This article is clearly provocative. Underlining the risk of smart cities does not mean amending the entire idea, but is rather an attempt to draw attention to some of the shortcomings already evident in the urban application of intelligent technologies and processes.
© Oriol Malet
Some people will remember that a few years ago the concept of sustainable cities was in vogue. After this came smart growth. And then an article in the Journal of Planning Literature pointed out that these terms, just as they were gaining acceptance, also seemed to be losing all meaning. Empty words.
It seems that the same is happening with smart cities. Today, the quantity of smart initiatives is so varied that it is difficult to make sense of them all. What, for example, do sustainable buildings, certificates of excellence in tourism, streetlight sensors, hotels lending out electric bikes, e-government and waste management centres have in common? All these examples appear in Barcelona Smart City Tour, a guide edited by Barcelona City Council, which puts on the table the fact that in the issue of smart cities, urban branding is often imposed on the concepts it wants to describe. Whereas any public urban initiative must identify and understand both the challenges of the present and the possibilities of the future, marketing, which seems to be the driving force of much of the discourse around smart cities, is not characterised by this capacity for analysis and planning. This is the beginning of a recipe for disaster. The packaging, the bells and whistles, are imposed on the content.
The current reality of smart cities already allows us to draw up some likely scenarios – on one hand, because we are aware that the Mobile World Congress and Smart City Expo will not always be held in Barcelona, meaning a smart strategy that does not rely on major events is a necessity; and on the other, because we have failed smart projects that keep being presented as examples of success but which we just need to visit or examine the details of to discover that their initial promises remain unfulfilled. A good example of this is Projecte SIIUR, which despite still appearing in the guides is a now-abandoned infrastructure of intelligent streetlights. Or the Media-TIC building, which has not only failed to reduce its operational environmental impact but is today, in terms of energy consumption, one of the most expensive buildings in Barcelona to maintain. Or, finally, the dozens of small projects involving sensors installed across the city that have not achieved their expected results, sometimes due to the way they work (bad design, poor integration with other platforms); and other times, because despite functioning well, the possibilities of these projects have not managed to capture the interest of any significant investors. These cases are turning the city, little by little, into a graveyard of smart “junk”. Technological euphoria leads us to underestimate the medium and long-term costs of the smart gamble, and the hot potato of responsibility keeps being passed on, from office to office, parliament to parliament.
In addition, thanks to the literature on technology and organisational management being so extensive, we know that often those who have to decide on the acquisition of technological products and solutions underestimate the long-term costs and tend to unquestioningly accept the promises of the “seller”. We are societies fascinated by technology, by the possibility of technological solutions fixing all the complex social and urban problems that we have failed to address at the source. And the combination of this uncritical technological optimism with a lack of specific training in software and systems engineering and processes makes it very easy to sell bad solutions for poorly defined problems. Some people sell the smoke; others buy it.
Often, however, it is not all smoke. Many times, the smoke is concentrated in the “public” parts of the smart technologies. Public–private co-operation must be, in theory, win–win. A situation in which, through collaboration, public and private institutions are able to optimise their resources and processes and mutually benefit. However, sometimes the win is only private whilst all the smoke concentrates in the public utility. Bus stops and intelligent streetlighting, for example, enable the identification and follow-up of mobile phone MAC addresses, and, it is hoped, the creation of personalised advertising experiences, through specific mobile apps and a crossover of geolocalisation data and that from consumption and leisure. The benefits for the companies that wish to place ads and those that manage the advertising is obvious. Public use and benefit for the city and its citizens from these urban infrastructures for market research is less clear. Even, at times, absurd. This theoretical public benefit is often “sold” in terms of improving the efficiency of public transport (calculation of human traffic volumes or queues for public transport) and, consequently, in terms of public safety (real-time police access to this data on public space usage). The particular expression or need for this information in the field of public management, the possibility of the same data being available from other sources or the fact that there are less costly ways of acquiring similar result, is rarely explored.
In this way the administration accumulates invoices, cities accumulate “junk” and the public accumulates both, with an aggravating factor: the smart city feeds itself on their personal data. Data and metadata on power consumption, internet use, geolocation information, leisure, habits and routines, social networks, interaction with the administration, economy and finance, use of public and private transport, fines and non-payments, court judgments as well as many, many other things, fuel the smart city. The crossover possibility of this data has enormous promise for improving public and private services. But personal data is also sensitive and valuable information that should be handled securely, respecting privacy and rights of access, mandatory rectification and cancellation. Poor management of this data can result in serious violations of fundamental rights, leading to vulnerability and injustice, especially when uncontrolled databases are created, when individual profiles are erected based on this information (data doubles) and automatic decisions are taken relating to this shadow data generated without the knowledge, consent or control of the people affected. The smart city can and does spy on us. Building an infrastructure that recognises these risks should be the starting point of any public commitment.
This dystopian view of the smart city can be as absurd as the technological scenarios often presented by cities and companies. With this in mind, recognising the fact that our commitment to smart cities has shortcomings in planning and implementation is a prerequisite in our way of approaching them; a prerequisite for the design of socially efficient smart cities and responsible research and innovation; a prerequisite, in short, for making sure the smart bubble does not sweep away the possibility of a true urban technology policy.