The truth about smart cities: In the end, they

will destroy democracy'

The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its usefulness: the
wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people. So why did that happen and whats
coming in its place?
Steven Poole
Wednesday 17 December 2014 14.39GMT

A woman drives to the outskirts of the city and steps directly on to a train; her electric
car then drives itself off to park and recharge. A man has a heart attack in the street; the
emergency services send a drone equipped with a defibrillator to arrive crucial minutes
before an ambulance can. A family of flying maintenance robots lives atop an apartment
block able to autonomously repair cracks or leaks and clear leaves from the gutters.
Such utopian, urban visions help drive the smart city rhetoric that has, for the past
decade or so, been promulgated most energetically by big technology, engineering and
consulting companies. The movement is predicated on ubiquitous wireless broadband
and the embedding of computerised sensors into the urban fabric, so that bike racks and
lamp posts, CCTV and traffic lights, as well as geeky home appliances such as internet
fridges and remote-controlled heating systems, become part of the so-called internet of
things (the global market for which is now estimated at $1.7tn). Better living through
biochemistry gives way to a dream of better living through data. You can even take an
MSc in Smart Cities at University College, London.
Yet there are dystopian critiques, too, of what this smart city vision might mean for the
ordinary citizen. The phrase itself has sparked a rhetorical battle between technoutopianists and postmodern flneurs: should the city be an optimised panopticon, or a
melting pot of cultures and ideas?
And what role will the citizen play? That of unpaid data-clerk, voluntarily contributing
information to an urban database that is monetised by private companies? Is the citydweller best visualised as a smoothly moving pixel, travelling to work, shops and home
again, on a colourful 3D graphic display? Or is the citizen rightfully an unpredictable
source of obstreperous demands and assertions of rights? Why do smart cities offer
only improvement? asks the architect Rem Koolhaas. Where is the possibility of
transgression?
The smart city concept arguably dates back at least as far as the invention of automated
traffic lights, which were first deployed in 1922 in Houston, Texas. Leo Hollis, author of
Cities Are Good For You, says the one unarguably positive achievement of smart citystyle thinking in modern times is the train indicator boards on the London Underground.
But in the last decade, thanks to the rise of ubiquitous internet connectivity and the

miniaturisation of electronics in such now-common devices as RFID tags, the concept

seems to have crystallised into an image of the city as a vast, efficient robot a vision
that originated, according to Adam Greenfield at LSE Cities, with giant technology
companies such as IBM, Cisco and Software AG, all of whom hoped to profit from big
municipal contracts.
The notion of the smart city in its full contemporary form appears to have originated
within these businesses, Greenfield notes in his 2013 book Against the Smart City,
rather than with any party, group or individual recognised for their contributions to the
theory or practice of urban planning.
Whole new cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, have already been constructed
according to this template. Its buildings have automatic climate control and
computerised access; its roads and water, waste and electricity systems are dense with
electronic sensors to enable the citys brain to track and respond to the movement of
residents. But such places retain an eerie and half-finished feel to visitors which
perhaps shouldnt be surprising. According to Antony M Townsend, in his 2013 book
Smart Cities, Songdo was originally conceived as a weapon for fighting trade wars; the
idea was to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo with lower
taxes and less regulation.
In India, meanwhile, prime minister Narendra Modi has promised to build no fewer than
100 smart cities a competitive response, in part, to Chinas inclusion of smart cities as a
central tenet of its grand urban plan. Yet for the near-term at least, the sites of true
smart city creativity arguably remain the planets established metropolises such as
London, New York, Barcelona and San Francisco. Indeed, many people think London is
the smartest city of them all just now Duncan Wilson of Intel calls it a living lab for
tech experiments.
So what challenges face technologists hoping to weave cutting-edge networks and
gadgets into centuries-old streets and deeply ingrained social habits and patterns of
movement? This was the central theme of the recent Re.Work Future Cities Summit in
Londons Docklands for which two-day public tickets ran to an eye-watering 600.
The event was structured like a fast-cutting series of TED talks, with 15-minute investorfriendly presentations on everything from emotional cartography to biologically
inspired buildings. Not one non-Apple-branded laptop could be spotted among the
audience, and at least one attendee was seen confidently sporting the telltale fat cyan
arm of Google Glass on his head.
Instead of a smart phone, I want you all to have a smart drone in your pocket, said one
entertaining robotics researcher, before tossing up into the auditorium a cameraequipped drone that buzzed around like a fist-sized mosquito. Speakers enthused about
the transport app Citymapper, and how the city of Zurich is both futuristic and
remarkably civilised. People spoke about the huge opportunity represented by
expanding city budgets for technological solutions.
Strikingly, though, many of the speakers took care to denigrate the idea of the smart city
itself, as though it was a once-fashionable buzzphrase that had outlived its usefulness.
This was done most entertainingly by Usman Haque, of the urban consultancy

