive than previous governments.33 Nevertheless, India represents the example of a government-directed smart cities project where technology remains a socially contested terrain. Its activists continue to remind smart city enthusiasts that any assessment of success or failure must consider the impact on democracy and on those whose voices are often silenced in the rush to impose smart city solutions proposed by technology experts, business leaders and government officials.

ENDNOTES 1.  Rachel Cheung, Smart cities: Are we sleepwalking into a Big Brother future of constant surveillance in the name of improved

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efficiency and safety?, South China Morning Post, August 16, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2159810/smart-cities-are-wesleepwalking-big-brother-future-constant-surveillance 2.  Alphr, Building a smart city: How Singapore is forging a path ahead of the rest, https://www.alphr.com/life-culture/1005939/ building-a-smart-city-how-singapore-is-forging-a-path-ahead-of-the-res 3.  Susan Fourtané, Smart city Dubai: The happiest city of the future, Interesting Engineering, December 27, 2018, https:// interestingengineering.com/smart-city-dubai-the-happiest-city-ofthe-future 4.  Jake Maxwell Watts and Newly Purnell, Singapore is taking the “Smart City” to a whole new level, Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/singapore-is-taking-the-smartcity-to-a-whole-new-level-1461550026 5.  Jake Maxwell Watts and Newly Purnell, Singapore is taking the “Smart City” to a whole new level, Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/singapore-is-taking-the-smartcity-to-a-whole-new-level-1461550026 6.  Eileen Yu, Singapore suffers ‘most serious’ data breach, affecting 1.5M healthcare patients including Prime Minister, ZDNet, July 20, 2018, https://www.zdnet.com/article/singapore-suffers-most-seriousdata-breach-affecting-1-5m-healthcare-patients-including-prime/ 7.  Fan Yang, China’s Big Brother smart cities: Can the law protect the privacy of Chinese citizens?, APPS Policy Forum, July 26, 2018, https://www.policyforum.net/chinas-big-brother-smart-cities/ 8.  Jenny Hsu, Alibaba Cloud launched ‘ET City Brain 2.0’ in Hangzhou, Alizila, September 20, 2018, https://www.alizila.com/ alibaba-cloud-launched-city-brain-2-0-hangzhou/ 9.  Ken Hanly, Yinchuan China’s model for a smart city, Digital Journal, July 25, 2017, http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-andscience/technology/yinchuan-china-s-model-for-a-smart-city/ article/498423 10.  Jiayang Fang, Yan Lianke’s forbidden satires of China, The New Yorker, October 15, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2018/10/15/yan-liankes-forbidden-satires-of-china

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11.  China publishes master plan for Xiongan New Area, China Daily, April 21, 2018, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201804/21/ WS5adb1285a3105cdcf6519b35.html 12.  Bloomberg News, A fifth of China’s homes are empty. That’s 50 million apartments, April 24, 2018. 13.  Chris White, South Korea’s ‘smart city’ Songdo: Not quite smart enough? South China Morning Post, March 25, 2018, https:// www.scmp.com/week-asia/business/article/2137838/south-koreassmart-city-songdo-not-quite-smart-enough 14.  Nabeel Shakeel Ahmed, Big data and urban planning in Pakistan: A case study of the urban unit, M.A. thesis, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, July 31, 2018, https://fes. yorku.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Ahmed_NS_MP.pdf 15.  Daphne Zhang, China’s Alibaba takes on Amazon in European cloud, Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2018, https://www. wsj.com/articles/chinas-alibaba-takes-on-amazon-in-europeancloud-1543924801 16.  Charles Rollet, The odd reality of life under China’s all-seeing credit score system, Wired, June 5, 2018, https://www.wired.co.uk/ article/china-blacklist 17.  Vietnam Investment Review, Siemens takes the world on the ‘digital silk road,’ June 25, 2018, https://www.vir.com.vn/siemenstakes-the-world-on-the-digital-silk-road-60437.html 18.  Feng Da Hsuan and Liang Hai Ming, Thailand can be smart-city flagship for Belt and Road, The Nation: Thailand Portal, September 28, 2017, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/opinion/30327874 19.  Zhuan Ti, Tomorrow’s smart city begins in South European country, China Daily, May 15, 2017, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ cndy/2017-05/15/content_29345007.htm 20.  Sujeet Kumar, Indians promised benefits of 100 smart cities, but the poor are sidelined again, The Conversation, December 24, 2018, https://theconversation.com/indians-promised-benefits-of100-smart-cities-but-the-poor-are-sidelined-again-107787 21.  Newley Purnell, India’s biometric feat: Big boon or big brother? Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2018, https://www.

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wsj.com/articles/indias-giant-new-biometric-database-has-criticsworried-11545412320 22.  Shreya Roy Chowdhury, As Bhopal is cast as a Smart City, its poor have a question: Where’s the room for us? Scroll.in, January 28, 2019, https://scroll.in/article/910434/as-bhopal-is-recast-as-asmart-city-poor-residents-worry-if-they-will-have-a-place-in-it 23.  Rina Chandran, As India adds 100 Smart Cities, one tells a cautionary tale, Reuters, September 2, 2018, https://www.reuters. com/article/us-india-landrights-city/as-india-adds-100-smart-citiesone-tells-a-cautionary-tale-idUSKCN1LJ04G 24.  Rina Chandran, As India adds 100 Smart Cities, one tells a cautionary tale, Reuters, September 2, 2018, https://www.reuters. com/article/us-india-landrights-city/as-india-adds-100-smart-citiesone-tells-a-cautionary-tale-idUSKCN1LJ04G 25.  Rina Chandran, As India adds 100 Smart Cities, one tells a cautionary tale, Reuters, September 2, 2018, https://www.reuters. com/article/us-india-landrights-city/as-india-adds-100-smart-citiesone-tells-a-cautionary-tale-idUSKCN1LJ04G 26.  Rina Chandran, As India adds 100 Smart Cities, one tells a cautionary tale, Reuters, September 2, 2018, https://www.reuters. com/article/us-india-landrights-city/as-india-adds-100-smart-citiesone-tells-a-cautionary-tale-idUSKCN1LJ04G 27.  Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Columbia University, 2018 Environmental Performance Index, https://epi. envirocenter.yale.edu/downloads/epi2018policymakerssummaryv01. pdf 28.  Maria Ari Habib and Hari Kumar, India finally has a plan to fight air pollution, environmentalists are wary, New York Times, January 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/world/asia/ india-air-pollution.html 29.  Aditi Sharma, What makes a city ‘smart?,’ Newsclick, June 26, 2018, https://www.newsclick.in/what-makes-city-smart 30.  Aditi Sharma, What makes a city ‘smart?,’ Newsclick, June 26, 2018, https://www.newsclick.in/what-makes-city-smart

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31.  Maria Abi-Habib and Hari Kumar, India finally has a plan to fight air pollution. Environmentalists are wary, New York Times, January 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/world/asia/ india-air-pollution.html 32.  Aprajita Vidyarthi, Smart City keeps out the poor and weak: TISS, CEE, Pune Mirror, October 19, 2017, https://punemirror. indiatimes.com/pune/cover-story/smart-city-keeps-out-the-poorand-weak-tiss-cee/articleshow/61136807.cms 33.  Press Trust of India, Need basic amenities, not Smart City: Patkar, The Hindu, April 22, 2018, https://www.thehindu.com/ todays-paper/tp-miscellaneous/tp-others/need-basic-amenities-notsmart-city-patkar/article23633486.ece

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5 WHO GOVERNS? PRIVATE SMART CITIES

Just give us a city and put us in charge.1 —Eric Schmidt, Founder and Former CEO, Google; CEO of Alphabet

BUT FIRST, A WORD ABOUT DISNEY Long before Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) began to spread throughout America’s cities, giving companies significant control over neighbourhoods, there was Disney, the Florida Project and the Reedy Creek Improvement District. This section begins with Disney because it pioneered in creating private governance of public space giving the company that gave the world Micky Mouse many of the powers traditionally reserved for cities, counties and the elected officials chosen to preside over them. The Florida Project was the original name for what would become Disney World and the Reedy Creek Improvement District was the name for the territory that the State of Florida handed over to Disney. It took 129

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spectacular political magic, worthy of a magic kingdom, to pave the way for private, technology-rich, smart cities. In his thoroughly researched book Walt Disney and the Quest for Community, Steve Mannheim describes how on 12 May 1967, Florida’s governor signed three bills into law that sped through legislative approval with just one dissenting vote to create the first multifunction, multicity, and multicounty special district in the United States.2 Florida and, to a lesser degree, California had pioneered in the creation of single-purpose special districts. This was something new because the legislation approved an arrangement whereby a private corporation would carry out multiple governance functions, across more than one city and county. Specifically, the state ceded to Disney a number of significant powers including: • Sovereignty over its own roads. • The right to condemn private property. • The right to impose its own penalties for non-compliance. • Exemption from government claims to eminent domain. It was also granted the right to: • Levy taxes, for example to maintain the district, provide utilities, and carry out drainage. • Issue tax-exempt bonds for capital projects. • Operate airport facilities. • Provide fire protection. • Operate public transportation. The two existing cities, Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, and other area authorities were given shared governance responsibilities. However, it was clear from the start, and it

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remains absolutely so to this day, that it is the landowner, the Walt Disney Company, that has the overriding authority to govern the area, just as it was clear from the start that Disney was in control of Celebration, the fully planned garden city spin-off from Disney World. There are numerous reasons given for this remarkable grant of power. At the time, turning a swamp into productive land was a major preoccupation in Florida. There were not many in the state’s leadership who would be caught defending a wetland habitat, especially when a major entertainment company promised to turn it into a magic kingdom, a centre for technological innovation, a model city, and a big moneymaker. Given the massive tasks of first drainage and then construction, many felt it was reasonable to provide Disney with considerable leeway to do whatever the company felt necessary. There were also those who argued that it was an advance in democracy to grant the entity that owned and operated a large land area the right to govern the place as it saw fit, including experimenting with different forms of management. Whatever the point of view, it is clear that Disney opened the door to the many examples of private, smart city governance on offer today. The town of Celebration, which is all that is left of the residential vision, turned out to be a pale imitation of what Walt Disney originally hoped would be the smart city of Epcot. But the company became enormously successful in demonstrating that private corporations could massively reshape urban governance. The United States is very much a nation of BIDs, zoning variances, and public–private partnerships (P3s) that often amount to government-subsidized corporate projects. The US has also been effective at exporting these new ways to manage urban space to nations all over the world. I live in Ottawa, Canada, and the playground across the street from my home is maintained by a fund provided by developers

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who received a zoning variance to build condos that exceeded zoning regulations. My playground is better maintained, but the neighbourhood located nearby is now dwarfed by towers entirely inappropriate to the scale of the area. In total, by 2018, my city of 1 million people contained 19 BIDs and these, in addition to helping local retail shops, represent a potent political force when communities clash over development plans, noise abatement, and new social services that might raise taxes. Moreover, P3s are now a fact of life in Ottawa, as evidenced by the contribution of public land to build a shopping mall, condominium apartments and a redeveloped sports stadium on public land a short walk from where I live. Canadians like to assert their national pride and independence from the United States, but they are not reluctant to import American forms of private governance.

AMAZON IN SEATTLE: WHEN A BIG CITY BECOMES A PRIVATE LABORATORY Several technology companies and their gurus are taking the concept of the private city a few steps beyond Disney. Before turning to those that have gone all the way or are planning complete private control, it is useful to consider Amazon, which has branded its headquarters location of Seattle by turning the city into a private lab where 45,000 local employees help the company try out potential new retail services and logistics models. For example, to test the potential to compete successfully in the convenience store market, led by 7-Eleven, Amazon set up fully automated Amazon Go smart stores in Seattle. The goal is to eliminate the need for employees by having customers pick out items and check themselves out. Surveillance cameras and scanners do the work. Learning from its first Go store that it cannot automate liquor sales

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and that return customers are interested in a narrow set of products, the company remodelled the second store to make it smaller, with fewer products, and containing nothing that would require an ID check – in essence, Amazon created a walk-in vending machine. Aiming to become America’s privatized post office, Seattle is also the test site for a pickup storefront that, unlike others at the company’s Whole Foods subsidiary, also serves as a sorting and package return facility. The company’s private delivery contractors use the facility to sort packages for delivery. These are, in effect, low-wage postal workers, who use their own vehicles and are provided with no employee benefits. Customers can also drive to the facility to pick up or return packages. Seattle, which Amazon also used to pioneer delivery by independent contractors, will help the company decide how far it can go to take on the US Postal Service. The city has also become a testing ground for the company’s Amazon Fresh concept, which permits customers to order groceries online and have them delivered to their cars by workers using surveillance cameras to match licence plates with orders. Having established itself through online book sales, the company has used Seattle to test the market for the sort of physical stores that its success helped to put out of business. More than just a nod to a bygone era, the bookstores in Seattle also serve as return centres for Amazon products ordered online. The Seattle experiments demonstrated that the return function is more popular than book buying. As a result, Amazon hopes to take on the competition from companies that hoped to make money from the growing online sale returns market. In the past, cities have been used to test-market new products. Amazon has expanded the concept by using Seattle to test entire business concepts, including the private provision of public services.3 It will be interesting to see how the company will build on its Seattle experience when it opens

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a new headquarters in the Washington, DC area. Resistance drove Amazon out of New York, but the company should have a free hand in testing an even wider range of urban management visions in the US capital.

COMPANY TOWNS: AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE Google is not alone among the technology giants trying to disrupt established cities. Others have gone beyond the goto search engine’s Toronto project by aiming to create smart cities from scratch. Frustrated by what they see as imperfections in urban design and development, today’s entrepreneurs are putting their ideas and their money into Xanadus of their own. They represent modern day versions of a fixture in American history, the company town. America’s first industrial city, Lowell, Massachusetts, was entirely run by and for textile mill owners. Workers in Milton Hershey’s turn-of-the20th-century chocolate factory in the company’s Pennsylvania town gave up local elections and privacy and, in return, received medical coverage, a free junior college education, and Hershey-run public parks. At around the same time, the Kohler family created a company town in Wisconsin that housed workers in its plumbing supply business. In addition to living in Kohler housing, workers and their families attended Kohler schools, and bought goods in Kohler shops. As with so many company towns, the beneficent patriarchy eventually faded when it butted heads with capitalist priorities. In this case, when workers tried to oust the company union and organize one affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, Kohler brought in enforcers armed with machine guns. Two workers were gunned down and 40 more were injured.4 These all represent significant examples for today’s privatized smart cities hatched by big tech gurus. But the precedent

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that fits best – in my view – certainly for its phantasmagoric quality, is Fordlandia, the dream city in the Amazon rainforest that Henry Ford cooked up as a way to ensure a supply of rubber for his cars and to demonstrate that a corporation can run a model city. Ford began the project in the 1920s because a British-led cartel was threatening to control the world’s supply of rubber. Back in 1876, a British expert on rubber visited Brazil and stole 1,000 pounds of rubber seeds which he proceeded to smuggle into the hold of his vessel. Companies from his imperial homeland had them planted to create rubber plantations in Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Fearing the loss of a key resource, Ford bought millions of acres of jungle 145 miles north of the equator to ensure a steady supply. But this was not just about rubber. With a deep love of American Midwestern towns and an even stronger faith in his ability to tame capitalism with humane working and living conditions, Henry Ford set out to expunge the tarnished image that the robber barons had given his beloved system, and to demonstrate that capitalists could create successful cities even under the harshest conditions. In spite of Ford’s best efforts, his dream turned into a colossal failure. Although he never visited the place named after him, Ford did get his model American town, got his rubber plantation, paid his workers well, and also looked after their medical care and education. But he also imposed rules that completely undermined the operation. He insisted on nine-to-five shifts for workers used to going in early and staying out of the afternoon heat. When he had managers impose his version of healthy living habits (no meat, no alcohol), workers rioted and set up a bar and a bordello on an island off the coast. On Ford’s orders, his managers refused to take expert advice on pest control. Plantation trees were decimated and many workers succumbed. It was a failure from the start, but because Ford refused to admit it, the Fordlandia experiment

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continued until the founder died. His heir immediately sold the entire operation back to the government of Brazil for $250,000. Fordlandia does live on, but not as the inventor of the Model T intended.5 In the ensuing years, the American concept of the company town continued, particularly as an American export, especially to China where the contractors working for American technology companies set up larger versions of the American model. Today, for example, the remote city of Zhengzhou employs 350,000 workers making Apple iPhones, with almost everyone sleeping in company beds, eating company food, and exercising at the start of each workday to company music. Billed as ‘a startup the size of a country that will change the way we live and work forever’, the megacity project NEOM pushes the company town to the limit: a tech centre that Saudi Arabia hopes will spearhead the transition from an oil-dependent economy to one that is both technologycentred and economically diverse. Led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, NEOM plans to open in 2025 as a $500 billion high-tech development situated along the country’s Red Sea coast and occupying more than 10,000 square miles. Presented as a ‘technology-forward development’ and app-driven city, with funding provided by the sale of stock in the government’s oil business, the project’s leaders have discussed partnerships with both Alibaba and Amazon, who are expected to apply Next Internet technologies to all facets of life in the new city. If successful, NEOM will break new ground by turning the traditional company town into a corporate state city. Like China, Saudi Arabia is planning multiple smart city projects, including a smart tourist destination larger than Belgium and another new city expected to be larger than Buenos Aires.6 These plans may be slow in coming to fruition because the Crown Prince’s reputation

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suffered a massive blow in 2018 when the world learned that he most likely was responsible for the murder and dismemberment of a journalist working for The Washington Post. Potential investors in the kingdom’s smart city projects have backed off, at least temporarily. With the rise of big technology firms in the United States, the concept of the company town – the private city run not just for business, not just like a business, but as a business – has come home to America. Will technology entrepreneurs succeed in demonstrating that their form of capitalism can save cities, or will they only succeed in creating new versions of Fordlandia?

ZUCKTOWN Near its rapidly expanding headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Facebook is building Willow Village on a 59-acre parcel that will contain 1,500 apartments plus shops, schools, parks and a cultural centre, as well as the full complement of smart city systems. Facebook employees who choose to live near company headquarters receive a five-figure bonus and are the likely occupants of most of these apartments. Every private company town, including those adopting smart city ideas, is distinct in its own way and Willow Village is no exception. The project sparked controversy for a number of reasons but particularly because of its location between two of the areas poorest and most heavily Hispanic communities. In response to charges that Willow Village is the first step in a thorough gentrification of the area, Facebook has set aside 225 apartments for low-income residents. That has not stopped critics from reminding the advocates of what is now being called Facebookville and Zucktown about the tortured history of America’s company towns.7

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Y COMBINATOR AND THE NEW CITIES INITIATIVE One of the more widely regarded smart city projects by a technology company is the New Cities Initiative proposed by the leading Silicon Valley technology incubator Y Combinator. Distancing itself from what the company calls ‘crazy libertarian utopias for techies’, Y Combinator plans ‘to design the best possible city given the constraints of existing laws’. It gives no indication that it has any particular location in mind but plans to invest its considerable capital and influence in one or more places that best meet its demanding criteria. Relishing the prospect of starting with a blank slate, the company poses what it perceives to be fundamental questions: • What should a city optimize for? • How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its key performance indicators or KPIs)? • What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city’s culture? • How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential? • How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city? • How should citizens guide and participate in government? • How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change? These are general questions that are also very important, even if cast in a form of IT-speak that uses words like ‘optimization’ (Can any city optimize? Can it optimize for more than one objective?) and KPIs. To provide a more concrete basis for pursuing the build-from-scratch initiative, Y Combinator asks these tactical questions:

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• How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city. • How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live? Can we figure out better zoning laws? • What is the right role for vehicles in a city? Should we have human-driven cars at all? • How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities? • How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text? • What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community? While more specific, these questions break little new ground from what urban designers and planners have been debating for many years, justifying what many urbanists contend is the naïveté of the new city builders.8 Nevertheless, they do suggest that a major contributor to the success of big tech is deeply interested in applying strategies honed in Silicon Valley to produce brand-new smart cities. Can a city be incubated and developed like a private startup? The world may soon find out.

