Smart cities: two words which suggest a glittering future of technology and progress, where digital technology will help out with everything from getting your bins collected to ensuring your drive through the city is as smooth as possible.
Or, alternatively, an Orwellian nightmare where the poor are tossed out of our shiny new cities in favour of the upper classes, while governments use new smart technologies to track our every move.
Maybe that sounds a little alarmist. But such is the debate floating around the media at the moment as smart cities become ever more of a reality.
The first issue – the exclusion of poorer citizens from the smart cities of the future – has come to the forefront in India, where the government is pushing ahead with plans to build 100 smart cities in what is the most ambitious smart city project to date.
The idea, according to India’s urban development minister Venkaiah Naidu, is to create a “smart (intelligent) physical, social, institutional and economic infrastructure”, which will guarantee employment opportunities and “a very high quality of life, comparable with any developed European city”.
So far, so idealistic. And yet a storm broke out earlier this year when journalist Shruti Ravindran tweeted an excerpt from a brochure given out to attendees at Mumbai’s Smart Cities in India: Reality in the Making conference, which suggested that Indian smart cities could become “special enclaves” where new laws exclude the country’s poor from entering.
“There are only two ways to keep people out of any space – prices and policing,” the brochure read. “In other words, the prices will automatically be higher in such cities – the notion that they will be low cost is flawed. Even if possible from a cost provision perspective, they cannot be low cost from a demand supply perspective.
“Even with high prices, the conventional laws in India will not enable us to exclude millions of poor Indians from enjoying the privileges of such great infrastructure. Hence the police will need to physically exclude people from such cities, and they will need a different set of laws from those operating in the rest of India, for them to be able to do so.”
It reads like a manifesto for social exclusion of the worst kind and on social media people were understandably shocked. “Cannot believe my eyes!” Geetika Dang tweeted. “WOW. wow. wow,” Lilly Irani added.
The shockwaves from the news are still being felt, with articles cropping up regularly in Indian media decrying the government’s Smart Cities initiative. But before we judge it is important to give some context. The quote was not taken from a smart city instructional guide. Rather, it came from an article by economist Laveesh Bhandari entitled Smart cities: What to Do and What Not to Do. That’s an important distinction.
What’s more, Bhandari has since pointed out that he does not support such exclusionary plans. “I am describing the unfeasibility and undesirability of a thoughtless smart-city vision,” he told The Guardian. “When you invest so much without thinking about services and low-cost housing and governance, then you will end up creating enclaves that keep out the poor.”
Could smart cities be used to exclude the poor, in India and elsewhere? Undoubtedly.
Will they be used to this end? In some places, the sad reality is probably yes. Creating the infrastructure necessary for a smart city is not cheap and you can imagine developers limiting their use to the monied upper and middle classes.
As Ravindran points out in an excellent Guardian article, this is something that seems to already be happening in India. Ravindran cites the example of Palava City, a smart city in Mumbai’s northeastern exurbs, which apparently plans to issue its residents with “smart identity cards” and will watch over them through “smart surveillance”.
This brings us onto the second key criticism of the smart city model. Smart cities will, by necessity, collect millions of data points every day. This is used to improve infrastructure – for example by allowing bins to be collected when they are full. The worry, though, is that local governments who have invested heavily in smart cities may then be tempted to sell on this data to private companies to help recoup their investment.
Mike Weston, CEO of data-science consultancy Profusion, recently raised these concerns in a widely read op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal entitled Smart Cities’ Will Know Everything About You: How can marketers cash in without becoming enemies of the people?
“Given the value of this data, it’s conceivable that municipalities or private businesses that pay to create a smart city will seek to recoup their expenses by selling it,” he writes.
On the face of it, then, it all sounds pretty bleak for the smart city. And yet, we shouldn’t get too despondent. Weston, for example, believes that this Orwellian future of smart surveillance is by no means a foregone conclusion and can be avoided if city developers act responsibly.
And while cities might feel the financial pull of private companies as they look at their dwindling coffers, they will also need to keep their citizens happy if the smart city is to prove a success.
In fact, by raising the issue now – and in a space as high profile as the Wall Street Journal – Weston could be doing us all a favour, giving voice to these concerns about data early in the smart city game, before opinions becomes entrenched and lines drawn.
The issue of social exclusion is a more difficult one. It is a depressing thought that smart city technology could be used to exclude the poor. After all, wasn’t the internet supposed to be a great leveller, bringing online access to all thanks to cheap smartphones and wi-fi?
But smart cities don’t have to be that way. Look, for example, at Barcelona, one of Europe’s most advanced smart cities and winner of the EC’s European Capital of Innovation prize last year, as well as a very left-leaning city. Its smart city projects include city-wide free wi-fi, a new technology-driven bus network and an mSchools project for both state and private colleges – all projects designed with inclusion in mind.
As these example – both good and bad – show, smart cities can be used for considerable common good. Or they can be an exclusionary tool that favours the monied elite and global business. They key, inevitably, is in how we use them. And in that we can, hopefully, all play a role.
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