What do we really know about Smart cities?
By Sara Khaliq
When we say Smart Cities or Smart Governance, often the first thing that comes to mind is flying cars, teleportation devices and holograms. In this blog I will attempt to bring clarity to the ambiguous term that is increasingly relevant to potential developments in various societies around the globe.
A smart city is thought to be a region or area that uses technological and electronic monitoring. For example, with sensors, voice activation, and artificial intelligence that, combined with extensive data collection, can create a community that is enhanced in economic, social, mobility and environmental means. And, of course with an efficient form of governance at the heart, namely smart governance. This may all still sounds like a distorted cloud of words, and to some extent the term ‘Smart city’ cannot be placed within the confines of a distinct definition. However, with extensions of smart city technology distinctly present in places such as Amsterdam, Stockholm and Hong Kong, the idea of a smart city is no longer an unreachable phenomenon, but one that is manifesting itself in our world.
There is a strong link between the undeniable necessity for good governance in smart cities, after all these, along with the tech companies, are the individuals that will determine how the trajectory of technological development unfolds. Furthermore, in order to retain legitimacy and consent from the people, smart governance is arguably the most important law of a smart city. In theory the concept of smart cities sounds impeccable, higher standards of living, extra emphasis on governance, a more economically and environmentally efficient system sound like things that we, as a no brainer should support.
However, like nearly everything in this volatile world, smart cities, if they were to be implemented systematically, are not that simple. There is the formidable sentiment that democracy in the words of a constitution or in the case of the UK, an “unwritten” constitution, is not exactly emblematic of reality. If we do not have this balance correct, what would introducing a technologically reliant aspect into governance do? At the risk of sounding like a cynic, couldn’t smart governance facilitate increasing political manipulation, the distortion of data to fit whims of the day, or an easy eluding of accountability behind the guise of technology if something goes wrong? Furthermore, a smart city would be established on the basis of interpretations of the data collected. This, in a worst-case scenario can causes an existential crisis to the livelihood of smart cities, as there is not a universally accepted thesis of attainable and utopian conditions to live under. Issues that need to be magnified, may be curtailed by leaders and or, tech innovators. Data cannot singularly answer every issue in a sociological model and will struggle to co-exist under the pressures of budgets, and the dichotomy of those in control.
Fundamentally, there is also the clause that perhaps we in our current age of modernity are not yet at the pinnacle of the technological capacity that is required for the establishment of smart cities in a larger sense. There is evidence of recurring issues that arise with dependency on technology, in this regard I am not referring to something like faulty smart gas meters, but more to the extent of imagining your smartphone crashing and then multiplying this individual chaos to an entire community. The feasibility of steadfast smart technology to encompass an entire community is simply not in the funders’ budget.
I concede that theoretically, there is an alluring rationality to running a city like a computer’s database, but human error is an inevitability. Regardless of how technologically advanced a city can become, smart cities have a long way to go before we can see them in the vicinity of our intimate everyday lives.
