Smart cities: realising the promises while minimizing the perils

Smart Cities Realising the promises whilst minimizing the

perils

Prof. Rob Kitchin

Maynooth University

Smart cities

• Lots of definitions of smart cities. Generally encompass three dynamics:

• Instrumentation and regulation

• Cities composed of ‘everyware’: ICT infrastructure, devices, sensors, software, big data

• Cities become knowable and controllable in new, dynamic, reactive ways

• More efficient, competitive and productive service delivery

• Policy and economic development

• Advances in ICT reconfiguring human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, governance

• Cities as competitive, entrepreneurial, knowledge-driven systems

• Social innovation, civic engagement and hactivism

• ICT provides means for transparent and accountable governance, new forms of civic participation, better informed citizens

Smart city technologies

Domain Example technologies

Government E-government systems; online transactions; city operating systems; performance management systems; urban dashboards

Security and emergency services

Centralised control rooms; digital surveillance; predictive policing; coordinated emergency response

Transport Intelligent transport systems; integrated ticketing; smart travel cards; bikeshare; real-time passenger information; smart parking; logistics management; transport apps

Energy Smart grids; smart meters; energy usage apps; smart lighting

Waste Compactor bins and dynamic routing/collection

Environment Sensor networks (e.g., pollution, noise, weather; land movement; flood management)

Buildings Building management systems; sensor networks

Homes Smart meters; app controlled smart appliances

Civic Various apps; open data; volunteered data/hacks

Urban big data

• Directed

o Surveillance: CCTV, drones/satellite

o Scaled public admin records

• Automated

o Automated surveillance

o Digital devices

o Sensors, actuators, transponders, meters (IoT)

o Interactions and transactions

• Volunteered

o Social media

o Sousveillance/wearables

o Crowdsourcing/neogeography

o Citizen science

Urban big data

• Diverse range of public and private generation of fine-scale (uniquely indexical) data about citizens and places in real-time: • utilities

• transport providers, logistics systems

• environmental agencies

• mobile phone operators

• app developers

• social media sites

• travel and accommodation websites

• home appliances and entertainment systems

• financial institutions and retail chains

• private surveillance and security firms

• remote sensing, aerial surveying

• emergency services

• Producing a data deluge that can be combined, analyzed, acted upon

Single systems

Integrated, city & sector wide

Data-driven urbanism

www.dublindashboard.ie

Data-driven urbanism

• Cities are becoming:

• ever more instrumented and networked, their systems interlinked and integrated

• knowable and controllable in new dynamic ways

• Urban operational governance and city services are becoming highly responsive to a form of networked urbanism in which big data systems are:

• prefiguring and setting the urban agenda

• producing a deluge of contextual and actionable data

• influencing and controlling how city systems respond and perform in real-time

• transforming practices of city governance

Smart Cities

Smart government

e-gov, open data,

transparency, accountability,

evidence-informed decision

making, better service

delivery

Smart living

quality of life,

safety, security,

manage risk

Smart mobility

intelligent transport

systems, multi-modal inter-

op, efficiency

Smart

environment

green energy,

sustainability,

resilience

Smart people

more informed, creativity, inclusivity,

empowerment, participation

Smart economy

entrepreneurship,

innovation,

productivity,

competiveness

Promise of smart cities

Eight critiques of smart cities

1. City as a knowable, rational,

steerable machine

• Cities are understood to consist of a set of knowable and manageable systems that act in largely rational, mechanical, linear and hierarchical ways and can be steered and controlled

• Operational governance performed using a set of mechanistic data levers underpinned by an instrumental rationality in the form of KPIs and analytics

• Includes forms of automated management (automatic, autonomous, automated)

• Driving new forms of new managerialism

• Cities are fluid, open, complex, multi-level, contingent and relational systems

2. Objective, neutral, non-

ideological approach

• Smart city solutions are technical, objective and non-ideological

• Presents an image of being politically benign and commonsensical

• However, systems do not exist independently of the ideas, techniques, technologies, people and contexts that conceive, produce, process, manage, analyze and store them

• They are situated, contingent, relational, and framed and used contextually to try and achieve certain aims and goals

• They also possess a number of technical and managerial issues concerning design, measurement, processing – e.g., with respect to data sampling, handling, veracity (accuracy, fidelity), uncertainty, error, bias, reliability, calibration, lineage

3. Technocratic governance and

solutionism

• All aspects of a city can be treated as technical problems and solved through technical approaches

• Practices ‘solutionism’: complex open systems can be disassembled into neatly defined problems that can be fixed or optimized through computation

• All that is required is sufficient data and suitable algorithms

• Undermines/replaces other forms of knowing cities, plus phronesis (knowledge derived from practice and deliberation) and metis (knowledge based on experience)

• Marginalizes other forms of governance and solutions

4. Neoliberal political economy &

corporatisation of governance

• Overly driven by corporations interested capturing government functions as new market opportunities

• Promoting the marketisation of public services and the hollowing out of the state

• City functions are administered for profit

• Potentially creates technological lock-ins or corporate path dependencies

5. Ahistorical, aspatial,

homogenizing and bounded

• One size fits all approach

• Treats cities as a generic market

• Treats cities as if bounded entities

• Often idealised imaginary of green field development, rather than complexities of established communities, competing interests and legacy infrastructure

• Fails to recognize history, culture, context, local sense of place, politics, governance, diversity, etc.

