Smart cities: the comeback
So-called smart cities are growing in number, from Nigeria to South Korea. In Songdo, South Korea, billed as a “master-planned city...setting benchmarks for urban innovation,” sensors track the movement of residents, the roads they use, the water they consume, the waste they produce, and the list goes on.
The idea of urban planners collecting data on its residents isn’t new. In this article, Mark Vallianatos explores how the Community Analysis Bureau in LA used computer databases, cluster analysis and infrared aerial photography in the late 1960s and 1970s to produce reports on neighbourhood demographics across the city. Relating to the current attitude of collecting as much data as possible, he writes:
Bureau staff noticed that it didn’t take sixty-six data types to pinpoint which parts of the city had the worst blight and poverty. Three sets of data considered together—birth weight of infants, sixth-grade reading scores, and age of housing—emerged as an accurate indicator for housing decline and socioeconomic disadvantage.
Crucially, he also points out that though more data than ever before was collected, the “bureau’s findings were easy to dismiss as interesting but inessential factoids” and resulted in very little policy change, providing potential words of warning for current and future data-driven city projects.
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Sensor data collection - responsibly?
As far as I can tell, often when residents have realised the extent of surveillance in smart city initiatives, there has been a backlash. In the UK, the City of London cancelled a scheme where sensors in recycling bins monitored the phones of passers-by to help target advertisements, after complaints from citizens.
Some of the biggest companies in this area acknowledge the issue - Wim Elfrink, executive vice president of industry solutions at Cisco, has talked publicly about the need to give citizens an “opt-in and opt-out.” Pragmatically, I wonder if that’s possible given the abundance of sensors in public places - from the bins in London, to connected street lighting, to sensors embedded in the pavement below your feet.
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Alternative models
When it comes to data collection and use, one of the main criticisms of smart cities is the way that data flows straight from residents (who might not know their data is being collected or be able to opt out) to the city government or the company contracted to manage the process.
What if data on the city was gathered by citizens rather than companies? Making the data collection process participatory could help residents of a city to raise important issues they’re facing - and perhaps make the boundary between active and passive data collection a bit clearer too.
One such example is FLOAT Beijing, an initiative that we profiled last year as part of work on citizen-generated data with the DataShift. With FLOAT, citizens in Beijing learned how to generate their own data on air quality in the city, using self-made air quality sensors attached to kites. So, next steps: how do cities use this data to make better policies?
Image from FLOAT’s Kickstarter page
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The city is not a lab
I recently got to join one of Tactical Tech’s ‘Terrace Talks’, which featured speakers Orit Halpern and Ingrid Burrington. Orit’s analysis of the ‘smart city’ phenomenon was, in all honesty, pretty terrifying, and made me think a lot about what we are valuing and seeing as progress. She also talked a lot about the way in which smart cities are seen as experiments or prototypes, thus absolving anyone of accountability if things don’t turn out as planned.
But people live in those cities, and smart city technologies can have massive impacts upon their lives; from data collected by default without any kind of consent from individuals, to the potential political and social consequences of “smart city” decision making.
To read more on this theme, check out this piece by Leah Meisterlin - ‘how (not) to experiment, in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world’, Orit’s work, or the GovLab’s reading list on Urban Analytics.
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Responsible design
So, who is designing these systems? The designers often seem to be a world away from the problems they’re trying to solve - an issue that Ethan Zuckerman wrote about recently in relation to a different field.
But the issues he mentions are particularly valid when it comes to some of the companies and firms working on urban design + smart city issues, like Utopia Cities, the San Francisco-based “world’s first ever design and urban planning firm focused solely on slums”. Their programs include “Slums 2.0” and “SLUMLabs” (and if you listen hard, you might be able to hear my eyes rolling).
The who behind these decisions matters a lot. It’s not directly data, but data + design go hand in hand. For inspiration, check out this piece from 1980, written by Dolores Hayden, entitled: What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?
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Responsible data food for thought
City governments that have suddenly started working with new methods of data analysis and much larger quantities of data are often partnering with private sector companies. In New York, for example, they’ve partnered with Palantir to “zero in on what the city sees as illegal hotels”.
This isn’t the first time Palantir has been mentioned in this newsletter - their data practices and associations worry me across the board. Start-ups working specifically on smart city issues are popping up everywhere, too - so, where does that data go? Can we expect the same kind of accountability that we would from public government bodies, if they are passing the data on to privately-owned start-ups and companies to actually crunch the data?
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As always, feedback, suggestions, and links for the next newsletter are very much welcomed.
- Zara & The Engine Room
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