The allure of technology into the “utopia” of the Smart City

In the last few years, being “smart” has changed from being an adjective used on people to being employed within the tech realms. By using this word, “smart” objects often promise efficiency, optimization and innovation. Smart cities are not different. Although the term is often used with ambiguity and is considered flexible, smart cities share a common attribute: the rise of the undertaking of innovation and change through digital solutions at the center of urban development (Sadowski and Pasquale 2015). The way in which technology has disrupted the construction of the city in its components such as privacy, policing, democracy and many more, is discussed in the books of Zaheer Allam and Ben Green. While Allam presents us with a more optimistic view of how the rise of data can (and has) changed livability in cities (2020), Green’s critique of what we consider to be a “Smart City” aims to prove that the technology-driven solutions embedded in it are not value-neutral, thus making them obsolete to solve the social problems that cities face.

Smart cities are the promise of the future that has arrived. The desire to exploit technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to enhance government capacities and people’s lives has been adopted by municipalities around the world. As presented by Allam, the disruption in urban life caused by the use of data can have a significant positive impact on governance structures as well as management and planning. He further argues that presented with these opportunities, cities should not fall into the allure of a modernist perspective, since it might decrease the livability within cities by ignoring social problems, and focusing only on the architectural aspects of urban life, such as buildings and infrastructure. The book also revises how artificial intelligence is impacting urban life by providing alternatives to challenges such as climate change and population increase with mechanisms of food security and urban sustainability. But what is more interesting about Allam’s perspective is the role of the private sector in the construction of Smart Cities.

In the book, he explains that smart city projects are a window to create public-private partnerships (PPP) to finance them. PPP usually represent an opportunity for governments, as they grant “the opportunities to use their available financial resources to finance and provide social services that cannot be overlooked” (Allam 2020, 88). The book mentions a couple of fallouts of the PPP such as Intellectual Property (IP) claims by private companies which make it impossible for municipalities to have rights over the generated data, as well as the risk of surveillance mechanisms that breach users’ privacy. Despite the problematic nature of these issues, Allam still states that PPP are an essential need for municipal governments and Smart Cities, overlooking the much deeper social and political problems that these could bring. Just in April of 2020, it was reported that the Amazon-owned company Whole Foods was using heat maps to track zones that have risk of unionization, interfering with their employees privacy (Peters 2020). Not only does this show the dangers of allowing private companies to develop “Smart Cities” projects, but it also presents a minor flaw of the book: it fails to elaborate more on the protocols and laws needed in order for cities to have the upper hand above private companies.

Furthermore, the book does not dive deep into perhaps one of the most interesting opportunities for “Smart Cities”: culture. Allam’s analysis of the effects of digital technologies and data on culture and tourism is quite unexpected. It puts together various aspects previously discussed such as private initiative and social media, but also briefly explores new topics such as diversity, indigenous peoples and the role of youth in the realms of urban life. It would be interesting to read more on this topic in the future, as the author cut it short and did not give the necessary attention that such complex issues need. In the eyes of Allam, technology should be used as much as possible in all aspects of urban life, but he leaves unexplored the unwanted consequences that it might cause, precisely because he does not see one key aspect of technology: it is not value neutral.

Bruno Latour argues that humans have delegated human force, values and ethics to non humans, creating mechanisms that have morality and ethics embedded within (1992, 157). This is exemplified by Ben Green’s critique of the Smart City, as most of today’s versions of it are based on pure technology-driven solutions that fail to address the real social problems. These cities are created by people blindsided by what Green calls “Technological (or ‘tech’) Goggles.” These tools are dangerous as they construct a false utopian vision of urban life, creating an environment that might deepen and exacerbate injustice and inequality. Tech goggles are grounded on the belief that technology, besides providing neutral and optimal solutions to social problems, is a primary mechanism of social change. They present every problem as a technological one. Green highlights that the risk of tech goggles rely mostly on the fact that people wearing them tend to simplify problems that are rooted in fluctuating political and social scenarios. With this in mind, the book seeks to demonstrate how instead of aiming toward “Smart Cities,” municipalities should look to become “Smart Enough.”

The “Smart Enough City” is a “city where technology is embraced as a powerful tool to address the needs of urban residents … but is not valued for its own sake or viewed as a panacea” (2020, 10). Throughout seven chapters, Green explains that Smart Enough Cities should address complex issues rather than artificially simple ones; have clear policy goals that answer social needs; accept the idea that the best outcome will result from innovative policy and institutional reforms; embrace the fact that they are a tool that supports democratic values, such as equity and justice; and, provide the environment for municipalities to properly exploit data that answers the problems the city faces. Together, these characteristics make the Smart Enough City harder to achieve practically, but also theoretically, as it centers the debate on how technology should be used within urban life.

Green’s book is part of a wider set of literature that looks beyond optimization of social problems. Rittel and Webber explain that social problems are wicked problems, because they cannot be solved with a definitive formulation and it is practically impossible to have all of the necessary information to solve them, making them fall into a dichotomy of “good and bad” (1973). Moreover, the building of cities should be made with “meaningful inefficiencies” in mind, as they accommodate technologies into a civic system that embraces more than the “good player” (Gordon and Walter 2019). Furthermore, the role of Big Data and Artificial intelligence is even more problematic when speaking about cities. The complexity of their use relies on the fact that they are solutions that often tend to ignore the context on which they are collected or deployed (Offenhuber 2014), they endanger the democratic principles of transparency and accountability (Brauneis and Goodman 2018), widen the economic gap for low-income people by excluding them from opportunities (Madden et al. 2017) and replicate human bias in machine bias (Angwin et al. 2016). Moreover, they create a new type of privacy inequality within lower class citizens that lose their privacy in exchange for maintaining themselves within the economic system (Garlick 2015).

Ben Green presents a book that speaks to municipalities and policy makers, encouraging them to move away from the technological allure. It would have been interesting to see further exploration on how these municipal governments can build the capacities (both human and financial) to become “Smart Enough.” Despite the well-constructed argument directed toward local governments, Green does not speak to the citizens, a key element of any city that is studied. Is there a way of creating a “Smart Enough City” in which technological solutions emanate from civil society leadership? And if so, what is the role of government in the procurement of these actions? Although the book presents an analysis of several “Smart Cities,” it is important to, in the future, explore more cities in the global south (such as Brasilia, that is the subject of study in the final chapter of the book). A more just and equitable city might be hard to achieve, but Green presents the basis to move toward the right path, with technology as an important partner.

Both books discussed here are the effort of authors that seek the implementation of technological tools in urban life. Nonetheless, Allam’s extremely optimistic point-of-view is based on a more technical background, while Green dives deeper into social theory. As such, Green’s book presents a more structured and richer argument against blindly trusting technology. Urban planners can rely on both books to see the opportunities and disadvantages that technology might bring, as the ideas presented share a common trait: technology solutions. But technology is not value-neutral, so governments should seek the creation of equitable environments that put at the center human solutions to solve human problems. Life in cities is embedded in power-related problems that go beyond optimization-related solutions, thus the need of exploring how technology can enhance the way of living, rather than impoverishing it.