How Smart Cities Succeed or Fail
By: Corey Recvlohe
Tags: Policy, Politics, Smart Cities, Urban Planning, Technology

Technological innovation is the driving mechanism of modern economic organization. Since the industrial revolution, technically efficient products produced at scale have created the conditions necessary for vast accumulation of material wealth. The wealth central to these processes has enabled urban centers to expand their influence, becoming locations important for the trade of capital and labor. Contemporary cities are no different than those of an earlier era, but have transitioned to exchanging digital rather than physical goods, using repositories of extensive data drawn from internet-connected devices.

Having established their presence in the 1990s and maturing in the early 21st century, corporations producing digital services have prospered. Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, and many others, are platforms for a novel economy. This emerging economy relies on a new kind of labor, popularly labeled the “creative class,”¹ but who are mainly knowledge-based workers. Within lofty downtown offices and glass-laden condominiums, they are building products increasingly marketed to cities as solutions for perennially known problems. From city administration to waste allocation, power systems to water treatment, street crime to transportation, no service is left unaltered by information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The flourishing of digital devices and growth of produced data creates tremendous opportunities for individuals and municipalities alike. With these data, urban functions can be restricted or augmented according to rules programmatically determined by governing authorities. Many approaches affect the use of those data, and under what circumstances residents can retain sovereignty and privacy over their production. This work will examine how different municipal governance strategies impact those privacy rights and the extent to which data sovereignty is either protected or ignored in seeking urban policy outcomes.

From Dubai to Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro to Singapore, each location in this analysis will encounter the myriad ways in which regimes of different types engage with technical innovations to bring about ‘smart’ change to their metros, including administration of services. Common between them are initiatives utilizing algorithmic capabilities; however, they can notably differ on dynamics such as privacy, security, and the provision of public goods.

The following section will first define the ‘smart city,’ then attempt to segment between successful endeavors and project failures from the perspective of data interoperability, including how those data affect municipal services. Highlighted are the interplays between regime types and the sorts of implementations sought out to complement their municipal agendas. I will end with a brief outlook on the useful takeaways and obstacles challenging city authorities as expansive technological disruption impacts urban environments.

What is a Smart City

While the term ‘smart city’ may be conceptually imprecise, several factors contribute to its definitional scope, including aspects of technology, sustainability, governance, urban politics, and economic development.² Perhaps the most commonly used definition is a city that solicits “investments in human and social capital and traditional and modern communication infrastructure [to] fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance.”³ How cities become smart is another matter. Usually, initiatives to incorporate these disparate elements focus on finding technical solutions to ‘wicked problems’ or how technology can address quality-of-life issues ranging from cleaner air to safer streets.⁴

Criticisms of these policies often involve the techno-centering vision of large conglomerate vendors. The critiques have a point. Smart city solutions built with ICTs can enable lock-in and path dependency, creating ‘sticky’ reliance on proprietary systems.⁵ Lack of administrative-technical acuity will invariably lead to blind-spots, propping-up inadequate implementations, project failures, and corruption. Essential to analyzing smart city initiatives — and their political economies — is how policies and governance strategies either succeed or fail, contribute to or move away from data sovereignty and personal privacy.

While not the focus of this piece, it is essential to note that smart cities may already be transitioning to much more complex and autonomous systems, utilizing Artificial Intelligence in ways that “mimic cognitive functions [associated] with the human mind, such as learning and problem solving.”⁶ This sea-change in computational power will affect urban planning and development insofar as emerging AI-powered techniques can address climate change, biodiversity loss, natural disasters, pandemics, and other probabilistic problem-sets.

From a governance standpoint, how different smart cities harness power is contextually crucial to this analysis. Whether fitting the mold of growth machines,⁷ pluralist regimes,⁸ or urban social movements,⁹ the creation of smart cities are constitutively oriented towards the broader socio-economic goals of administrations responsible for planning their realization. The resulting strategies chosen by particular locales are manifested in the kinds of technically sophisticated systems created. This contributes to the variety of ‘smart city’ types found.

Included are four smart cities that exemplify successful protections of privacy and data sovereignty and peculiar failures promoting systematic surveillance. Apparent is the array of developmental philosophies and why they have selected solutions in furtherance of intrinsic interests tied to their unique conditions. What cannot be discounted, though, are how those regimes influence technological choices. Whether entrusting residents with bottom-up buy-in or enforcing strict regulation of rental privileges, each city is endowed with characteristic political economies informing their definition of ‘smartness.’

Smart City Successes