Umbrellium. The corporate smart-city rhetoric, he pointed out, was all about efficiency,
optimisation, predictability, convenience and security. Youll be able to get to work on
time; therell be a seamless shopping experience, safety through cameras, et cetera.
Well, all these things make a city bearable, but they dont make a city valuable.
As the tech companies bid for contracts, Haque observed, the real target of their
advertising is clear: The people it really speaks to are the city managers who can say, It
wasnt me who made the decision, it was the data.
Of course, these speakers who rejected the corporate, top-down idea of the smart city
were themselves demonstrating their own technological initiatives to make the city,
well, smarter. Haques project Thingful, for example, is billed as a search engine for the
internet of things. It could be used in the morning by a cycle commuter: glancing at a
personalised dashboard of local data, she could check local pollution levels and traffic,
and whether there are bikes in the nearby cycle-hire rack.
The smart city was the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people,
suggested Dan Hill, of urban innovators the Future Cities Catapult. It never answered
the question: How is it tangibly, materially going to affect the way people live, work,
and play? (His own work includes Cities Unlocked, an innovative smartphone audio
interface that can help visually impaired people navigate the streets.) Hill is involved
with Manchesters current smart city initiative, which includes apparently unglamorous
things like overhauling the Oxford Road corridor a bit of horrible urban fabric. This
smart stuff, Hill tells me, is no longer just IT or rather IT is too important to be called
IT any more. Its so important you cant really ghettoise it in an IT city. A smart city
might be a low-carbon city, or a city thats easy to move around, or a city with jobs and
housing. Manchester has recognised that.
One take-home message of the conference seemed to be that whatever the smart city
might be, it will be acceptable as long as it emerges from the ground up: what Hill calls
the bottom-up or citizen-led approach. But of course, the things that enable that
approach a vast network of sensors amounting to millions of electronic ears, eyes and
noses also potentially enable the future city to be a vast arena of perfect and permanent
surveillance by whomever has access to the data feeds.
One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiro to see
this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with
screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: What began as a
tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control
panel for the entire city. He quotes Rios mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: The
operations centre allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours
a day, seven days a week.
Whats more, if an entire city has an operating system, what happens when it goes
wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city,
according to Hollis, is really just a perpetual beta city. We can be sure that accidents
will happen driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems
or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects
of the smart city look then?

A less intrusive way to make a city smarter might be to give those who govern it a way to
try out their decisions in virtual reality before inflicting them on live humans. This is the
idea behind city-simulation company Simudyne, whose projects include detailed
computerised models for planning earthquake response or hospital evacuation. Its like
the strategy game SimCity for real cities. And indeed Simudyne now draws a lot of its
talent from the world of videogames. When we started, we were just mathematicians,
explains Justin Lyon, Simudynes CEO. People would look at our simulations and joke
that they were inscrutable. So five or six years ago we developed a new system which
allows you to make visualisations pretty pictures. The simulation can now be run as
an immersive first-person gameworld, or as a top-down SimCity-style view, where you
can literally drop policy on to the playing area.
Another serious use of pretty pictures is exemplified by the work of ScanLAB Projects,
which uses Lidar and ground-penetrating radar to make 3D visualisations of real places.
They can be used for art installations and entertainment: for example, mapping
underground ancient Rome for the BBC. But the way an area has been used over time,
both above and below ground, can also be presented as a layered historical palimpsest,
which can serve the purposes of archaeological justice and memory as with ScanLABs
Living Death Camps project with Forensic Architecture, on two concentration-camp sites
in the former Yugoslavia.
For Simudynes simulations, meanwhile, the visualisations work to gamify the
underlying algorithms and data, so that anyone can play with the initial conditions and
watch the consequences unfold. Will there one day be convergence between this kind of
thing and the elaborately realistic modelled cities that are built for commercial
videogames? Theres absolutely convergence, Lyon says. A state-of-the art urban
virtual reality such as the recreation of Chicago in this years game Watch Dogs requires a
budget that runs to scores of millions of dollars. But, Lyon foresees, Ten years from
now, what we see in Watch Dogs today will be very inexpensive.
What if you could travel through a visually convincing city simulation wearing the VR
headset, Oculus Rift? When Lyon first tried one, he says, Everything changed for me.
Which prompts the uncomfortable thought that when such simulations are
indistinguishable from the real thing (apart from the zero possibility of being mugged),
some people might prefer to spend their days in them. The smartest city of the future
could exist only in our heads, as we spend all our time plugged into a virtual
metropolitan reality that is so much better than anything physically built, and fail to
notice as the world around us crumbles.
In the meantime, when you hear that cities are being modelled down to individual
people or what in the model are called agents you might still feel a jolt of the
uncanny, and insist that free-will makes your actions in the city unpredictable. To which
Lyon replies: Theyre absolutely right as individuals, but collectively theyre wrong.
While I cant predict what you are going to do tomorrow, I can have, with some degree of
confidence, a sense of what the crowd is going to do, what a group of people is going to
do. Plus, if youre pulling in data all the time, you use that to inform the data of the
virtual humans.
Lets say there are 30 million people in London: you can have a simulation of all 30
million people that very closely mirrors but is not an exact replica of London. You have

