Who do 'smart cities' serve: actual residents or Big Tech?
Data is important, but cities depend on infrastructure and people more than technology, says journalist
How smart are smart cities?
It's a simple question. But it isn't exactly easy to answer.
While smart technologies promise a safer city, and a sustainable and efficient way of living an urban life, the hype around smart cities can be a distraction from truly vital urban infrastructure, according to Toronto-based urban affairs journalist John Lorinc.
In his book, Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, Lorinc explores the future of urban planning and smart cities. He argues that while there's a role for smart city technology in improving urban life, cities are messy, complicated human environments that depend on physical infrastructure, architecture and civil engineering.
And the massive data collection and digital surveillance behind smart city technology raises alarms about privacy and how Big Tech companies use that data.
Lorinc's Dream States won the 2022 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, an annual award presented by the Writers Trust of Canada honouring non-fiction that "advances and influences policy debates." And he just recently won the inaugural Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award.
Lorinc and IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed walked around a former site of a proposed smart city project called Quayside in Toronto. The project was intended to transform an undeveloped post-industrial area off of the city's waterfront into a beautiful five-hectare neighbourhood shaped by cutting-edge technology.
Quayside was the vision of Google's urban planning subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs. It was pitched in 2017 and backed by the municipal, provincial and federal governments. But in 2020, Sidewalk Labs cancelled the Quayside project citing uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here are excerpts from Lorinc and Ayed's conversation.
On the website of the Sidewalk Labs, it says that they wanted a 'new model of inclusive urban development.' But the language that is most often used is that it would be a smart neighbourhood or a smart city — a kind of prototype of a smart city. What made it a smart city?
So the vision that Sidewalk Labs had for this space, and other places that it wanted to develop smart cities is that it was going to be a dense neighbourhood that they said would be built from the internet up. There would be a lot of sensors that would be gathering information about people and vehicles moving through public space. There would be a lot of sensors monitoring energy consumption and water usage and all of those kind of features.
And where did those sensors exist?
Everywhere, in all sorts of places. What they do is gather information, digitize it, and it creates a stream of data that can be analyzed and used to create different applications.
The most important word in the name of Sidewalk Labs is Labs. Because what they wanted to do was build this neighbourhood, but then use it as a test site for all these new technologies that they were going to to develop. And they could sell those algorithms, and different types of software, and different types of sensors and systems to other cities that are looking to do the same kind of thing.
Can I ask you if it had actually gone through, could we visually tell that it was a smart city?
No. This is an interesting question that came up when they were proposing this area was that there would be a lot of public space monitoring, a lot of sensors and cameras. And so there were some academics who were advising Waterfront Toronto. They said, 'Well, how do you know when you've walked into this area that suddenly data is being gathered on you?' Like, we're walking down a Toronto street. As far as I know, we're not being surveilled but that would be different inside that smart city area. And so the question is, 'Have you given your permission to be captured in some way? Do you know what that information is going to be used for?' So these were actually quite confounding questions.
It's striking how the term 'smart city' has become synonymous with harvesting data from citizens and putting it to unapproved uses.
Well, for one thing, it's very cheap to collect data. The sensors that collect air quality data and water quality and traffic movement — all that is very inexpensive. And there's this whole history of using data for commercial purposes. The big online retailers collect an enormous amount of data. They use algorithms to analyze it, to detect consumer patterns and to push products at you and so on. This smart city trend really started to take that idea, which is you have all this data, you have all these algorithms that can analyze it and can we direct that towards the way cities function in some way.
But was there not a concern that perhaps that data would not simply be used purely to improve the place where you live, but it actually went well beyond that?
That really did come to the fore as the Sidewalk Labs proposal was being vetted in Toronto. And frankly, in lots of other places that have looked at smart city technology. Data is a very amorphous term. It could mean a cellphone signal from a cell tower. It could mean your credit card number. It can mean a visual image of you passing through a turnstile. There are lots of different types of data. Some of it is identifiable. Some of it you can put together different pieces of data and come up with a way of identifying somebody.
And as the Sidewalk Labs proposal was being scrutinized in Toronto, and as these proposals have been scrutinized in places like Amsterdam and in Barcelona and lots of other places, that question about what happens to the data, whether we've given our consent as residents to give the data and how we use it, these are all very germane questions. They require a lot of debate and thought because it can be misused.
I'm curious what what the difference is between the extensive data collection that goes on right now by Big Tech compared to what it would be like in a smart city?
Cities sit on an enormous amount of data. I think the smart city industry saw all of that data as a great opportunity to marry the algorithms and the technology with the data and see what comes up. It builds on the fact that we have to hand over a lot of data to municipal governments through our property tax bills, our gas bills, our utility bills.
When I was researching Dream States, I came across an example where some smart city company had gotten access to driver's licenses in one of the states in the U.S. And they all have a photograph of the license holder. They were scooping up all those images to create a huge database of faces. And for sure, nobody who's gotten their driver's license in that state gave their permission to do that. So it kind of leaks.
I guess the question that often came up for me is: Is there evidence that would be of service? Is there any evidence, like anectodal or otherwise, that's actually using all this data that's collected by cameras and sensors and cellphones to improve, let's say, public safety or waste management better than human observation?
The way I look at it is that it should be a tool and not an end in itself. We rely on data in every facet of our lives, right? So the data is important, but it's not the only thing that you should use. So urban design is a good example where there are a lot of digital technologies that are brought to bear in urban design, to help make better quality spaces, better quality buildings, but you have to know and experience these places in real life to do it properly.
The asterisk I'd put on that is that as we transition to a low carbon energy system, which has a lot of electricity and less carbon based energy, the technology that's required to manage grids is not something that human beings are capable of really perceiving. And there are lots of smart grid applications that are in various states of gestation, which are really important and are going to play an important role in the way we get ourselves off carbon.
If big technology companies are driving all of this, as you say, is there any limit to how much of the public sphere will actually be monetized?
Well, I think that one of the interesting lessons about Sidewalk Labs and there's another similar lesson in Barcelona is that the public does have concerns about too much and too intrusive technology. And so there was a lot of pushback here, sufficient that Sidewalk Labs went away.
In Barcelona, which is sort of seen as one of the hubs of smart city technology, there was a lot of similar pushback. And so the municipality there really sought to incorporate public feedback in the way it adopts new types of smart city technology. So they had this whole governance model, which is very democratic, and there's more public engagement there. So I think that's a healthy sign.
*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.