NO, NOT MUSKVILLE, YARRABEND Elon Musk, of Tesla fame, is not reluctant to define a smart city, and he is so confident about it that his company is building one in an Australian suburb. To no one’s surprise,

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the new city of YarraBend will run on Tesla batteries, Tesla solar, Tesla transportation, and Tesla charging stations. The $1.5 billion project on the banks of the Yarra River is expected to start with the construction of 2,500 homes priced at about $1 million each, that will be outfitted with Tesla battery packs, inverters, and solar panels. According to Tesla and its local partners, smart technologies built into every step of construction will enable YarraBend residents to generate 80% less waste and consume 43% less water than the typical suburban dwelling. Moreover, they will be able to charge their electric cars for free at on-site stations. Digital connectivity will provide residents with a complimentary ‘tech concierge’, who will assist in setting up and maintaining the Next Internet technologies in each home and connect them, through a dedicated app, to the town’s transportation, education, security and entertainment amenities. Bike paths, green space, playgrounds, and, in a nod to New York’s High Line, an elevated park are planned. Shops, restaurants and an ‘art and design precinct’ will be located in the centre of the community. One of the reasons for the choice is the proximity to public transit, including a five-minute walk to a train station. Smart cities appear to be futuristic but are often weighed down by very mundane issues. Xanadu, as Orson Welles depicted in Citizen Kane, can darken very quickly. For Elon Musk and YarraBend, the problem is asbestos contamination generated by a paper-manufacturing plant that operated on the land for more than 80 years. The developer knew that the land contained asbestos when it bought the property but claims to be unaware of the extent of contamination and the expense of the clean-up. As a result, Tesla’s model city is the subject of a court battle between the developer and the company that sold the land. Meanwhile, prospective buyers who have paid hefty deposits for units will not be using their digital concierge for some time.9

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PETER THIEL’S FLOATING CITIES Plans for corporate tech cities often border on the eccentric, combining futuristic technology with a sense that this is where a billionaire plans to wait out the coming apocalypse. Such is the proposal presented by the Seasteading Institute, which was set up by a former Google employee and the grandson of free-market economist Milton Friedman, with seed money from the libertarian tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The Institute explores the potential for building floating cities, protected from both the prying eyes of government and the threat of climate change, by a location in international waters. Libertarian ideas would thrive as residents float along on rising seas. As far-fetched as this sounds, there is now big money and even a supportive government behind the project. The government of French Polynesia has created what amounts to a special economic zone for the Seasteading Institute to experiment, including 100 acres of beachfront for the group to test out its operation. To up the hipster quotient, advocates draw inspiration from the annual Burning Man festival and boast about funding through an initial coin offering, where capital is raised by creating and selling virtual currency in a marriage of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. With the support of French Polynesia and the enthusiasm spreading throughout the substantial anarcho-libertarian segment of the tech industry, advocates expect construction will begin soon. Seasteading has created a new company, Blue Frontiers, to build and operate the new city with the goal of creating about a dozen structures by the early 2020s. At a cost of about $60 million, these will include residences, hotels, offices, restaurants and retail outlets. The structures are expected to feature green rooftops and to make extensive use of local wood, including bamboo and coconut fibre, as well as recycled metal and plastic. The long-term goal is to have thousands of cities in place

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by 2050, each exploring new forms of stateless governance as they keep climate change, and, presumably, pirates, at bay.10

BILL GATES IN THE DESERT With feet planted more firmly on the ground, no less of a tech guru than Bill Gates has been associated with the new city of Belmont in the Arizona desert, intended for development on about 35,000 acres west of Phoenix. The association may, however, be as much a media creation that developers are using to sell the idea as anything. Gates himself has not claimed this to be his project. Nevertheless, his investment company, Cascade, is helping to fund Belmont Partners, the real estate investment firm responsible for getting the project off the ground. Plans are for the new city to include 80,000 homes, 3,400 acres of commercial space, and 470 acres for public schools, and a total population of 200,000 people. Featured technologies will include fleets of autonomous vehicles, widespread reliance on solar power, high-speed digital networks, as well as the rather ambiguous ‘new manufacturing and distribution paradigms’. While the extent of Gates’s association is unclear, what makes this case particularly interesting is that the developers are not challenging national media stories about his involvement, likely in the hope that this rather mild example of a smart city will take on the hightech cachet that will help sell it to potential buyers. What is clear is that Belmont has revived hope among state officials to secure funding for an old, some might say, dumb city concept: a long-planned interstate highway linking Phoenix to Las Vegas that will serve Belmont residents.11 Moreover, Belmont’s critics are understandably questioning where this desert city will get its water. Most of Arizona draws water from the Colorado River, which it shares with

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Nevada and California. According to long-standing regulations, to initiate the development, investors have to demonstrate the ability to secure a water source for 100 years. One reason to focus on advanced technology is to make a better case that it can deploy state-of-the-art measures to manage water efficiently. In essence, a sceptic might conclude that Belmont advocates are using smart city concepts and the image of one of the digital world’s main founders to build a city that would support a rather old-fashioned highway construction project. The promise of electric cars and solar power might also help justify using scarce water resources, even as the region and the world face the prospects of massive climate change.12

BLOCKCHAIN USA Belmont is not the only company planning smart cities in the desert. In neighbouring Nevada, Blockchains LLC is building from scratch a place that will integrate blockchain technology into all aspects of city life, providing a first-of-its-kind foundation for the widespread use of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and 3D printing. Set on 70,000 acres in the northern Nevada desert, which the company head Jeffrey Berns purchased for $170 million in 2017, the city is expected to comprise homes, apartments, markets, schools, a college campus, an e-sports gaming arena, and even a bank. Berns is a self-proclaimed despiser of banks and decided to create one himself using blockchain technology. The project understandably sounds futuristic and ambitious even for a tech dreamer, but Berns has sunk a total of $250 million into it and already has a partnership deal with a major Nevada utility. Once again, there is no telling where the water to support the town will come from.13

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WILL BIG TECH RUN SMART CITIES? It should come as no great surprise that successful technology companies, especially those based in Silicon Valley, and the leaders who piloted them to financial success, are trying to remake cities, including their governance. Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Bill Gates believe, like Henry Ford and Walt Disney before them, that success entitles them to ‘disrupt’ whatever they choose. Just because elected governments have operated cities in the past does not mean they should continue to do so. After all, in their view, corporations, especially their own, have demonstrated time and again that the private sector is better at meeting the challenges of a turbulent world than the creaky bureaucracies of the public sector. Is it not just a logical extension of decades of deregulation, privatization and liberalized trade? Is it not time to take off the training wheels of P3s, declare victory for the private sector, and leave government to the few tasks that companies have yet to make marketable? There is also big money to be made from rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of big cities, seeding entirely new ones and unleashing the power of the technologies they pioneered to make their projects even more profitable. Moreover, in order to fully realize the potential to turn cities into corporate profit centres, advocates have begun to discuss the use of advertising throughout the smart city infrastructure. Third parties who want access to customers, and their data, are proposing to cover some of the costs of smart city infrastructure through advertiser sponsorship.14 According to one CEO, Every city wants to be smart, but the challenge is it’s very expensive to deploy the infrastructure, the fiber and the IoT devices to make it all happen. Marketing becomes a way to create a virtuous cycle

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around that because rather than using taxpayer dollars, you can tie it to an advertising concession.15 Such a potential bonanza leaves little doubt why Eric Schmidt dreamed of giving his company a city of its own. Nevertheless, there is nothing dreamy about the track record of big tech in the major cities where its influence is widely felt. Two of the most significant places where technology firms operate in the United States, New York and San Francisco, are among the absolute worst on any scale of income and wealth inequality in America. They are also cities with massive affordable housing crises and significant transportation problems, except for those privileged enough to hold important jobs with big tech companies. Moreover, both cities are among the least prepared for climate change as rising seas and massive storms already begin to batter coastlines. A 2018 account captures the contrasts in the City by the Bay where just a 15-minute walk from the headquarters of Twitter and Uber, two companies that have helped drive the median price of a home to over $1 million, we find the heroin needles, the pile of excrement between parked cars, the yellow soup oozing out of a large plastic bag by the curb and the stained, faux Persian carpet dumped on the corner. It’s a scene of detritus that might bring to mind any variety of developing-world squalor. But this is San Francisco, the capital of the nation’s technology industry, where a single span of Hyde Street hosts an openair narcotics market by day and at night is occupied by the unsheltered and drug-addled slumped on the sidewalk.16 In this and other cities where big tech exerts big influence, there seems to be constant talk about ‘building community’,

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even as firms like Apple and Facebook create headquarter offices that are almost completely cut off to anyone but their badge-wearing, heavily monitored employees. How, for example, can Apple present itself as a company that brings people together when no one but its employees are allowed near its colossal new headquarters building, ‘the giant cocoon’, in Cupertino? Distant from public transit, most of its employees have to take their cars or Apple-provided shuttles. As one commentator concluded, Apple ‘produced a building roughly the shape of a navel, and then gazed into it’.17 Silicon Valley itself has been described as an ‘informal caste system’ comprised of four groups led by an Inner Party of corporate heads who run big tech firms and by venture capital investors. Well below these is an Outer Party of skilled technicians and marketers who operate the companies. They are paid well, but given the cost of living in Silicon Valley, they are the region’s middle class. In addition, unlike those occupying middle-class positions in the past, Outer Party members work the hours of early industrial workers in the years before the trade union movement fought and won limits on the working week. Well below the Outer Party is the Service Class, whose work lives are defined by the ‘gig economy’. They are the Uber and Lyft drivers, Instacart shoppers, TaskRabbit manual labourers, Amazon delivery workers, and others who barely get by serving those in the privileged castes. Finally, there are the untouchables, the many homeless, often drug-addicted social outcasts, who commit petty crimes to survive. They may sleep in tent cities surrounded by hopeless squalor, in the shadow of unimaginable wealth, unseen by all but the Service Class who eye them warily for fear of slipping and becoming untouchable too. Increasingly the new untouchables are controlled by the constant gaze of the monitoring device embedded everywhere, including in street lights. We are now entrusting the future of urban life to the very

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people who, in addition to creating vast amounts of wealth, have built what amounts to a caste system in the richest part of the richest country in human history. Is this smart?18 The technology companies that would like to run smart cities have also talked a great deal about sustainability and resilience in the face of climate change. Sadly, most of this chatter has not shown up in their choices for the buildings that house their own headquarters. Consider the example of Facebook. As Elizabeth Rush documents in her masterful book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, the company has constructed a 430,000-feet-square campus on what was once tidal wetlands that are today only 1.6 feet above sea level. Sparing no expense, Facebook hired the renowned architect Frank Gehry to design it and paid $200 million to complete the structure. Before construction began, the company dumped 72,500 cubic yards of dirt onto the site to raise it above the base flood line, lifted the first floor, and elevated the entire building onto 10-feet-tall concrete buttresses, in the hopes of protecting the structure from anticipated rising seas and storm surges. Nevertheless, roadways leading to the building, as well as storm pipes and the sewer system, which form the public infrastructure, are the wider community’s responsibility to maintain and repair. These remain at or below sea level and will likely be the first to succumb to the ravages of climate change. The mountains of dirt the company has poured over these lands may indeed cover up short-term climate effects, but what remains reveals a great deal about Facebook’s approach to the environmental challenges the world now faces. As Rush concludes, Silicon Valley and the tech industry and the innovative ethos of San Francisco are twenty-firstcentury versions of the same old get-rich-quick scheme, the same old narrative where the march of

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progress promises to transmute buried rocks into rocket fuel, deserts into cornfields, thin air into capital, stolen swamplands into private property.19 Chapter 6 offers a few alternatives to this ‘same old narrative’.

ENDNOTES 1.  Emily Badger, Google’s founders wanted to shape a city. Toronto is their chance, New York Times, October 18, 2017, https://www. nytimes.com/2017/10/18/upshot/taxibots-sensors-and-self-drivingshuttles-a-glimpse-at-an-internet-city-in-toronto.html 2.  Steve Mannheim, Walt Disney and the quest for community, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. 3.  Karen Weise, Want to see what’s up Amazon’s sleeve? Take a tour of Seattle, New York Times, September 23, 2018, https://www. nytimes.com/2018/09/23/technology/amazon-seattle-testing.html 4.  Hardy Green, The company town, New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010. 5.  Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2009. 6.  Rhomir Yanquilling, Saudi megacity to rival the size of Belgium, Urbanize Hub, March 6, 2018, http://urbanizehub.com/saudimegacity-to-rival-the-size-of-belgium/ 7.  David Streitfeld, Welcome to Zucktown, New York Times, March 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/ facebook-zucktown-willow-village.html 8.  Adora Cheung, New cities, Y, June 27, 2016, https://blog. ycombinator.com/new-cities/ 9.  John Stensholt and Nick Lenaghan, Trouble at the mill: Developer Glenvill sues Amcor over Alphington clean-up, Financial Review, June 19, 2017, https://www.afr.com/real-estate/trouble-at-

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the-mill-developer-glenvill-sues-amcor-over-alphington-cleanup20170616-gwsdjs 10.  David Gelles, Floating cities, no longer science fiction, begin to take shape, New York Times, November 13, 2017, https://www. nytimes.com/2017/11/13/business/dealbook/seasteading-floatingcities.html 11.  Patrick Sisson, An idiot’s guide to futuristic smart cities under development, Curbed, November 17, 2017, https://www.curbed. com/2017/11/17/16670378/smart-city-sidewalk-labs-bill-gates-elonmusk 12.  Gillan Taddun, Bill Gates’ proposed smart city could also be a water-constrained one, Smart Cities Dive, July 13, 2018, https:// www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/bill-gates-proposed-smart-citycould-also-be-a-water-constrained-one/527744/ 13.  Jeremy Wall, Blockchain smart city to be built in Nevada, Invest in Blockchain, November 2, 2018, https://www. investinblockchain.com/blockchain-smart-city-nevada/ 14.  Armand Tabatabai, The economics and trade-offs of ad-funded smart-city tech, TechCrunch, December 1, 2018, https://techcrunch. com/2018/12/01/the-economics-and-tradeoffs-of-ad-funded-smartcity-tech/ 15.  George P. Slefo, Advertising could pay for 5G-enabled smart cities, AdAge, January 11, 2019, https://adage.com/article/ digital/5g-enable-smart-cities-advertising-pay/316213/ 16.  Thomas Fuller, Life on the dirtiest block in San Francisco, New York Times, October 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/10/08/us/san-francisco-dirtiest-street-london-breed.html 17.  Adam Rogers, If you care about cities, Apple’s new campus sucks, Wired, June 6, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/applecampus/ 18.  Antonio García Martínez, How Silicon Valley fuels an informal caste system, Wired, July 9, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ how-silicon-valley-fuels-an-informal-caste-system/ 19.  Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American shore, Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2018, p. 244.

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6 WHO GOVERNS? CITIZENS

We’re building our policies around the need for technological sovereignty, based on free and open software, formats and data, which are technically feasible, economically sustainable and socially fair.1 —The City of Barcelona

What is the city but the people?2 —William Shakespeare

CITIZENS AND PARTICIPATION While citizens have some involvement in both governmentrun and privately run smart cities, their participation is generally passive and minimal. What is called consultation is typically a process of informing residents about smart city plans to better gauge levels of support and opposition. Modifications might take place but rarely are plans entirely derailed. For example, Google’s Sidewalk Labs subsidiary has met with citizen groups in Toronto, ostensibly to consult with 151

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them on plans for the Quayside smart city project. This has enabled the company to understand the opposition better and particularly the pace that would best enable the Google subsidiary to go forward with the minimum of political difficulty. There is no evidence that this process has led the company to modify its plans in any significant way. This is especially the case for key issues such as who will control data, from the valuable intellectual property contained in planning documents to the information the company expects to gather from on-site surveillance. Alternatives to the government- or corporate-directed smart city are rare, with only one location offering a comprehensive citizen focus. And so, this is the shortest chapter in the book. Nevertheless, it may be the most valuable chapter, because it demonstrates that there are alternatives to the two dominant forms of smart city governance. Furthermore, it offers evidence that it is possible to build a smart city that puts democracy, social equality and a genuine commitment to public space at the forefront of urban policy. Citizenship and participation have become buzzwords in the smart city literature. They are increasingly used by advocates and enthusiasts to win support for technical systems. However, in doing so, smart city advocates tend to dilute what it means to promote citizenship. Two critics of this tendency, Paolo Cardullo and Rob Kitchin, refer to it as the ‘neoliberal conception of citizenship’ which, in the smart city context, favors consumption choice and individual autonomy within a framework of constraints that prioritize market-led solutions to urban issues, reinforced through practices of stewardship (for citizens) and civic paternalism (deciding what is best for citizens) enacted by states and companies, rather than being grounded in civil, social and political rights and the common good.3

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They document how IBM and Cisco, pioneers in the business of smart city technologies, have incorporated terms like ‘citizen-focussed’ in their marketing material, as have government funding assistance programmes, like those backed by the EU. To specify this point better and distinguish it from citizenshaped smart city projects, it is useful to revisit a classic article on citizen participation. In 1969, Sherry R. Arnstein’s ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners (now known as the Journal of the American Planning Association) and was widely circulated, especially among those advocates of Jane Jacobs’s approach to urban activism.4 Looking for a practical, applied conceptualisation of Jacobs’s work, urban activists, along with those seeking to expand democracy in all facets of life, contributed to its popularity. The article has been reprinted many times over, including in what is arguably the most popular English-language collection of classic articles on urbanism, The City Reader. Arnstein distinguishes between three types of interaction between citizens and authorities. At the bottom of the ladder is non-participation, which encompasses manipulation at the very bottom and therapy just above it. For Arnstein, ‘Their real objective is not to enable people to participate in planning or conducting programs, but to enable power holders to “educate” or “cure” the participants’. Non-participation is solely a process of providing a bit of information and reassuring those affected that the project will not prove harmful or may even benefit them. The second type of interaction is tokenism, which includes, at the lower rung, informing citizens and moves up to consultation and then placation. When citizens are informed or consulted, they are permitted to hear or even be heard, but they do not have the power to ensure that their views will be followed. According to Arnstein,

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‘there is no follow-through, no “muscle”, hence no assurance of changing the status quo’. Placation simply adds the ability to advise, without any assurance that those in power will heed any of what they hear. The final type of interaction is actual participation, as citizens gain the ability to win a genuine partnership that enables negotiations with trade-offs. At the uppermost rungs of the ladder, citizens are actually delegated specific powers, or, in the most democratic form of participation, they achieve a majority of decision-making power that provides citizens with full managerial control. Arnstein recognised from the start that her conceptual scheme had shortcomings. There is, for example, nothing about roadblocks to participation. Nor is there much about the complex process of co-optation. But her conceptual scheme does provide a nuanced language for questioning the use of words like ‘participation’, all too often casually tossed around by smart city advocates to mistakenly identify what happens when a meeting is called, citizens arrive, are informed about a project and are able to ask questions, only to learn that their ‘participation’ has been largely ritualistic. Most smart city projects led by government and the private sector demonstrate this minimal level of participation. Significantly greater levels of involvement distinguish citizenfocussed efforts to create smart cities.

Barcelona en Comú: Democracy by Design Under the banner of ‘In Common We Can’, Barcelona is the primary exemplar of a smart city in the making, where citizen participation is central and the commitment to public space and open data is firm. While other urban areas have made significant strides in citizen involvement, it is, in fact, the only urban area that has created a comprehensive democratic smart

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city strategy and actually tried to implement it. This should come as no surprise. In an age of nation-states, big corporations and transnational bodies like the EU, it is remarkable to find a city taking charge of a process that has such significant political and economic consequences. In spite of all the roadblocks it has faced, by early 2018, fully 40,000 Barcelona residents had actively contributed their ideas and actions to help build the project. In mass meetings and small groups, in government hearings, union halls, and in the many social movement gatherings that seemingly take place all the time in this politically aware city, people continue to debate the future of democracy and the role of technology. Undoubtedly, the city’s long-standing and often contentious defence of its independent Catalan culture and its support for progressive social movements are helping to drive the approach. Notwithstanding these unique features, the city provides the best model for how to create an alternative to the centralised-state- or private-­ sector-run smart city. Barcelona is at the forefront of a global movement of cities known as municipalism, the slightly awkward name for the view that, especially in the current political climate, cities represent the only alternative to neo-liberalism globally and right-wing populism nationally. For the leaders of Barcelona, cities represent the only organised hope for democracy, community and open governance. Established in 2014, ‘Barcelona en Comú’ is identified as the platform from which the city makes policy. As its mayor and former Occupy activist Ada Colau put it in a 2018 interview: Public space is the place, par excellence, for democracy: this space that belongs to all of us. Therefore, this is also the space of the most vulnerable people, which is what democratic systems should prioritise: the people who have

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fewer opportunities. If you have little private space, you have more public space and public services – libraries, beaches, parks. It is the space to meet with others, but also it’s a space where you can be who you want to be – this is the space for freedom. And, therefore, it is a space where you can build up the city with others. So, from that point of view, the more public space there is, and the better its quality, the better the quality of the democracy.5 To demonstrate this commitment to the most vulnerable, soon after taking office, the mayor initiated a series of measures to stop rampant evictions and expand social housing, renewing almost 600 houses left empty by big banks. It also imposed regulations on Airbnb and other short-term rental companies that had contributed significantly to skyrocketing increases in housing prices and in rents. In the face of such problems, many cities immediately turn to the private sector and spend large sums on infrastructure improvements whose benefits are often difficult to assess. By contrast, the government of Barcelona sought to retake control over the governance of infrastructure, including utilities like water and electricity that impoverished citizens were increasingly unable to afford. With strong pressure from its people, the government of Barcelona chose to renew its infrastructure with affordable housing, low-cost utilities and universal access to the means of communication. With its commitment to the fullest possible public participation in civic life, Barcelona distinguishes itself among smart cities by putting citizenship first, ahead of technology. However, within the context of building a democratic city, Barcelona recognises that technology plays a strong role. The city has named a Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer, who has called the task of bringing together

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democracy and technology ‘the political challenge of the century’. Again, it is worth noting that the city’s chief IT officer sees technology as primarily a political challenge because, as she puts it, the smart city ‘is not just about building gadgets and new technology’. Instead, smart city projects must ‘deliver a more sustainable economic system’.6 The official, Francesca Bria, lives up to her commitment to free and open data by widely sharing Barcelona’s position with anyone who will listen. Her government has partnered with numerous cities that, while generally not as thoroughly sold on the idea of digital democracy, are nevertheless willing to exchange ideas about programmes and policies. So far these have included New York, Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow and Dubai, each of which has added to a rich dialogue on the politics of information technology. According to Bria, ‘We want to move from a model of surveillance capitalism, where data is opaque and not transparent, to a model where citizens themselves can own the data’.7 These principles are given practical substance in the city’s policies and practices, including reducing what it calls ‘the oligarchy of technology providers’, by refusing deals that might lock the city into long-term dependencies on large companies like IBM, Cisco and Siemens.8 The result is a more open digital marketplace for smaller providers of technology and services – a particularly important accomplishment for a country where 90% of businesses are small or medium-sized. Barcelona alone has over 12,000 companies in its technology industry and the city’s active and aggressive support for local business, gives them a leg up in the public procurement process. ‘We are introducing clauses into contracts, like data sovereignty and public ownership of data’, says Bria.9 To illustrate her city’s ability to change corporate policy further, she cites the example of Barcelona’s big contract with the telecommunications giant Vodafone. At the city’s insistence, the

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company no longer controls data on customers and usage. Rather, it is required to deliver data in machine-readable form to City Hall every month. This is backed by an equally strong commitment to data sovereignty, which means that every contract must follow the principle that data gathered on citizens in the course of rolling out new smart city services belongs to citizens and must be kept in trust by their representatives. This often puts a strain on negotiations with private sector providers, but it is important enough to the city that officials willingly turn down low bidders and those who promise flashier or more efficient products and services because the city insists on retaining control over data. In order to boost public sector capabilities in information technology, Barcelona has pioneered with the creation of a Municipal Institute of Information Technology, which trains cadres of specialists to develop and oversee the application of digital services that conform to the city’s commitment to building a citizen-led commons that makes effective use of technology. The Institute is part of another innovative agency, Barcelona’s Municipal Data Office whose four-person staff is responsible for managing and analysing the city’s vast stores of data and for developing algorithms to guide decision-making, where appropriate. Barcelona has also established a firm policy target that reserves 70% of its investment in new software to vendors who provide it on an open-source and open-licence basis. Since large multinational technology firms tend to avoid such conditions, this amounts to support for local companies. In addition, the city plans to solidify the network of cities in the Catalan region by sharing code with other regional authorities. Finally, Barcelona is committed to managing and distributing city data through an Open Data Portal, which will safeguard security, privacy and the digital rights of citizens as established through the EU’s new data protection regulations.

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This is backed up by a code of ethics promoting encryption and data sovereignty for citizens.10 In effect, these are all experiments in creating democracy by design. As if to demonstrate that democracy by design is far from a rejection of technology, Barcelona has made extensive use of Next Internet systems. Here are some examples: • Smart street lighting, which adjusts intensity based on the proximity of pedestrians. Sensors collect air quality data and provide access points for the city’s free Wi-Fi programme. Personal data is not collected. Unlike in other cities, lamp-posts are not used to identify and move homeless people. • Park irrigation systems sense and control water distribution to public parks and fountains. Two-thirds of all parks are already equipped, and water conservation has increased by 25%. • A driverless citywide public transit line runs for 30 kilometres with 23 stations. Safety has improved and the service is more efficient because the system can automatically adjust to passenger demand. • Smart parking spaces let drivers know about the availability of spaces in each location. Nevertheless, the city limits the overall number of parking permits to reduce emissions. • Digital bus transit stations feature tablet screens at each stop that offer tourist tips, bus arrival times and tools for navigating the city via public transit. Each station also offers free Wi-Fi and USB charging stations. Bus stops also provide information about the citywide bike-share programme. • Noise sensors located in major gathering places, like the Plaza del Sol, limit excessive late-night noise. Sensors alert

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police when crowd noise gets too much for local residents in time for people to be moved to another area before things get out of hand.11 There is no guarantee that all or even part of Barcelona’s ambitious, citizen-focussed, smart city agenda is sustainable in the long run. Democracy appears to be in retreat throughout the world. Nevertheless, at the very least, it serves as an important alternative to government- and private-sector-driven models for how to create a smart city. It also provides an example of how one city can serve as a focal point for progressive policies.

