How Is It With Smart Cities?
There’s three types of people in the world:
those who believe smart cities are a good idea; those who think it's a bad one; and those who likely have other things to care about. Whichever category you identify with, and personally I’ve oscillated between the three, it’s obvious that smart cities gather dystopian and utopian narratives equally. There is something about them that inspires either fear or hope. I tend to want to side with Deleuze about this, who would probably say that however power dynamics are in a smart city, the task remains to be the search for new ways to resist it. Even though what they are exactly, and whether they mean the death or life of great cities is still unclear, we should start to think – and then act – like smart cities are already a thing. Because they are.
Whether we care or not, it would be healthy to admit that the spectre of the smart city challenges our myriad and stayed conceptions of social organization, public/private space, privacy, and individual sovereignty. They also confront us with even newer and more extreme potentials for the embedding of technology into our everyday relations.
Bianca Wiley, CIGI fellow and smart city expert, describes them simply as the “use of technology and data in cities.” As for their potential impact, she has more choice words: they either promise to endanger our society, democracy and sovereignty; or they will “support local needs, improve urban environments and support democratically informed policy.” In light of the polarity of hypothetical outcomes, and considering that we’d be living in these cities regardless, a set of paired questions come to mind: how will we live together in a smart city? And what needs to happen for me to want to?
But these are questions to be answered in another post. For now, I’m interested in figuring how like everything else at the intersection of technology and society, smart cities don’t have to retroactively become another one of our f*ck-ups. And this involves trying to think about its alternatives beforehand.
Smart cities are complex digital architectures.
Most people either don’t know what life in a smart city entails or have only their imagination and the Jetsons for reference. This common knowledge-gap among individuals represents a fundamental vulnerability if our cities are on their way to becoming more data-driven and technologically saturated.
The example of Sidewalk Labs in Toronto demonstrated that the public is generally aware of the dangers associated with unauthorized access to their data and excessive value extraction from it, which CIGI fellow Teresa Scassa rightly points out, often happens by way of our surrendering and not through our consent. This minimal awareness and suspicion of private malpractices all but killed the Sidewalk project.
Working backwards then, the task for smart cities advocates should first be establishing the optimum level of public awareness that leads to the creation of new smart cities initiatives. If we could provide their answer, which is to assume we had it, the public would need to first be asked: what do you want and need that a smart city could provide?
As per Wylie, prospective smart city residents should be consulted early and often about what they want and need prior to procurement and implementation. We, “the public,” seem to have our futures determined all to often by the anti-teleological whims and straight-up fantasies of the once-losers turned technocrats and authoritarian Big Tech CEOs.
But smart cities are different from yet another social media App. When it comes to our cities, wherever we live, it's clear that overt and ongoing public buy-in and demand at the project’s beginning is crucial. It would need to be maintained, too. If those in charge are capable of it, this kind of process necessitates a high degree of reciprocity, meaning decision makers in agile fashion would be open to informing and being informed by the public about how things are going to be in the smart city.
For the maintenance of public support, I think that those responsible for procuring, providing, and operating smart cities infrastructures should remain accountable for residents like the municipal authorities of old. As a resident of Toronto, I think they’d have to do this in ways that are better and more nuanced than the job they’ve so far done, too. Public/private sector accountability for citizens in smart cities cannot be a singular task, but will be an ongoing part of all their operations. Carey Doberstein and Étienne Charbonneau support this idea in their paper about public sector innovation, stating that the “process of innovation adoption is not merely a technical, rational, evidence-based process, but one that is embedded in democratic systems through which public servants must respond.”
Just as I’d like to think that democratic participation exceeds the ballot box, I also think that how we decide things ought to be in a smart city should be a part of our lived experience therein. If lampposts and Metro turnstiles are collecting data, surely we can figure out how this data empowers instead of extinguishes our role as citizens and the power of democratic decision-making. Likewise, in their paper on smart cities and inclusive growth, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) envisions the co-creation of policies and mutual accountability between citizens and the public sector in a smart cities context throughout the policy cycle.
“Buy over build” procurement is a practical necessity for smart cities implementation.
But this should only reinforce the need for open procurement and robust, conscientious, and agile governance frameworks that champion privacy, data sovereignty and interoperability. Mark Wilson, the former digital strategy advisor for Waterfront Toronto involved in the Sidewalk affair, thought that procurement and governance of smart technologies could “ensure public control [and] achieve public benefit and integrated service delivery, while avoiding vendor lock-in.”
While I agree with Wilson, I agree more with the insight of Mozilla’s Mark Surman, who thinks that the problem of procurement for smart cities is not specifically about the firm in question or their technologies, as Sidewalk’s infamous example might suggest. Instead, Surman says the initiative failed because we lacked the right rules and policies to govern these technologies and assuage the public’s valid concerns about how their data would be collected, handled, stored, and used.
The belated discovery that data rights are important (they are) is sometimes explained by the operative asymmetry of power and knowledge between the public and private sector when it comes to Tech in general. But this dynamic no longer has to be a stumbling-block. Instead, we can think of it as a comparative advantage: to design a great smart city, public and private both should together stick to what they’re good at doing. Like the rules of the road, each level of government is in turn responsible for providing and enforcing the protocols that shape how we leverage the technological infrastructures necessarily supplied by highly specialized, profit maximizing firms.
