>S05E25 of Connection Problem: The Fiction of the Smart City
This week is all centered very much around smart cities & governance. A recurring theme in this newsletter recently if ever there was one! The conversation is buzzing in ways it hasn’t in a long time, so engaging in this debate seems like time well spent.
A quick friendly hello & welcome to those of you who just joined recently. I very much look forward to connecting with you over the next few issues. (Don’t be shy, hit reply, say hi!)
That said, tomorrow I’ll go on a summer break with this newsletter. We’ll be off for a while, getting some much-needed R&R. Rivers and caves and mountains and the sea and a wedding and lots of good food and a bunch of books are all going to be part of that equation, and I can’t tell you just how exciting those prospects are to me right now.
So this is going to be the final installment of Season 5 of this newsletter. To be continued in early August, with Season 6. Enjoy your summer!
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Smart City Fictions
You may be wondering: Why is this all about smart city stuff, and why now? There's a lot happening in that space at the moment, and it's getting a lot of attention - but nowhere near enough for something as important. It's an important part of my ongoing work with Brussels think tank FEPS as well as the primary focus of my research that I'm doing in my fellowship with Edgeryders. And finally, smart cities have been an interest of mine for a long, long time now going back to research for the German government (done together with long time friend and collaborator Prof. Christoph Bieber), and even longer before that, co-hosting Cognitive Cities Conference (CoCities) back in 2011. And to see in hindsight just how prescient and ahead of their time the speakers were that we invited to CoCities: mind blown.
Can we just acknowledge for a second that Spotify apparently commissioned a whole set of Jeff Goldblum reaction gifs? And, turns out, not just with Jeff Goldblum, either.
Anyway, that’s why smart cities, and why now, and why I care. So: Onward!
For years, the “smart fridge” was the poster child of failed, forced innovation that nobody really wanted. Just put a chip in it! Equally, a city doesn’t automatically become a better city by putting a chip in it (or sensors, or actuators, or a parking app).
When Sidewalk Labs (the Google sister/Alphabet subsidiary) published their new master development plan for the new Toronto waterfront in a giant data dump of some 1.500+ pages, you could see how across Toronto’s media outlets, editors were burning the proverbial midnight oil, systematically digging through these giant PDFs (or paper stacks) to figure out what was actually being planned at all.
This piece (spacing.ca) caught my eye, as it directed readers’ attention to where the most interesting stuff is often hidden: the tables in the appendices. So that’s right where I went, and started poking around just a little bit, which led me to write this (slightly embarrassingly long) Twitter thread. (And, later, a slightly cleaned up complementary blog post.)
This Twitter thread got a lot of attention, and brought a bunch of interesting folks into my timelines. But it also got me quoted in Canadian newspaper The Star, who picked up my thread on the thorny issue of governance and put it in context of other experts critical of privatizing the urban space. The few others I know from the thread make me think I’m in good company there. And of course that’s where my timeline and DMs and other messages started getting a lot more interesting.
Turns out, people online have opinions! Who’d have thought! 😱
Rather than rehash any of that here, though, is that it kind of led me down a rabbit hole into the origin of the term smart city. Etymology is always an interesting starting point for jargon: Where words come from tells a lot about the embedded thinking. And smart city is no exception.
Luckily, there’s a super interesting paper I happened to find online: Smart cities as corporate storytelling by authors Ola Söderström, Till Paasche, Francisco Klauser, published in 2014. (I don’t know any of them.)
Let me quote some key bits I found pretty helpful in thinking about smart cities, based on the origin of the term itself (highlights mine). It’s quite a lot of quotes; feel free to skip them if this isn’t up your alley.
IBM’s smarter city “mobilizes and recycles two long-standing tropes: the city conceived as a system of systems, and a utopian discourse exposing urban pathologies and their cure.”
”this story is to a large extent propelled by attempts to create an ‘obligatory passage point’ (...) in the transformation of cities into 'smart' ones. In other words it is conceived to channel urban development strategies through the technological solutions of IT companies.”