Amsterdam: DECODE and FairBnB No other cities have gone as far as Barcelona in democratising urban governance and technology. However, some have matched it or gone even further in specific areas. These provide additional exemplars for citizen-focussed approaches to smart city development. Amsterdam has embraced smart city aspirations for over a decade, beginning with the appointment of a Chief Technology Office and the establishment, with a $50 million grant, of the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, a think-tank resulting from a 2013 design competition initiated by the city. Building on an early inventory of 12,000 datasets across 32 city departments, Amsterdam was able to create a comprehensive data management system to coordinate transportation, energy use, housing, communication and other key urban functions. Amsterdam has also joined Barcelona in the EU-funded DECODE project, that deploys a data strategy devolving ownership and control to citizens while protecting the right to privacy. Citizens, social entrepreneurs, hackers and privacy

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researchers are involved in creating the data system which, once it is completed, will enable users, through city-­sponsored workshops, to build software and applications from a platform that aims to meet the genuine needs of citizens without compromising privacy. Amsterdam has pioneered in the development of FairBnB, a citizen-based alternative to Airbnb and other short-term rental companies based solely on a for-profit model. Specifically, it responds to the growth of short-term rental apartments in Amsterdam, which many believe has undermined communities by pushing up prices and increasing the transient population. Because of Airbnb’s intransigence about providing data to regulatory authorities and citizens, Amsterdam residents concluded that the only way to combat the excesses of short-term, market-based rental platforms was to create a public system based on a fair economic model subject to strong regulatory control.12

Ouishare Paris Social movement organisations within cities are increasingly turning to sharing economy networks to produce and distribute services outside of the orbit of transnational business. These are not to be confused with Airbnb, Uber and other platform-based commercial organisations that make use of the term ‘sharing’ as a means to brand the quest for profit better. One example is Ouishare (https://www.ouishare. net/), which operates in cities across Europe, Latin and North America and the Middle East, to connect people interested in pursuing democratic, decentralised governance and collaborative practices in urban areas. Its branch in Paris, where the organisation was founded, has helped to launch the Data­Cités project, which brings together urban activists who believe

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that data is a resource of the commons and not a business commodity. Their goal is to develop new models for delivering basic energy, transportation and waste removal services using shared data. The objective is to create a smart city by starting with a data commons, and not with technologies and services provided on a commercial basis by big technology firms.

Sharing Ser vices in Seoul With some of the highest rates of information technology penetration and use in the world, the capital of Korea has enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a paramount digital city. Nevertheless, it has not been recognised among the leading smart cities because there has been nothing especially distinctive about its approach to urban technology and democratic governance. This began to change in 2012, when the city government initiated Sharing City Seoul, a programme to support new shared services that might empower citizens, reduce waste, address social and environmental problems, and expand economic opportunities.13 Drawing on its stateof-the-art digital networks, the city is promoting car sharing, room sharing, book sharing and 60 or so additional citizen participation projects. All of this sounds positive for building a citizen-focussed community, but critics are increasingly concerned about the city’s commitment to using blockchain technology to manage many of the city’s new services. The major public services that will adopt blockchain include welfare, vehicle history management, the issuance of certifications, donation management and even voting. The critics worry that, in the rush to appear tech-savvy, government authorities are deploying systems of dubious value and potential danger.14

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Nevertheless, Seoul’s citizens have demonstrated a remarkable ability to balance the strong commitment to new technology, including for smart cities, with local movements to create innovative spaces largely free from technology. A good example is the Samcheong Forest Library located in the outskirts of Seoul. Citizens in the area wanted to do something innovative that did not require investment in or even the use of digital technology. Believing that gadgets already filled too much of their lives, they came together, formed a co-operative and built their own library in a forested park. In addition to its selection of books, the library contains a café and a small patio. While classical music plays in the background, locals sit on window benches, read, munch on a dessert, or watch the trees, enjoying an example of a citizen-led innovation that does not require dependence on technology. Instead, it frees them from the burdens of an always-online life.15

SMART CITY GOVERNANCE AND THE INEVITABILITY OF CLIMATE CHANGE These last three chapters have provided a broad overview of smart city projects around the world, viewing them through the lens of governance. Much of what gets written about smart cities concentrates on the Next Internet systems that make it possible to monitor practically everything and everybody within their boundaries. That is understandable, because these technologies are powerful and provide an opportunity to brand an old institution, the city, with the newest of the new in the digital world. Nevertheless, this focus begs the question of what technologies are chosen, for what purpose and to whose benefit. These are the age-old questions of governance that remain central to the future of urban life. It matters greatly whether states create smart cities as extensions

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of government, corporations construct them as extensions of market power, or citizens drive their development as a means to build democracy and equality. Notwithstanding the breathless prose that conjures visions of technological utopias and a digital sublime, smart cities, like cities throughout history, are messy, contested terrains on which competing forces vie for power because the outcome of these contests, including the resulting balance of power, matters greatly. In those cases where reports on smart cities pay some attention to the governance implications, their focus tends to stay within the bounds of the city itself and the balance of forces that create policy in the city. They rarely zoom out to make connections that address how global and regional forces shape smart city development. For example, the power of neo-liberal capitalism and the transnational businesses that have benefited from its policies have promoted the growth of private smart cities. That is primarily because what came to be called globalisation, or the spread of unregulated markets worldwide, has enabled companies like Google and Facebook to grow without the oversight that their predecessors in the communication business once faced. At the heart of neo-­ liberalism is the removal of regulations, and the commodification of more goods and services (especially, in recent years, intellectual property), and the expansion of trade across national boundaries. For example, the tax code in Canada once made it impossible for foreign newspapers to operate profitably, national regulations severely restricted the operation of foreign telecommunications firms, and strong data protection laws limited the power of foreign information technology companies. This enabled Canada to exercise some control over its national cultural, media and information technology services. It also protected national companies and those they employed. Neo-liberalism has not only reduced the protection of national firms. Under its banner, and with the

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support of Canadian governments at every level, Google can now occupy one of the richest pieces of real estate in Canada’s richest city and control practically all of the technology, software, applications and data on the site it is developing. Neoliberalism facilitates the expansion of certain kinds of smart cities, particularly those that reserve the bulk of control to private companies driven to commodify whatever they can. Not all businesses find complete private control to be in their best interests, because there are social costs to urban governance that can cut into revenue streams. These include the expense of building and maintaining infrastructure, providing services such as education, health care, and policing, and addressing the conflicts that every community has to manage. Companies generally prefer to rely on the state to socialise these costs and to keep wealth generation private. As a result, we find the range of state-directed smart cities that, in the context of neo-liberalism, practise what has been called private Keynesianism, or policies that use tax revenues to make cities profitable enterprises for corporations. Although state-corporate tensions have sharpened in recent years, particularly with the rise of nationalist attacks on the global trading system, the opportunities to socialise the costs of private power are growing because they provide common ground for both neo-liberals and nationalists. Seen in this context, Barcelona and the examples from other cities are therefore not just alternatives to dominant smart city formations. They represent resistance at the municipal level to significant tendencies in the global political economy. Among smart cities, Barcelona is far and away the leader in citizen-centred governance. But its governance falls short, as do almost all of the other smart city projects, when it comes to climate change. Promoted in part for the ability of sensors to provide real-time information on energy use and climate monitoring, smart city technologies barely make a

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ripple to counter the waves of climate disruption approaching the world. In fact, smart city advocates rationalise coastal projects and flood-plain locations with unjustified claims that smart city technologies will protect them. The time for smart city advocates and their critics to take climate change seriously is long overdue. Of the many smart city projects, whatever the mix of technologies and forms of governance, the only one that stands out for taking climate change seriously is under development by the Government of Norway and the City of Oslo. This should come as no surprise because the city has been a pioneer in urban innovation. For example, having banned vehicles from the city centre in 2019, Oslo became one of the most pedestrian-friendly cities in the world. Now, it is focussing an innovative eye on creating a new city that it hopes will be a model for climate change resilience. Located near the city’s airport with which it will have a close connection, Oslo Airport City (OAC) is a built-from-scratch community that is scheduled to begin construction in 2019, although the 260-acre site will not be fully operational until 2022. When it is ready for use, the new city will contain 11 million square feet of new buildings. Airports do not typically conjure thoughts of how to fight climate change, but that may be one reason to build OAC. For if an airport city can do it, then why not any city? OAC is to run entirely on the renewable energy that the city itself produces, making it the first energy-positive airport city. Excess capacity will be sold to other cities and used at the airport to de-ice planes, thereby cutting down on the airport’s fuel usage. The city’s downtown will be completely car-free, and most locations will be a walk away or easily accessible by public transit. In fact, only electric vehicles will be allowed within OAC. Bicycle paths will course through the entire city, as will public parks, and mass transit. The plan also calls for the full range of green smart city technologies – autonomous

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vehicles, smart lighting for streets and offices and smart security. There are many details to be worked out and, certainly, the balance between reliance on technology and the need to e­ nable the city to grow organically bears close scrutiny. But with ­climate change approaching most of the world, it is encouraging to witness a realistic plan for an energy-positive city.16 So far, we have looked at the material constitution of smart cities by concentrating on the technologies and forms of governance that distinguish them. But these are far from providing a complete picture. Not only do cities exist in hardware, software, apps and politics, they also live in discourse, in the stories, myths, marketing and branding that fill the urban imaginary. Chapter 7 addresses what these are and explains their significance.

ENDNOTES 1.  City of Barcelona, Barcelona digital government: Open, agile and participatory, October 19, 2017, https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/digital/ en/blog/barcelona-digital-government-open-agile-and-participatory 2.  William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act III, Scene I. 3.  Paulo Cardullo and Rob Kitchin, Smart urbanism and smart citizenship: The neoliberal logic of ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities in Europe, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, March 9, 2018, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/xugb5 4.  Sherry R. Arnstein, A ladder of citizen participation, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), pp. 216–224, July 1969. 5.  Marsha Gessen, Barcelona’s experiment in radical democracy, The New Yorker, August 6, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/ news/our-columnists/barcelonas-experiment-in-radical-democracy 6.  Michael Carroll, Barcelona reflects on smart city lessons, Mobile World Live, March 20, 2018, https://www.mobileworldlive.com/ featured-content/home-banner/smart-cities-cannot-rely-on-technologyalone/

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7.  Thomas Graham, Barcelona is leading the fightback against smart city surveillance, Wired, May 18, 2018, https://www.wired. co.uk/article/barcelona-decidim-ada-colau-francesca-bria-decode 8.  City of Barcelona, Barcelona digital government: Open, agile and participatory, October 19, 2017, https://ajuntament.barcelona. cat/digital/en/blog/barcelona-digital-government-open-agile-andparticipatory 9.  Thomas Graham, Barcelona is leading the fightback against smart city surveillance, Wired, May 18, 2018, https://www.wired. co.uk/article/barcelona-decidim-ada-colau-francesca-bria-decode 10.  City of Barcelona, Barcelona digital government: Open, agile and participatory, October 19, 2017, https://ajuntament.barcelona. cat/digital/en/blog/barcelona-digital-government-open-agile-andparticipatory 11.  George Ogleby, 7 ways that Barcelona is leading the smart city revolution, Edie.net, December 12, 2018, https://www.edie.net/news/7/ Seven-ways-that-Barcelona-is-leading-the-smart-city-revolution/ 12.  David W. Smith, Amsterdam leads fight against data surveillance capitalism, Eureka, May 22, 2018, https://eureka. eu.com/gdpr/amsterdam-surveillance/ 13.  Seoul Metropolitan Government, The “Sharing City Seoul” project, http://english.seoul.go.kr/policy-information/key-policies/ city-initiatives/1-sharing-city/ 14.  Wolfie Zhao, Seoul mayor plans $100 million fund to build blockchain smart city, Coindesk, October 8, 2018, https://www. coindesk.com/seoul-mayor-plans-100-million-fund-to-buildblockchain-smart-city 15.  David Sax, End the innovation obsession, New York Times, December 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opinion/ sunday/end-the-innovation-obsession.html 16.  Chelsea Gohd, Norway plans a sustainable “City of the Future,” Futurism, March 16, 2018, https://futurism.com/norway-sustainablecity-future

7 THE URBAN IMAGINARY: MYTHS AND MARKETS

In today’s modern urban context, we appear to be constantly bombarded with a wide range of new city discourses like smart, intelligent, innovative, wired, digital, creative, and cultural, which often link together technological informational transformations with economic, political and socio-cultural change.1 —Robert G. Hollands

Call it a sign of the times: At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, there are more vendors listed as selling ‘smart cities’ technologies than gaming products or drones.2 —Laura Bliss

I suspect that we are also witnessing the classic attitudes of any period in which the proponents of change have seen themselves as apocalyptic messengers with the mandate to convert.3 —Ada Louise Huxtable 169

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THE MACHINE IN THE GARDEN In the tradition of nineteenth century romantics who had experienced the effects of the factory system in England, Ebenezer Howard once called his country’s industrial cities ‘ulcers on the very face of our beautiful island’.4 It seemed a hopeless task to think that it would be possible to restore the human relationship to nature, as Leo Marx put it, once people put ‘the machine in the garden’.5 An unassuming stenographer, Howard spent his free time working on plans to achieve that restoration, specifically to cleansing his homeland by creating garden cities. If he were to succeed, England, and perhaps the rest of the world, would be filled with planned communities that separated homes, parkland, factories and farms into distinct areas. Those determined to require institutional care, for whatever reason, would be sequestered at a distance from each of these areas. Growth would be contained, a population of 30,000 was considered ideal, and this would give England both its cities and its gardens too. Howard may have been ‘a heroic simpleton’, as George Bernard Shaw once called him, but he was enormously successful in changing urban discourse and transforming the imaginary of the ‘dark Satanic Mills’, as William Blake famously characterised the Industrial Revolution, into a bright and beautiful garden city.6 Howard’s garden city of the nineteenth century became the English new town of the twentieth century and gave birth to the modern suburbs. Cities are not just a mix of material structures, technologies and people. They also live in the imagination, as metaphors and myths that fill stories about communities and that also power the marketing campaigns that sell them. In her touching essay ‘Goodbye to All That’, Joan Didion captured the precise spirit of the urban imaginary in her send-off to New York, which was, for her,

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no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of ‘living’ there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu.7 This chapter examines the urban imaginary through a series of discourses, myths and dreams about what the city might become. These include Howard’s garden city, the modernist vision of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, along with its monumentalist, Brutalist, and neo-baroque or postmodern variations. In reaction to these examples of modernism, Jane Jacobs gave us the organic city, which turned two centuries of urban planning on its head. Finally, there are the creative city, nowhere better described and mythologised than in the work of Richard Florida, and today’s smart city. There are others, but these are particularly good exemplars of the urban sublime. As myths, they fill stories about places whose buildings, streets, attractions and people, come alive in the retelling. As embodiments of the sublime, cities become larger than life and language, a means to overcome the banality of everyday life that is both transcendent and terrifying. They are also marketing tools, the discursive raw material to sell cities to actual and potential residents, workers and visitors. A life in discourse gives cities a power beyond their wealth or political power, in part, because they provide the world’s marketing machine with the tools to sell technologies, real estate, tourism, a career and, most importantly, the good life. This is especially the case when discourse is successfully aestheticised. In fact, all advertising is essentially aestheticised myth, a story turned into an appealing form. As myths, the garden city, the Radiant City, the organic city, the creative city and now the smart city, are assessed and valued not for

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how accurately they reflect a specific city but in their believability. How well do they convince people to make them the leading urban ideal? Myths rise or fall not because they are right or wrong but because they are living or dead. Belief, not scientific veracity, gives them life and it is typically only a new, more convincing or more effectively aestheticised myth that can replace them. These urban exemplars, including the smart city, come alive in the imaginary and give rise to new forms of materiality such as the ‘new towns’ that arose out of the vision of the garden city. In essence the material structures that form cities and the discourses that imagine them are interdependent. They exist in a dialectical relationship, giving rise to one another until tensions and contradictions in both material and discursive life create the conditions for new discourses and new forms of materiality. Howard’s ideas arose out of the growing utopianism embodied in both the movements and the literature of his time. In response to the ravages of the Industrial Revolution, communities sprang up across England and the United States to demonstrate that another way of living was possible for the burgeoning working and middle classes. Robert Owen and his followers brought utopian socialism to a string of communities across England and the United States. Some believed that a return to agrarianism was the only solution to urban ills, while others, influenced by Marxian ideas, believed that the working class could take back the streets and seize control of their factories and cities. Howard closely followed these movements and the visionary literature that mapped out a utopian future. These included especially Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, one of the most popular books of its time, which envisioned a planned utopian socialist society that would give the masses the power that Owenites, Fabian socialists and Marxists had fought for and failed to achieve.

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Among the very few writers more popular and successful than Bellamy was Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty was second only to the Bible in sales through the 1890s. The great urban reformer, Jacob Riis, dates the start of the progressive era with the publication of this book and no less than Albert Einstein penned the blurb of a lifetime: ‘One cannot imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form and fervent love of justice’.8 For Ebenezer Howard, George’s political economy was a call for planning, especially land-use planning, and for government intervention, particularly through a land tax to better distribute the results of growing land values resulting from technological enhancements. We should throw away ideas about laissezfaire and free markets, George insisted. For Howard, it meant that all economic arrangements were human creations and the key to a beneficent future was planning for the benefit of all. A better world, perhaps even utopia, was possible. Howard’s vision lives on in the detailed planning diagrams contained in his book, To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform, published in 1898 and reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow. This work occupies a central place in the literature of the urban sublime. I choose the term ‘sublime’ carefully because, following Edmund Burke and others who provided the classical conception of the sublime, the term references an aesthetic of transcendence that is both supremely attractive and utterly repugnant. As Burke described it, the sublime is nothing like the beautiful and rather more like what it means to be awful, that is, both inspirational and fearsome. Howard’s vision is sublime because it has one foot in Arcadia and another in eugenics. The positive, utopian, or Arcadian qualities are fairly obvious. In precise circular diagrams of what he called ‘slumless, smokeless cities’, Howard mapped places with ample green space, including parks, forests and farms. They describe places that are unmistakably

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very d ­ ifferent from cities left to the mercies of unfettered industrialisation and the unchecked marketplace. On the other hand, they also contain spaces set aside to sequester the homeless, the blind, the deaf, epileptics and the mentally ill, leading to concerns that urban planning was tainted with ideas from the eugenics movement, which was very popular at the time. Although Howard himself did not use the term eugenics, leading figures in the eugenics movement, including members of the German garden cities association, viewed controlled breeding as an integral part of city planning. An article in the journal Planning Perspectives captured the connection: The exploitation of town planning and architecture for the objectives of race hygiene is decades older than the Third Reich. The idea of selective human breeding, propagated by Galton, Ploetz and others, appeared in one of Ebenezer Howard’s diagrams of 1898, then more explicitly in the German garden cities organisation, where around 1910 the leading German eugenicists were members of the board.9 Howard’s version of the urban sublime came under particularly sharp attack from Jane Jacobs, who was not shy in her criticism of practically all forms of a priori planning. Jacobs reserved especially blunt language for the garden cities movement in her magisterial book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Not going as far as other critics who directly referenced the connection between Howard’s vision and eugenics, Jacobs took sharp issue with the paternalistic nature of the project which was, in her view, more than a plan for a new physical space. It called for a new top-down political and economic order that bore a close resemblance to American company towns. For Jacobs, the biggest deficiency in Howard’s proposal is one that is shared by all visions of

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perfect societies: ‘As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge’.10 Societies, as her life’s work documented, do not work this way. People, including the working class of old industrial societies, will make their own plans for their lives and for their cities. No planned suburb remains for long as its planners intended. The garden city was not only undemocratic; it was unachievable. Although she never put it this way, I think it is fair to say that Jacobs believed that people make cities, if not necessarily under conditions of their own making. In spite of the criticism, like many visions of the sublime, the idea of the garden city lives on, as an alternative to the industrial city and a solution to urban ills. It continues to resonate in both the stories we tell each other, as myth, and in the material spaces that bring together homes and gardens in suburban developments. It is aestheticised over and over again in images about making a home in an idyllic garden. Although only two communities in England bear Howard’s direct influence, he gave life to an idea that carries on in the suburbs and more distant exurbs that continue to attract people looking for green lawns, a bit of forest, a preplanned community and a taste of the urban sublime.

