Opinion: Dan Hill on 'smart cities'
Though we’re still waiting for hoverboards, we live in an era long predicted by science fiction, where technology can intelligently operate our cities, responding to our needs. But instead of focusing on smart cities we should be concentrating on smart citizens, says Dan Hill as he outlines the past 10 years of smart-city thinking. Dan Hill is CEO of Fabrica, a design and communications research centre in Treviso, Italy
The smart-cities movement has been around for nearly a decade, often feeling like a solution searching for a problem -- Cedric Price's aphorism 'Technology is the answer, but what was the question?' is as relevant now as it was 50 years ago.
I would identify three ages of smart cities at least, perhaps indicating a restless search for a market, for a client. Yet as a result of this rapid evolution, could the third age mean a maturing of the conversation, finally the possibility of a new urban age informed and enabled by contemporary technologies rather than those of yesterday?
The first age we might see as defined by grand projets such as Masdar and New Songdo City, led largely by two sectors that seem out of step with thinking in cities, or in technology, never mind their intersection: property development and corporate IT.
As a result perhaps, these projects seem fundamentally flawed, oriented as they are almost entirely around efficiency. Philosophically, the same systems that run, say, a Formula 1 racing car -- real-time sensors and actuators engaged in harmony -- are simply applied to the city, as if it too was a coherent infrastructure that simply needs a new operating system, a bounded ecosystem that can be measured and managed in the same way.
The problem is that we do not build cities in order to build infrastructure. We do not make cities to make buildings. They are simply enablers, secondary matters. Despite their sheer obviousness, they are not that important. Nor are cities coherent systems that can be controlled. Perhaps people come together in cities to create commerce, to create culture, for community and conviviality, even to create the idea of the city itself. These might be core drivers to orientate city-making around.
The second age of smart cities, emerging in response to the overblown promises of the first, was rather more humble: code-based interactive enhancements of building projects or of existing services such as transit, energy and so on. They are not holistic, but focused: installations, media facades, LED-based displays, open data-sets, mobile apps, devices... This age has been more successful, simply as clients and needs could be located and allied with contemporary technology.
Yet so far they fail to produce a new urban condition. They add new modes and layers to the city, yet the transformative promise of the smart city suggested in that first age is little more than hinted at. Hence the need for a third age of smart cities. Could we sketch out a more mature approach to smart cities, informed by contemporary technology thinking (rather than corporate IT) and contemporary urban thinking (rather than property development, and indeed most architecture) yet addressing systemic chance at an urban scale?
Such a third age might observe that the 'smartest' use of technology is in the hands of citizens themselves, in the mobile social media that has somehow enabled revolutions and protests as well as all those taxi-hailing apps. The same dynamics, deployed elsewhere, are behind the explosion in urban crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and sharing economic platforms. While the latter are yet to enable large-scale urban change, such movements have clearly accelerated, where the smart-city movement has generally meandered.
This is the emergence of what might be called a 'smart citizens' approach, predicated on the notion that many citizens now expect to be involved in the systems that affect their lives, and that includes urban policy, planning and design. Though often nascent, patchy and small-scale, such activity nevertheless has the promise of such a participative culture. And urban strategies that balance and integrate these hard infrastructures with the soft infrastructure of the civic might yet be able to weave together the disjointed innovations that characterise our second age, tempered, honed and directed through this engagement. Perhaps the design of a truly smart-city strategy could start here, building on a participative approach to city-making?
Technology culture frequently trots out the importance of 'failing fast', rarely realising that you don't really want to fail in truly meaningful areas, such as healthcare, education, housing, and yes, city-making. Yet we need to see the first and second ages of smart cities as fast failures, to call out their hubris and careless mismanagement of promising advances, sure, but also so that we learn from them.
Only by asking these broader questions might we find a way to weave together smart citizens, redesigned urban governance, integrated city systems, smart infrastructure, apps and services, and urban informatics. The city is a public good, greater than the sum of its parts. And so with the smart city -- it must not simply be the sum of upgraded yet disjointed components but something greater too.
