Smart Cities
When did cities become smart? Were they stupid before? Tremendous energy is being exerted into making our cities smart, by governments, politicians, and private companies. But what is a smart city? What is meant by smart in this context? And are these cities even that smart?
Smart cities can mean many different things, but central to the concept is the urban operating system (UrbanOS), which is the data and programming which constitutes and powers all modern cities. When we try and understand what is smart in this context, we must investigate who is selling smartness. This means exploring how power operates through the smart city and smart concepts. Once we start investigating power and the smart city, we see the process of creating smart cities also involves the creation of ‘smart’ citizens. This illuminates how capitalism and corporate interest moderate and modulate ‘city-zens’ behaviour through smartness, and how these private companies utilise language to extol the values of smartness. This has involved significant intellectual investment into the ideology of a corporatized digital city. This matches with general trends of privatisation seen across neo-liberal governments. Embedded in this process of digitisation, is the privatisation of data collection in the city and the privatisation of city space. I am not aiming to dissect digitisation as a general process, but rather challenge the embedded ideology behind modern digitisation, particularly in the context of city space. This ideology focuses on efficiency and optimisation, which comes at the expense of public participation. Concepts of smartness do very little to bring in marginalised ‘city-zens’ to the city and support them to access the digital city. As such, it is important to conceptualise a version of the smart city which challenges neo-liberal orthodoxy, which creates a democratic and participatory smart-city framework.
What is the UrbanOS?
Urban Operating Systems have existed in one form or another, far longer than any concept of the Smart City. Urban Operating systems have grown increasingly complex as data collection has become embedded into everyday practices and people’s lived experience of the city, whether “smart” or otherwise. This increasing complexity is then constitutive of smart city technologies. Related to this is the ubiquity of computing and network access in the city “where software and the spatiality of everyday life become mutually constituted” (Kitchin, 2013). Therefore, the UrbanOS is not something that is centred in only Smart Cities. The ambiguity of concept and language within the smart city means it is hard to challenge issues of ownership of data and programmes which constitute the UrbanOS.
In its ideal form the UrbanOS is an innocuous technology which helps a city to run smoothy. That can be traffic management and other forms of transportation, public wi-fi connectivity or other digital systems of urban management. It is an urban planning diagram that uses digital systems to make a city smart. A city does not necessarily need to be smart to have an Urban Operating System. However, there is an underlying computational logic which is central to smart city technologies and the UrbanOS. It is therefore necessary to problematise the loose concept of the Smart City, which can be said to be a “Language game around urban management and development” (Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014). The Smart City is a conceptual tool, used by corporations to sell a utopian vision of the city, creating a unitary language extolling positive transformations. But this concept is deliberately broad and imprecise. Despite this imprecision of definition, at its core it seeks to create both smarter cities and smarter citizens, through different forms of control. This control is achieved by reconfiguring the relationship between technology and society with the aim of optimisation and efficiency through the commodification and marketisation of citizens and their lived experience of the city. This is made possible through the production, processing, and value extraction of large amounts of data, which all citizens of the city, either consciously or otherwise, are continuously producing at a greater and greater rate. As such it is important for citizens and radical politics to place itself at the intersection of smart city technologies and the UrbanOS. This will make visible the difficulties in creating a democratic UrbanOS and to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy which underpins “Smart” technologies.
How does power operate through the UrbanOS?
To challenge modern smart cities, we must look at the modern UrbanOS as a system of power and control. In this context it is interesting to look at the Smart City and UrbanOS through the lens of Deleuze. Deleuze identifies new “technologies of governing”, which can be seen as an illustration of the underlying computational logic of the UrbanOS. This computational logic then governs the city and its subjects. For Deleuze society is no longer shaped in Foucault’s image of “disciplinary societies”, but is now a “society of control”, where both public and private institutions exert power horizontally. For Deleuze, the corporation has replaced the factory, and capitalist control exercises itself through the constant collection of data and surveillance. This means power is more complex and exercised constantly through “computational logic”. Deleuze’s dystopia, rather than a warning, has been “enthusiastically adopted by urban planners, city managers, corporate gurus and tech savvy pundits” (Krivý, 2016). Deleuze shows that digital and computational control has a much longer history than smart city concepts. However, what is particularly pertinent in the context of the development of the UrbanOS is that smart technologies, now the basis for these operating systems, are explicitly owned, developed, and implemented by private companies and corporations. Smart cities are dependent on systems that inherently surveil and control. Societies of control have transferred almost unlimited power to corporations of control in the realm of the city.