• Fails to recognize interdependencies across space

6. Reinforce power geometries &

inequalities

• Smart cities/solutions are the

vision of certain vested

interests

• They serve the interests of

certain constituencies

• They control/regulate

populations

• Actively marginalize/dispossess

some

7. Profound social, political,

ethical effects

• Surveillance and erosion

privacy (in its diverse

forms)

• Ownership, control,

data markets

• Social sorting

• Anticipatory governance

• Nudge

• Dynamic pricing

• Data security

• Control creep

Location/movement tracking

• Controllable digital CCTV cameras + ANPR + facial recognition

• Smart phones: cell masts, GPS, wifi

• Sensor networks: capture and track phone identifiers such as MAC addresses

• Wifi mesh: capture & track phones with wifi turned on

• Smart card tracking: barcodes/RFID chips (buildings & public transport)

• Vehicle tracking: unique ID transponders for automated road tolls & car parking

• Other staging points: ATMs, credit card use, metadata tagging

• Electronic tagging; shared calenders

8. Buggy, brittle, hackable

• Intertwines two open, highly complex and contingent systems - cities and digital systems

• Creates environments which are inherently buggy and brittle; prone to viruses, glitches, crashes, and security hacks

• Producing stable, robust and secure devices and infrastructures becomes more of a challenge

• New systems lead to the discontinuation of analogue alternatives — no alternatives until the system is fixed/rebooted

Getter smarter about smart cities Realising promises while minimizing harms

Re-imagining smart cities

• Rather than abandon the notion of smart

cities, need to re-imagine and reframe them

and address shortcomings:

• Reframing goals

• Reframing cities

• Reframing management/governance

• Reframing epistemology

• Addressing ethical/security concerns

Reframing goals

• Normative questions

• Who and what are smart cities for?

• New markets & profit?

• State control and regulation?

• Citizens and quality of life?

• What kind of cities do we want to

create and live in?

• Set thinking within a social

justice/citizenship framework, not

simply management, governance or

economy

Reframing cities

• Cities are not simply technical systems that can be solved with technical solutions

• Nor can they simply be steered and controlled

• Cities are complex, ever-evolving, inter-dependent contingent systems

• They are full of culture, politics, competing interests and wicked problems and often unfold in unpredictable ways

• Smart city tech/discourse need to shift to recognize and accommodate a more nuanced, relational understanding of cities

Reframing management and

governance

• Contextual use in management

• Co-creation, co-production, citizen-engaged

• Used in conjunction with deliberative democracy, policy changes, social/political interventions, other investments, etc.

• Flexible and bespoke solutions; layer onto legacy systems

• Open platforms; standards/interoperability

• Smart city vision: smart city advisory board; smart city strategy

Reframing epistemology

• How we come to know and predict the city

• Urban science, urban informatics

• Reductionist, mechanistic, atomizing, essentialist, deterministic, producing a limited and limiting understanding of cities

• But not one without use or value

• Reframe the realist epistemology and instrumental rationality to acknowledge situatedness, positionality, contingencies, assumptions, shortcomings; to avow grand claims to truth, or God’s eye view

• Also to forego asserting value over other forms of knowledge such as phronesis and metis, but to be used in combination with them

Addressing ethical/security concerns

• Market:

• Industry standards and self-regulation

• Privacy/security as competitive advantage

• Technological

• End-to-end strong encryption, access controls, security controls, audit trails, backups, up-to-date patching, etc.

• Privacy enhancement tools

• Policy and regulation

• FIPPs

• Privacy by design;

• security by design

• Governance

• Oversight of delivery and compliance: smart city governance, ethics and security oversight committee;

• Day-to-day delivery: core privacy/security team; smart city privacy/security assessments; and computer emergency response team

Conclusion

• Entering an era of embedded and mobile computation

• Vast quantities of real-time data, cities are responsive to

these data, and enable new kinds of monitoring, regulation

and control

• Cities are becoming data-driven and are enacting new

forms of algorithmic governance

• Whilst smart city technologies undoubtedly provide a set of

solutions for urban problems they also raise a number of

fundamental, normative and ethical questions

• The challenge is to realise the benefits whilst minimizing

pernicious effects

Background

http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/progcity

@progcity

Rob.Kitchin@nuim.ie

@robkitchin

https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/rob-kitchin