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And as cities, especially U.S. cities, compete with other cities for private investment, a race begins to compete to win over new technologies that don’t work well with existing public agency systems or technical processes. Many experienced the anxiety of smart cities in the 2010s with a sense of anxiety: they joined the creative class and feared that they would be left behind in the fight for a new innovation economy because they believed new technologies could provide real solutions.
All this means that in many ways the city is no longer the primary consumer of smart city businesses. Rather, it primarily functions as an innovation sandbox used by the technology sector for product prototyping and service delivery. For industry, cities are mostly places where customers live.
Lighter touch
In earlier times, collaboration between cities and industries created new roads, bridges, buildings, parks, and even entire neighborhoods. These changes, from large neighborhoods like Levittown to the Eisenhower-era Interstate Highway System to Central Boston’s Artery, caused a lot of criticism. But at least they meant a real investment in the built environment.
Today, however, cities like Toronto are organized against large-scale smart city initiatives that propose changes to physical infrastructure, and many technology companies have focused on “lighter” projects. These include smart services such as travel sharing and food delivery applications that collect a lot of data but leave the physical city unchanged.
The real problem is that smart city projects, in their many manifestations, do not look back to see what needs to be changed, adapted, dismantled or dismantled. Functionally, cities are located in layers of interconnected (and sometimes disconnected) systems. Being on any street corner in the center is like observing old and new infrastructure (traffic signs, light poles) installed by public agencies and private companies for a variety of reasons. (Regulations also vary greatly between jurisdictions: in the U.S., for example, local governments have highly adapted land use controls.) But most current projects are not designed to reconcile with existing urban systems. The idea of smart cities, like the technology sector itself, is looking forward.
The “light” interventions that are known today float above the complexity of the urban landscape. They are based on existing platforms: the same roads, the same homes, the same cars. These business models require (and offer) some upgrades and minimize the need for technology companies to negotiate with operating systems. Soofa, for example announces that its smart search kiosks can only be installed on “four screws on concrete surfaces”. But these screens hardly integrate with a city’s transportation system, let alone improve them.
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