Used under Creative Commons license
If the smart cities movement loses sight of its goal, it will fail. It will become another of those period-dated, quaint, seemed-a-good-idea-at-the-time, don’t-know-really-why I was-into-that, phases. Like bell-bottom trousers.
(For younger readers: 50 years ago, young men decided it would be cool to dress like sailors from the waist down. You will notice: this particular notion has now been abandoned).
So: how could smart cities become the “bell-bottoms” of 2018? More interestingly, how can this be avoided?
The smart city – which is best described as a ‘movement’ rather than a clearly defined concept – has the potential to make life better for a vast number of people.
If this happens, it will become a significant contributor to progress. People who have poured effort into it, who have argued and cajoled and persuaded others to open their minds to new possibilities, will rightly have a sense of achievement.
They will be able to say to their kids (possibly via social media, if actual speaking human-to-human has become a lost skill): “I was part of making that happen”.
However there are risks that two altogether different scenarios might develop.
The first is that the movement becomes buried in its own quagmire, lost in the vendor-driven detail on which technologies to use: or lost in the critical, but extremely complex, questions of who should ‘own’ the vast truckloads of data that roll out.
The second, more sinister, is that smart cities enable someone to have such an insight into our lives that they become able to ‘control’ our behaviour.
This someone could be a central government running a social credits system, or one the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) or their successors.
So, what should smart cities aim to achieve? If there is clarity about this, the concept of the smart city will be useful for a long time to come, rather than a one-decade wonder.
The goal: liveability
The answer is simple: liveability. Smart cities should be – and generally are – trying to improve liveability for their citizens.
However, many things contribute to liveability. Urban and suburban areas don’t just need to be smarter. They also need to be ‘greener’ – more parks and recreational facilities as population grows. They should also be more affordable.
But the idea of ‘liveability’ will change. Liveability is a moving target. When the steam train made it possible for cities’ slum-dwellers to go to the seaside for the first time in their lives, “liveability” for those people took a big leap forward.
But half a century later you can bet that they took it for granted; and that every time a train was delayed or broke down, it seemed like a huge imposition.
Likewise, as ‘smarts’ enable us to (say) find a parking spot in two minutes, instead of 20 minutes, it will seem like a blessing from heaven and a huge leap forward.
But a few years – or months – later, that “blessing from heaven” feeling will be a distant memory. Once progress is reality, we take it for granted.
The smart cities movement has to fight on a lot of fronts: against getting buried in technical complexity; against the threat of people-control by organisations who amass microscopic insight into our lives; and against losing sight of the goal, which sits somewhere in that simple-to-say but complex-to-achieve concept: liveability.
Creator Tech has authored a White Paper on data sharing which we think will interest you. Download it here.
