SMART CITIES – FOR OR AGAINST?
Here are some passages from a blog post to give you ideas of how to envisage smart cities.
There is also a reference to 3 smart cities which you can research on the Internet: Songdo, Masdar
City, PlanIT Valley, and a smart city project from the 1960s: Ciudad Guayana. Look at these
examples to get concrete examples of what a smart city is.
BLOG POST
For or Against Smart Cities: Where Should Planners Stand?
Wednesday, February 19, 2014 - 6:00pm PST by JENNIFER EVANS-COWLEY
Two recent books, Anthony Townsend's Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New
Utopia and Adam Greenfield’s Against the Smart City, take on the good, the bad, and the ugly of smart cities. I'm
currently teaching a free course, TechniCity, where we are exploring many of the issues raised by Townsend and
Greenfield in the course.
As I read these books, I was struck by the challenges that face city planners in the future, which gave me serious pause
because I don't believe that we are planning for the future we are likely to see in 30 years. As I read various
comprehensive plans for cities, counties and regions, they focus on the reality of today—the way that we act
as a society here and now. They don't seem to recognize the vastly different future that is likely to
come. And the future that is forecasted rarely considers the role technology will play in reshaping our cities. Our cities
should be thinking more about technology.
Townsend points out that in the next 100 years we are going to build as "much urban fabric as we've built in all of human
history." He argues that technology is critical to addressing the challenges we will face. What a tremendous opportunity
for city planners to shape the future. But who is it that is shaping this future?
Greenfield raises the cautionary flag, making the important point that there is a limit to considering technology in the
future of our cities. He points to cities that have been planned with technology as the foundation. He focuses on New
Songdo, Masdar City and PlanIT Valley as examples of cities where technology is integrated
into "objects, surfaces, spaces, and interactions that .... comprise everyday life." New Songdo, for
example, is expected to wire every single part of the city to run on information. Townsend reports that Songdo is the
world’s largest experiment in urban automation, “with millions of sensors deployed in its
roads, electrical grids, water and waste systems to precisely track, respond to, and even
predict the flow of people and material.” For example, in order to save electricity, lights will be
off on blocks that are empty and will automatically turn on when a pedestrian is detected. The
people behind New Songdo have plans to roll out 20 new cities in China and India using Songdo as a template.
Greenfield finds this most extreme technology-based city planning to be absurd, because these
cities are not being designed to serve the interests of the people who live in them. He argues that
while we can sense and monitor all kinds of systems, but that isn’t what makes a city real—it’s the people and how they
use the city.
How do we get to this two ends of the spectrum, with cities that aren't considering technology and those that are planned
on a foundation of technology? In part it’s who is shaping these plans. The smart cities that Greenfield discusses
are being planned as a result of partnerships with firms such as Cisco, IBM and Siemens.
These companies are trying to bring planners solutions to a wide range of problems. While
certainly well intentioned, can we really expect the technology companies of the world to
understand how cities work and what makes them truly livable?
These initial smart city building efforts are premised on rationality—that is, if we have enough information, then we can
have cities that reduce energy consumption, minimize traffic congestion and provide a high
quality of life. Greenfield and Townsend both challenge us to remember our history. Townsend takes the reader on a
journey through our cities as they become increasingly automated, pointing, for example, to efforts at building automation
during the oil crisis in the 1970s. Given how rapidly technology changes, the technology of today may go the way of the
eight-track and electric typewriter. I look back to the way we planned our cities in the 1960s. At that time we thought
that technology was going to be transformative for our cities. Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela was planned by
a joint team of planners from Harvard and MIT using the latest technologies of the time. In the
case of Guayana, today it is a city that has inadequate public transit and substantial spatial
inequality. We can point to the mistakes that planners of the past made across the world. Yet
are we making the same kinds of mistakes today by either ignoring the technology that is coming or by over relying on
technology to solve our cities' problems? (…)
Jennifer Evans-Cowley, PhD, AICP is the Vice Provost for Capital Planning and Regional Campuses and Professor of
City and Regional Planning at The Ohio State University.
http://www.planetizen.com/node/67449