“this discourse promotes a conception of urban management that is a technocratic fiction (...) where data and software seem to suffice and where, as a consequence, knowledge, interpretation and specific thematic expertise appear as superfluous. (…) this discourse prioritizes public investments in IT over other domains of spending and thereby introduces a new ‘economy of worth’ (...) which is particularly problematic in resource-scarce cities.“
“(…) mediations – from small talk to complex machines – (…) translate phenomena into a manageable language. (…) the translation of the different dimensions of the urban world into the unitary language of urban systems is crucial in IBM’s campaign. (...) this discourse really gains momentum once cities and their problems thus translated are embedded in a narrative of positive transformation. Here, the smart city discourse becomes a story with a plot and can be fruitfully interpreted in the light of research on storytelling in planning”
“Stories are important because they provide actors involved in planning with an understanding of what the problem they have to solve is (…). More specifically, they play a central role in planning because they “can be powerful agents or aids in the service of change, as shapers of a new imagination of alternatives.” (….) stories are the very stuff of planning, which, fundamentally, is persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future. ”
An interesting bit on the use of language to create equivalence: Data makes everything equal:
“What urban systems theory provides, seen from this perspective, is primarily a powerful metaphor creating a surface of equivalence. It translates very different urban phenomena into data that can be related together according to a classical systemic approach”
“In this approach, cities are no longer made of different - and to a large extent incommensurable - socio-technical worlds (education, business, safety and the like) but as data within systemic processes. (…) [IBM's Smarter Cities campaign] tends to reduce the analysis of the city to a machinic vision of cities. As a result, the analysis of these ‘urban themes’ no longer seem to require thematic experts familiar with the specifics of a ‘field’ but only data- mining, data interconnectedness and software-based analysis. (...) Complexity, multipli-city is simplified, flattened into the uni-city of scaled systems and presents itself as IBM’s fiat lux to its clients. This reduction of expertise has political consequences: as Marcuse (…) observes, the organic or systems metaphor also creates a fictitious entity ‘the city’ supporting “a search for consensus politics, in which the claims of the minority or powerless or disenfranchised or non-mainstream groups are considered disturbing factors in the quest for policies benefiting ‘the whole’”.”
And of course, this version of the smart city doesn’t pick sides. Never stand for anything, it’s all neutral, services rendered on a subscription or pay-per-play basis:
“such a discourse promotes a mentality where urban affairs are framed as an apolitical matter. In the smarter cities campaign, causes of urban problems are associated with demographic trends (…), climate change and tight municipal budgets. Never with politics. The rhetorical means of the campaign also aspire to political neutrality. Systems thinking is neither progressive, nor conservative: it decomposes a phenomenon into related parts. There are of course left and right wing utopias, but the horizon of a utopian structure of thinking is apolitical.”
This is one of the underlying core failures — after all, if anything, urban development is inherently, systemically, totally political. Continuing this last quote:
“smart technologies can optimize any system, from the surveillance of political opponents to waste management. It can be sold to democratic regimes such as Denmark as well as to much less democratic ones such as Syria. Very much like Le Corbusier saw functionalist urbanism as an apolitical model he was ready to propose to postcolonial India, fascist Rome or Stalinist Russia, smart urban technologies are an omnibus ready to stop wherever customers are to be found.”
So there’s that. A long series of quotes to be sure, but I hope this is as helpful to you as it was to me.
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AI governance
Earlier this year, Nesta released a map of global AI governance which I’ve been revisiting. One of the framing statements hadn’t registered with me before, but did now: “It is safe to say that a wide-ranging consensus has emerged around what the most pressing issues are, namely: fairness, accountability and transparency, as well as making sure that the use of AI systems upholds fundamental human rights.”
It’s true, that does seem like a thing that’s safe to say by now, and that fact alone is a-ma-zing. Now the real work begins of course, but even just having a kind of baseline established is really powerful. So, shout-out to Nesta for doing excellent work in this space.
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How far can your voice carry
Tom Coates was thinking out loud about building in protocol-level harassment barriers into social/communications platforms. This is part of some larger thread where the future of social media might lie: Are more decentralized, possibly smaller, more private spaces where things are headed? Can we reconfigure public timelines to be a little less fraught with intentional conflict?
“For example, if you can’t see people more than two steps from you, then the incentive for them to be unpleasant or harassing diminishes a lot, and if there’s an asymetry between the two sides too, that can help. It depends on the physics basically, how far can your voice carry”
This is such an elegant, evocative metaphor. Tom says he's been using that turn of phrase for decades. How had I not encountered it before?
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Miscellaneous
Why plants don’t die from cancer. A fascinating, if somewhat morbid read: “Crucially, the burden brought by radiation at Chernobyl is less severe than the benefits reaped from humans leaving the area. Now essentially one of Europe’s largest nature preserves, the ecosystem supports more life than before, even if each individual cycle of that life lasts a little less. In a way, the Chernobyl disaster reveals the true extent of our environmental impact on the planet. Harmful as it was, the nuclear accident was far less destructive to the local ecosystem than we were. In driving ourselves away from the area, we have created space for nature to return.” 😱
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Currently “reading”: Exhalations (Ted Chiang), Netter is Better (Thomas Hermann)
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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability starting in August, so let's have a chat.
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What's next?
Summer break. Research on some AI-related things. More smart city research. There are a few reports to write.
Conference season in the fall is beginning to fill up: I’m still trying to balance how much conference speaking I should be doing this fall and next spring. (How do you balance it, if this question applies to you?)
Have a lovely end of the week!
Yours truly,
Peter
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and is currently an Edgeryders fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? A shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
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Pictures: Unsplash (kylejglenn), giphy/spotify.