How smart is the Smart City?
In part two of this four-part series on cities and technology, we turned our attention to smart cities. This concept gained some traction over the last decade as a technocratic solution to urban problems. Through the use of open data, widespread surveillance systems, and various digital data-generating tools, the smart city promised an apolitical suite of practices that could improve and optimize city governance and life. But as we learned in Part One, nothing about technology is politically neutral. We speak with four different scholars on their work in the smart cities arena and how it intersects with postcolonial critique, economic development, and the politics of open data.
Guests
David Banks, SUNY, University at Albany
Ryan Burns, University of Calgary
Ayonna Datta, University College London
Shannon Mattern, University of Pennsylvania
Erin McElroy, University of Washington
John Stehlin, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Reading List
David Banks (2023), The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Ryan Burns & Preston Welker (2022), “’Make our communities better through data’: The moral economy of smart city labor,” Big Data & Society 9:1.
Victoria Fast, Ryan Burns, & Debra Mackinnon (2022), “Toward Urban Digital Justice: The Smart City as an Empty Signifier,” in Digital (In)Justice in the Smart City, pp 3-23.
Ayona Datta (2020), “The ‘smart safe city’: Gendered time, speed, and violence in the margins of India’s urban age,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110:5.
Ayonna Datta & Nancy Odendaal (2019), “Smart cities and the banality of power,” Environment and Planning D 37:3.
Ayonna Datta (2019), “Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India’s smart urban age,” Environment and Planning D 37:3.
Rob Kitchin (2014), “Making sense of smart cities: addressing present shortcomings,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8:1.
Shannon Mattern (2016), “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019,” Places.
Shannon Mattern (2017), “A City Is Not a Computer,” Places.
Credits
Many thanks to the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University, the managing editors at Urban Affairs Review, and our guests for sharing their time and insights with us. The show’s music is “Hundred Mile” by K2, courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.
Producer and sound engineer: David Weems, Drexel University
Executive Producer and writer: Emily Holloway, Associate Managing Editor, Urban Affairs Review.
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Shannon Mattern
Yeah, I really dislike the term smartness, in part because yeah, it is such a one of those elastic terms that we talked about before, like technology, like infrastructure, and in this case, it's deployed in very political, commercial ways. It can mean myriad things in different discourse communities. Tech developers are probably going to use it to mean, especially those that want to monetize their work, are using it probably to mean again the way Jason Sadowski uses it, something that is about what can render itself quantifiable. How can we extract data from as many things in the environment as we can to find ways to kind of cross reference data streams to see how we can optimize something and model a system that actually embodies what we think are the most salient important values, which are typically economic and about maximizing economic profit and efficiency. Are those always the values that we should be prioritizing about everything else? Are there are other more kind of civic tech realms who realize that smartness, as problematic as that term itself is, could be used to talk about civic intelligences, things through kind of like open data sets or civic tech?
Emily Holloway
Hi, this is Emily Holloway. You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. In this four-part series, we’re taking a wide-angled look at the relationship between cities and technology. Last time, we heard from six different scholars about what exactly technology is and how it is deployed in cities today – including Professor Shannon Mattern, from the University of Pennsylvania, who you just heard from. This week, we’re going to focus on smart cities – what are they exactly, where do they come from, and how do they work? We’ll start with Professor Ayona Datta, she's in the geography department at University College London.
Ayona Datta
I don't know if you know much about the history of Shimla -- Shimla used to be the colonial capital in the summer. So come summer, the whole British bureaucracy used to move from North India, from Delhi in North India, which is to get really hot in the summer, up to the hills and carry all of their paraphernalia, including their women, their children, the servants and the bureaucratic officials up to Shimla to stay there for five months in the summer. So, when we actually looked at the old historic records, the idea of order and modernity and progress was laid out in all of those improvement trust reports that the colonial government created from the early 19th century when the Shimla municipality was created. And you see resonances of that even in the Smart Cities initiatives about order, about progress, and often that order and progress is related to what disorder means. And disorder often means slums. And so one of the slum’s smart cities initiatives, even though sometimes it doesn't mention in all of the cities, it doesn't necessarily say that smart cities means slum-free cities, but many cities interpreted that to be slum-free cities. So, one of the initiatives in many of these 100 smart cities was to remove the slums or to order the slums, or to order informal settlements. So I would say in a way that the Smart Cities initiative is just one more moment in a kind of imagination of a different kind of radical transformation through technology. But it's not really exceptional if you put it in context of the various moments that have come from the colonial period, in which order and disorder have been a continuous anxiety of the colonial government and then the government that came afterwards.