Infrastructural oversight shouldn’t be determined by municipalities alone, whose public interest goals and weaker regulatory power can leave them open to private exploitation. As with most infrastructure governance and provision, the state has a minimal responsibility to set rules that make it generative and enable the market to innovate solution delivery, capacity building and upscaling. From Ottawa we already have the framework of Canada's Digital Charter, which if combined with the CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance would substantiate their 2020 commitment to UNDRIP, and guarantee that core rights to data interoperability, sovereignty, and access would be part of smart city developments across the country.
Although these principles cannot literally be enforced, the current smart cities paradigm in Canada – especially post-Sidewalk – should provide enough normative and environmental pressure on provincial and territorial governments to either adopt or iterate on these national frameworks to accommodate their principles to the idiosyncrasies of their local contexts. It would then be up to municipal authorities and their private partners to ensure that their technology sufficiently operationalizes these data governance frameworks.
The role of municipal authorities in a smart city are especially significant, because their “subjects” (the public) and “objects” (their data) are plural categories. The aggregated data about the quotidian happenings of a city and its inhabitants cannot guarantee its own singular meaning.
Surprising even myself, I’ll use a statistical metaphor: just as correlation is not causation, “the public” (counter-intuitively) functions as the shifting standard-error of its own data. As such, the public is recognized as the complex, living approximation that might sometimes refer to the momentary accuracy of its datafied reflection without ever being reduced entirely to it. Data therefore only means something about its public (and becomes valuable, too) not in how it is, but in how it is used. How the data is used then, is ultimately up to the municipality in question.
The data of a smart city is not personal data per se. Most likely it is the de-personalized and de-identified aggregate data that tracks behavioural metrics like mobility patterns, consumer trends, environmental data, and service delivery feedback. We’re correct to assume that the habitual decisions and activities of “the public” probably produce reliable datasets to be leveraged in real-time for product/service innovation and sociological insight. But data’s presumed reliability in a smart cities context becomes complicated once we consider what Kean Birch calls data’s “reflexivity”. For him, there is a minimal gap between us and the data we produce because we are “constantly changing as individuals as the result of learning about the world, so any data produced about us always changes us in some way or another, rendering that data inaccurate.”
Accepting Birch’s intriguing claim as valid, I still see in smart cities the chance to correct the archetypal variance between what a citizen says they’ll do, and what they actually do. Ideally, by incorporating in its design and iterative operations the stages of public consultation and real-time data collection, smart cities could present a nuanced approach to solving the age-old problem of political representation: unifying the public’s infinite and individual preferences into a singular and actionable “public interest.”
In truth, our data is less about us as identifiable individuals, and more about what we do relative to one another. In aggregation and in the right hands, braced by adequate and robust data policies, this representational and changing “public data” might have the power to renew our own sense of public interest and public good. Perhaps through smart technologies, and not in our resistance to them, we could elevate our personal experiences and preferences in real-time to be democratically relevant.
As most of us might attest to, there is an ever-growing rift between our lived-experiences and the Politics meant to represent us. This rift extends and exists between the places we are actually living in and wanting to live in, and justifies the inadequacies of the places provided us anyway. It may be that in smart cities, our being citizens might become something practical again.
Think of how we report accidents or police action on Waze. What if we could do the same but for the purpose of civic feedback? As one bunch of scholars have put it, “smart city engagement programs and technologies themselves shape the contours of citizen participation, define what citizenship means, and delimit who is involved in a particular issue.” Instead of this being some imposition of external limit, it could mean an opportunity for us to establish anew the import and influence of citizenship in determining the space we occupy in digital society.
As we have known it, the “attention-economy” has infiltrated and dominated our civic and personal lives through its infinite proliferation and the penetration of the useless. But the political could also become something we pay attention to if in a smart city, civic life through data sharing actually became in the immediate something participatory.
As of late, the ballot box hasn’t done me any good. There is still too much difference between what I vote for, and what happens. How about you?
From Martin Heidegger to Jane Jacobs, we’ve learned that our being-in-the-world is determined by some measure of our relation to the spaces in which we dwell. But the advent of the smart cities and our data-subjectivity within them, seems to pose the question of this relationship anew. Idealism notwithstanding, smart technologies force us to reconsider what structures and secures the plurality of the lives and experiences encapsulated in a city. And so echoing Wylie and Surman, I think the problem of smart cities is not a technological one, but a political one.
This point is more fully registered in the speculative observation that the givenness of our political assurances and categories is eroding all around us, as we are more and more determined or “enframed” by our own technological pursuits. The idea of a smart city forwards an intimate infusion of technology into our ontic realities and strivings and holds a mirror up to them, requiring us to ask ourselves again: how will we live together? How do we best design common space to support that life? How am I free?
Funny, what a little data can do. Instead of fearing the inevitable, we should act as though it has already happened. It’s time that we embrace neither hope nor fear, and instead start searching (and demanding) for new ways to make what is already upon us – smart cities included – work for us.