After the 2008 financial
crisis, a new approach to urbanism and service delivery began to take root
worldwide. With advancements in technology, city planners devised new ways to
monitor the needs of urban residents and use technology to deliver services. By
deploying the
Internet of Things across myriad
tasks of urban management, the
“smart city” was born.
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More than a decade
later, the smart city revolution has become commonplace in the world’s leading
cities. Yet, the concept appears to have been more of a branding coup than a
total revolution in urbanism.
The use of technology to
ease urban life is nothing new in cities. Since the first cities more than
6,000 years ago, humans have continuously looked for ways to improve the daily
grind of everyday life with technology. With the advent of the smartphone, city
planners have been able to collect massive pools of data and better understand
what residents need. As a surveillance technology, the smartphone is unrivaled
in human history for the sheer amount of information it collects about
individuals. This data gives city planners radically new insights into how the
urban environment is used and where resources should be allocated.
Smart city branding
Smart city branding,
however, tends to focus on individual ease instead of monitoring of data. In
cities like Dubai and Singapore, residents use smartphone applications to
interact with city services as municipal offices move away from paper in
official transactions. Residents can use smartphone applications to report
service outages, pay fines, and more. Smart city marketers envision a future
where residents never have to visit a physical city office to conduct business,
and resources are automatically allocated based on demand.
Smart city branding, however, tends to focus on individual ease instead of monitoring of data. In cities like Dubai and Singapore, residents use smartphone applications to interact with city services as municipal offices move away from paper in official transactions. Residents can use smartphone applications to report service outages, pay fines, and more.
Over the past decade,
many cities worldwide have adopted varying degrees of the smart city approach.
Even in cities like Cape Town, residents can handle many issues through
smartphones or online. The model of a truly innovative smart city is changing.
Saudi Arabia’s planned city NEOM on the Red Sea coast promises to weave
technology into virtually every aspect of the urban environment.
Build their own city
from scratch
On the other side of the
world, a group of leading technology investors in California
want to build their own city
from scratch and test the smart city concept to solve urban problems.
California Forever is a project backed by Silicon Valley billionaires Reid
Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Marc Andreessen, with plans to build a “dream
city” in Northern California. The project has already acquired vast tracts of
land and promises to create a future smart city with the latest in solar power,
security, and quality of life.
These investors are
responding to the severe decline of Californian cities. From San Francisco to
San Diego, Californian cities have been unable to curb rising crime and
homelessness. The tech backers of California Forever are punting on the smart
city concept of a controlled environment maintained by the latest surveillance
technology to provide an alternative to California’s increasingly dangerous
urban areas.
At their core
This makes sense. At
their core, smart cities are typified by monitoring architecture built into the
urban environment. But the public narrative has always been something softer.
To fully appreciate this dichotomy, we must consider how emerging markets have
transformed over the last two decades. In the middle of the 2000s, investors
began looking for
new markets with great
returns. Thanks to globalization, cheap money due to low-interest rates, and a
rising young population, emerging market countries, mainly in the Global South,
became investor hotspots. A new narrative developed that justified and accelerated
new investor sentiment. Namely, technology and growing youth populations were
pointing towards a historic transformation of the global economy. The future
was in emerging markets.
Dubai has new nexus
points of innovation
Technically, this was
not wrong. Technology has enabled knowledge workers worldwide to have more
access to markets. Many cities across the emerging world have growing youth
populations that enjoy many more opportunities than their parents. Cities like
Dubai have become new nexus points of innovation, bringing diverse populations
of people together. The narrative has broken down in recent years as high
interest rates have dried up the cheap money fueling this exuberance. Yet, some
emerging market countries have truly come into their own.
A smart city narrative
The smart city narrative
remains vital to the emerging market narrative. Using a smartphone to pay a
parking ticket is branded by many city officials as a demonstration of
technology’s promise to make life easier. It removes a hurdle of bureaucracy so
often associated with the legacy of colonialism in some emerging market
countries.
This makes sense. At their core, smart cities are typified by monitoring architecture built into the urban environment. But the public narrative has always been something softer.
Now that these
developments have become commonplace worldwide, the narrative needs to shift.
The rise of artificial intelligence is one area that will change how we think
about cities. Thanks to the large amounts of data cities have collected over
the past decade; AI systems can be deployed to predict and handle resource
allocation. The seamless experience the smart city vision promises can be more
easily carried out with AI.
The dream of a truly
smart city is not over
The dream of a truly
smart city is not over. As long as humans live in cities, there will be a drive
to improve the urban environment. The branding of smart cities in relation to
the growth of emerging markets has likely seen its best days and will change as
new technology gives planners more options. As such, an important chapter in
the history of urbanism is about to close as another one opens.
Joseph Dana is a writer
based in South Africa and the Middle East. He has reported from
Jerusalem, Ramallah, Cairo, Istanbul, and Abu Dhabi. He was formerly
editor-in-chief of emerge85, a media project based in Abu Dhabi exploring change
in emerging markets. Twitter: @ibnezra
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