Emily Holloway
Ayona, what do you mean exactly by postcolonialism?
Ayona Datta
The way I have approached it so far, and I think maybe I will probably also step out of calling myself postcolonial, to finding a word that captures more what I want to do, but what I really want to understand is the kind of genealogy of urbanization and genealogy of technology development, and digitalization that has impacts or that has been impacted by transformations in state governance. And so the postcolonial moment that is when the global South countries slowly begin to gain independence and begin to actually transform their own ways of governmentality and their own ways of state governance is a very crucial moment in really understanding what's happening now, because a lot of what's happening now in urban transformations, technology transformations has actually got genealogical foundations in colonial governance. And in some cases, especially when you read colonial policies or colonial reports, you'd see so many aspects of that being used even now by post-colonial states and even in thinking about the future, that the idea that modernity is deeply rooted in technological improvements is a very colonial idea, and that is being used. So for me, postcolonialism is not really making a break from what was there before, but actually seeing continuities and genealogies of transformation on what is the role of the state? What is the role of development? What is the role of cities? What is the role of transformations in general that affect social, political, cultural life on an everyday basis and where the foundations lie? But how those foundations have been maybe used or cleanly broken off in order to approach a certain kind of a vision or imagination of a future.
And like I said, this is where I think the postcolonial approach helped because we saw each city in India drawing upon its own history to talk about what it was, what was its identity before and what it wants to become in the future. In some cases, you see cities drawing upon that identity to project a new sort of identity, but in some cases, you see cities wanting to break from that past identity because that's kind of associated with underdevelopment or lack of development and wanting to go in a different way. In terms of what they wanted to do, I think the overall smart cities mission, I think the goals of it were quite novel because in a way it could also be seen as a decolonial approach because it was really about decentralizing this understanding of what is this Western smart city into how each city would then interpret and execute their project so that in itself was, I think quite interesting. And it laid out the possibility of each city, kind of from the bottom up, could determine what it wanted to do. So, for the first time, they actually had public consultations and then they would create a list of what are the priorities for the public and they would draw from civil society, from residents’ associations. And you know, small-scale businesses to tell them what was needed, but often what happened with that is what was needed as a list from the citizens was not in line with what a smart city would be, as in driven by technology.
Emily Holloway
Let’s back up – you're talking about the 100 smart cities initiative in India, right? Can you give our listeners a little context on that program?
Ayona Datta
It was really in the early moments of the Smart Cities initiative, I think even before it was actually launched, that there was a there was a proposal that India was going to create 100 new smart cities from scratch.
What really fascinated me was that despite all of the infrastructural failures of the past, that India was going to go all out to create these cities, which were going to be ubiquitously wired and possible to predict how the traffic would go, how people would, you know, dispose their waste. How electricity would be censored and how water meters would be censored so in order to avoid leakage, so it was a very kind of... to me it was a very western model and so that's when I began reading about smart cities and that's how I landed up really looking at digital urbanisms. It was really from the perspective of understanding why at this moment are we looking at a particularly, I would say radical, kind of transformation in a global south city which has so many other problems to deal with: kind of access to basic infrastructure for its most marginalized was to me the biggest priority and the fact that at this moment, to divert that attention into looking at creating 100 new smart cities, which has a whole host of issues, was the key concern for me. And then, of course, very soon, I think the policy shifted from creating 100 new smart cities to retrofitting 100 existing smart cities, because I think the realization was that it's impossible from every point of view politically, from land access, from investment, etc. And so then I focused of course more at looking at how these smart cities would actually manifest, and the 100 smart cities as a policy that was initiated then in 2015, right after the early proposals and early imaginations was that they would choose across India across all the sub national or the regional states a few cities to make it kind of universally across India, so it wouldn't be concentrated geographically and most of these cities actually added up to be smaller sized cities and it was seen more as a way of spurring growth and technology use and transforming governance, so to speak. And then the smart city policy began as there is no universal smart city and I was really excited to see that, that there was not going to be this kind of top-down effect, but more that each city would then create its own vision for what it wanted to be smart. But over the period of these years, I think what has really happened is a lot of centralized power has determined what kinds of smart city projects are created. And it's been now well documented that most of it has not been successful in delivering the objectives. They were initially pilot projects, but kind of ran out of steam in some cases. In some cases, the actual technology element, which was supposed to be the key element in making it labeled as smart, didn't end up happening because of many, many different issues with technology transfer and so many of these projects have actually turned out to be regular infrastructure projects, with again some of the failings that we have seen in the past.