THE TOWER IN THE PARK To look at them in design drawings, nothing would appear more different than Ebenezer Howard’s circular patch of familiar nature, dotted with places for everyone, and the modernist Radiant City of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, more widely known as the architect and urban planner Le Corbusier. Imagine, as he did in the 1930s, razing the city of Paris, as we still know it today, and building giant towers from west to east, each one set in expansive parkland. With mathematical

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precision, blight disappears, along with centuries of history and his towers in the park become a Radiant City. Despite the apparent differences, these two modernist visions do share major attributes. In both cases, what came before is assumed to be inherently inferior to what they would build. Admittedly, removing woodlands and meadows to make way for Howard’s garden city evokes less shock than bulldozing the City of Light for modernist towers cutting across the heart of the city. Yet, both operated on the assumption that new plans, imposed from above, are inherently superior to what they replace. There is also a similarity in their approach to the relationship of humans to nature. Notwithstanding extreme differences in the shape and size of the structures that fill their designs, each surrounds his creation with green space. The reaction to the Industrial Revolution loomed over both and proposals for cities that might bring the machine and the garden together in harmony very much mattered. Neatness, stability and order imposed by a singular authority to bring people and nature together inspired both the humble stenographer and the brash polymath. Howard might never state openly, as did Le Corbusier, that ‘a house is a machine for living in’, but his mechanistic plans spoke for themselves.11 It is, in fact, only a few short steps from their vision of the machine in the garden to the smart city where the garden becomes the machine. The career of New York City’s master builder Robert Moses (sarcastically dubbed in The New York Review of Books by the writer and critic Gore Vidal as the ‘Emperor of Concrete’) embodies the unity of the garden and Radiant cities.12 In a move reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s plan for Paris, Moses famously planned to cut a wide swathe across Lower Manhattan for a major highway linking New Jersey in the west to Brooklyn and Long Island in the east. It took a social movement to stop this project. But it turned out to be one of

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Moses’s few failures as he used his political clout to bulldoze successfully through New York City and State, building highrise after high-rise and paving highway after highway. But that was only one half of Moses’s vision. He also sought to become the king of the garden with low-rise suburban developments, set in parkland locations and connected by treelined parkways, no highways, reserved for cars only. Robert Moses distilled the essence of the garden city-Radiant City ideal: top-down planning from a central authority figure who treated urban design as a fixed entity that would realise a greater good, and that could only be tainted, if not completely destroyed, by consultation with citizens. Moses was the surgeon operating on sick cities that required painful medication and sometimes amputation to survive. The Radiant City arrived after the automobile began to reshape transportation and when population densities grew beyond the capacities of nineteenth century urban infrastructure. The skyscraper seemed more appropriate to the needs of the twentieth century. Le Corbusier’s original design left numerous open spaces among the towers that radiated out from the city centre. These would conduct traffic flows, supporting motor transport, bicycles and pedestrians who would presumably enjoy the densely treed boulevards. The vision of massively tall structures, set like giants in vast open spaces, gave the Radiant City a sublime quality, alluring in its otherworldliness and terrifying all the same. It was functional, but also built on a scale that easily evoked shock and awe. A few cities applied the grand boulevard concept, but many did not because developers preferred to generate maximum value from their land. One variation brought the Robert Moses touch to Le Corbusier’s vision. New York’s Stuyvesant Town was an assemblage of 110 buildings with 11,250 apartments set in as much parkland as Manhattan could provide. Originally serving as middle-income housing, Stuy Town, as it

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was called, now provides market-rate housing to economically privileged Manhattanites. Similar designs, but with taller buildings and less park space, became the model for public housing in New York and across the Western world, with few positive consequences. The Radiant City came in several subsequent types, including the monumental, the Brutalist and the neo-baroque. These urban visions are often viewed separately from the one Le Corbusier imagined because they admittedly contain their own distinctive qualities. I prefer to see them as adaptations of the Radiant City ideal because they share enough modernist principles, especially the view that cities are blank slates for great architects and their benefactors to make grand aesthetic statements that should supersede what others, including urban residents, may want or need. The monumental city has been prominent in national capitals and in some older commercial centres where tall structures and accompanying statuary and ornamentality celebrate the power of the state and commerce, such as in Washington, D.C. and Brasilia. These tend to incorporate much of the grand boulevard and green space design of the original Radiant City, partly to call attention to the virtue, historical significance and generosity of the state and its commercial partners. Indeed, one of the very first genuine skyscrapers, the Woolworth Building in New York, was a monument to capitalism, and to this day is referred to as the Cathedral of Commerce. The monumental city maintained that displays of power did not have to sacrifice artistry and craftsmanship or even a bit of frivolity. Nevertheless, its large open spaces made mass surveillance easier, diminishing the likelihood that popular uprisings could succeed at taking to the barricades. Another variation, with the less-than-pleasant title of Brutalism, was all business – whether public or commercial. These are the concrete structures that fill cities like Moscow, live on

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in the apartment blocks of Shanghai, and in the Government Center in Boston. Brutalism staked a claim to honesty and the simple, if stark, representation of the world as it is. One strand of the approach positioned itself as an unquestionable embodiment of power; another had a more social democratic inclination that celebrated equality and affordability. Brutalism insists that there is no need for ornament or artistry because they provide a false beauty that covers the reality of power or the need to be careful to spend scarce resources only on meeting the material needs of the masses. In the 1980s and 1990s, the city of Brutalism gave way to a neo-baroque or postmodern variation of the Radiant City ideal. Some might see this as a controversial conclusion because the postmodern turn in architecture and urban design is often viewed as a critical response and an alternative to the formality and functionality of Le Corbusier’s modernist ideal. There is some substance to the view that the artistic genuflections to history and the less-than-functional ornamentation are acts of rebellion. If so, they are rather weak gestures. Aesthetics have politics and when it comes to modern and postmodern design, the similarities outweigh the differences. As one of the greatest architecture critics of the twentieth (or any other) century, Ada Louise Huxtable, explained about postmodernism in her 1981 classic ‘Is Modern Architecture Dead?’: I see it as a much broadened phase of modernism – not as the undoing of modernism. I do not like the phrase post-modernism because it implies that something has been finished and replaced. I do not see this as counterrevolution, but as part of a linked, continuous development.…13 Postmodern design has given us buildings with the appearance of complexity, fragmentation, asymmetry and humour (think of Frank Gehry’s crumpled paper look). There is also

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often more than just a wink to historical forms that modernists thought had long been discarded. That said, most of what passes for the postmodern vision is more like Philip Johnson’s AT&T building in New York City, whose Chippendalestyle ornamentation at the top and seven-storey-high arched entranceway won it landmark status in 2018. One can find its clones all over the world including in Shanghai where it seems that every other high-rise has its own reference to Chinese history or myth set atop the standard modernist building. Aside from the ornamentation and, in some cases, a more expansive lobby, there is not much difference between the typical postmodern building and its modernist counterpart. Most are built for corporate offices or luxury housing. Moreover, expansive lobbies primarily serve to enhance surveillance and security. In some cases, for example in the original AT&T building, which was purchased by another communication giant, Sony, and its neighbouring IBM headquarters building, large lobbies provide for that contemporary anomaly: the private public space. Whether formally defined as modernist or postmodernist, these buildings have space set aside, which remains the private property of their owners, for the general public to use as part of a municipal programme that permits such companies to build taller than zoning laws permit. This results in more office space from which to secure rents. In return for receiving permission to create structures that soar through zoning limits, owners agree to set aside enclosed open spaces at the base for the general public. I have spent considerable time observing such spaces and I cannot say they resemble the public places most people know. Private companies continue to own and maintain them. In addition to surveillance cameras, there are numerous private security guards patrolling the area. Moreover, signs posted on walls and tables list a host of restrictions including bans on people carrying large packages, a standard means of keeping out the homeless.

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Years ago, the intellectual historian Russell Jacoby wrote about another postmodernist icon, the Hotel Bonaventure in Los Angeles, whose much admired multi-storey lobby masked the curious absence of a clearly marked front door. As Jacoby explained, in words that chastised those who praised the open, airy quality of architecture, intimating that it was more democratic, the postmodern aesthetic contained a deeper political purpose. By making the hotel garage the main entrance, only those who belonged in the hotel would easily gain entrance and those who did not, mainly the poor and the homeless, could easily be kept out of the building and its seemingly open lobby.14 The playful and airy qualities of postmodern design offer one side of a sublime vision whose obverse is an unabashed authoritarianism. This should come as no surprise to those familiar with the life of one of the movement’s leading figures, the designer of the original AT&T building Philip Johnson, whose years of support for Hitler’s Germany, and outright disdain for all architecture with a social purpose, is well documented.15 Imaginaries are often recycled in whole or in part to reflect, reinforce and influence how the world is seen and how it is built. One ought not to be surprised when the recycling process returns to fashion, even when it involves a bad boy of the modernist tradition: Brutalism. In your face and unornamented, Brutalism is making a comeback especially in Eastern Europe, but elsewhere as well, as if to knowingly signal that we live in an impoverished world where the ornamentation, irony and playfulness of postmodern design mocks the austerity and inequality that many now face. Remarkably, Brutalism now attracts a younger generation as explained in an interview with a long-time resident in one of Poland’s icons of the genre: for all the faults of Communist housing, the spaces were actually better thought-out, and in many

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ways more livable, than the suburban sprawl that members of his generation had sought. The housing estates were self-contained units that included schools, grocery stores, hair salons and a range of other conveniences. He talked of an emerging communist chic that was rejuvenating the reputation of these buildings.16

THE URBAN DANCE: EYES ON THE STREET In its many different forms, including monumental, Brutalist, and neo-baroque or postmodern design, the Radiant City lives on, particularly when compared to the organic city. The organic city occupies a very different place in the urban imaginary from the modernism designed into the garden and Radiant cities. I call it organic because it envisions a city that grows organically from its roots in how the mass of urbanites actually use cities. It is most closely associated with Jane Jacobs, who saw both the garden and the Radiant imaginaries as modernist deviations from the proper way to think about and build cities. Her major book The Death and Life of Great American Cities decisively breaks with a century of takenfor-granted ideas about imagining, planning and developing cities. The city, which had been defined as a thing, such as a garden or a tower, would now be viewed as a process encompassing the social relationships that make up a complex order. ‘Under the seeming disorder of the old city’, Jacobs writes, wherever the old city is working successfully is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes.

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The order is all composed of movement and change, … we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance – not to a simpleminded precision dance … but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce one another and compose an orderly whole.17 She goes on to describe a day in the life of this ballet as witnessed from her apartment in the West Village neighbourhood of Manhattan. The urban dance begins with her routine of putting out the garbage in the morning and watching kids skip off to school and it ends with the night ballet of graveyard shift workers picking up a salami and a bottle of milk at the deli as a crowd gathers around a random musician practising tunes down the street. In the organic city imaginary, urban life is built from a million different moments like these, not from centralised planning that puts houses in gardens and towers in parks. What makes it organic is that, with a minimum of advanced organisation, the random interactions of people, structures and the natural environment produce growth. Modernist planners only get in the way of such organic development because, believing they are certain about what cities need, they impose plans, rules and structures on people and their communities. Cities do not need modernist planners, Jacobs concluded; they need diversity in the people who come together on its sidewalks, in the structures that look out on those sidewalks, and in the uses to which those structures are put. Human diversity means a community that is used by its people, with eyes on the street, throughout the day and night. Some are at home during the day; others at night. Some work along the street, giving people reason to wander the sidewalks, thereby multiplying opportunities for contact and interaction.

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Encounters, even casual ones, often contribute to personal and community growth. Structural diversity means a range of housing, businesses and public institutions that meet the needs of residents and also contribute to community growth. Good design provides opportunities for people to make their own city, as long as planners, designers and developers leave them with a minimum of fixed constraints. It is not difficult to understand the sublime quality of the organic city. It is an ode to democracy, worthy of Walt Whitman and manifested not in the formality of the ballot box, but on the bustling streets where people actually live. It sings about community, social contact and taking care of one another. It tells the story of a rich diversity that brings together many different kinds of people, businesses and social organisations. When its parts fit together, they form an organic whole that takes on a life of its own. Jane Jacobs’s work, as well as the many commentaries and biographies that assess it, continue to thrive. Around the time of her birthday in May, people gather in cities around the world, including my home city of Ottawa, to join a Jane’s Walk, a volunteer-led neighbourhood walking tour that celebrates her insights and opens walkers’ eyes to community issues. Like all exemplars of the sublime, however, there is another side to the organic city: the terrifying ease with which capitalism can sweep it aside. There is very little left of the neighbourhood Jane Jacobs lived in and wrote about. As the entire West Side of Manhattan is turned into exclusive housing, posh hotels, corporate office towers, fancy restaurants, playgrounds for the rich and attractions for tourists, Jane Jacobs’s New York is rapidly disappearing. There are many instructive examples but one of the more interesting is the fate of a project that grew from the vision of a community activist who lived Jacobs’s vision and activism. Unlike the story of saving lower Manhattan from Robert Moses’s planned expressway,

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the creation of the Burdick Apartments, not far from where Jacobs lived, has not been given much attention. In 1959, Thelma Burdick mobilised residents of a 12-block area that Robert Moses had scheduled for demolition, what was formally called ‘slum clearance’, to stop the project. She succeeded. Few had taken on Moses and won, particularly not those who called for the building of subsidised low-income housing with sufficient quality construction to make people proud to live in the building and walk the streets of the community. It was a long fight, taking 10 years to win city approval and nearly another 20 to raise the funds to complete the project. For many years, it was one of the gems of affordable housing in Manhattan and anchored a thriving neighbourhood that Jacobs would be proud to know. Sadly, however, Burdick’s vision is now threatened by the forces of greed marching headlong through Manhattan. One of the great features of the Burdick building was its backyard playground, a space featuring a slide, monkey bars, a sandbox and a track where kids could ride their bikes. It also contained a garden for the adults, who in summer kept it overflowing with vegetables and flowers. Responding in part to the formal and sequestered parks that filled Howard’s detailed plans for the garden city, Jane Jacobs was never fond of the planned playground. She felt that they were more often than not poorly integrated into communities, received little random foot traffic and were dangerous at night. She preferred the sidewalk, the stoop, the street and backyard play spaces. The backyard of Burdick Apartments offered precisely just such a place for its African-American, Asian, Hispanic and White residents to come together. Parents could easily look out of the rear windows of their apartments and keep an eye on their children at play. One account called it ‘an oasis of open space for all the tenants who lived there’.

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All of that ended in 2012 when Ian Schrager the co-founder and co-owner of famed nightspot Studio 54 and his partners paid $50 million for the property to build a luxury hotel and condo complex. Now residents of Burdick Apartments live in the shadow of an exclusive 28-storey hotel with condos at the top that sell for $20 million and a terrace bar where it can cost $500 just to sit at a table. The park and the garden are gone. Nevertheless, Schrager, who named the hotel, unironically, Public, makes his project sound like a hymn to equality: It’s based upon a simple but very important, revolutionary idea: luxury for all. Just think about it. It means that everybody is entitled to participate in a luxury experience, giving them everything they need and everything they want. Tenants of the Burdick would strongly disagree. In fact, they fought back from the start realising that, even if they did not have a winning case, they would be able to wring concessions from the developer. After seven months of negotiations, Burdick residents received an assurance that their apartment building would retain its subsidised low-income designation and that they would receive new apartment air conditioners, new washer-dryers for the common laundry room and restoration of the building’s common areas. Most residents are pleased to have received something, even if it does not come close to compensating for what the park meant to them. They are also understandably fearful of losing their building to the next well-heeled developer arriving with or without promises to bring a taste of luxury to the masses.18 The sad fate of the Burdick Apartments’ park is now a common occurrence in New York and other large cities where, with or without a fight, capitalism is laying waste to organic city dreams, bulldozing the neighbourhoods and the

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imaginary that Jane Jacobs made famous. Nevertheless, the myth lives on and continues to motivate social movements, the marketing campaigns of smart city developers and proposals to change urban governance.

FROM THE CREATIVE CLASS TO THE SMART CITY In addition to material and energy resources, information has always been central to social production. However, in the period immediately after the Second World War, it became a particular focus of attention because the growth of computer and telecommunication technologies provided a qualitative expansion in the ability to measure information, monitor information transactions and package information products. Moreover, the computer and the network systems that enabled high-speed data transfers meant that the entire economy, from banking to education, would benefit from the new technology. It was inevitable that social theorists would soon address the significance of this development. Among the many who did so, Daniel Bell stands out for defining the social significance of information in The Coming of PostIndustrial Society and for addressing problems associated with its wider cultural significance in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. In doing so, the Harvard sociologist helped to construct an information imaginary, or the vision of a society whose foundation was the production and distribution of information and whose specialists would play increasingly central roles in the global information economy, as well as in the management of society. Social theorists would later elaborate on Bell’s work or contend with it, but few could avoid addressing the growing centrality of communication and information technology in all facets of life.

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It was also inevitable that urban studies would soon take up the significance of these ideas for cities. Fifteen years after Bell’s book appeared in 1973, Manuel Castells produced The Informational City, which critically examined the impact of the new networked technologies on the world’s urban areas. According to Castells and a host of urbanists influenced by his work, the new information economy was bringing about a radical change in spatial relations, which transformed the connections between cities, by turning some into powerful global hubs and others into wasteland. It was also restructuring social relations within cities, by empowering those holding leverage in the information economy and by impoverishing those who did not. While Castells was busy focussing on information technology, Steven Graham and Simon Marvin produced the very influential Telecommunications and the City, which filled a major blind spot in urban studies. As important as these works were for helping to construct an urban imaginary of the informational city, neither Castells nor Graham and Marvin addressed Bell’s second issue: the cultural contradictions of a newly informationalised capitalism. Bell had argued that the very success of a market economy was undermining capitalism because it produced a consumer culture that fostered hedonism and eroded the very ascetic values, such as delayed gratification, that, he argued, once contributed to the growth of capitalism. Rapidly expanding cultural and entertainment industries were an increasingly significant component of capitalist information economies but they were also producing the content and conditions that, in his view, were undermining the system. There were some who paid attention to Bell’s argument that consumer culture was undermining capitalism. They renewed debates about the corrosive impact of mass culture. Others, particularly urbanists, chose to concentrate instead on the sheer growth and social significance of the expanding

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communication and cultural industries. This research congealed around discussions of the creative class and the creative city, initiating a new urban imaginary with significant social consequences. A key figure in this discussion was Richard Florida, whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class became a best seller that was released again in 2012 in a ‘Revisited: Revised and Expanded’ form. Just as Jane Jacobs’s vision of the organic city arrived when people were growing tired with overly planned cities and suburbs and sought something more authentic, Florida’s concept of the creative city coincided with the decline of the industrial city and the expansion of the cultural and IT industries. Specifically, for Florida, creativity had become ‘a fundamental economic driver’ and this empowered a new creative class ‘spanning science and technology, arts, media, and culture, traditional knowledge workers, and the professions’. Comprising one-third of the U.S. workforce and a larger share in major urban areas, the creative class was having a profound impact on all aspects of life, ‘extending even into the rhythms, patterns, desires, and expectations that structure our daily lives’.19 This development helped fuel a new urban imaginary because, in Florida’s view, the talented were increasingly favouring cities over suburbs, with urban centres replacing suburban industrial parks to create intensive growth. This helped to fuel a revival of older cities, where run-down conditions led to cheaper rents than could be found in more recent boom towns. Aspiring creatives, especially artists, and those looking for a more diverse and accepting community, returned to older cities, and turned declining poor and working-class neighbourhoods into vibrant centres of culture and engines of a creative economy. Florida’s upbeat message offered city officials and urban planners a new way to build a successful city: do whatever it takes to open the city to these new artistic and technological innovators. It was not necessary to build

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outside the city, with or without gardens, nor to bulldoze old cities to make way for radiant structures, with or without parks. Jane Jacobs was correct to call for diversity in the social and institutional composition of urban communities as well as sidewalks kept busy all day and night. However, for Florida, diversity was not an end in itself. What mattered was the constitution of urban diversity and those cities with a preponderance of creative talent would emerge as the most successful. The creative city imaginary also took advantage of another emerging trend in thinking about cities. The global spread of communication and information technology made popular the view that location was declining in significance. As long as you are jacked in to what was then called cyberspace, you could conduct business, get an education, communicate with friends and family, and just have fun. For businesses, the prospect of online selling meant that paying to rent or build a brick-and-mortar building in a big city neighbourhood was no longer necessary or desirable. The End of Geography would join the End of History and the End of Politics in a trinity of digital mythology.20 The dotcom bust of the early 2000s helped prompt a rethinking and a revival of interest in the not very eye-popping phrase ‘agglomeration economies’. In essence, whatever the state of technological development, the concentration of resources, including the right types of labour and capital, in one location, accelerated the potential for economic growth. As it turned out, the three most important words in the real estate business –location, location, location – still mattered. The return to the view that place counts, even in a global information society, warmed the hearts of old city advocates and added a significant additional dimension to the creative city vision. The new key to a thriving city was the concentration of diverse creative talent, both artistic and technology-savvy, in defined communities.

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The creative city imaginary provided the reasoning and the mythic gloss to pursue a range of urban redevelopment plans, most of which involved giving developers and businesses financial incentives to create entertainment and technology districts. These included tax and zoning relief, direct subsidies and partnership arrangements, that lured prospective contributors to the creative economy in the hopes of revitalising the city. Cities also sweetened the pot with publicly built or subsidised performance venues and sports stadiums. Just as importantly, they increased police budgets to crack down on crime, ‘clean up’ neighbourhoods that might contribute to violence and moved the homeless out of areas targeted for creative economy development. Another consequence of the creative economy policy was the emergence of the so-called gig economy, marked by precarious, low-wage and sometimes unpaid labour that provides an essential foundation. More than just a plan for economic development, the myth of the creative city furnished a handy excuse for helping developers, offering subsidies to businesses, cracking down on suspected or incipient crime and more tightly managing labour, the poor and the homeless. The creative city myth became the near-perfect story to justify massive gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, and redevelopment of entire areas that had been homes to generations of the working class and the poor. To the casual eye and the visiting tourist, these neighbourhoods do look better. But that meant little to those driven out of their homes and their communities ostensibly to open room for creativity which, it turned out in many cases, meant remaking cities for the wealthy, who had made their money the ‘old-fashioned way’ – by inheriting it or succeeding in the world of finance. The creative city imaginary justified practically whatever it would take to sprinkle a little Hollywood stardust or perhaps even host the next Silicon Valley. The sublime vision of

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the city energised by a vanguard of artists and technologists renewed hope for the urban future and no one was a better cheerleader than Richard Florida. The first version of The Rise of the Creative Class, published in 2002, when information technology still attracted unbridled optimism, was full of platitudes about how the creative class would power entire societies. Written in the shadow of the financial crash, the revised edition is more restrained, but it still holds out hope that urban uprisings, aided by the burgeoning digital world, would lead to revolution. ‘There are signs the Creative Class may at last be coming of age’, he declared. ‘The year 2011 was the turning point. The first half of the year saw the uprisings of the Arab Spring, which toppled some regimes and profoundly shook others’.21 Next came the Occupy movement, which began in the heart of the creative city and led to urban upheavals around the world. For Florida, although there were different types of participants, ‘The vanguards of both movements were middle-class students and young professionals – highly educated, digitally savvy members of the Creative Class’.22 Perhaps most importantly, referring to Occupy, ‘the movement had a decidedly urban cast’ derived from the inherent quality of cities ‘of their density and ability to push people together in public places’.23 These events fit perfectly into the imaginary of transcendent, transformational change that the creative city and its vanguard class were bringing about: All of this seems to signal that the Creative Class may at long last be developing what Marx would have called class consciousness; that the dynamic issue of becoming a class for itself may be overtaking the more academic questions of class of itself.24

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Florida was not alone in seeing the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street as portents of revolutionary upheaval rather than, in the first case, a foreshadowing of even stronger authoritarianism, or, in the case of Occupy, a minor uprising along the winding road to President Trump. But most did not go so far as to see these developments as evidence of an emerging radical class consciousness among those who work in the creative industries. Nevertheless, the discourse around the creative city helped construct a new urban imaginary, one that featured the sublime vision of unleashed creativity and the terrible consequences for those who do not fit the current fashion in creativity. It is only a small step from the creative to the smart city, to Google founder Eric Schmidt’s plea to ‘just give us a city and put us in charge’. The creative city is a story about who should lead the urban world. The smart city deepens and extends this narrative with a rich vision of filling the entire metropolis, including everyday objects and people, with intelligence and creativity. There are clear affinities between the creative and the smart city because the latter can also be thought of as a creative place where, for example, universities, libraries, museums and the arts thrive. From this perspective, creative New York has always been a smart city, because it contained great institutions of higher learning, including world-renowned Columbia and the model public institution that is City University. These contributed to making this earlier version of the smart city work for the vast majority of New Yorkers, not just for its elites. Moreover, while Silicon Valley might be the classic example that made the Bay Area a smart district, agglomerations of creative and cultural intelligence have been vital to the success of cities for years. Consider Los Angeles, where in the 1960s and 1970s musicians lived in Laurel Canyon, recorded in nearby Hollywood, and performed in the clubs along Sunset Boulevard. Their work helped to make the City of Angels a global centre

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for music and every inch a smart city for cultural creation and production.25 It also provided a model for Silicon Valley and other high-tech centres. Smart is not only about technology. Smart cities produce the institutions that help creative citizens apply their talents. However, today’s urban advocates stress the unique dimensions of today’s cities, choosing to focus on the technologies that power them, more than on the creativity displayed by urbanites themselves. Today’s smart city discourse provides an excellent embodiment of what I called, in a 2004 book, the digital sublime. Building a smart city involves merging traditional materials and digital technologies. It also requires language that can rise to meet the vision of a new civic ideal. Specifically, to construct this story, advocates sing its praises in hyperbolic words that appear aimed to match in narrative form the transcendent quality of the technology-enabled city: ‘Our cities are on the verge of a radical transformation’, pronounces Antoine Picon in his primer Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence, ‘a revolution in intelligence comparable in scale to the one that, in its time, brought about industrialization’.26 Picon concludes that the smart city is nothing short of ‘a new urban ideal’, a spatialised intelligence that extends beyond humans: Rather than conceiving of a city whose circuits of information and communication are simply sprawled out and whose intelligence continues to reside exclusively within the men and women who communicate through them, why not imagine the progressive development of non-human forms of reasoning and even of consciousness?27 According to this version of the smart city imaginary, it is not enough to make people smarter. The ultimate goal is to develop ‘algorithms, artificial intelligence, robotization

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and cyborg-type assemblies between biological organisms and machines’ that will make the entire city come alive with a new form of intelligence.28 At last, in Picon’s mythic imaginary, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of the general will would be realised in tangible form. This sentiment is repeated many times over in accounts of the smart city. Picon may be particularly good at working the mythmaking machinery of transcendent language, but there is little real difference between this vision and that of the pragmatic Sidewalk Labs director who announced that ‘the potential for these new technologies is breathtaking’.29 This is all part of a process, evident from the time of the telegraph, to construct a technological sublime which, according to cultural historian Leo Marx, ‘arises from an intoxicated feeling of unlimited possibility’.30 They are visions of progress which, in his words, ‘rise like froth on a tide of exuberant self-regard sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and contradictions’.31 It is fair to say that, as the communication historian James Carey has demonstrated, we make myths whenever we make communication technology. The telegraph, telephone, radio, television and the computer all arrived with their own visions of inevitable progress, world peace and the promise of overcoming the weight of history, the constraints of geography and the banality of politics. There is no better evidence of the power of myth than the persistence of these views and their rebirth with each new wave of communication technology, in spite of overwhelming evidence that they are false. Each wave has contributed to social change, but has brought us no closer to world peace, and the world is still burdened (and enabled) by history, geography and politics. The smart city is just the latest in a long line of sublime visions, a technological version of what religion and the natural world once provided. They persist as long as those with the power to sustain them continue to do so.

