smart cities: realising the promises while minimizing the perils
TRANSCRIPT
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Smart Cities Realising the promises whilst minimizing the
perils
Prof. Rob Kitchin
Maynooth University
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Smart cities
• Lots of definitions of smart cities. Generally encompass three dynamics:
• Instrumentation and regulation
• Cities composed of ‘everyware’: ICT infrastructure, devices, sensors, software, big data
• Cities become knowable and controllable in new, dynamic, reactive ways
• More efficient, competitive and productive service delivery
• Policy and economic development
• Advances in ICT reconfiguring human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, governance
• Cities as competitive, entrepreneurial, knowledge-driven systems
• Social innovation, civic engagement and hactivism
• ICT provides means for transparent and accountable governance, new forms of civic participation, better informed citizens
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Smart city technologies
Domain Example technologies
Government E-government systems; online transactions; city operating systems; performance management systems; urban dashboards
Security and emergency services
Centralised control rooms; digital surveillance; predictive policing; coordinated emergency response
Transport Intelligent transport systems; integrated ticketing; smart travel cards; bikeshare; real-time passenger information; smart parking; logistics management; transport apps
Energy Smart grids; smart meters; energy usage apps; smart lighting
Waste Compactor bins and dynamic routing/collection
Environment Sensor networks (e.g., pollution, noise, weather; land movement; flood management)
Buildings Building management systems; sensor networks
Homes Smart meters; app controlled smart appliances
Civic Various apps; open data; volunteered data/hacks
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Urban big data
• Directed
o Surveillance: CCTV, drones/satellite
o Scaled public admin records
• Automated
o Automated surveillance
o Digital devices
o Sensors, actuators, transponders, meters (IoT)
o Interactions and transactions
• Volunteered
o Social media
o Sousveillance/wearables
o Crowdsourcing/neogeography
o Citizen science
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Urban big data
• Diverse range of public and private generation of fine-scale (uniquely indexical) data about citizens and places in real-time: • utilities
• transport providers, logistics systems
• environmental agencies
• mobile phone operators
• app developers
• social media sites
• travel and accommodation websites
• home appliances and entertainment systems
• financial institutions and retail chains
• private surveillance and security firms
• remote sensing, aerial surveying
• emergency services
• Producing a data deluge that can be combined, analyzed, acted upon
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Single systems
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Integrated, city & sector wide
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Data-driven urbanism
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www.dublindashboard.ie
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Data-driven urbanism
• Cities are becoming:
• ever more instrumented and networked, their systems interlinked and integrated
• knowable and controllable in new dynamic ways
• Urban operational governance and city services are becoming highly responsive to a form of networked urbanism in which big data systems are:
• prefiguring and setting the urban agenda
• producing a deluge of contextual and actionable data
• influencing and controlling how city systems respond and perform in real-time
• transforming practices of city governance
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Smart Cities
Smart government
e-gov, open data,
transparency, accountability,
evidence-informed decision
making, better service
delivery
Smart living
quality of life,
safety, security,
manage risk
Smart mobility
intelligent transport
systems, multi-modal inter-
op, efficiency
Smart
environment
green energy,
sustainability,
resilience
Smart people
more informed, creativity, inclusivity,
empowerment, participation
Smart economy
entrepreneurship,
innovation,
productivity,
competiveness
Promise of smart cities
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Eight critiques of smart cities
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1. City as a knowable, rational,
steerable machine
• Cities are understood to consist of a set of knowable and manageable systems that act in largely rational, mechanical, linear and hierarchical ways and can be steered and controlled
• Operational governance performed using a set of mechanistic data levers underpinned by an instrumental rationality in the form of KPIs and analytics
• Includes forms of automated management (automatic, autonomous, automated)
• Driving new forms of new managerialism
• Cities are fluid, open, complex, multi-level, contingent and relational systems
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2. Objective, neutral, non-
ideological approach
• Smart city solutions are technical, objective and non-ideological
• Presents an image of being politically benign and commonsensical
• However, systems do not exist independently of the ideas, techniques, technologies, people and contexts that conceive, produce, process, manage, analyze and store them
• They are situated, contingent, relational, and framed and used contextually to try and achieve certain aims and goals
• They also possess a number of technical and managerial issues concerning design, measurement, processing – e.g., with respect to data sampling, handling, veracity (accuracy, fidelity), uncertainty, error, bias, reliability, calibration, lineage
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3. Technocratic governance and
solutionism
• All aspects of a city can be treated as technical problems and solved through technical approaches
• Practices ‘solutionism’: complex open systems can be disassembled into neatly defined problems that can be fixed or optimized through computation
• All that is required is sufficient data and suitable algorithms
• Undermines/replaces other forms of knowing cities, plus phronesis (knowledge derived from practice and deliberation) and metis (knowledge based on experience)
• Marginalizes other forms of governance and solutions
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4. Neoliberal political economy &
corporatisation of governance
• Overly driven by corporations interested capturing government functions as new market opportunities
• Promoting the marketisation of public services and the hollowing out of the state
• City functions are administered for profit
• Potentially creates technological lock-ins or corporate path dependencies
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5. Ahistorical, aspatial,
homogenizing and bounded
• One size fits all approach
• Treats cities as a generic market
• Treats cities as if bounded entities
• Often idealised imaginary of green field development, rather than complexities of established communities, competing interests and legacy infrastructure
• Fails to recognize history, culture, context, local sense of place, politics, governance, diversity, etc.