Emily Holloway
That’s really interesting, that each city was given the latitude to craft a plan that was designed around their unique regional identity. But I wonder how this unfolded in practice? Were planners and officials actually responsive to local residents’ needs and interests?
Ayona Datta
If there was a need to create a public footpath, that had to be a smart footpath. So, then you would need to create sort of sensors that would light up lamps as people would walk along the footpath. But in our conversations with citizens or citizen groups that say that's just a gimmick, we don't need that, you know, we need a footpath that would just take us from, you know, that was keep us safe and not let us get into traffic. We need, you know, a good waste disposal system in which waste workers would come and take the waste from our house. But in doing so, particularly I remember in in Delhi Smart City, which was also very kind of limited to particular areas of the city. But in in one area where they unrolled the smart waste program, the waste workers were the ones who were being monitored. And they created the system in which if your waste is not collected, the citizens can take a picture and upload it. But what happens is a waste workers job gets into the line. So rather than creating a system that will be efficient, it actually reinforces some of the social inequalities in which people kind of who are more precarious in that hierarchy of employment would be the one that's targeted for lack of waste disposal. So in many cases, basically what happened is the intentions of the program were quite perhaps much more democratic than how it actually was executed and actually how it turned up and how then people interpreted it to be not successful or nothing that really is going to impact my everyday struggles.
The other aspect of it was that you can only -- if you are thinking about a smart city that is driven by technology -- you can only insert technology where the basic services are existing. So, if you are living in a slum, there is hardly any way that you're going to get a smart waste system or a smart water system because you don't even have the water lines coming to your house. So often, these smart water systems or smart waste systems would be piloted in middle class neighborhoods, and that sort of, of course, reinforces the social economic differences between different neighborhoods, between different social groups.
And that really was something that for us, I mean we kind of wanted to see what impact it was having on the ground aspects of it and that was some of the things that we found was really creating, you know, impossibility amongst the citizens in some cases to accept the smart city as it is being executed. We have these two projects, one was called learning from smart cities and this learning from smart cities was really kind of targeting looking at the smaller cities that we're getting these smart cities initiatives and how they were executing them and in these learning from smart cities, we kind of divided it across three different themes. One was imaginaries, which is how the smart city imagined its future, and there we were, looking at the different policies that it was and the initiatives that it had for smart city projects. The imagination then led to the governing of it. So how was this smart city being governed? And what we found was that these smaller cities really didn't have the technology capacity or the resource capacity to execute these projects or to govern these smart cities projects because they had never had that kind of technology development as larger metropolitan cities, so we found the infiltration of a number of professional consultants, knowledge capital coming in and driving these smart cities projects which then of course leads to more of a profit motive. And then the third aspect that we really looked at was living with the Smart City, and there we were talking directly to citizens and community members. And what came across then was that there was a kind of erasure of assets of the city that the smart city initiatives were not acknowledging. And some of these assets were tangible but also intangible, like you know to do with spirituality, to do with memory, to do with you know, history, heritage -- these were not being acknowledged in some of the Smart Cities programs.
Emily Holloway
Can you talk about any in particular that stood out to you?
Ayona Datta
A very interesting example we came across is when the smart city, Shimla, which is a really small town in in the hills in the Himalayas, up north, the consultants were from Delhi, who had never actually designed or worked on anything in the hills. So, they found it really difficult to even understand how this city is actually standing or how is the city even working along a hillside, which is, you know, really, really steep climbs up and down the hill. And so then one of the proposals was to flatten parts of it so that it's easier access and create elevators or escalators between different levels and you know, there's a kind of lack of understanding I think of being in the place. What then impacts on citizens and thinking? Well, this is not really meant for us This is not what we want, and it's a kind of that disconnect, both kind of culturally, but also technologically, that disconnect of what we want is not what we are getting and yet we don't seem to have a voice in directing what we want. So there were all of these sorts of contestations and struggles, in some cases accepting what was happening, but also in some cases direct pushback from citizens saying no, this is what we want and the municipality elected leaders saying no, we know this is not what we want, but we can't really change it because we have been told that this is what we have to do and so there were all of these confusions as well and most of the cases when we were talking to both elected officials, civil servants, citizen groups, the first question we were asked is what is a smart city? Do you know what's a smart city? Because we still don't know what a smart city! And our answer was, you know what? Even we don't know because there's just so many definitions of a smart city.