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THE PANOPTIC CITY? Urban imaginaries are largely aspirational creations, carving out space on the sunnier side of the city sublime. The cottage in the garden, the tower in the park, sidewalks full of people and high-tech creatives reinventing the city or just heading down the street in autonomous vehicles, all constitute hopeful images. Like every sublime image, they contain, and often mask, a far darker side. Today’s urban imaginary of the smart city can just as easily, and perhaps more appropriately, be viewed as the panoptic city, to capture the inherent danger of ubiquitous surveillance embodied in every digitally connected device. The opportunity to improve municipal management and profit from the vast expansion in data gathering also enables commercial- and government-approved surveillance on a radically new scale. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham used the term ‘panopticon’ to identify what was for him an ideal model of prison surveillance that positioned the watchers at the centre of a circular facility, able to view every inmate at all times. The proliferation of urban Operations Centers, pioneered by IBM in Rio de Janeiro, increasingly serve as the digital equivalent of the central tower in Bentham’s model prison, but with a far more expansive reach. Urban imaginaries provide powerful narratives that aim to capture a time and place. Like all myths, they are strong on conveying a specific way of seeing but are weak at providing nuance and complexity. There is nothing in the smart city imaginary that asks for whom the city has become smart. It may be smart for companies that want to profit from selling technology and data. It may also be smart for governments that wish to monitor and control the behaviour of citizens. However, it may be quite the opposite for those under constant surveillance, who give up the right to control information about themselves and what they do. For them, it is more

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appropriate to imagine urban life as a massive monitoring system, the core of the panoptic city. This is especially important to keep in mind as companies make use of the smart city imaginary as a marketing device.

SELLING THE SMART CITY We make myths whenever we make cities, and the smart city is no exception. As accurate as it may be, this statement only partially describes the dynamic power of a discourse. The smart city imaginary is not just a reflection of beliefs about the next stage in urban development; it is integral to the construction of cities because it is essential to the sales process. Technology companies and governments, consulting firms and think-tanks, construction firms and lobbyists – these and other interested parties are now fully involved in marketing the plans, the materials and the enthusiasm to make old cities smart and to build entirely new ones. Major investments in the sales process are essential because smart city projects are expensive, disruptive and raise thorny social issues such as surveillance, privacy and the ownership of data. The sales process begins with the big companies that stand to benefit the most from the technology-enabled city. These are led by IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Siemens and Microsoft in the West and by Chinese firms Huawei and Alibaba throughout Asia. The Taiwan-based Foxconn, which manufactures Apple devices from its locations in China, is also an increasingly big player, travelling the world to promote smart cities. In 2018, it showed up in Wisconsin to spend $1 million on a Smart Cities – Smart Futures Competition to generate ideas (and support) from the local research community. These firms advertise widely, circulate promotional literature all over social media and host, or

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participate in, conferences that make the sales pitch directly to government officials and bureaucrats. When Forbes magazine asked a former IBM executive, now working for a smart city speciality firm, ‘What has been the biggest change you’ve seen emerge with smart cities recently?’, his answer was ‘Just Google the words “smart city event” – there is a new conference popping up every week’.32 It is little wonder that the magazine refers to the executive as the unofficial ‘CMO [Chief Marketing Officer] of Smart Cities’. He understands that selling smart cities is as important and as challenging as actually building them. IBM was first off the mark, when in 2009, as the US was still mired in the Great Recession, the venerable computer pioneer held out a beacon of hope by calling for a commitment to its ‘smarter cities’ initiative. From the start, the company framed its message as both a world-altering opportunity and absolutely essential. There was not much choice in the matter: Cities must prepare for change that will be revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, as they put in place next-generation systems that work in entirely new ways. City administrations must decide what activities are core, and, therefore, what they should shed, retain or expand into. Not only that, cities must ‘assemble the team’ – integrate their own administrations and work with other levels of government, especially country-level, as well as private and non-profit sectors.33 Cisco, another early leader in developing smart city systems, pitched a similar combination of promise and threat: radical technological change is coming to cities, and municipal governments must act now to take best advantage. As the company’s Smart City blog put it:

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Did you know that Smart Cities are poised to drive significant change in how we work, play and learn in 2018? Thanks to the explosion in big data analytics capabilities and mobile, real-time video/ information sharing, historians may someday look back on this year as the fulcrum upon which technology and government fully meshed to turn their communities in a more vibrant direction. So, it’s critical that those who lead our state and local governments at every level, not just IT, understand and integrate these technology shifts proactively. From city operations and public safety to transportation and utilities, it’s time for your community to start turning aggressively towards big data analytics and real-time video/information sharing solutions as the core of your Smart City initiative. If not, you may be left behind.34 Cisco has succeeded in this promotional drive, in some instances, spectacularly. When the company learned that Kansas City, Missouri was digging a trench under Main Street for street cars, it advised the city to install cable and sensors to monitor traffic. The city said yes and before most of its citizens were aware, Cisco and Sprint had installed Wi-Fi kiosks along the 2.2-mile streetcar route, surveillance cameras and new LED street lights also equipped with video cameras. Although many have used the free Wi-Fi service, the promise of shorter commutes with a new traffic management system has yielded a less-than-whopping saving of 37 seconds for the average trip. Moreover, in the rush to the future, the city decided against opening the project to competitive bidding, choosing instead to give the bulk of the work to Cisco and have Sprint manage the Wi-Fi network.35 Promise and threat are repeated across the corporate world, including from

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China’s smart city leaders Huawei and Alibaba, who leverage their national market dominance to create networks of smart cities throughout Southeast Asia. Companies throughout the world use direct advertising and public relations pieces thinly disguised as news stories to sell smart cities. The breathless prose does not require a trained eye to spot. As one put it, Once firmly in the realm of science-fiction, technological advances mean the concept of a “smart city” is now closer than ever to sciencefact.… The marriage between automation and data create an efficient, sustainable economy where the whole metropolis is designed to improve the quality of life for every person living there.36 Paid publicity pales in comparison to news stories in reputable publications such as Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail, which featured a story on ‘How 5G Will Change Your Life’. The newspaper has produced some of the best journalism on Google’s controversial effort to control the smart city development in Toronto. But when it takes up smart city technology, every inclination to produce a critical assessment disappears. Addressing the next wave of wireless technology, the article celebrates in sublime prose and video how 5G will make possible driverless cars, smart city traffic controls, industrial automation, the efficient delivery of public utilities and other city services, personal health management, and a night in a crowded stadium without a single dropped call. No mention of the panoptic city here. Just ‘Faster speeds. Higher bandwidth. Lower latency. The next era of wireless technology is coming – and it will open the door to life-changing innovations’.37 Similarly, the leading business magazine, Forbes, offers a dramatic vision that begins with digitally enabled street lighting that, banal as it

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may appear, will provide the foundation for a cornucopia of benefits: Smart street lighting is being recognised by many city leaders as a first step toward the development of a smart city. In addition to increasing the energy efficiency of the city and reducing energy costs, carbon emissions, and maintenance costs, intelligent lighting can also provide a backbone for a range of other city applications, including public safety, traffic management, smart parking, environmental monitoring, and extended Wi-Fi and cellular communications.38 In addition to advertising, PR campaigns and news stories, private think-tanks have provided an enormous boost to the positive image of smart cities by producing report after report that identifies a bounty of financial and social benefits. Firms like Deloitte (‘Forces of Change: Smart Cities’), Forrester Research (‘A New Age for Smart Cities’), Gartner Research (‘Turning Smart Cities into Intelligent Urban Ecosystems’) and McKinsey and Company (‘Smart Cities: Digital Solutions for a More Livable Future’), have led the charge. Consider, for example, Frost & Sullivan, another leading corporate research organisation. Its primary report on urban issues concludes that ‘Smart cities are anticipated to create huge business opportunities with a market value of over $2 trillion by 2025’. Moreover, the company forecasts that smart city technologies will enable cities to integrate huge increases in population and achieve a smooth transition to urbanization, with technological advances helping municipalities optimize resources for maximum value to the population, whether that value is financial, savings in time, or improvement in quality of life.

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There is no end to the benefits and little indication of roadblocks along the way.39 These private think-tanks and the companies that hire them are prominent participants in the steady stream of smart city conferences that take place throughout the world. Some of these are specific to the topic, while others – like the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas – are organised to sell all types of IT but have focussed on smart city applications in recent years, including the proprietary systems of industry leaders like Cisco. The smart city was the conference theme in 2018. The CES event is important for ideological reasons because it helps promote enthusiasm for technological solutions. In writing about the conference, a leading business publication could not be clearer about the need to build smart cities or be any more definitive about why it is essential to make them market-driven. Circulated on numerous business sites, it asks: Will smart cities be vibrant bastions of competitive private free enterprise and innovative new networks of communication that simultaneously respect individuals’ privacy? Or are planners on a path to setting up mega public utilities and administered cartelization, and compulsory information collection?40 For many, CES showcases the right technologies and helps build support for the right way to think about them. Deployment of Next Internet systems in a free-market environment is the key, they conclude, to successful smart cities. Promotional conferences have drawn especially large attendances in Asia. For example, in 2017 the China Hi-Tech Fair Smart City Exhibition in Shenzhen drew 350,000 attendees, the population of a small city. Conferences that create a bit of distance from corporate sponsorship provide more

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legitimacy. For example, the popular TED Talks has featured 10 such presentations and the regional TEDx spin-off has showcased many more. In the TED tradition, these tend to be upbeat, clever and focussed on the sublime, with an occasional peek at the threats, the greatest of which would be to retreat from the smart city challenge because this would unleash the destructive forces of uncontrolled urbanisation. Corporate promotion of smart city technologies runs deep and Disney, once again, is playing an important role through the adoption of Next Internet technologies throughout its theme parks and cruise ships. After all, it was an inventor with the company who developed the MagicBand, a wearable device that uses radio-frequency identification, bluetooth low energy and near-field communication technologies to connect guests’ park tickets, hotel room keys and payments, offering access to resort rooms, merchandise payments, theme parks and rides. They also give Disney an enormous store of data on the behaviour of its most valuable customers. This same inventor, or ‘imagineer’, in Disney speak, eventually went on to work for the world’s largest cruise operator. The company, Carnival Cruise Line, turned the MagicBand into the Ocean Medallion, a device that significantly expands the power of the original to add artificial intelligence and augmented reality experiences across the cruise line’s fleet, thereby enabling Carnival to build its own database on passengers. By associating the urban world of tomorrow with what enthusiasts call the happiest places in the world, these devices have trained millions in what to expect from a smart city future. As one promotional story asks: ‘Want to live in a futuristic smart city today? Take a cruise’.41 While not quite as ‘hands on’ a promotional tool, corporate-sponsored contests for smart city supremacy are also a significant sales device (Tables 2 and 3). They begin with regular announcements, by big companies or the research firms

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Table 2.  Top 20 Smart Cities.  1

Singapore

 2

London

 3

New York

 4

San Francisco

 5

Chicago

 6

Seoul

 7

Berlin

 8

Tokyo

 9

Barcelona

10

Melbourne

11

Dubai

12

Portland

13

Nice

14

San Diego

15

Rio de Janeiro

16

Mexico City

17

Wuxi

18

Yinchuan

19

Bhubaneswar

20

Hangzhou

Source: Juniper Research. (2018). Smart cities: What’s in it for citizens? (p. 8). Retrieved from https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/ sites/11/2018/03/smart-cities-whats-in-it-for-citizens.pdf

that service them, that rank the top smart cities in the world. They appear in a variety of numbers – Top-5, Top-10 and Top-20, are common. A typical example is a report by the private think-tank Jupiter Networks, which gave Singapore the title of best smart city, primarily for its use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to automate city services. Another award, announced at what is called the ‘Oscars of the mobile

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Table 3.  Top 20 Smart Cities by Performance Index. Mobility

Health

Safety

Productivity

1

Singapore

Singapore

Singapore

Singapore

2

San Francisco Seoul

New York

London

3

London

London

Chicago

Chicago

4

New York

Tokyo

Seoul

San Francisco

5

Barcelona

Berlin

Dubai

Berlin

6

Berlin

New York

Tokyo

New York

7

Chicago

San Francisco London

8

Portland

Melbourne

San Francisco Melbourne

9

Tokyo

Barcelona

Rio de Janeiro Seoul

10

Melbourne

Chicago

Nice

Dubai

11

San Diego

Portland

San Diego

San Diego

12

Seoul

Dubai

Melbourne

Nice

13

Nice

Nice

Bhubaneswar Portland

14

Dubai

San Diego

Barcelona

Tokyo

15

Mexico City

Wuxi

Berlin

Wuxi

16

Wuxi

Mexico City

Wuxi

Mexico City

17

Rio de Janeiro

Yinchuan

Mexico City

Rio de Janeiro

18

Yinchuan

Hangzhou

Wuxi

Yinchuan

19

Hangzhou

Rio de Janeiro Yinchuan

20

Bhubaneswar Bhubaneswar

Hangzhou

Barcelona

Hangzhou Bhubaneswar

Source: Juniper Research. (2018). Smart cities: What’s in it for citizens? (p. 6). Retrieved from https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/ sites/11/2018/03/smart-cities-whats-in-it-for-citizens.pdf

industry’, gave the GLOMO prize to Bristol in the UK. The city was honoured for its use of technology, in this case for the integration of wireless, optical fibre cable and radio frequency systems to provide 5G services that use, among other things, IoT-enabled smart street lighting.42

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Corporations do not always have to take the lead in promoting smart cities. Given the positive associations from most coverage of new urban technology, governments tend to take on the role enthusiastically. Nervous that the public is receiving too much critical news about smart cities, the U.K. All Party Parliamentary Group on Smart Cities called on the government to take a more proactive promotional role to challenge ‘misconceptions and misunderstandings’ and ensure a joined-up approach between businesses and those who work most closely with and on behalf of their citizens – local government. By fully embracing the smart cities approach, central government can empower local authorities to show ordinary people how smart can positively impact on their everyday lives.43 Governments carry out this work in a variety of ways, including underwriting smart city projects, providing tax and other incentives to developers and holding conferences that enable governments and businesses to meet up, promote smart cities and strike partnership deals. Some government officials have so bought into the smart city mythology that they are not reluctant to issue dire warnings for those failing the ‘smart’ test. One good example is Bob Bennett, the Chief Innovation Officer for Kansas City, Missouri, which began its march to smart city status in 2011 when Google chose it to demonstrate the value of connecting homes with fibreoptic cable. After 25 years in the military, Bennett became a national leader in promoting urban technology and does not hesitate to proclaim the consequences of resistance: ‘Cities that fail to embrace technology today, that fail to embrace a data-driven approach, those cities will be in the digital Rust Belt 20 years from now’.44 Bennett and other civic officials have won free wireless for residents, but at the

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expense of citywide surveillance technology that comes with a high price tag and significant threats to privacy. Both the US and Canadian governments have sponsored smart city contests that reward local governments and businesses, typically for their success in deploying Next Internet technologies. The US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology has led the way, with reports that promote smart cities and conferences that bring together interested public and private sector parties. It sponsors the Smart and Secure Cities and Communities Challenge, which forms teams of international specialists who focus on specific problems such as public Wi-Fi, traffic management and various aspects of securing these systems. Even the Pentagon has jumped on board, to promote turning military installations into smart cities, primarily to boost security. Wired magazine, which has a long history of promoting information technology, put it this way: If a terrorist followed through on those threats to military staffers, a smart military base’s networked cameras and license plate recognition sensors would single out new visitors and direct them to entry gates with tighter security. In the worst-case scenario, a smart base could isolate the sound of gunfire and communicate its location to emergency responders on-base. An alert could be sent to everyone’s smart phones notifying them of an active-shooter and indicating which areas to avoid. Base officials could immediately lock down schools, daycare centres and hospitals. And the data trail enables easier intelligence collection and prosecution.45 In 2018, the Canadian federal government mobilised a national campaign, the Smart Cities Challenge, that pressured

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municipalities across the country, whatever their size and location, to produce smart city plans. Given the millions in prize money, it was hard for any urban government, even tiny ones like Summerside, Prince Edward Island or the Lower Nicola Indian Band, to decline. As a result, cities, towns and First Nations communities diverted resources to produce detailed plans, including how they would partner with technology companies. Governments across the country were turned into the marketing arms of smart city enthusiasts. As the mayor of the district of Squamish in British Columbia, population 20,000, proclaimed: But perhaps the greatest opportunity for information collection is to envision every citizen as a potential sensor, collecting information, measuring, mapping, crowdsourcing and groundtruthing their reality, and the potential for greater collaboration between academics, the private sector, governments and its citizens.46 Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, whose government initiated the challenge, was so taken by smart city technologies that he stood side by side with Google founder Eric Schmidt when the company announced its plans to make Toronto a model smart city. Trudeau’s enthusiasm was once again put on display a short while later when he shared a platform with Schmidt at a Google-sponsored conference in Toronto. The promotional support provided by these North American governments is replicated throughout the world. The only difference is that Asian governments, especially the leadership in China, often play a stronger promotional role than their private corporations. They subsidise technology companies, host conferences, promote demonstration projects and actually build smart cities. In return they gain support and a treasure trove of data on their own citizens. International

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organisations like the United Nations International Telecommunications Union have also gotten behind the smart city idea with positive reports using the mythic language of ‘transformation’ and ‘revolution’ for those cities that adopt the right technologies. For the UN and other international bodies, the smart city is an opportunity to manage population growth in poor regions of the globe. The eagerness to adopt technological solutions to urban problems now transcends dominant ideologies throughout the world. It is one of the few themes that unites neo-liberal internationalists and conservative nationalists. As earlier chapters demonstrated, from Singapore to Barcelona, the belief in smart city solutions takes many different forms as does their implementation. Nevertheless, they share the firm belief that cities can be made smart with new communication and information technologies. This is understandable because many of the problems facing the world’s cities are so daunting, from climate change to population growth to mass migration, that many believe it will take a miraculous solution, a deus ex machina, to find any hope of a solution. In our era, that typically leads to the technological sublime, a belief in the transcendent power of technology that makes it easy to miss the problems it creates, to dismiss critics as neo-Luddites and to reduce the hard work of urban planning to the simple search for the right digital applications. Chapter 8 addresses the problems with this approach and offers alternatives to what has become the dominant vision of the smart city.

ENDNOTES 1.  Robert G. Hollands. Will the real smart city please stand up? City, 12(3), pp. 303–320, 2008. doi:10.1080/13604810802479126

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2.  Laura Bliss, A “smart city” in Toronto might be a smart realestate play for Sidewalk Labs. And for the public? CityLab, January 9, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/01/when-a-techgiant-plays-waterfront-developer/549590/ 3.  Ada Louise Huxtable, Is modern architecture dead? The New York Review of Books, July 16, 1981, https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/1981/07/16/is-modern-architecture-dead/ 4.  Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the street: The life of Jane Jacobs, New York, NY: Knopf, 2016, p. 165. 5.  Leo Marx, The machine in the garden, New York, NY: Oxford, 1964. 6.  Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the street: The life of Jane Jacobs, New York, NY: Knopf, 2016, p. 165. 7.  Conor Friedersdorf, Why a young Joan Didion never bought furniture in New York, The Atlantic, May 18, 2010, https://www. theatlantic.com/projects/the-future-of-the-city/archive/2010/05/ quote-of-the-day/56872/ 8.  Albert Einstein, Henry George and his principles in Land and Freedom, May–June, 1934, https://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/einstein-albert_henry-george-and-hisprinciples-1934.htm 9.  Wolfgang Voigt, The garden city as eugenic utopia, Planning Perspectives, 1989, 4(3), 295–312, doi:10.1080/ 02665438908725685 10.  Jane Jacobs, The death and life of great American cities, New York, NY: Random House, 1961, p. 24. 11.  Greg Morse, What is a machine for living in? Place Exploration, October 28, 2015, https://placeexploration. com/2015/10/28/a-house-is-a-machine-for-living-in/ 12.  Gore Vidal, Emperor of concrete, The New York Review of Books, October 17, 1974, https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/1974/10/17/emperor-of-concrete/ 13.  Ada Louise Huxtable, Is modern architecture dead? The New York Review of Books, July 16, 1981, https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/1981/07/16/is-modern-architecture-dead/

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14.  Russell Jacoby, The last intellectuals: American culture in the age of academe, New York, NY: Basic, 2000. 15.  Mark Lamster, The man in the glass house: Philip Johnson, architect of the modern century, New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. 16.  Akash Kapur, Can Poland’s faded Brutalist architecture be redeemed, New York Times, October 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/10/10/t-magazine/poland-brutalism-architecture.html 17.  Jane Jacobs, The death and life of great American cities, New York, NY: Random House, 1961, p. 65. 18.  Nikita Steward, Sarah Blesener, and Sergio Peçanha, How a garden for the poor became a playground for the rich, New York Times, October 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2018/10/18/nyregion/new-york-city-inequalitygentrification.html 19.  Richard Florida, The rise of the creative class, revisited, New York, NY: Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2014, Preface, http://www. amazon.com 20.  Vincent Mosco, The digital sublime: Myth, power, and cyberspace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 21.  Richard Florida, The rise of the creative class, revisited, New York, NY: Basic Books, Kindle Edition, Preface to the revised edition, 2014, http:www.amazon.com 22.  Richard Florida, The rise of the creative class, revisited, New York, NY: Basic Books, Kindle Edition, Preface to the revised edition, 2014, Conclusion, http:www.amazon.com. 23.  Richard Florida, The rise of the creative class, revisited, New York, NY: Basic Books, Kindle Edition, Preface to the revised edition, 2014, http:www.amazon.com 24.  Richard Florida, The rise of the creative class, revisited, New York, NY: Basic Books, Kindle Edition, Preface to the revised edition, 2014, http:www.amazon.com 25.  The importance of Laurel Canyon as a creative magnet is brought to life in David Yaffe, Reckless daughter: A portrait of Joni Mitchell, Toronto, Canada: Harper Collins, 2017.

