Book Review 3: The Smart Way Forward: A Review of Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence

What if our traditional urban planning practices were overtaken and overturned, introducing a whole new set of problems, tools, and future possibilities?

Such might be the case with the smart city, “a city activated at millions of points” (p. 13) and made intelligent “in the sense of the ability to learn, understand, and reason” (p. 28) through the proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) across not just our urban world, but physical space in general. First coined in 2005 and increasingly occupying the minds of academics, urban enthusiasts, and corporations, the smart city movement has grown into a $39.5 billion industry in just a few short years (p. 32). And it will continue to grow, with 50 billion connected devices currently linked to the Internet and providing data on our homes, our cities, and even our own bodies (p. 33).

If you are in the urban planning field at all and have not yet heard of the smart city movement, then you should quickly brush up: It will come to occupy every nook and cranny of our discipline. Indeed, since 2012 the smart city has been the most frequently cited concept in the academic literature on urban sustainability, ending sustainable city’s 16-year run (de Jong, Joss, Schraven, Zhan, & Weijnen, 2015). And in practice, many are advocating the smart city movement at dozens of entrepreneurial conferences, at city trade shows, in master’s programs at prestigious universities, and even in a recent Department of Transportation $40 million grant challenge. But what is the smart city? In short, it is the addition of another “layer” to our understanding of the city. Geography, meteorology and hydrology, ecology, and then socioeconomics, demographics, history and prejudice: Each of these lenses chronologically occupies the minds of urban planners who seek to understand the city in all its dimensions. Today we can understand the city through terabytes of data that superficially read as ones and zeros but, with the right algorithms, tell a story about practically every facet of urban space. From smart metering and road congestion pricing to smartphone apps that guide you along local residents’ favorite secret hikes, this layer of data upon a city has drastically altered urban space and will continue to do so.

Antoine Picon’s book is the most recent monograph on smart cities, and perhaps the most important since Anthony Townsend’s Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (2013). Claiming that “our cities are on the verge of a radical transformation, a revolution in intelligence comparable in scale to the one that, in its time, brought about industrialization” (p. 9), Picon devotes his book to resolving the primary conflict of the smart city movement to date: The supposed tension between the inherent technocracy of some smart city innovations and the empowering individualism enabled through digital technologies and platforms (the smartphone, Twitter, Wikipedia). This debate has been smoldering for years in various journals, on online forums, and at conferences, leaving us to wonder which smart city strategy leads to the best city: “neocybernetic inspiration with technocratic overtones, or new perspectives of democratization linked to the spread of information and communications technology?” (p. 11). Indeed, Townsend commented in a MIT Technology Review interview that smart city tech can either make our cities top-down, centralized, authoritative command centers, or it could decentralize power, create redundant infrastructure, increase social interaction, increase sustainable behavior, and incite creative energy (Berg, 2015, p. 63). Several smart city critics have referenced the cultural geographers Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Neil Brenner, worrying that smart cities, as peddled by the likes of Cisco, IBM, Siemens, and Hitachi, are actually neoliberal Trojan horses, disguised as urban “saviors” but actually there to privatize public services and spaces.

If the differences between the two seem unclear, then consider some clarifying examples. To understand the neocybernetic smart city, we could look to the IBM Rio de Janeiro Operations Center, an undeniably Orwellian “control room” that, with its ubiquitous sensors and cameras throughout the metropolis, enables a “rational” response to any digitally-recorded events (p. 75). On the other hand, scholars and activists, most notably among them Townsend, have promoted the smart city as an inherent decentralizing force, one that breaks down bureaucratic and centralized systems of control and response. Both Picon and Townsend point to smart phones as the material means of this democratic force. Picon finds promise in the “smart mobs” (p. 84) enabled by social media, who can quickly move to protest injustices and inequities perpetuated by governments. And Townsend sees smartphones enabling an open-source approach to urban planning that solicits the creative intelligence of the people who actually live there, as opposed to the wholesale standardization of smart cities through the global sales teams of a few corporations (Townsend, 2014).

Picon argues that cities need both. Indeed, centralized tech directives issued from municipalities or corporations and citizen-driven initiatives appear to be mutually supportive of each other. If smart cities are to reinvent the energy grid, whereby ICT can automatically adjust a household’s thermostat to decrease peak demand, or transit systems, which stand to be completely remade through ride-sharing and autonomous vehicle technologies, then some degree of centralized, sophisticated coordination is necessary. Picon encourages his readers to realize that “there are some fields, albeit limited in number, where a neocybernetic type of management seems preferable to citizen engagement” (p. 90). Ironically, however, it is only through such centrally controlled systems that “the desires and experiences of spontaneity and collaboration” can then flourish (p. 84). Ultimately, Picon proposes that scholars and practitioners need to conceive “a form of city intelligence” that is “both widespread and focused,” diffuse among all urban inhabitants and their tools of collaboration and participation, and yet also concentrated in control rooms and command posts that keep a city functioning materially (p. 100).

Picon’s last chapter turns towards a more theoretical exploration of how digital technologies might change the urban experience in the 21st century. In particular, he foresees augmented reality (AR), geolocation, and 3D modeling technologies adding new dimensions to an individual’s relationship to space. While in the past, scholars and practitioners may have referred to these digital technologies as virtual, Picon believes such terminology is now obsolete, given the growing “association between the physical and the digital world, or between atoms and data bits (p. 106). While I do not find this concluding chapter to be quite relevant to the primary conversations of the smart city movement, it nevertheless tangentially relates to how ICT technologies might alter urban planning and the public participation process. Indeed, with AR and 3D modeling, one can surely imagine a future where urban planners ask community participants to put on their AR goggles to visualize proposed developments. Picon’s book is an integral contribution to the smart city movement. In addition to proposing a framework that I believe resolves the tension seen thus far in smart cities (cybernetic technocratic control versus democratic, technological empowerment of individuals and communities), Picon simply orients the reader to what the smart city actually is. No longer an abstract possibility, the smart city actually exists. A diverse collection of distributed events, processes, and centralized transformations, the smart city movement is certainly under way in cities across the world. Picon’s clear writing and seamless reference to many examples, along with complementary images and graphics, creates a highly informative reading experience, and will leave you wondering what smart city changes are already under way in your own city. To quote Picon’s last words, maybe we should all look a bit more closely at this smart city ideal and process: After all, it’s a “different future” that invariably will come, and, with a little help on our end, it might even be a future “rich in promise” (p. 156).

About the Author

Patrick Russell studied Literature & Environment (MA) at the University of Nevada, Reno, and holds two BA degrees in Philosophy and English from the University of Central Arkansas. He will soon complete a Masters of Science in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas, and is currently writing his thesis on the development of smart cities. You can follow his blog City Smarts at Medium.com.

References

de Jong, M., Joss, S. Schraven, D., Zhan, C., & Weijnen, M. (2015) Sustainable— smart—resilient—low carbon—eco—knowledge cities: Making sense of a multitude of concepts promoting sustainable urbanization. Journal of Cleaner Production, 1(14), Web. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S0959652615001080

Townsend, A. M. (2014). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Berg, N. (2015). Smart cities will take many forms. MIT Technology Review, 118(1), 63–64.