Smart Cities

Someone mentioned this in class the other day and I had read about it before so I decided to expand on it!

In October 2017, Sidewalks Labs, a sister company of Google, was contracted to design and reimagine Quayside, a derelict waterfront industrial neighborhood in Toronto. Sidewalk Labs aims to develop the neighborhood as the “world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up” and create a “smart city.” In Sidewalk Lab’s proposal, they call Quayside, “A new type of place.”

Other traditional cities have experimented with data collection and feedback. For example, cities have adopted senor-enabled stoplights, apps that mark potholes, and street light systems that self-reports malfunctions to keep the lights on in high-crime areas. But Silicon Valley wants to create a city with a “constant flow of data” so the city can collect and analyze it in real time. Sidewalk promises “the most measurable community in the world.”

Ideas for the neighborhood include pay-as-you go garbage chutes that separate recyclables and charge households by waste output, hyperlocal weather sensors that could heat up snow-melting sidewalks, apps to tell residents when public spaces like Adirondack chairs were open, crowdsource approval for block-party permits, auto-calibrated traffic signals, regulating building temperatures, and separate ways of payment transactions specifically for residents and businesses. Currently, Sidewalk is working from the ground-up, spending a year on public consultations and polling Toronto for its own vision of the neighborhood.

However, privacy advocates and traditional planners definitely have some reservations about the idea. Smart city developed by corporations blur the line between the public and private sectors. Does collecting data about the city and its residents ruin the social interaction between the city dwellers? How does this interacts with Jacob’s vision of a sidewalk “ballet”? How does data collection interfere with privacy? Who owns the data? Corporations like Google are ultimately attempting to profit off their ventures—is this the right model for a city to follow? What will be the long term impacts of placing power over civic lives into private hands? Whose laws apply? Who controls the city if the city is being run with data and algorithms?

Sidewalk plans to treat the smart city like a smartphone. Third party developers (for example, Lyft) can have access to data and provide services much like third parties can develop apps for smartphones. Sidewalk has ensured the data collected in Quayside will not be used for advertising purposes and the data will be scrubbed of personal identification. However, some privacy advocates worry that collective data (traffic/pedestrian patterns of a neighborhood, analyzing sewage for concentrated drug use) can be harmful to the community. Additionally, it is unclear what entity will make the decisions on how data can be used and for what purposes.

Additionally, an idea that I don’t think was developed fully in the articles I read was the inherent classism of the proposal. Some of the ideas for the smart city involve apps which rely on smartphones. Not very resident will have access to a smartphone or the ability to charge it consistently unless they have a permanent residence and stable income.
Sources:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610249/a-smarter-smart-city/

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/googles-guinea-pig-city/552932/

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/29/google-city-technology-toronto-canada-218841

https://torontoist.com/2017/10/civic-tech-list-questions-wed-like-sidewalk-labs-answer/