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26.  Antoine Picon, Smart cities: A spatialised intelligence, Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015, Kindle Edition, Introduction, http:// www.amazon.com 27.  Antoine Picon, Smart cities: A spatialised intelligence, Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015, Kindle Edition, Introduction, http:// www.amazon.com 28.  Antoine Picon, Smart cities: A spatialised intelligence, Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015, Kindle Edition, Introduction, http:// www.amazon.com 29.  Daniel L. Doctoroff, Greater than ever: New York’s big comeback, New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2017, p. 351. 30.  Leo Marx, The machine in the garden, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 198. 31.  Leo Marx, The machine in the garden, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 207. 32.  Steve Olenski, A Q&A with the smart cities CMO, Forbes, December 5, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/ sites/steveolenski/2017/12/05/a-qa-with-the-smart-citiescmo/#1ab49d904d23 33.  Susanne Dirks and Mary Keeling, A vision of smarter cities, IBM Institute for Business Value, 2009, https://vdocuments.mx/avision-for-smarter-cities-ibm.html 34.  Kenn Dodson, Top 10 smart city trends for 2018, Cisco Blog, https://blogs.cisco.com/government/top-10-smart-city-trends-for-2018 35.  Timothy Williams, In high-tech cities, no more potholes, but what about privacy? New York Times, January 1, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/us/kansas-city-smart-technology.html 36.  Robotics and Automation News, Last mile logistics: Our cities are getting smarter, July 7, 2018, https:// roboticsandautomationnews.com/2018/07/08/last-mile-logisticsour-cities-are-getting-smarter/18142/ 37.  Christine Dobby, How 5G will change your life, The Globe and Mail, February 16, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/reporton-business/how-5g-will-change-your-life/article38009527/

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38.  Eric Woods, From connected street lights to smart cities, Forbes, April 6, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ pikeresearch/2018/04/06/smart-cities/#2c2b5bb413c8 39.  Frost & Sullivan, Frost & Sullivan experts announce global smart cities to raise a market of over $2 trillion by 2025, April 4, 2018, https://ww2.frost.com/news/press-releases/frost-sullivanexperts-announce-global-smart-cities-raise-market-over-2trillion-2025/ 40.  Clyde Wayne Crews, Who will own the infrastructure in the smart city? Forbes, January 11, 2018, https://cei.org/content/whowill-own-infrastructure-smart-city 41.  John Gaudiosi, Want to live in a futuristic smart city? Take a cruise, Yahoo! Finance, December 11, 2018, https://www.yahoo. com/news/want-live-futuristic-smart-city-211528967.html 42.  Cabot Institute for the Environment, Bristol University, Bristol wins global Smart City Award, March 8, 2018, http://www.bristol. ac.uk/cabot/news/2018/smart-city-award.html 43.  Alex Croxton, Government must challenge popular smart city misconceptions: A report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smart Cities says many people feel alienated by the concept, and calls on the government to challenge some popular misconceptions, ComputerWeekly.com, June 27, 2018, https:// www.computerweekly.com/news/252443797/Government-mustchallenge-popular-smart-city-misconceptions 44.  Timothy Williams, In high-tech cities, no more potholes, but what about privacy? New York Times, January 1, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/us/kansas-city-smart-technology. html 45.  Ted Johnson, Smart city tech would make military bases safer, Wired, February 19, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/02/smartcity-tech-make-military-bases-safer/ 46.  Government of Squamish, British Columbia, The smart cities challenge, October 20, 2017, https://squamish.ca/yourgovernment/ mayors-blog/the-smart-cities-challenge/

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8 WHOSE SMART CITY?

I’m not saying America’s cities are turning into dystopian technocapitalist hellscapes in which corporations operate every essential service and pull every civic string. … O.K., so maybe I am saying that America’s cities are turning into dystopian technocapitalist hellscapes.1 —Farhad Manjoo The city is a symbol of outward-looking cosmopolitanism – a potent answer to the homogeneity and insularity of the nation state. Today it is the only place where the idea of exerting meaningful democratic control over one’s life, however trivial the problem, is still viable.2 —Evgeny Morozov If we know that cities everywhere are always already smart, and that their intelligence resides with the people, our task as designers is finding out how best to harness that intelligence.3 —Adam Greenfield

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WHY CREATE AN URBAN IMAGINARY? Profit and Power It is one thing to say that we make myths whenever we make technology or cities. It is quite another to explain why. There are important reasons to associate the smart city with narratives of technological transcendence that make it the best, if not the only, hope for the urban future. While there is considerable hyperbole in forecasts about the size of the market for digital systems, there is little doubt that the financial stakes are high. Smart cities offer major sources of revenue in the sale of technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that are located in street lights, vehicles, cameras and other devices across cities. The market for sensor-equipped and connected devices has only just begun to expand, even in the developed world, and it is understandable that technology companies such as IBM, Alibaba, Siemens and Cisco, are eager to promote the view that deploying Next Internet technologies can save the world’s cities from their seemingly intractable problems. Another related revenue stream comes from the systems that manage and control this vast array of connected devices, enabling rapid responses to changing conditions. Prime examples include the Operations Centers that IBM pioneered in Rio de Janeiro and the Siemens City Cockpit in Singapore. These vastly expand opportunities to make use of all data gathered by surveillance devices and to develop new algorithms for managing traffic, crime, trash collection, street lighting and other city services. Moreover, as evidenced by Google’s strong reluctance to part with the data it hopes to gather from its Toronto smart city site, there is another huge revenue stream in the data collected on the uses of connected devices. The opportunities to measure, monitor, package and

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sell data grow with each new smart city, each new operations centre and each new connected device. Whether or not smart cities work for urban residents, it is increasingly clear that they work for the businesses selling technologies, systems and data. Smart cities are also raised to mythic status because of the opportunities they provide governments to manage and control people. Detailed mass surveillance does not just produce the gold of marketable data; it also creates the quantified self, a vision of human beings, in the words of one commentator, ‘as manipulable subjects rather than rational agents’4 and, according to another, ‘as a bundle of psychological vulnerabilities to be carefully exploited [that] reduces people to mathematical inputs’.5 Governments, whether explicitly authoritarian or not, see smart city technologies as solutions to the problem of monitoring and managing growing populations, including newly arriving migrants. Dynamic algorithms that change with each new wave of data make the job easier, by offloading decision-making to a set of computer-generated rules that can also serve to offload responsibility. Even though research has demonstrated that algorithms embody the race, gender and class discrimination in societies, what amounts to inscribing inequality in code, the appearance of objectivity, reified in code, provides a convenient vehicle for deepening and extending political control.

Livability Even if digital immersion produces better service delivery, it may nevertheless render cities less personally satisfying for residents and visitors, particularly if smart cities are little more than Trojan horses for massive gentrification and deepening inequality. Smart cities tend to construct hyper-planned,

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technology-immersed spaces that fly in the face of what we have learned about how people actually use cities. Excessive planning can limit and constrain the organic process whereby people make and remake cities to suit their own needs. Good planning facilitates the process of human city building. But the smart city programme is so technology-driven that it only rarely refers to what is now the accepted wisdom about how cities actually work and for whom they work. Part of the problem resides in leaving it to large, private technology companies to take the lead in designing and building smart cities. Businesses can be agile, but they are also accustomed to rigid authority hierarchies, and not to the rough and tumble of democratic governance. As a result, elected officials are under great pressure to run their communities like corporations, leading to a democratic deficit that creates problems for social equality, public participation in decision-making and the simple livability of cities. For example, officials in Kentucky gave Google the contract to remake the capital city of Louisville with high-capacity fibre-optic cable to produce data speeds known only in a few other cities. Happy to join the ranks of smart cities, the city proudly displayed a handful of neighbourhoods where the service was launched in October 2017. Because the service met with a host of problems including the failure of shallow, but lower cost, trenches for cable, Google shut down the project 18 months later and left the city and its citizens with no recourse. The company admits it could have repaired and rebuilt the network but ‘that’s just not the right business decision for us’. Louisville provided the company with sufficient lessons to deploy in other locations and that is all that mattered to Google. Having turned over its major smart city application to big tech, Louisville was left to clean up a big mess. Promised improved livability, Louisville residents learned the hard way that technology is no guarantee of convenience.6

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Sur veillance and Privacy The mythic visions of a smart city, including predictions that revenues will soar into the trillions of dollars and that cities will operate more efficiently than ever, are also required because the tech-enabled municipality comes with a lot of baggage. Fears of ubiquitous surveillance, an end to privacy, the widespread harvesting of data for profit, mass disruptions as systems fail and hackers attack, and the personal and organisational time wasted with tending to a device-filled world, do not inspire strong faith in a smart city future. Concerns about surveillance are not new, especially in the digital era, but the extent of the capabilities and the incentives has expanded enormously with smart cities. As one privacy expert put it, ‘The whole point of a smart city is that everything that can be collected will be collected’.7 Moreover, much of this collection will take place without anything resembling user consent. That is because smart city surveillance is ubiquitous, capturing data on residents, visitors and workers alike, as they move through the city. This marks a significant leap from capturing online activities, which typically requires user consent, albeit through complex consent forms embedded in what are euphemistically called privacy policies. Even this form of consent disappears when information is gathered as people walk down sidewalks, drive through streets, park their cars, shop, work, play or simply sit on a park bench. The smart city threatens to reduce the flâneur or passionate urban observer, celebrated in nineteenth century French literary culture, to little more than a marketable data point. Municipalities as large as San Diego, California and as small as Richmond Hill, Ontario are installing on their streets what is called smart lighting that is fully equipped with the means to carry out 24-hour surveillance. These promise savings on energy and traffic management costs, but also create

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opportunities to monitor human activity continuously. With monitoring devices placed in objects throughout urban areas, the likelihood of mass surveillance expands enormously. Governments cite the benefits, including improved management, cost savings, protection from crime and control of the homeless population. The technology companies that have gone into the urban development business stand to profit from the sale and maintenance of equipment and from the data they sell to advertisers and other third parties. They often provide assurances that personal identifiers will be stripped before such transactions take place, but that does not always work, and it does not stop the company itself from retaining and using such data. With little protection afforded in legal systems throughout the world, urbanites have to rely on the commitments of governments and companies conducting the surveillance. However, with municipalities under pressure to maximise efficiency and fight crime and with companies expecting to generate revenue from data to offset their massive investment in building smart cities, public fears about surveillance and the loss of personal privacy are completely warranted. One of the major reasons why the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, Ann Cavoukian, quit her position as an adviser to Google on its Toronto project was that the company refused to provide assurances that it would strip personal identification data at the point of collection. Some questioned why she chose to advise a company that has shown little respect for personal privacy throughout its history. Presumably, it was in the hope of nudging the company to take measures to promote privacy. To her credit and the benefit of all who care about surveillance in the digital world, Cavoukian has established a set of internationally recognised principles known as Privacy by Design, which should guide all smart city developers:

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• Be proactive. ‘Prevent the harm from arising’. • Privacy is the default. ‘You don’t have to ask for privacy; we give it to you automatically’. • Embed it in design. ‘Bake it into your data architecture, into your code, into your policies, so it’s not an afterthought’. • Positive-sum, not zero-sum. ‘It’s “privacy and”, not “privacy versus”. Privacy and creativity. Privacy and data utility. Not either-or, win-lose, but win–win’. • Strong security end-to-end, with full life cycle protection. • Tell your customers what information you have on them. Give them a right of access to your data. I tell companies and the government that while you may have custody and control over someone’s data, it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the subject. • Keep it user-centric. ‘When you focus on the needs of your customers, the rest flows’.8 In a world full of companies eager to profit from data, governments keen to control unruly citizens and hackers who just want to make mischief, there is no guarantee that these principles will work all the time. It will take strong political action, committed to regulating smart city technologies and their uses. This will not be easy because when it comes to the depth of concern and details of addressing the issue, there is deep disagreement that tends to follow political divisions. A 2018 study from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, based primarily on a national survey of Americans, concluded that concern for privacy is widespread but it is Democrats far more than Republicans who care deeply enough to want to take significant

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action. This deep political divide is, the authors conclude, most closely connected to a major class division over privacy and surveillance: it is low-income Americans who are most deeply affected by it.9 As a result, in the United States at least, addressing privacy involves building coalitions across political and class divides, a nearly impossible task in the current climate.

Ownership of Data Surveillance and privacy are not the only sources of reasonable concern. There is also the issue of who owns the data that both governments and corporations are harvesting from public and private smart city spaces. Urban real estate deals are increasingly little more than plays for data. While companies continue to compete for the right to become the next Emperor of Concrete, as the master builder Robert Moses was called, they also want to dominate the dataverse. Ideally, they would like to control urban public places, as well as the office space and the residential housing they build. That includes data gathered from public infrastructure, and from the devices they build into as many spaces as they can. Imagine, for example, a smart home with builtin digital assistants provided by Amazon, Google, or Apple that gather voice commands, questions and conversations to generate revenue for their own marketing departments or by selling it to third parties interested in what residents talk about. Digital home services are now a $400-billion-dollar business in the United States and it increasingly operates online (as in ‘Alexa, find the three best plumbers near here’). According to one investment analyst: ‘We think it inevitable that digital platforms will one day dominate procurement of all home services’.10 That is partly owing to convenience but

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also because data on all of these interactions is a valuable commodity. Competition to control these spaces and provision them with proprietary technology or with systems that direct data streams to developers is intense. However, outside of a few academic circles, there is little discussion of the rights of users, such as homeowners, to keep control and perhaps even profit from data gathered about them. Where businesses eye a new revenue stream, citizens should reasonably see the theft of what rightfully belongs to them: information about themselves and what they do. According to one scholar, As we race towards sensor-laden smart cities, we need to demand that our governments pay close attention to who will own and control the data generated in these cities. If the answer is the private sector, we need also to be skeptical of claims by private sector actors that the data will nevertheless be shared with the public and with other developers. The devil is, as always, in the details. Which data will be shared? With whom? At what cost? And for how long?11 That is one major reason why Google’s proposal to build a smart city neighbourhood in Toronto is especially important. Since there are very few actual rules on data ownership in smart cities, Google hopes to establish a global template for the right of companies to retain control. But as Nabeel Ahmed, a smart city expert and member of the Toronto Open Smart Cities Forum puts it, ‘It is as if Uber were to propose regulations on ride-sharing, or Airbnb were to tell city council how to govern short-term rentals. By definition, there is a conflict of interest’.12 If companies own smart city data, then citizens (and their public representatives) are reduced to being their tenants, first paying for the right to use smart city

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services and then paying again by giving up valuable data about themselves.

Black Gold for Hackers Companies and governments are not the only institutions looking to benefit from smart city surveillance. As one commentator colourfully described, smart city data will be ‘black gold for malicious hackers’.13 It did not take long to realise this forecast. In July 2018, Singapore, the global model for the connected city and the winner of several smart city competitions for its technological prowess, found that hackers had stolen the personal health records of 1.5 million citizens. A total of 160,000 of these, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and a few of his ministers, also had their outpatient medication information stolen. As a result of this greatest ever data breach in Singapore’s history, smart city projects were put on hold pending a cybersecurity review. Myths die hard, and it is typically not until new ones come along to replace them. So, it should not come as a major surprise that the official charged with managing digital security simply reaffirmed the dominant myth: ‘We must not let this derail our Smart Nation services … it is the way of the future’.14 In fact, a few months after the world learned about the hacker attack on Singapore’s health records, the Smart City Expo World Congress named the city-state the top smart city of 2018. Smart cities multiply the number of access points available for hacker attacks. Some may choose to hack into individual sensors located everywhere, a relatively easy task. This will do damage, but not nearly as much as when they target hubs that gather data into a centralised repository. That typically happens when hackers are looking for ransomware: payment for returning stolen and re-encrypted data to its rightful owners,

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as when the UK National Health Service was hit in 2017. The closer hackers come to the heart of the smart city, typically an operations centre that manages multiple streams of data, the more challenging is the job – but the greater are the damage and the reward. Researchers working for IBM Security found major hub security problems in smart city projects: It appears to be a huge area of vulnerability, and the stakes are high when we’re talking about putting computers in everything and giving them important jobs like public safety and management of industrial control systems. When they fail, it could cause damage to life and livelihood and when we’re not putting the proper security and privacy measures in place bad things can happen, especially with motivated and resourced attackers.15 Specifically, the investigation found that exposing municipal infrastructure and public safety sensors to manipulation could easily destabilise traffic lights, deactivate radiation detectors or even create a massive public catastrophe such as causing a dam to overflow because of bad water level data. There is no shortage of ‘motivated and resourced’ hackers in today’s world, and so the prospects for attacks grow with each new smart city system installation. According to cybersecurity experts, it will not take a lot of either motivation or resources to break into IoT devices successfully. A 2018 report discovered that many of these are hackable by design: We found issues in design as well as vulnerable implementations, along with hundreds of thousands of unsecure deployments. These issues highlight the risk of how endpoints could be open to denialof-service (DoS) attacks and, in some cases, taken advantage of to gain full control by an attacker.

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Despite the fixes in the design specifications, it is hard for developers to keep up with a changing standard when a technology becomes pervasive. Also, the market for this technology is very large because the barriers to entry are fairly low. This has led to a multitude of fragmented implementations.16 Moreover, when the company Aruba, the network arm of Hewlett-Packard, investigated cities that have installed smart city systems, it found that 86% had already experienced a security breach. Admittedly, many breaches are minor and do little to no damage, but such results, in the early days of smart city applications, do not bode well for enthusiasts of the techenabled city.17 No section of the smart city fabric is beyond attack. For example, many municipalities are connecting their roads so that autonomous vehicles can be monitored and directed through the global positioning system. An attack on that system could overturn directional and speed commands leading to chaos on roads. A 2018 survey by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), a non-profit founded in 1969 to assess the quality of computer systems, documented that such an example is not far-fetched and, in fact, is likely to be repeated in water, power and other key urban systems, unless there are significant changes in the quality of security. Only 15% of its 2,000 respondents, made up of professionals in information technology and cybersecurity, thought cities were sufficiently equipped to address cyber-attacks. Energy, communication and financial services were considered most vulnerable. Interestingly, when asked about the greatest threats to smart cities, the respondents listed hackers slightly below nation-states, which were felt to have the necessary resources to disrupt urban systems.18 There is little doubt that the threat from hacking is serious. It is also likely that fixes will manage

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issues as they arise, just as they have for similar failures throughout the history of computing. Nevertheless, since Next Internet technologies significantly raise the complexity level, it is likely that fixes will be temporary and that authorities will continually need to assess the risks of exposure to attacks.

Normal Cities, Normal Accidents In 1999, the sociologist Charles Perrow wrote Normal Accidents, a book that explained how the biggest threats to technological systems are not external but actually resulted from the complexity intrinsic to systems. Threats are compounded by attempts to make them more secure, adding more layers to the overall complexity. Drawing on numerous examples, including the Union Carbide pesticide plant leak in Bhopal, India that killed close to 4,000 people, the nuclear plant meltdown at Chernobyl, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, Perrow documented the inherent dangers of excessive complexity. Although his book appeared well before the rise of smart cities, Perrow’s ideas are more powerfully resonant today than when he wrote them.19 Imagine a city dependent on millions, if not billions, of sensors embedded in public and private infrastructure and interconnected in overlapping network grids. Imagine also that the city relies on quick responses to data fed into one or more central command centres whose managers are expected to respond quickly to potentially fatal threats to vital transportation, energy and communication systems. Complicating the matter even more, there are almost always multiple different public and private systems, each using their own software, including private proprietary programmes that challenge the capabilities of the best engineers to achieve smooth system interconnections. Even when integration is accomplished, the need for

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regular software updates, especially to fix newly found security breaches, can lead to breakdowns. Hackers representing either national governments or rogue operators may not be the biggest danger facing the interconnected city. The systems themselves may become the biggest challenge because they are very complex, deeply intertwined, with little tolerance for failure, and require constant updates to their operational and security software. IT professionals agree that the challenge for older cities is particularly acute because they face an installed base of legacy systems that are difficult to upgrade and integrate. They often repeat the admittedly geeky joke that God created the world in just seven days, but God did not have to deal with an installed base. Older systems are difficult to integrate into new architectures and their persistence often eludes developers. Inevitably, this leads to problems down the road. Older systems, however, are slow to disappear because replacing them is expensive. Moreover, proprietary systems are also slow to go because the companies installing them hope to make it difficult for customers to make changes. There is more to be gained by locking their users into an integrated hardware and software configuration. Ideally, providers want customers to depend on them for updated hardware and software. Apple has successfully used this method to help the company become one of the world’s most valuable businesses. Many other businesses, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, have emulated Apple by tightly connecting hardware and software. This often leads to calls to use open architecture software, that can easily and inexpensively connect to new systems, a worthy request but one not easily or inexpensively achieved. Since many cities are strapped for cash and bombarded by vendors eager to sell the latest ‘smart city solution’, they face major challenges to determine the best applications that meet their specific needs and avoid catastrophic disruptions and breakdowns.

