#efficiencyofcities

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 8: The desirability of lending total control to the ‘systems’

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. Governments and developers are increasingly adopting “smart” solutions in areas from traffic control to waste management. However, it is important for governments (and residents) to understand that the adoption of new technology does not necessarily make a city “smart.” The concept of what exactly makes a city “smart” is undefined and still evolving. 

Smart city ideals are based on the key role of digital networks, data, and technical experts in recasting the urban environment in the key of enhanced efficiency, information, and knowledge about how, why and when the city functions. In this light, there has been the emergence of a set of critiques focused on critically interrogating the smart city and its myriad iterations. Rob Kitchin (a geographer with the National University of Ireland, Maynooth) states these as technocratic governance, brittle and hackable urban systems, surveillance, corporatisation of governance and the politics of urban data. He is not advocating that cities shun technology but that they foster a more open debate about how best to adopt it. He underscores the importance of reimagining the smart city vision and its evaluating/reporting mechanisms on what makes the city work.

Visualizing the city

Source : Left - http://www.dublindashboard.ie/; top-right: http://citydashboard.org/london/; bottom-right: bigdata.architecture.org

The ultimate vision is a city that is hyper efficient, easy to navigate, and free of waste—and which is constantly collecting data to help it handle emergencies, disasters, and crime. The orderly, manageable city is a vision with enduring appeal, from the PlanIT valley to Masdar City in the UAE to Songdo, an entirely new smart city constructed near Seoul, Korea. But there’s an equally compelling vision of the city as a chaotic and dynamic whirl of activity, an emergent system, an urban jungle full of possibility—a place to lose oneself. Efficiency isn’t the reason we like to live in cities, and it’s not the reason we visit them. Tourists come to India for experiencing the bustling charm of the streets, the colorful landscape, the diverse culture and not for the sterile tall buildings of GIFT (smart city in Gujarat,India). 

Malik ghat Flower Market in Kolkatta, India

Rendering of GIFT Smart city, India

Source : http://giftgujarat.in/documents/GIFT.pdf

In a city where everything can be sensed, measured, analyzed, and controlled, we risk losing the overlooked benefits of inconvenience. We could compare the networks being built today to the way cities were redesigned for car travel in the first half of the 20th century: As dirt roads were paved, then widened, then run through neighborhoods, and raised into overpasses, they remapped cities completely, for better and worse - new towns were born then. Smart-city infrastructure like software, sensors, and networked systems may seem more ephemeral than a highway , but its legacy will similarly shape how cities work for the next generation.

The idea of new towns seen as “smart cities” is reinforced in the Volume 4 reading through four case studies namely PlanIT Valley in Portugal; Lavasa in India; Strand East in London; New Songdo in South Korea. They are seen as contemporary variants on the new town idea with a ‘city in a box’ approach having a coded framework as its foundation. 

Amidst all the glossy renders and marketing, governments should realise making a city smart is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The end is to make cities liveable and inclusive for all its citizens. Smart cities can't just be about showing innovation and conveying administrations; in a far-reaching way, they must be comprehensive and equitable spots to live in. For eg - In the Indian context, there has been a bold move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. “The smart city concept implies an oversimplified vision of technology. It is based on the belief that technology can solve any problem without fundamentally changing lifestyles. However, can India’s problems actually be simplified to the point that they can be controlled by a large set of data points? Does this mean that the current problems are not social, but technological? Given a country as diverse as India, can the heterogeneity of its cities be accommodated in a linear vision backed by technology?” (Kajaria, 2014)

Whether technology comes from citizens or the city, there’s a philosophy built into the smart-city vision, one in which there’s always a technological answer to a city’s ills. “It’s almost as if things can be boiled down to a simple equation: technology plus innovation equals urban sustainability,” says Kitchin.

But what about issues like persistent poverty, social injustice, or public education which aren’t primarily technological problems with single “best” answers that can be optimized by a system? Do we simply not ‘code’ it?

Does the city of the 21st century necessarily need to be ‘smart’ to claim that it is ‘developed’ and ‘modern’? Is that why cities of today are ardently lauding a smart label. “After all, which city wouldn’t want to be called smart, creative and cultural?” (Hollands, 2008)