Emily Holloway
Did you ever land on a definition, in the end?
Ayona Datta
In terms of what smart is, I don't think I don't think the Smart Cities mission ever had a prescriptive definition because it always said the cities need to decide, but the prescription was that it has to be technology-led. But when we did our workshops with the citizens, we were given a really fascinating description of smart and one of the one of the representatives from the Slum Improvement Committee, they said to us, I don't think smart is about technology. I think smart is about making do the best with what you have. And in a way that's also about resource efficiency. But he's really, he was really speaking to the struggles of people in the margins. And he said well, I earn very little money, but with that I'm able to live, you know, have a family, keep a family, educate my children so that they have a better future. So being smart is about making the best with what you have in order to have a better future. And to me that sort of struck as a more maybe a more kind of what you would call a more subjective, a more contextual, definition of being smart, where technology perhaps is only one aspect of being smart.
So yeah, I mean I guess if we ask people, they will all have different definitions of smart, but a policy definition, a definition given by the earlier definition given by all the ICT global companies like IBM and all of that were about resource efficiency through technology. Because if you think about the earlier tropes like green cities, sustainable cities, you know, energy efficient cities, all of that indicates that we would need to make some changes to our lifestyle. And there would be a certain amount of pushback, particularly from the middle classes, multiple privileged classes, as in, do I need to now start using public transport? Do I need to stop using my car? Whereas if you think about smart, it tells you that you don't need to change yourself. Technology will help make all the changes so you can use 24/7 water. It's just that the water sensors are going to reduce leakage and wastage, so it's a very seductive idea and it's that's why I think it's kind of circulated like wildfire across the world because it really does not demand anything of us as citizens and of the political establishment, you know, to ask anything of its more kind of privileged citizens. So, it's a kind of win-win situation for everyone to use smart and use it as a trope for urban transformations. But of course, it is rooted in a legacy of disadvantages and structural disadvantages.
Emily Holloway
Ayona, thank you so much for sharing that – you brought up some really important points, especially about how the social context for smart cities – like these embedded and longstanding social and cultural inequalities in these places – really shapes the distribution and reception of so-called “smart” solutions.
Other countries have been pursuing smart city initiatives that are somewhat tailored to each city’s regional identity and assets. We talked to Ryan Burns, who you met in our first episode, who has spent a few years looking at Calgary, Canada’s smart city challenge. It’s literally a world away from India and Shimla, where Ayona did her smart cities research. In this context, though, Ryan is also looking at these policies through the framework of coloniality. Ryan, I think the term you really use to explore Calgary’s smart city challenge is digital neocolonialism – can you kind of unpack that for us?
Ryan Burns
I did not coin the term digital neocolonialism, but I was attracted to it because of the nuance it gave. When a lot of people talk about digital colonialism, they sort of lump a lot of really nuanced, diverse and complex processes into one label that doesn't really accurately capture a lot of processes and relations and individuals and actors and so on. So, I really wanted to use this term, digital neocolonialism, to flesh it out, conceptualize it a little bit more deeply and think about what it gives us when we're thinking about smart cities and extraction and exploitative relationships in the smart city. What does neocolonialism as a conceptual framework give us? And so the key difference is that in the 20th century across the world, we started to see formal withdrawal of imperial countries from their colonies, the UK from Africa, France from Africa, and so on and so on. However, as Kwame Nkrumah said, he pointed out as the first President of Ghana that when these countries withdrew from their colonies, they really just replaced those relations of power with other relations of power that benefited them. So yes, there was a formal withdrawal of military and government officials and so on. But it was replaced by what we can think of as like soft relations, cultural relations, economic relations, debt instruments and so on and so on. This was a very important distinction that yes, you could say that these countries were now sovereign, but in a lot of ways they were just as beholden to the colonial powers as before. And so that's sort of the tension that we're trying to tease out with this term digital neocolonialism, is that if we think of digital colonialism, as again some of these large actors, the state, private multinational corporations and so on. They might exert a lot of important influence on how the smart city operates and looks through setting internet protocols, through setting large national scale political economic frameworks and imperatives, but there's still a very large presence of sort of free market cultural associations and normative assumptions about what the smart city should do and can do that, that the idea of neocolonialism helps us better get at, I think. And so it's about a more diffuse set of relations, power, extraction, and so on. So, for example, if the nation state of Canada were extracting data from its citizens, we would probably have a lot of recourses, democratic recourses, to contest those extraction processes or to say you're collecting the wrong data or you shouldn't collect this data, that sort of thing. However, when it's Google collecting a lot of data about you, you oftentimes have no recourse for contesting that collection, but even more importantly, you don't know where those data go, so they can be sold to further actors who sell it to further actors, and so on and so on. And so you don't know where that chain of data goes. You don't know how they act on it. You don't know what kinds of influence it wields on your life. And so that's what I think digital neocolonialism helps better get at.