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Smart city managers operate on a much larger scale than the individual household, but homeowners face similar issues. That is because homes are increasingly connected to the smart city grid for the delivery of essential services like power, water and communication. They also contain digital assistants, WiFi-enabled thermostats and, of course, routers that are among the least secure of all digital devices. Moreover, individuals get from place to place with cars that are filled with digital technologies, and they carry smartphones that provide essential information even as their every move is tracked. Companies selling these devices require customers to install software updates regularly. Some even stop providing updates even when they are required. As one expert explains: Short of rejecting internet integration with appliances, dealing with this is not easy. As with home routers, we tend to keep appliances around for years, so vulnerabilities aren’t phased out quickly. In fact, many vendors might stop issuing firmware updates for physical objects even while they’re still widely in use – abandoning the public to problems lurking in embedded code. And otherwise-valuable ‘over the air’ security updates could also be a gateway to a hack, especially for small vendors of cheap if useful objects like $5 drones.20 It is no wonder that people are increasingly frustrated with systems that do not work or work poorly and are suffering from device fatigue. As one obviously frustrated early adapter put it, I’m not going to warn you against making everything in your home smart because of the privacy risks, although there are quite a few. I’m

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going to warn you against a smart home because living in it is annoying as hell.21

SMART DISTRACTION, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE EFFICIENCY TRAP In addition to the promises and the problems associated with smart cities, the focus on creating them draws attention away from pressing issues facing urban areas and the planet. Technology-enabled cities are a prime example of what Evgeny Morozov has called ‘solutionism’, which involves leaping into the development of technologies and then finding problems for which they might be a solution.22 For example, figure out how to embed sensors in street lighting and then find a problem, like street crime or homelessness, that they might be able to solve. Rather than determining the underlying causes of these problems and building solutions based on the findings, smart city ‘solutionists’ call for developing technologies and then find problems they might solve. There is arguably no greater problem facing cities and the planet than climate change and it too has been the object of solutionism. Smart cities are often hailed as environmentally friendly and a defence against climate change. Such an assessment is typically based on the view that Next Internet technologies will help cities operate more efficiently, reducing their carbon footprints and slowing, if not halting and reversing, the arrival of destructive climate change. Some providers of smart city systems have indeed made more use of sustainable solar and wind energy to power their data centres and other facilities, including their own headquarters buildings. It is also the case that by monitoring every device that draws on carbon-based power sources, cities are now more aware of how they use energy and more capable of controlling their

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power requirements. As a result of these initiatives, there are expectations that the spread of smart cities will reduce power consumption by as much as 20%. But all of these measures are dwarfed by current and anticipated demands for electricity that are arriving with the global expansion of ever larger data centres and the installation of sensor-equipped devices throughout cities. The accelerating demand for data and for systems that can distribute and use data also expands the need for power. There is reasonable concern that, instead of reducing carbon consumption, smart cities will increase it by promoting what is called the efficiency trap or the tendency for energy-curbing measures to create false confidence and actually increase consumption. According to the research firm Gartner, the world will contain over 20 billion energy-consuming connected devices by 2020, an increase of three times over 2017.23 As the number of technology-rich cities grows, the demand for these devices is likely to grow exponentially with no saturation point in sight. This expansion is also accelerating the demand for data centre facilities, including the growing number of so-called ‘hyper-scale’ cloud farms that surpass 1 million square feet. By 2018, data centres consumed from 2% to 3% of the world’s electricity and emitted about as much carbon dioxide as the entire global airline industry. With global traffic doubling every four years, these factories of the digital world are expanding rapidly. Construction cannot keep up with demand and the total annual cost of building them has reached $20 billion.24 Despite promises to make their data centres more energy-efficient by drawing on renewable energy, most providers remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels. This is especially the case in China, South Korea and India where data centres still rely primarily on coal-fired power generation.25 With IoT devices producing 3.5% of worldwide emissions by 2028, and 14% by the year 2040, the communication

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industry as a whole will take up a growing share of global electricity consumption. By 2025, absent significant abatement measures, the industry will require fully one-fifth of the world’s energy resources. According to 2018 research by Anders Andrae, by 2025 the industry will surpass all countries but the US, China and India by producing 5.5% of all global emissions. By that date, data centres alone are likely to produce 3.2% of global emissions. It is hard to make the case for sustainability when the demand for global computing power required by sensor-equipped devices, surveillance cameras, video streaming and email increases by 20% annually.26 Facilitated by fifth-generation mobile technology and the arrival of sensor-equipped cars, robots and AI systems, all of which are central to smart cities, the demand for power will likely accelerate. If new energy hogs such as cryptocurrencies make any headway into future economies, the demand for power will almost certainly increase sharply. Notwithstanding promises of efficiencies that justify massive investment in smart city technologies, their lengthening carbon footprint is a significant cause for concern. It may very well be the case that, as one critique concluded, ‘The smart city industry is a Trojan horse for technology companies. They come in under the guise of environmentalism and improving quality of life, but they’re here for money’.27

RESISTANCE These concerns and criticisms have begun to inspire resistance to smart cities, especially to projects developed by big technology firms. Resistance grew particularly fierce, for example, when Apple attempted to build a new town square in the heart of Stockholm. The project was designed by Foster + Partners, one of the world’s elite architectural firms, and

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featured a large retail store, café, park and other amenities, such as free Wi-Fi. Even after protests led to the scaling back of the original ambitious, town-like, project in Kungsträdgården – the King’s Garden area in the city centre – the opposition continued to make itself heard, and the city completely rejected Apple’s proposal in October 2018. One local designer explained the primary concern in socio-spatial language: Kungsträdgården is the most important park in Sweden. It is the thread that pulls together the historical power of the monarchy with the commercial blocks of Hamngatan and the workingclass districts of Södermalm. This is very important for democracy because it has to do with power, symbolically and spatially.28 The area is one of the oldest in the city and provides the public with space for a range of events, including pride parades, political debates and winter ice-skating. Stockholm’s opposition succeeded in demonstrating that technology companies, however deep their pockets and however congenial their design schemes, do not have an inherent right to impose their will on cities that still cherish public over private spaces. One of the reasons why Stockholm succeeded is that social movements in the city were able to convince politicians, even those dreaming of dressing up their old city centre in a digital sublime, that they would not tolerate Apple’s intrusion. That the city, around the same time, also rejected calls to bid for the 2026 Winter Olympic Games is evidence of a strong public sphere and political leaders attuned to its wishes. While there has been significant resistance to Google’s attempt to remake a portion of Toronto, overturning the project is difficult because the organisations opposing the project, from those worried about the impact on the waterfront

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to those concerned about surveillance and data ownership, have not been able to convince the political elite, including the city’s mayor, the provincial premier and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. That is partly because political leaders cling to the hope that Google will expand its operation in Canada. They accept Google’s vision of the benign and salutary impact of technology firms on urban areas. It is also not insignificant that these political elites have close ties to local and national development firms that see the Google project as a door-opener to build smart city technology projects around the world. Nevertheless, the opposition to Google’s plans for Toronto, especially the resignation of numerous people from their positions as advisers, has received extensive international attention. Moreover, a report from the provincial auditor general, which blew the whistle on the hasty approval of Google’s proposal, particularly before the resolution of data ownership and surveillance issues, has emboldened opposition. Activists like Bianca Wylie, a founder of the public interest organisation Tech Reset Canada, have already succeeded by getting Google to scale back its initially very ambitious project. Whether or not their work is fully successful, resistance to what was once an easy sell bodes well for those aiming to counter the smart city movement. So too is the example of the urban resistance movement in New York City that led Amazon to back out of its deal to build a new headquarters in the Big Apple. Amazon continues to operate throughout New York, but the agreement that would have brought the company $3 billion in public incentives inspired a coalition of resistance organisations that proved too inhospitable for Jeff Bezos’s company. Scholars have contributed to resistance through research that challenges the dominant literature which has lionised the smart city movement for years. Until recently, academic

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criticism has come from projects produced by Francesca Bria, Adam Greenfield, Evgeny Morozov and James Townsend, among a handful of others. This has begun to mushroom into more expansive critical projects such as the Real Smart Cities project, an EU-funded programme of research and education. Real Smart Cities has brought together scholars from several British and European universities to investigate how smart cities technologies present a threat to democracy and citizenship and how digital tools might be used create new forms of community participation. Smart city advocates are increasingly concerned about these and other examples of resistance to what they once perceived as the inevitable coming of the smart city. In a 2018 report, the research and consultancy firm Black & Veatch noted growing scepticism about the long-term benefits of these projects. Their survey found a sharp jump in the number of respondents who viewed the tech-enabled metropolis as a passing fad. According to a company official, There were some inflated thoughts on what smart cities were going to do and how quickly they were going to get here. We think that people are growing leery of the buzz word and the lack of apparent progress.29 Citing Google’s trouble in Toronto as the most significant story of the year for technology-enabled cities, one publication actually referred to 2018 as ‘the year of the Smart City skeptic’.30 Resistance takes many forms, and for some cities that means low-tech solutions to urban problems. This is particularly evident in transportation where a number of cities have enacted programmes that limit the use of motorised vehicles in city centres. These municipalities have also made major investments to bring their sidewalks up to standards that

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pedestrians find appealing. The City of Denver has taken a leading role, for example, by proposing to spend $1.2 billion on sidewalks, and, at an even greater cost, by rebuilding its public transit so that most of its residents are within a quarter-mile of a stop. In Europe, Madrid is banning all cars owned by non-residents from its city centre and redesigning many of its major avenues to make them more pedestrianfriendly. The City of Paris has banned vehicles on a road that parallels the Seine and plans to turn it into a pedestrian- and bicycle-only thoroughfare. Finally, Oslo plans to ban all cars from its city centre beginning in 2019.31 These policies differ from the increasingly popular ‘congestion pricing’ system, essentially a fee to drive into the centre of the city, which big cities hope will reduce city-centre congestion. Unlike congestion pricing, they do not favour those who can easily afford the added cost of driving their cars into the city. Seattle, which contains the primary headquarters of Amazon and is known for its tech-savviness, made its mark for technology resistance when it decided to dismantle a wireless mesh network and surveillance cameras that the police argued were essential for their work. Purchased from the federal Department of Homeland Security for $3.6 million, the system was able to ‘track and log every wireless device that moved through its system: people attending protests, people getting cups of coffee, people going to a hotel in the middle of the workday’. Removal of the five-year-old system resulted from the political agitation that primarily came from the local American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of anti-­surveillance activists. For them, eliminating this datagathering network demonstrated that you can make a smart city even smarter with less technology.32 Resistance has also taken the form of attacks on the technologies that power smart cities including, increasingly, the autonomous vehicles that promise to take the work and the

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risk out of driving. Angered by the use of these vehicles, such as those the company Waymo uses to move cargo in Arizona, people have slashed tyres, pelted Waymo vans with rocks and tried to force them off the road. Along with venting anger, these actions have threatened public safety and especially the emergency drivers providing back-up and helping to facilitate the transition. According to the scholar Douglas Rushkoff, People are lashing out justifiably. There’s a growing sense that the giant corporations honing driverless technologies do not have our best interests at heart. Just think about the humans inside these vehicles, who are essentially training the artificial intelligence that will replace them.33 It is hard to say precisely what this portends for urban areas, but the road ahead may very well be somewhat bumpier than initially anticipated. These are important developments. However, declining faith in smart cities will matter little unless it is mobilised into sustained opposition and action. If it is to come, the likely route to such resistance will be through existing movements that address problems with the big technology companies providing the foundations for smart cities. These include opposition to corporate concentration, especially to the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, as well as opposition to accelerating surveillance. They are also on the front lines in the battles over privacy rights, network neutrality and the rights of citizens to control their own cities and the data they generate. In Western countries, they operate openly. But it is easy to miss organised resistance in Asia, especially in China, because opposition is more typically criminalised. However, I have observed it at first hand and through associates in India, China, Singapore and Malaysia. In some places, like the EU, governments have

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led the push-back against the hegemony of American tech giants through legislation, particularly the General Data Protection Regulation that protects citizens’ privacy and the right to control personal data. Nevertheless, for all of their individual accomplishments, these movements remain piecemeal, focussing on important but narrow problem areas. Perhaps that is the only way to achieve success in a world of massive corporate and state power. But this is by no means a certainty, and smart cities may provide the ultimate test for those mobilising to create a more democratic and citizen-driven digital world. One battle that bears close scrutiny is the resistance to Amazon’s plans, heavily subsidised by government, to set up a new headquarters in New York City. A coalition of multiple movement organisations has mounted numerous protests that caused Amazon to question its decision to go forward and, finally, to abandon the project entirely.34 Smart cities represent a new and significant challenge to citizen-support organisations, because they concentrate and intensify a host of problems that have been addressed only narrowly. They are the places where all of the issues that have preoccupied digital rights advocates, since the days of Web 1.0, intersect and converge. In this respect, smart cities provide an opportunity for social movements to come together, whether they have focussed on the material or the online problems facing municipalities, to fight for citizen control over both bricks and bits. It is not just the organisations that have fought to protect online privacy, overcome digital divides, ensure citizens’ rights to data and defend network neutrality, which have a stake in coming together to insure a more just smart city. It is also those who have fought for fair housing policies, defended public space and marched for social equality. Moreover, because smart cities concentrate many of the concerns raised by climate justice supporters, the environmental movement needs to be more fiercely involved in big urban issues.

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MUNICIPALISM The convergence of radical and reform movements is embodied in what is being called municipalism. Once associated with anarchism, the concept now refers to citizen movements to take power in cities, out of a belief that the municipality offers the greatest hope for democracy today. It is a growing recognition that, as Morozov has put it, the most meaningful scale at which a radical change in democratic political culture can occur today is not the nation state, as some on the left and the right are prone to believe, but, rather the city.35 Frustrated by the undemocratic alternatives on offer from neo-liberalism and nationalism, people are turning to the pragmatism of urban politics to renew cosmopolitan democracy. Advocates identify progressive city initiatives and promote their wider applications. Municipalism starts from the view that, to paraphrase a well-worn line, people make cities, but not under conditions of their own making. Natural conditions and technologies play a role in urban development and redevelopment, but it is ultimately the people who live, work and visit that create cities. They do so, however, under conditions established by earlier generations. There is a givenness to cities that sets conditions or limits, but this does not determine what people actually make of their city. The corollary to this assumption is that cities are already smart and that their intelligence derives from people who have to carry out the complex tasks that cities require. Technologies do not make cities smart and those who develop and deploy them should only do so in order to make the best use of existing human intelligence. This is far more valuable for urbanites than extracting intelligence from people and lodging it in

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machines, in the futile hope that this activity will somehow make a city better. Municipalism encourages people to make their own cities. Following the example of Jane Jacobs and other urban activists, it calls for organising urban practices from the grass roots without relying, as is so often the case today, on political and corporate elites. Specifically, it systematically seeks to bring marginalised voices into the debate about the future of cities, drawing on their lived experience in neighbourhoods and their communities. It places care, co-operation and relationships at the heart of politics, encouraging all of us to take responsibility for where we live, for the environment and for each other. Municipalism does not avoid technology, but recognises that it is an enabler that can, if used primarily in the service of control and profit, easily take on a life of its own and overwhelm individuals and communities. Supporters have pointed to several specific examples of municipalism in action. Barcelona is generally singled out as a model city for its citizens’ platform Barcelona en Comú, launched in 2014, which has guided the implementation of several progressive policies, such as promoting direct citizen involvement in policy development, and a participatory budgeting system to redistribute income to activist and community groups. Naples, Italy became one of the first cities to establish a ‘Department of the Commons’ and the first in Italy to establish a statute that identifies the ‘commons’ as an interest to be recognised and protected as a fundamental human right. Making use of this law, the city has protected formerly abandoned buildings, that were occupied and used by citizens to keep them out of the hands of developers and speculators. Importantly, the administration of Naples has given a clear definition to the city’s commitment to public space:

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the tangible and intangible assets of collective belonging that are managed in a shared, participatory process and which is committed to ensuring the collective enjoyment of common goods and their preservation for the benefit of future generations. It also established a ‘Permanent Citizen Observatory on the Commons’ whose 11 members include experts in the law, in economics, in social welfare and in the environment. Seven are selected by the mayor, the other four are chosen in an online vote. They are responsible for producing studies and proposals for the protection and management of common goods.36 Additional examples of municipalism include the social movement Ciudad Futura in Argentina and Cooperation Jackson in the State of Mississippi. Municipalism is significant because it begins with the recognition that cities derive their intelligence from their people and that initiatives, with or without the extensive use of technology, begin with their citizens. With the world seemingly caught between the elite-driven alternatives of neo-liberalism and authoritarian nationalism, some might dismiss these notions as minor and unsustainable. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the history of cities is filled with what were initially called minor and unsustainable movements. Some of these turned out to be far more significant, such as the uprising made famous by Jane Jacobs, that went on to save treasured areas of New York City from the misplaced visions of elites.

A MANIFESTO FOR THE SMART CITY What happens when the model of a citizen-led city meets that of the technology-enabled smart city? There are numerous ways to answer this question, but I have chosen to do so by

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concluding the book with a set of principles – what one might loosely call a manifesto for the smart city. People make cities smart. The collective experience and intelligence of those who live and work in cities, along with those who visit them, are what make cities smart. The goal of smart city technology applications, especially Next Internet systems like the IoT, big data analytics and cloud computing, is first and foremost to help improve the quality of life and the capabilities of those who live in cities. It is not principally to expand the profit and power of businesses or the control of government over its citizens. Smart cities are democratic cities. Citizens must be involved in decision-making about smart city applications from the beginning of each project throughout completion, as co-participants with governments, private companies and public non-governmental organisations. Citizens have the right to access all information, including plans, policies and debates, about the smart city development process. A key index of a successful smart city project is the extent to which it helps citizens to expand democracy, that is, the fullest possible participation of citizens in the decisions that affect their lives. Smart cities value public space. Public space is comprised of areas where individuals and social groups are free to come together to communicate openly, including about social problems and political action. It is to be distinguished from commercial spaces whose primary purpose is to sell products and services. Smart city technologies make it easier to turn exchange into a market transaction, thereby threatening spaces outside the commercial sphere. Because public spaces are central to supporting the free flow of ideas and democracy, smart cities must protect public space, both online and offline. This includes public communication through universal access under public control, essential public utilities that

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provide energy and water, as well as public institutions such as schools, parks, libraries and public meeting spaces. Smart cities share data. Data gathered from smart city projects belongs to the people from whom it is collected. Citizens have the right to retain, remove, or place in a citizen-controlled public trust all data collected on their activities in smart cities. Data gathered on citizens does not belong to the private companies or government agencies that collect it. Citizens can agree to have private and public institutions make use of their data, but only when all parties are fully informed and when there is a guarantee that, if people choose not to share data at any time in the process, there will be no repercussions. Smart cities defend privacy. People have the right to personal privacy. That means any smart city data-gathering system must de-identify data at the source of collection and must take full responsibility to ensure that personal data does not go to third parties for sale to advertisers or other interested entities. Smart cities do not discriminate. Smart city projects, whether to improve transportation, energy delivery, communication or security, must be carried out without gender, race or social class discrimination. This includes the algorithms used in the decision-making process. These must be subject to public review and oversight, with the goal of ending the replication of historical social divisions. To that end, all decision-making algorithms based on data gathered in smart city projects must be open to public scrutiny. Smart cities preserve the right to communicate. People have the right to communicate, not just to receive communication. It is essential for public authorities to create universal and affordable citizen access to high-speed communication and extend access to information, especially about the operation of municipal governments and their private sector partners.

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Smart cities protect the environment. People have the right to a healthy planet. At every stage of each smart city project, it is essential to place at the forefront the goals of meeting the challenge of climate change, reducing and eliminating the use of non-renewable energy resources and maintaining a healthy biosphere. Smart cities and their streets are about people, not cars. The design of city streets and sidewalks is smart only if it begins with pedestrians, whose use of both breathes life into cities. Smart sidewalks are built to be filled with people and lined with trees. An empty sidewalk is like an empty theatre. Both demonstrate that there is something wrong with the production. Smart streets are best designed first to accommodate the needs of pedestrians and those who travel on nonmotorised vehicles. Smart cities deliver services. Abiding by these principles, particularly the commitment to citizen control over technology, it is reasonable to expect that smart city applications will strengthen the efficient management and delivery of all city services. These include public transportation, energy systems, as well as fire safety, policing, waste removal, water and sewer services. Furthermore, they can help in the delivery of public health services, as well as the management of public housing and public education.

ENDNOTES 1.  Farhad Manjoo, How tech companies conquered America’s cities, New York Times, June 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/06/20/technology/tech-companies-conquered-cities.html 2.  Evgeny Morozov, There is a leftwing way to challenge big tech for our data, The Guardian, August 19, 2018, https://www.