the 30 million agents, and then lets have a business-as-usual normal commute, lets
have a snowstorm, lets shut down a couple of train lines, or have a terrorist incident, an
earthquake, and so on. Lyons says you will get a highly accurate sense of how people,
en masse, will respond to these scenarios. While Im not interested in a specific
individual, Im interested in the emergent behaviour of the crowd.
But what about more nefarious bodies who are interested in specific individuals? As
citizens stumble into a future where they will be walking around a city dense with
sensors, cameras and drones tracking their every movement even whether they are
smiling (as has already been tested at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival) or feeling gloomy
there is a ticking time-bomb of arguments about surveillance and privacy that will dwarf
any previous conversations about Facebook or even, perhaps, government intelligence
agencies scanning our email. Unavoidable advertising spam everywhere you go, as in
Minority Report, is just the most obvious potential annoyance. (There have already been
smart billboards that recognised Minis driving past and said hello to them.) The smart
city might be a place like Rio on steroids, where you can never disappear.
If you have a mobile phone, and the right sensors are deployed across the city, people
have demonstrated the ability to track those individual phones, Lyon points out. And
theres nothing that would prevent you from visualising that movement in a SimCitylike landscape, like in Watch Dogs where you see an avatar moving through the city and
you can call up their social-media profile. If youre trying to search a very large dataset
about how someones moving, its very hard to get your head around it, but as soon as
you fire up a game-style visualisation, its very easy to see, Oh, thats where they live,
thats where they work, thats where their mistress must be, thats where they go to
drink a lot.
This is potentially an issue with open-data initiatives such as those currently under way
in Bristol and Manchester, which is making publicly available the data it holds about city
parking, procurement and planning, public toilets and the fire service. The democratic
motivation of this strand of smart-city thinking seems unimpugnable: the creation of
municipal datasets is funded by taxes on citizens, so citizens ought to have the right to
use them. When presented in the right way curated, if you will, by the city itself,
with a sense of local character such information can help to bring place back into the
digital world, says Mike Rawlinson of consultancy City ID, which is working with Bristol
on such plans.
But how safe is open data? It has already been demonstrated, for instance, that the
openly accessible data of Londons cycle-hire scheme can be used to track individual
cyclists. There is the potential to see it all as Big Brother, Rawlinson says. If youre
releasing data and people are reusing it, under what purpose and authorship are they
doing so? There needs, Hill says, to be a reframed social contract.
Sometimes, at least, there are good reasons to track particular individuals. Simudynes
hospital-evacuation model, for example, needs to be tied in to real data. Those little
people that you see [on screen], those are real people, thats linking to the patient
database, Lyon explains because, for example, we need to be able to track this poor
child thats been burned. But tracking everyone is a different matter: There could well
be a backlash of people wanting literally to go off-grid, Rawlinson says. Disgruntled
smart citizens, unite: you have nothing to lose but your phones.

In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society,
and in particular about who holds power in society. In the end, the smart city will
destroy democracy, Hollis warns. Like Google, theyll have enough data not to have to
ask you what you want.
You sometimes see in the smart citys prophets a kind of casual assumption that politics
as we know it is over. One enthusiastic presenter at the Future Cities Summit went so far
as to say, with a shrug: Internet eats everything, and internet will eat government. In
another presentation, about a new kind of autocatalytic paint for street furniture that
eats noxious pollutants such as nitrous oxide, an engineer in a video clip complained:
No one really owns pollution as a problem. Except that national and local
governments do already own pollution as a problem, and have the power to tax and
regulate it. Replacing them with smart paint aint necessarily the smartest thing to do.
And while some tech-boosters celebrate the power of companies such as ber the
smartphone-based unlicensed-taxi service now banned in Spain and New Delhi, and
being sued in several US states to disrupt existing transport infrastructure, Hill asks
reasonably: That Californian ideology that underlies that user experience, should it
really be copy-pasted all over the world? Lets not throw away the idea of universal
service that Transport for London adheres to.
Perhaps the smartest of smart city projects neednt depend exclusively or even at all
on sensors and computers. At Future Cities, Julia Alexander of Siemens nominated as
one of the smartest cities in the world the once-notorious Medellin in Colombia, site of
innumerable gang murders a few decades ago. Its problem favelas were reintegrated into
the city not with smartphones but with publicly funded sports facilities and a cable car
connecting them to the city. All of a sudden, Alexander said, youve got communities
interacting in a way they never had before. Last year, Medellin now the oft-cited
poster child for social urbanism was named the most innovative city in the world by
the Urban Land Institute.
One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez
of the University of New South Wales, suggests that a smarter way to build cities
might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on
the team. That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what
technologists call the end user in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the
tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeares Coriolanus: What is the city but the people?
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