• Fails to recognize interdependencies across space
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6. Reinforce power geometries &
inequalities
• Smart cities/solutions are the
vision of certain vested
interests
• They serve the interests of
certain constituencies
• They control/regulate
populations
• Actively marginalize/dispossess
some
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7. Profound social, political,
ethical effects
• Surveillance and erosion
privacy (in its diverse
forms)
• Ownership, control,
data markets
• Social sorting
• Anticipatory governance
• Nudge
• Dynamic pricing
• Data security
• Control creep
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Location/movement tracking
• Controllable digital CCTV cameras + ANPR + facial recognition
• Smart phones: cell masts, GPS, wifi
• Sensor networks: capture and track phone identifiers such as MAC addresses
• Wifi mesh: capture & track phones with wifi turned on
• Smart card tracking: barcodes/RFID chips (buildings & public transport)
• Vehicle tracking: unique ID transponders for automated road tolls & car parking
• Other staging points: ATMs, credit card use, metadata tagging
• Electronic tagging; shared calenders
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8. Buggy, brittle, hackable
• Intertwines two open, highly complex and contingent systems - cities and digital systems
• Creates environments which are inherently buggy and brittle; prone to viruses, glitches, crashes, and security hacks
• Producing stable, robust and secure devices and infrastructures becomes more of a challenge
• New systems lead to the discontinuation of analogue alternatives — no alternatives until the system is fixed/rebooted
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Getter smarter about smart cities Realising promises while minimizing harms
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Re-imagining smart cities
• Rather than abandon the notion of smart
cities, need to re-imagine and reframe them
and address shortcomings:
• Reframing goals
• Reframing cities
• Reframing management/governance
• Reframing epistemology
• Addressing ethical/security concerns
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Reframing goals
• Normative questions
• Who and what are smart cities for?
• New markets & profit?
• State control and regulation?
• Citizens and quality of life?
• What kind of cities do we want to
create and live in?
• Set thinking within a social
justice/citizenship framework, not
simply management, governance or
economy
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Reframing cities
• Cities are not simply technical systems that can be solved with technical solutions
• Nor can they simply be steered and controlled
• Cities are complex, ever-evolving, inter-dependent contingent systems
• They are full of culture, politics, competing interests and wicked problems and often unfold in unpredictable ways
• Smart city tech/discourse need to shift to recognize and accommodate a more nuanced, relational understanding of cities
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Reframing management and
governance
• Contextual use in management
• Co-creation, co-production, citizen-engaged
• Used in conjunction with deliberative democracy, policy changes, social/political interventions, other investments, etc.
• Flexible and bespoke solutions; layer onto legacy systems
• Open platforms; standards/interoperability
• Smart city vision: smart city advisory board; smart city strategy
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Reframing epistemology
• How we come to know and predict the city
• Urban science, urban informatics
• Reductionist, mechanistic, atomizing, essentialist, deterministic, producing a limited and limiting understanding of cities
• But not one without use or value
• Reframe the realist epistemology and instrumental rationality to acknowledge situatedness, positionality, contingencies, assumptions, shortcomings; to avow grand claims to truth, or God’s eye view
• Also to forego asserting value over other forms of knowledge such as phronesis and metis, but to be used in combination with them
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Addressing ethical/security concerns
• Market:
• Industry standards and self-regulation
• Privacy/security as competitive advantage
• Technological
• End-to-end strong encryption, access controls, security controls, audit trails, backups, up-to-date patching, etc.
• Privacy enhancement tools
• Policy and regulation
• FIPPs
• Privacy by design;
• security by design
• Governance
• Oversight of delivery and compliance: smart city governance, ethics and security oversight committee;
• Day-to-day delivery: core privacy/security team; smart city privacy/security assessments; and computer emergency response team
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Conclusion
• Entering an era of embedded and mobile computation
• Vast quantities of real-time data, cities are responsive to
these data, and enable new kinds of monitoring, regulation
and control
• Cities are becoming data-driven and are enacting new
forms of algorithmic governance
• Whilst smart city technologies undoubtedly provide a set of
solutions for urban problems they also raise a number of
fundamental, normative and ethical questions
• The challenge is to realise the benefits whilst minimizing
pernicious effects
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Background
http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/progcity
@progcity
@robkitchin
https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/rob-kitchin