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theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/19/there-is-a-leftwingway-to-challenge-big-data-here-it-is 3.  Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City, Lacuna Books, Kindle Edition. 2013, Chapter 14, http://www.amazon.com 4.  Tamsin Shaw, The new military-industrial complex of big data psy-ops, The New York Review of Books, March 21, 2018, https:// www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/21/the-digital-military-industrialcomplex/ 5.  Adrian Chen, Cambridge Analytica and our lives inside the surveillance machine, The New Yorker, March 21, 2018, https:// www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/cambridgeanalytica-and-our-lives-inside-the-surveillance-machine 6.  Frederic Lardinois, Google Fibre pulls out of Louisville, TechCrunch, February 7, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/07/ google-fiber-pulls-out-of-louisville/ 7.  Matthew Braga, Welcome to the neighbourhood. Have you read the terms of service? CBC News, January 16, 2018, https:// www.cbc.ca/news/technology/smart-cities-privacy-data-personalinformation-sidewalk-1.4488145 8.  Trevor Cole, Why privacy expert Ann Cavoukian quit Google’s Toronto smart-city project, The Globe and Mail, November 27, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/ article-why-privacy-expert-ann-cavoukian-quit-googles-torontosmart-city/ 9.  Joseph Turow, Michael Hennessy, Nora Draper, Ope Ankanbi, and Diami Virgillio, Divided we feel: Partisan politics drive Americans’ emotions regarding surveillance of lowincome populations, Philadelphia, PA: Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, April 2018, https:// www.asc.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Turow-DividedFinal.pdf 10.  David Marino-Achison, Here’s how one analyst sees two options in the digital home-services business, Barron’s, November 29, 2018, https://www.barrons.com/articles/heres-how-one-analystsees-yelp-and-angi-homeservices-stocks-performing-1543509075

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11.  Teresa Scassa, Who owns all the data collected by ‘smart cities’? Toronto Star, November 23, 2017, https://www.thestar.com/ opinion/contributors/2017/11/23/who-owns-all-the-data-collectedby-smart-cities.html 12.  Ava Kofman, Google’s “smart city of surveillance” faces new resistance in Toronto, The Intercept, November 13, 2018, https:// theintercept.com/2018/11/13/google-quayside-toronto-smart-city/ 13.  Nick Ismail, The future smart city and the impact on risk, availability, security and privacy, Information Age, August 3, 2018, https://www.information-age.com/future-smart-city-123473926/ 14.  Irene Tham, Smart Nation projects paused pending review of cyber security, The Straits Times, Singapore, July 21, 2018, https:// www.straitstimes.com/singapore/smart-nation-projects-pausedpending-review-of-cyber-security 15.  Lily Hay Newman, The sensors that power smart cities are a hacker’s dream, Wired, August 9, 2018, https://www.wired.com/ story/sensor-hubs-smart-cities-vulnerabilities-hacks/ 16.  Federico Maggi, Rainer Vosseler, and Davide Quarta, The fragility of industrial IoT’s data backbone, Trend Micro Research, 2018, https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wpthe-fragility-of-industrial-IoTs-data-backbone.pdf 17.  Nick Ismail, Creating a smart city needs collaboration and open infrastructure, Information Age, August 8, 2018, https://www. information-age.com/smart-city-collaboration-123474036/ 18.  ISACA, Smart cities pose new security challenges and opportunities, May 29, 2018, http://www.isaca.org/About-ISACA/ Press-room/News-Releases/2018/Pages/Smart-Cities-Pose-NewSecurity-Challenges-and-Opportunities-Global.aspx 19.  Charles Perrow, Normal accidents. Living with high risk technologies, updated edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 20.  Jonathan Zittrain, From Westworld to best world for the Internet of Things, New York Times, June 3, 2018, https://www. nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/westworld-internet-of-things. html

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21.  Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu, The house that spied on me, Gizmodo, February 7, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/the-house-thatspied-on-me-1822429852 22.  Evgeny Morozov, To save everything, click here: The Folly of technological solutionism, New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2013. 23.  Mark Hung, Leading the IoT: Gartner insights in how to lead in a connected world, Gartner Inc., 2017, https://www.gartner.com/ imagesrv/books/iot/iotEbook_digital.pdf 24.  Fred Pearce, The data on green data centers is still pretty cloudy, GreenBiz, April 24, 2018, https://www.greenbiz.com/article/ data-green-data-centers-still-pretty-cloudy 25.  Fred Pearce, The data on green data centers is still pretty cloudy, GreenBiz, April 24, 2018, https://www.greenbiz.com/article/ data-green-data-centers-still-pretty-cloudy 26.  Climate Home News, ‘Tsunami of data’ could consume one fifth of global electricity by 2025, The Guardian, December 11, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/ tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025 27.  Christopher Hume, Setting the record straight on Google’s Toronto ‘Smart City’ project and privacy issues, Toronto Storeys, August 22, 2018, http://torontostoreys.com/2018/08/googletoronto-smart-city-privacy/ 28.  Katherine Guimapang, An Apple town square? Stockholm says no, thank you, Architect News, November 1, 2018, https:// archinect.com/news/article/150093835/an-apple-town-squarestockholm-says-no-thank-you 29.  Stephen DeAngelis, Is the smart cities movement a passing fad? Enterra Solutions, March 1, 2018, https://www.enterrasolutions. com/blog/is-the-smart-cities-movement-a-passing-fad/ 30.  Laura Bliss, 2018 was the year of the Smart City skeptic, Citylab, December 27, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/ transportation/2018/12/smart-city-uber-google-facebooktechnology-startup-solutions/579025/ 31.  Richard Conniff, The pedestrian strikes back, New York Times, December 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/opinion/ sunday/cars-pedestrians-cities.html

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32.  Brendan Kiley, Surveillance system or public-safety tool? Seattle dismantles controversial wireless mesh network, Seattle Times, February 10, 2018, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattlenews/surveillance-system-or-public-safety-tool-seattle-dismantlescontroversial-wireless-mesh-network/ 33.  Simon Romero, Wielding rocks and knives, Arizonans attack self-driving cars, New York Times, December 31, 2018, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizonaattacks.html 34.  Robert McCartney, Jonathan O’Connell, and Patricia Sullivan, Facing opposition, Amazon reconsiders NY headquarters site, two officials say, Washington Post, February 8, 2019, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/facingopposition-amazon-reconsiders-ny-headquarters-site-two-officialssay/2019/02/08/451ffc52-2a19-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story. html 35.  Evgeny Morozov, There is a leftwing way to challenge big tech for our data, The Guardian, August 19, 2018, https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/19/there-is-a-leftwingway-to-challenge-big-data-here-it-is 36.  Marta Cillero, What makes an empty building in Naples a “Common Good”? Political Critique, April 25, 2017, http:// politicalcritique.org/world/2017/naples-common-good-emptybuildings/

FURTHER READING

Ari Adut. Reign of appearances: The misery and splendor of the public sphere. Alessandro Busà. The creative destruction of New York City: Engineering the city for the elite. Ashley Dawson. Extreme cities: The peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change. Daniel Doctoroff. Greater than ever: New York’s big comeback. Virginia Eubanks. Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. Richard Florida. The new urban crisis. Amitav Ghosh. The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. Stephen Graham. Ed. The cybercities reader. Adam Greenfield. “Against the smart city: A pamphlet.” Jane Jacobs. The death and life of great American cities. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout. Eds. The city reader, 6th edition. Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria. “Rethinking the smart city.” 249

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Jeremiah Moss. Vanishing New York: How a great city lost its soul. Antoine Picon. Smart cities: A spatialised intelligence. Privacy International. “Smart cities: Utopian vision/ Dystopian reality.” Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel. The city of tomorrow: Sensors, networks, hackers, and the future of urban life. Jonathan F. P. Rose. The well-tempered city. Ugo Rossi. Cities in global capitalism. Bernard Rudofsky. Architecture without architects: A short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture. Elizabeth Rush. Rising: Dispatches from the New American shore. Saskia Sassen. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. James C. Scott. Against the grain: A deep history of the earliest states. Leslie Sklair. The icon project: Architecture, cities, and capitalist globalization. James Suzman. Affluence without abundance: The disappearing world of the Bushmen. Anthony Townsend. Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new Utopia. Katharine S. Willis and Alessandro Aurigi. Digital and smart cities. Shoshana Zuboff. Surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power.

INDEX Aadhaar system, 116 Absurdism, 105 Actants, 61 Action Comics, 24 Activists, 6 Advertising, 84, 201 Against the Grain (Scott), 42 Agglomeration economies, 190 Agricultural surpluses, 43 Airbnb, 34, 156, 161, 223 Alibaba, 5, 109–110, 216 Amazon, 109–110, 222, 234, 237 Amazon Fresh concept, 133–134 Amazon Go smart stores, 132–133 Amazon in Seattle, 132–134 delivery workers, 146–147 American as Apple Pie, 134–137 American Civil Liberties Union, 85 Amsterdam, 160–161

App-driven city, 136–137 Apple, 109–110, 146, 222, 237 Architecture Without Architects (Rudofsky), 40–41 Artificial intelligence systems (AI systems), 60, 143 AT&T, 83, 180–181 Baidu, 109–110 Barcelona, 240 Barcelona en Comú, 154–160 Becoming Digital (Mosco), 13–14, 19 Bell Labs, 83 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), 113 Berns, Jeffrey, 143 Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation, 118 Big data analytics, 19, 64–65 Big savings, 67–68 251

252

Big technology, 144–148 firms, 162 Bitcoin, 63 Black gold for hackers, 224–227 Blockchain technology, 143 Blockchain USA, 143 Bloomberg administration, 79 Bloomberg-Doctoroff impact, 78 Broadband communication, 51–52 Brutalism, 179, 181 Burdick, Thelma, 185–186 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), 78, 129–132 Cable revolution, 51 Capitalism, 44, 99, 135, 186–188 Carbon footprint, 232 Carousel of Progress, 49 Cathedral of Commerce, 178 Celebration, town of, 15, 52 Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), 81 Centralisation, 69 Centralised national government control, 99 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), 198 China (see also High-tech China) colossal smart city programme, 111

Index

massive investment in smart cities, 109 tech firms, 111 China Hi-Tech Fair Smart City Exhibition, 202 Cisco, 5, 29, 153, 157–158, 198–199, 216 Citi Field, 82 Citi Ventures, 84 Citizen Cloud, 102 Citizen Kane (film), 140 Citizen-focussed community, 162 Citizens, 98, 151, 242 Amsterdam, 160–161 arrive, 154 democracy by design, 154–160 Google subsidiary, 152 Ouishare Paris, 161–162 sharing services in Seoul, 162–163 tokenism, 153–154 ‘City Brain’, 103 City Cockpit, 71 City of technology, 59 big savings, 67–68 command and control in smart city, 68–71 Next Internet, 59–65 smart communication, 65–67 smart energy, 65–67 smart transportation, 65–67 City-technology dance, 43

Index

CityBridge’s privacy policy claims, 84–85 City–states, 2–3 Civic Data Trust, 89–90 ‘Clean up’ neighbourhoods, 191 ‘Cli-fi’, 9 Climate change, 8–10, 115, 230–232 smart city governance and inevitability of, 163–167 Climate refugees, 9 Cloud computing, 28, 61–63 Cold War, 46 Coming of Post-Industrial Society, The (Bell), 187 Command and control in smart city, 68–71 Communication, 101, 105–106, 117 instant, 1, 51 Communist Party, 123 Communist Party of China (CPC), 105–106 Community building, 51 Comprehensive democratic smart city strategy, 154–155 Computer simulations in steel city, 46–47 ‘Congestion pricing’ system, 236 Consumer culture, 188 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), 202 Cornell Tech, 73, 84

253

Corporate promotion of smart city technologies, 203 Creative city, 193 Creative class to smart city, 187 capitalism, 188–189 City of Angels, 193–194 global information economy, 187–188 imaginary, 191–192 transformational change, 192 urban imaginary, 189–190 version of smart city imaginary, 194–195 Crested anoles, 8 Critical social science, 3–8 Cryptocurrencies, 63, 232 Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, The (Bell), 187 Cultural studies perspective, 21 Cyberpunk, 28 Cyberspace, 190 ‘dark Satanic Mills’, 170 Data centres, 63 data-driven approach, 206 sovereignty, 158 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 40 Decentralised parliamentary system, 117

254

Decision-making algorithms, 243 process, 123 DECODE, 160–161 Democracy by design, 154–160 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act, 53–54 Denial-of-service attacks (DoS attacks), 225 Denver, 236 ‘Department of Commons’, 240 Deus ex machina, 24, 209 Digital assistants, 229 democracy, 157 home services, 222 infrastructure beacons, 68 sublime, 15, 164, 194, 233 ‘Digitalization Hub’, 71 Digitally enabled street lighting, 200–201 Disney, 129–132 Disney World, 129–130 Diversity, 190 Dynamic algorithms, 217 Edge computing systems, 63 Efficiency trap, 231–232 Electronics Industry Association, 51 End of Geography, 190 Energy hogs, 232 Environment protection, 244

Index

Environmental monitoring, 117 Environmental Performance Index (2018), 120–121 Eugenics, 173–174 Europe’s first smart city (see St Sofia) Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Epcot), 14–15, 18 Progressland to, 48–50 Facebook, 5, 34, 36, 109–110, 137, 146, 164–165, 237 Facebookville, 137 FairBnB, 160–161 Fifth-generation mobile technology, 232 5G technology, 110, 205 wireless networks, 31–32 Flixel Photos Inc., 88 Floating cities, 141–142 Forbes (business magazine), 200 Free markets, 173 Free Wi-Fi service, 199–200 Friction-free capitalism, 86 From Warfare to Welfare (Light), 46 Garden city-Radiant City ideal, 177 Gates, Bill, 142–143

Index

Gentrification, 82 Gig economy, 146–147 Global information economy, 187 Google, 5, 34, 109–110, 134, 164–165, 206, 222, 234, 237 satellite, 69 Sidewalk Labs subsidiary, 151–152 subsidiary, 152 Googleplex, 37 Governance types, 97–98 Government-directed smart cities policy, 117 Government-led smart cities, 98 high-tech China, 101–115 Modi’s India, 116–123 Singapore, 98–101 Great Recession, 198 Greater Than Ever: New York’s Big Comeback (Doctoroff), 75 Guardian, The (newspaper), 3 Hackers, 160–161 black gold for, 224–227 ‘Heroic simpleton’, 170 High Line, 81–82 High-tech China, 101 Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei city cluster, 108–109 BRI, 113

255

catastrophic climate change, 115 China’s tech firms, 111 Citizen Cloud, 102 CPC, 105–106 5G technology, 110 Huawei smartphone app, 103 incorporate “green” development, 114 intellectual property, 115 Shanghai, 109 Songdo, 107 TM Forum, 104–105 Housing and Land Rights Network, 119 Huawei, 109–110 Smartphone app, 103 Hudson Yards project, 80–81 Hui Cultural Park, 104–105 Human diversity, 183 Human settlements, 8 ‘Hyper-scale’ cloud farms, 231 IBM, 3, 5, 29, 51, 153, 157–158, 216 smarter city, 44–45 India Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation, 118 decision-making process, 123 Environmental Performance Index (2018), 120–121

256

government-directed smart cities policy, 117 Housing and Land Rights Network, 119 Modi’s government, 116 Smart Cities Mission, 121–122 Industrial Revolution, 170, 172, 176 Information and communications technology (ICT), 29–30, 70–71 Information technology, 116, 157, 190, 192 Informational City, The (Castells), 188 Instacart shoppers, 146–147 Instant communication, 1, 51 Intellectual property, 115, 152 International Olympic Committee, 82 International organisations, 208–209 Internet of Things (IoT), 13, 19, 59–61, 216, 242 devices, 231–232 technologies, 204–205 Journal of Strategy and Management, The (Capdevila and Zarlenga), 30 Journal of the American Institute of Planners (Arnstein), 153

Index

Journal of the American Planning Association (see Journal of the American Institute of Planners (Arnstein)) Jupiter Networks, 204 Key performance indicators (KPIs), 138 Kiosks, 84 Kitchin’s visionary analysis, 32–33 ‘Knowledge City’, 103 Kungsträdgården, 233 Laissez-faire, 173 Land-use planning, 173 Language, 34, 85, 105, 171, 194, 209 bureaucratic, 91 nuanced, 154 socio-spatial, 233 transcendent, 195 Lighting, 66 Linux, 34 ‘Little Italy’, 79 Livability, 217–218 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 172 Low-bandwidth telephone system, 53 Lyft, 146–147 MacOS, 34 Manifesto for smart city, 241–244 Market-rate housing, 178

Index

257

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 46 Medical app, 103 Mickey Mouse, 129–130 Microsoft, 109–110, 237 Ministry of Urban Development, 117 Mobile payment system, 102–103 Mobile phones, 110 Model Cities Act (see Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act) Monumental city, 178 Moses highway project, 86 Multimedia Super Corridor, 15, 106–107 Municipal Institute of Information Technology, 158 Municipalism, 20, 155, 239–241 Municipalities, 219 Muskville, Yarrabend, 139–140 Mythorealism, 105

Neo-liberalism, 164–165, 239 Neoliberal conception of citizenship, 152 NEOM megacity project, 136–137 Network of cities, 10–11 neutrality, 238 systems, 187 New Cities Initiative, 138–139 New Delhi advocacy group, 119 New Urban Crisis Index, 79 New York World’s Fair (1964), 47–48 Next Internet, 59 big data analytics, 64–65 cloud computing, 61–63 IoT, 59–61 systems, 19, 38, 159, 163–164, 242 technologies, 103, 111, 203, 207, 216, 227 Non-participation, 153–154 Normal Accidents (Perrow), 227

Nanotechnology, 143 Nation-states, 6 National biometric identification programme, 116 Nationalism, 239 Neo-liberal capitalism, 164–165

Occupy movement, 192 Olympic bid, 82 Olympic dream, 82 Olympic Village, 79 Online education, 51 Online selling, 190 Open Data Portal, 158 Operating system, 34

258

Organic city imaginary, 183 vision, 189 Oslo Airport City (OAC), 166 Ouishare Paris, 161–162 Outer Party members, 146–147 Ownership of data, 222–224 Paid publicity, 200 Panoptic city, 196–197 Panopticon, 196 Parasitic rulers, 43 Paris, 175, 236 Parking garages, 66 Participation, 151 Amsterdam, 160–161 democracy by design, 154–160 Google subsidiary, 152 Ouishare Paris, 161–162 sharing services in Seoul, 162–163 tokenism, 153–154 ‘PeopleMover’, 49 Permanent settlements, 42 Phantasmagoric quality, 135 Pittsburgh approach, 47 Planning Perspectives, 174 Platforms platform-based commercial organisations, 161–162 smart city, 34–38

Index

Political economy, 173 Postmodern design, 179–180 Postmodernism, 179 Privacy by Design, 220–221 policies, 219 researchers, 160–161 in smart city, 219–222 Private Keynesianism, 165 Private smart cities (see also Smart city) Amazon in Seattle, 132–134 American as Apple Pie, 134–137 BIDs, 129–130 big tech, 144–148 Bill Gates in the desert, 142–143 Blockchain USA, 143 Disney, 129–132 Muskville, Yarrabend, 139–140 Peter Thiel’s floating cities, 141–142 Y Combinator and New Cities Initiative, 138–139 Zucktown, 137 Production surpluses, 42 Progress and Poverty (George), 173 Progressive social movements, 155 Progressland to Epcot, 48–50 Promenade Plantée, 82

Index

Public catastrophe, 225 communication, 242–243 health services, 244 institutions, 243 services, 103, 133–134 space, 242 Wi-Fi, 207 Public–private partnerships (P3s), 54, 78, 85, 131–132 Punch cards in City of Angels, 47 Quantified community, 81 Quayside smart city project, 152 Radiant City, 171, 175–178, 182 Radio Row, 83 Real Smart Cities project, 235 Recycling process, 181 Regional health information platform, 103 Research in Motion (Balsillie), 88 Resistance to smart cities, 232–238 Right(s) to communicate, 243 of users, 223 Rio Operations Center, 68–69 Roosevelt Island, 84 Seasteading Institute, 141 Sedentism, 42

259

Selling smart city, 197 (see also Private smart cities) company forecasts, 201–202 corporate-sponsored contests, 203–204 digitally enabled street lighting, 200–201 free Wi-Fi service, 199–200 free wireless for residents, 206–207 International organisations, 208–209 promotional conferences, 202–203 Smart Cities Challenge, 207–208 technological change, 198–199 technology-enabled city, 197–198 top 20 smart cities, 204–205 Sensor-equipped tags, 104 Server factories, 63 Service Class, 146–147 Sharing services in Seoul, 162–163 Sidewalk Labs, 73–75, 84–85, 89–91 Siemens, 5, 70, 157–158, 216 Silicon Valley, 15, 83, 139, 146 companies, 112–113 technology, 138–139

260

Sinicisation process, 105 Sisupalgarh, 38–39 Sloan Commission on Cable Communications, 53 ‘Slum clearance’, 185 ‘Slumless, smokeless cities’, 173 Smart Cities Mission, 118–119, 121–122 Smart city (see also Private smart cities), 22, 28, 97, 172, 194, 209, 216, 230 in bottle, 24 citizens, 30–32 computer, 33–34 creative class to, 187–195 data-gathering system, 243 event, 198 governance and inevitability of climate change, 163–167 manifesto for, 241–244 movement, 55, 98 municipalism, 239–241 platform, 34–38 proposals, 23 resistance, 232–238 smart distraction, climate change and efficiency trap, 230–232 space-time machine, 32–33 technology, 28–30

Index

technology enthusiasts, 107 urban imaginary creation, 216–230 Smart City in Digital World, The (Mosco), 1, 9, 11–14 city–states, 2–3 climate change, 8–10 critical social science, 3–8 networks of cities, 10–11 patterns, 12–13 trilogy, 13–15 urban areas, 4–5 urban village to life in cities, 15–18 Smart communication, 65–67 Smart distraction, 230–232 Smart energy, 65–67 Smart home, 222 Smart lighting, 219 Smart Nation programme, 99–100 Smart streets, 244 lighting, 201 Smart transportation, 65–67 Social Construction of Ancient Cities, The (Smith), 39 Social credit score, 101–115 Social entrepreneurs, 160–161 Social movement organisations, 161–162 Solutionism, 230

Index

Songdo, 106–108 Sony, 180 Sorry to Bother You (film), 37 Space-time machine, 32–33 St Sofia (Europe’s first smart city), 114–115 State-driven smart cities government-led smart cities, 98–123 types of governance, 97–98 Street View maps, 69 Structural diversity, 184 Sublime, 173, 175, 200, 203 digital, 15, 164, 194, 233 quality of organic city, 184 technological, 51–52, 195, 209 urban, 24, 171, 173–175 vision, 175, 181, 191–193, 195 Substantial anarcholibertarian segment, 141–142 Surveillance in smart city, 100, 219–222 Taiwan-based Foxconn, 197 Task-Rabbit manual labourers, 146–147 Tata research group scholars, 122–123 Tax revenues, 165 Tech concierge, 140 TechGirls Canada (Saadia Muzaffar), 89

261

Technological/technology, 197, 239 advances, 42 change, 198–199 companies, 216 development, 190 sublime, 51–52, 195, 209 technology-driven smart cities, 1–2 technology-enabled cities, 194, 230 technology-forward development, 136–137 Telecommunication equipment, 109–110 technologies, 187 Telecommunications and the City (Graham and Marvin), 188 Tencent, 109–110 Tesla batteries, 140 charging stations, 140 solar, 140 transportation, 140 3D printing, 143 Time’s twisted arrow, 38 Architecture Without Architects (Rudofsky), 40–41 first smart city, 38–39 sedentary and smart, 41–44 TM Forum, 104–105 To the Cloud (Mosco), 13 Tokenism, 153–154 Traffic management, 207

Index

262

Traffic signals, 6–7 Transportation, 101, 105–106, 117 Trojan Women (Euripides), 76 Uber, 34, 146–147, 161–162 UK National Health Service, 225 Union Carbide pesticide plant leakage in Bhopal, 227 United Nations International Telecommunications Union, 209 Urban development, 120 Urban Dynamics (Forrester), 46 Urban dynamics in steel city, 46–47 Urban imaginary, 171 black gold for hackers, 224–227 from creative class to smart city, 187–195 livability, 217–218 machine in garden, 170–175 normal cities, normal accidents, 227–230 ownership of data, 222–224 Panoptic city, 196–197 profit and power, 216–217 selling smart city, 197–209

surveillance and privacy, 219–222 tower in park, 175–182 urban dance, 182–187 Urban life, 183 Urban real estate, 222 Urban sublime, 24, 171, 173–175 Urban village to life in cities, 15–18 Urbanism, 153 US Postal Service, 133–134 Utopian socialism, 172 Utopianism, 172 Virtual Singapore, 100 Voting from home, 51 Walt Disney and Quest for Community (Mannheim), 130 Walt Disney Company, 131 Washington Post, The (newspaper), 137 Waterfront Toronto, 86–89, 91 WeChat Electronic Toll Collection system, 110–111 ‘Tencent ride code’, 110–111 Western transnational corporation, 117 Willow Village, 36 Windows, 34 Winter Olympic Games (2026), 233

Index

Wired (magazine), 11, 207 Wired city, 50–53 Wired Nation, The (Smith), 50–51 Wireless technology, 200 World Health Organisation, 120–121 World Trade Centre, 121

263

WorryFree, 37 Worst-case scenario, 207 Y Combinator, 37, 138–139 Zoning regulations, 78 variances, 131–132 Zucktown, 36–37, 137