This is not to say that the adoption of these technologies is being forced upon us by some shadowy cabal. One cannot deny individuals agency in adopting these technologies, or that the institutional adoptions of technologies which have surveillance embedded in them do not have some appeal beyond control of citizens. This can be explained by Althusser’s theory of seduction and ideology. On the one hand subjects are promised freedom, choice, and convenience, however this then comes at the cost of optimisation, productivity and control for the corporations and governments. This duality speaks clearly to the neoliberalisation of space and commodification of subjects through technology in general and more specifically, smart technologies and the UrbanOS, through the Datafication of citizen experience. It is therefore important to clarify that neoliberalism shifts citizenship away from inalienable rights and the common good toward a conception rooted in individual autonomy and freedom of choice, and personal responsibilities and obligations. In other words, we have ceded control of the city to neoliberal computational logic because it is seductive due to the promises of “smartness”. For some this is not wholly negative, and many extol the virtues of this freedom of choice and personal responsibility, particularly those who see technology as liberating citizens from government control.
Neoliberalism, The Smart City and the UrbanOS
Although a digitised UrbanOS has existed for some time, the advent of smart technologies has changed the dynamics of power. “Smartness” has shifted into the hands of private corporations. Governments now rely on these private actors to become “smart”. In many ways, smartness as a concept is a linguistic game, used to seduce city officials and the public. Analysing these language games requires not just looking at individual “smart” technologies but the underlying computational logics of the UrbanOS. Smart City technologies and their underlying computational logics, make the city and its citizens products. One need only look to the aggressive promotion of Smart Cities by the world’s largest software services and hardware companies who “view city governance as a large, long-term potential market for their products” (Kitchin, 2013). Part of the reasons city governments are so willing to adopt these technologies is that the digital ideology is accepted as one of increased efficiency and profit. This efficiency and profit rely on the privatisation of public space, making neoliberal technocracy the governmental ideology of the smart city space. The computational logic of the UrbanOS is underpinned by notions of operationalisation, datafication, prediction, sensing, mapping, and circulation. This technocratic vision of the city is in many instances an undemocratic one, which has been “reduced to a single technology centric vision of the city of the future” (Vanolo, 2013). The underlying UrbanOS is designed not by concern for citizens but by the belief that the ubiquity of digital and interactive technology will “optimise patterns of consumption and communication” (Krivý, 2016).
One clear example of the corporate roots of the smart city is IBM trademarking “smarter cities”. IBM, CISCO and other companies have enthusiastically adopted the role of place makers, building on the corporate vision of Disney, to become Smart City Corporations. What is important to note when seeking to understand the new developments in the UrbanOS is that city governance has dramatically changed. Whereas before, urban operating systems were “coalitions of state and corporate interests spanning over sixty years” the balance of power has now shifted (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2020). Now, as city governments fall further behind in the financial pecking order, they rely more and more heavily on corporate interests. The public sector no longer occupies a space of digital innovation. This has also meant that whilst city governments are invested in the real time political workings of a city, private businesses have begun developing their own urban theories. IBM have a clearly developed urban theory which underpins their smart technology innovation, all of which has tremendous implications for the modern UrbanOS as a corporate tool. Looking further into many of the smart city funding projects, many of them have been reduced to “technocratic partnerships with powerful public and private actors” (Calzada, 2020), where the private actors have been given huge amounts of control.
The Example of Sidewalk Labs and Link NYC
Google’s subsidiary Sidewalk Labs is an example of corporate interests embedding themselves within city spaces. They have installed and run the public Wi-Fi kiosk system for New York, LinkNYC, equipped with cameras and surveillance tools. Their failed bid to develop and build “Sidewalk Toronto”, which would have been a completely new area of Toronto, built on a disused area of the harbour front, was yet another example of corporate interests investing in placemaking. On an even larger scale, Sidewalk Labs have partnerships with federal government departments in the United States, partnering with the Department for Transportation to offer the “The Smart City Challenge” to cities across the US.
For financially unstable governments like cities, the optimism of corporate smart city narratives is incredibly enticing, with promises of efficiency, modernisation, productivity and convenience for cities and their subjects. However, it seems to have been overlooked that the motivation of these private initiatives is profiting from citizens daily lives and practices. Modern smart technologies have reconstituted the UrbanOS into a system which seeks to commodify people and the spaces they inhabit. Only those amenable to this logic of corporate technocracy can access the benefits of smartness and become smart citizens. One need only look at the areas LinkNYC covers, to see that only those areas that are deemed desirable or profitable are covered by free Wi-Fi connectivity. Looking at the circled area of the map below, most of the social housing “projects” on the Lower East Side have little to no coverage (LinkNYC, 2022). This underlines the real-world implications of corporate Smart City narratives for marginalised citizens who are often excluded.