Emily Holloway
And you’re in Calgary! It’s super interesting that you look at smart cities and data as these kinds of extractive enterprises, then – harvesting, packaging, and commodifying data as a kind of natural resource, since Calgary is also at the center of Canada’s energy economy. Do you think there’s some continuity there, or at least a relationship between these phases of political economy?
Ryan Burns
And to contextualize the Calgary case a little bit more, the Smart City program and a lot of the technology stuff that's happening here is part of a broader effort to diversify the economy a little bit because it has been dominated by oil and gas for about 70 years or so, and so the newest push is to say our economy is a little bit more robust, a little bit less prone to booms and busts if we have some secondary industries and tertiary industries, that kind of help smooth out the boom and bust cycles. So that's sort of where a lot of the tech stuff is coming from, especially the smart city program. And so in a lot of ways it just sort of reproduces those same logics and rationalities that that dominated the city’s and the province’s politics for the last 70 years.
Emily Holloway
So how does the Canadian Smart cities challenge work, exactly? Is this a top-down federal program, or is by province, or city...?
Ryan Burns
It's all of the above because the nation – Canada -- had a smart cities challenge a few years ago, they're actually renewing it in this current budget cycle. They just announced in the last few months that they're going to do another smart cities challenge. And so this sort of sets a framework for municipalities generally to say, please give us this $5,000,000 because we want to be a smart city because we're going to do X,Y, Z, or Zed for the Canadians. And it sets some priorities, some frameworks and then municipal governments respond to that.
And you see that take different forms across the globe, because most many countries have a very similar program. The US had one as well, two actually and so you know, I've done some very basic analyses of the different ways that cities pitch their smart city programs to these national programs. In Canada and the US, they look very different from each other. But then these two countries look wildly different from the Smart Cities challenge In India, for example, and in the United Kingdom, and so on. So, these all look different in different countries and that itself is pretty interesting for me. I think I was a little bit heartened to see that the first round of Canadian Smart Cities Challenge applications focused less on glitzy high-tech solutionism and more on pretty deeply rooted political problems, like can we just introduce a small set of technologies to help relieve food insecurity and transport inaccessibility and those kinds of things. Some deep-rooted problems that are almost certainly not solvable through digital technologies, but they the technologies might be able to do something to help a little bit.
Emily Holloway
So last time we started talking about database ethnography, which is kind of how you examined the organization of open data in these studies. Maybe start with open data – what is it, how does it operate, where do you see problems with it?
