12 June 2019
In its broadest sense, a city is a place where people in many forms come together, as reflected in the Greek term “polis,” meaning “people”.
In this context, a city is a place where people come together to work, exchange, play and live side by side through a myriad of organisations and functions, comprising a city’s stakeholders.
A city is also an administrative entity within a geographic context, which is entrusted with authority from its in-dwellers to carry out activities contributing to their well-being. In this sense of “city”, people pay in the form of taxes to live within the city’s jurisdiction, to have a say in how the city is managed, and to make use of the city’s services.
As such, cities are also financial and governing bodies, and in-dwellers, as governed by the city, enjoy the status of “citizen”.
These are decidedly simplistic views on the roles cities play in the life of their in-dwellers and in the communities, large and small, with which they interact.
They lack the descriptors which in common parlance help us to distinguish one city from the next, as being “exciting,” “fun,” “quiet,” “pretty,” “liveable,” “boring,” etc. Nor do they address the character of a city: its soul, heart, vibe; where we can talk about culture, art, peace, love – a feeling in the “air”; its leadership, its brand; something virtual, even something “digital”.
How many people, for example, who do not live in Manchester have an affinity and feel part of the city because of its football team?
How many people in the world feel New York is “their” city, even if they do not reside there?
How might we use such city “brand loyalty” in encouraging behaviour change?
As citizens, city dwellers have obligations, but they also expect to derive a net benefit to their existence from city life, whether that is social, financial, physical, intellectual, emotional, or otherwise.
So, what does the term “smart city” mean, other than a marketing phrase for the large tech companies such as Cisco and IBM?
I guess a truly smart city would have nobody in poverty, no crime etc. or maybe it would be an automated city with no people which seems at times what the tech companies are talking about.
They are focussed more on the digital infrastructure of the city and tend to forget the very function of a city which is an organic gathering of people.
Ideally smart city would be consigned to the dustbin of marketing terms along with machine learning, algorithms etc, but to some degree we are stuck with it as a lazy description of something very complex.
Smart city adds nothing other than being some sort of umbrella term for the application of digital technologies to improve the life of citizens.
Whether the city is smart will depend on how the city does things rather than the implementation of technology.
Perhaps less emotive descriptions like City 2.0 should be used to indicate a city is looking seriously at how technology can affect the city both for good and bad.
Many cities today will say they are smart cities and have a smart city initiative – it’s very much a box tick and has very little underpinning it.
However, it’s a term that attracts attention from funders such as Innovate UK and H2020 and as a result draws more in without deep thought.
We have smart everything today: smart homes, motorways, factories and the term smart is woolly and poorly defined - it neither describes the state of a city such as poor or rich, hot or cold, or the role of a city, autocratic, enabling democratic.
Tech companies like to use it as a synonym for control and find some places have embraced the use of smart as a dashboard for the city with the mayor pulling the levers.
Others prefer to look to crowd or citizen sourced approaches as the “smart” way, but this often seems to dismiss expertise; I am not that keen on crowd-built structures and technology though people must be involved in the design and impact of technology.
I see a city as an enabler not an end in itself and digital tech should enable citizens in the same way as roads and rail and canals have done in the past.
There is no measure of a smart city though there are some attempts for purposes of awards etc. Hence aspirations to be a smart city are more of a call to arms and initiate processes.
However, any city ought to want to define its direction in terms of the well-being of its citizens rather than the number of sensors or servers or algorithms.
This can then lead to a vision of life in a city supported and enabled by tech, not one driven by tech.
Since the opposite of smart is dumb, there must be many dumb cities around the world, but that is as meaningless as smart.
If it means anything smart is the recognition by a city in all its forms that change is an ongoing process and a city needs to be forever embracing new ideas and approaches, whether digital or not to improve the well-being of its citizens.