Ryan Burns
Open data is a social and political formation that serves certain kinds of roles and functions in society, especially in urban society and you know, there are lots of historical parallels that we could draw to help us understand what those roles and functions are. One would be the growth of the nonprofit sector in the late 80s and early 90s with the rollback of the state to provide social welfare provisions and the neoliberalization, free marketization of public services and functions necessitated that the nonprofit sectors step in to fill in a lot of those gaps. Not just the specific functions of government, but also to tame the disorder that's present in all capitalist accumulation contexts. Waste pickers, for example or, you know, homeless shelters, food kitchens and that kind of thing. So you know, there was a concomitant rise of nonprofits at the same time as the rollback of the state. So, you can draw a lot of parallels here. One parallel would be that the city sees a lot of potential in offloading the analysis and actioning labor on to volunteers. I really highly doubt that any city, any particular city government official sits down and says, OK, how can we cut costs? Let's not pay an analyst. Let's instead hold a data-thon. Nobody thinks about it that way. They think about this as an interesting opportunity, but again, it serves a very important political role. So in a lot of my work I've written on data-thons and hackathons and even data production as an invisibilized labor. I have a paper on moral economies, for example, where I where I argue that a lot of the data production and then the analysis and acting on the data is recruited through deploying kind of feel-good messages, you're helping your community, you're going to make your hobbies and everyday activities better for everyone around you. So, contribute your data from your smartwatch, from your phone, contribute your data to these projects so that we can make our city a better place. So there's some research projects in the City of Calgary that I've looked at around wearable technologies for bicyclists as a way of producing data for the smart city and then the analysis and extraction of insights or production of insights through data-thons and hackathons is kind of signaling this growth of data for good kinds of organizations and Girls who Code where they're trying to deploy these moral economies, help STEM become less white and male, by responsible-izing women, responsible-izing people of color to say, hey, it's on you to fix this rather than acknowledging that there's a there's a massive pipeline issue involved, like as Safiya Noble has pointed out in her book Algorithms of Oppression, there are plenty of high schoolers who are very interested in STEM across all kinds of racial and gender lines.
Emily Holloway
You point out a lot of important dilemmas with open data, extraction, exploitation, and casualization, which really drives home how major economic transitions at the macro level – like deindustrialization or neoliberalism – end up affecting how data is generated and cataloged, and then how that data ends up being instrumentalized as information or even knowledge. David Banks, who we also heard from in the last episode, approaches this from a totally different angle. David, in your book, you look at how cities leverage cultural perceptions to jumpstart economic recoveries. You’re looking in upstate New York, but it seems like the lessons you draw could be applied to thousands of struggling postindustrial communities around the world.
David Banks
So, there's the title of my book is, you know, is a phrase I came up with that I argue is basically the third movement in city reform. And I don't mean like social movement in the sense of like this like grassroots have like change, but it is it is definitely a social and political change, but it's like a professional reform movement. It's like internal to urban planners, and probably more importantly, economic development professionals, people who work in industrial development authorities, Chambers of Commerce, sort of like regional and city economic development offices that have lots of different titles. But the City Authentic leverages our desire for like urban living, while also recognizing increasing cost of living is becoming untenable. And so you leverage like those push and pull factors of like wanting to live in a city, but it being rather unaffordable to create these competitive advantages in small, usually in smaller and medium-sized cities, but also in larger cities, neighborhoods will play off each other in this way. So that you still want to be able to maybe walk live in a walkable neighborhood that can go to a nice coffee shop. And maybe there's like something nice to do outside in summer on the weekend. And you can all like walk to these things and you have what is generally considered a nice urban lifestyle that's maybe the opposite of the suburban cookie-cutter neighborhood that a lot of millennials probably grew up in. So you want to do the opposite of that, but then you find that most major cities, big cities, you can't afford to live in or you can't afford to do the things that signal kind of like or feel like you're living in a urban neighborhood at the price points that are available in big cities and so smaller ones have been able to say, hey, if you want that experience, here's what the average rental price is for a two-bedroom. Here's all the fun things you can do, and people move to those as a result, but there that is somewhat an effective campaign, although you also see a lot of displacement and so also a lot of cities make small gains in population or stay steady.
Emily Holloway
We kind of touched on this before, but the “City Authentic” is kind of doing some work as a metaphor here, because you place it in a genealogy of other city typologies. Can you talk about that historical trajectory a bit, and maybe help us understand how perceptions of cities, and really, like, public identity, have always been important to a city’s growth and economic position?
David Banks
This is like I said, the last of the last or third of three other movements. The first one, the city beautiful movement. If you ever took like a history of cities, or maybe even an American history course you heard about this? This is when, as the American frontier in the west closed, eastern banks and capital had to find new ways to invest money. And they were looking to the newly rebuilt Paris and what was starting to happen in London and say, oh, we need to compete with these European cities as the new center of quote-unquote Western civilization. And so the moneyed interests start putting a ton of capital into cities as one sort of a hedge against rising left wing radicalism, because you know, it's like, you know, Carnegie was like, hey, I'll, I'd like to keep my head if I'll give you a library. Right? So, like, there's stuff like that, but also, of course the library gets put in a place where poor people used to live. They get all displaced and you know, and the and this of course all happening on the backdrop of Native American genocide, right? But in general, the idea is, you know, a really rich person signals to slightly less rich people, that it's time to invest in a city by building a big thing. And these big things are beautiful and a lot of them remain kind of our shared cultural and historic heritage in these big cities, they are generally loved buildings. And so in in general the city is supposed to be like a very artistic, beautiful, sculpted thing.
By the end of World War Two, this changes into a focus into efficiency. So instead of the steel and steam power that both funded and built the City Beautiful, now we're moving into the power of code, and not just computer code, like the versions of computer code in IT infrastructure is helping sort of manage the logistics of new cities, especially in the American South. But it's also the code of like zoning, right? And different sorts of zoning codes that say very specific things about how many units to the acre can be here versus you know how tall the building can be over there. This is the rationalizing of the city that marks sort of the main points of the City Efficient movement. You get figures like Harlan Bartholomew, who's kind of like the Johnny Appleseed of professional planning, going around and making sure that cities have these planning departments that his company produces in a lot of ways, and then we get credentialed planning like in all the departments like the one I work in today. But then there's also figures like Le Corbusier, right, you know, and the International Congress of Architects, that modern architects that talk about buildings should be very efficient things that you either live in or work in, and the two shall not meet and so you start thinking about places in these very rational, purpose-built ways. And so that's the City Efficient. And the City Authentic, in addition to what I described earlier, is also sort of a reaction to that utilitarianism and bringing back or at least a desire to keep and preserve a lot of the City Beautiful stuff and then try to make more of it, though our political economy makes it very difficult to do because land prices are so high, the building has to be very cheap to build, and so there's always that tension there of creating an authentic place is materially, economically very difficult to see, at least the symbols of it, specifically because of the historic progress of these three movements.
Emily Holloway
Maybe there’s a case to be made about the city authentic being a kind of genre in the smart city movement, although it’s definitely leveraging a different kind of data, a more qualitative kind of data, than what we tend to expect from smart cities. David’s book examines how social media platforms, especially Instagram, have played an important role in mediating outside perceptions of places like the postindustrial communities he researches. We’ll dig into that more in our next episode about urban platforms.
We’ve definitely covered a wide range of the critiques of smart cities. But it seems like many of our guests are pointing out the general conditions that mobilize smart city design and policy. Driven by an imperative to surveille, order, and optimize, smart city infrastructures are also frequently developed in partnership with private companies – which are inherently driven by profit motives. But as Ayona Datta pointed out earlier from her fieldwork, “smartness” doesn’t necessarily have to stem from these factors.
Ayona Datta
I don't think smart is about technology. I think smart is about making do the best with what you have and in a way that's also about resource efficiency. But he was really speaking to the struggles of people in the margins. And he said well, I earn very little money, but with that I'm able to live, you know, have a family, keep a family, educate my children so that they have a better future, so being smart is about making the best with what you have in order to have a better future.
Emily Holloway
In our last episode, Shannon Mattern shared a really fascinating historical and anthropological perspective on the dashboard – how it operates to filter out extraneous or irrelevant information. She also had a lot to say, much like the man Professor Datta described, about what smartness can actually mean once it’s separated from the impulses of capital or colonialism.
Shannon Mattern
A smart city is not just a sensored, embedded dashboarded urban realm. We also have to recognize, and our cities would be much better governed, more inclusive if we also manifested forms of smartness that we have to integrate with the more kind of digital sensor AI-driven smartness. A library is one great place where multiple forms of intelligence coalesce.
Emily Holloway
Next time: platforms. We’ll be talking to John Stehlin more about his research on platform urbanism, and revisiting our conversations with David Banks, Shannon Mattern, and Erin McElroy.
John Stehlin
Because the platform -- which it when we talk about digital platforms, we're basically talking about like multi-sided markets between multiple different actors that benefit from network effects and that have a sort of algorithmic logic to how these markets are structured, right, and so a company like Facebook convenes this social world right and then generates revenue based on privileged access to this consumer pool, right? And their data, right. And so that sounds like a city in a way, right?
Emily Holloway
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was produced and mixed by David Weems and written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.