What can we learn from City-Building Games?
Many of the issues with the smart developed UrbanOS is that datafication has implicit assumptions about how people live and operate in a city. These assumptions are also based on expectations of the life cycle of urban development. It is interesting to use the example of city building games as a parable for smart city technologies being the basis for the modern UrbanOS. As Bereitschaft (2016,) argues, “video games represent a crucial bridge between the realms of play and practice”, as the games operating systems “mirrors many of the capabilities of a geographic information system”. The example of city building games is also useful for understanding the ways in which the modern UrbanOS may be failing people. Just as in city building games like Sims City or Cities Skylines, smart city management is undertaken through “Top-down, unilateral and practically omnipotent form of Urban Development” (Bereitschaft, 2016). Smart cities become less about citizens and more about the spaces themselves becoming “electronic hubs, the centres of demand for telecommunications”, where the urban becomes “governed more by interconnectivity than by boundaries” (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2020).
The embedded assumptions of smart city technologies can also be seen in city building games. Just as with many smart city developments, the car is king in city building games (Bereitschaft, 2016). Much of the city design process goes into roads and traffic management, particularly in Cities Skylines, where players regularly complain about the problem of traffic management. This is also a real-world problem with smart city development. One need only look to current “innovation” in mass transit in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Elon Musk’s Boring Company’s “smart” solution to the pervasive issue of traffic in U.S. cities has been to build a giant tunnel to transport cars. Los Angeles, which does not have a functioning mass transit system, would have benefitted from public transportation innovation.
There are other interesting lessons to be drawn from city building games. The programming of these games is limited in terms of diversity, with no concept of the relationship between race, gender, class, and sexuality to the experience of the city space. Even with the great complexity of the operating system in the games, there is no mention of welfare and every subject in these games is commodified and housed according to their field of work. As Vanolo (2013) notes in their analysis of smart cities in Italy, the smart city discourses never take on the challenges of “hot Issues”, like welfare capacity. In this sense it is useful to underline how data-based epistemologies advance a very narrow view of the city.
The Ecumenopolis
A negative aspect of the digitisation of space, is the implicit assumptions and expectations of urban development. Doxiades (1966) saw a future of the city which foreshadowed both the negative aspects of the cities we live in today and a better future. His imaginary of Ecumenopolis is particularly interesting as it challenges humanity to not just think of cities, but to conceptualise the lives we want to live in cities. Doxiades saw that the world was “building the wrong cities for the future” (ibid., 1966) citing the over-use of natural resources, the inadequacy of cars as transportation in the urban environment as well as the destruction of recreational space in many of the world’s cities, among many other things. Although written before the advent of the digital age, his imaginary foresaw the automation of many of the functions of a cities operating system, which now encompass the UrbanOS. Policy must look to the future, as Doxiades did when he imagined Ecumenopolis, and generate an UrbanOS which does not commodify its subjects and is inherently democratic in nature. It is interesting in this context to look at the collection of speculative fiction in How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables (Graham, M et al., 2019) as a warning to cities about increasing corporatisation and what that means for citizens and democracy.
The Failures of Smartness
If smart city imaginaries are to be democratised, to encompass a more inclusionary UrbanOS, it is important to underline the general failures thus far. As Kitchin (2013) has asserted, the underlying computational logics are “inflected by social privilege and social values”. These systems, generally developed by corporations, who espouse the logic of the middle and upper classes, generally do not align with the needs of the poor and marginalised. The citizen within the smart city is “a data-point, a targeted consumer, a user, an investor, a sorted individual, and a surveilled, controlled and policed subject” (Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio and Kitchin, 2019). There is very little space for citizens to be co-creators or owners of the smart city. This underlines one of the key issues of smart technologies and as such the modern UrbanOS. It is a top-down, technocratic model of city management, which seeks to homogenise citizens to the city’s needs; that of “Capital accumulation and technocratic governance” (Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio and Kitchin, 2019).
This imaginary of the city is a neoliberal one, which is not unexpected considering the power of “smart” corporations. This does not mean that smartness must follow this route of development and it is important to conceptualise alternative framings and how these would manifest themselves. One such idea is the reorientation of the concept of smartness, moving away from technology and locating it’s focus with people. This would then help to move the smart city and UrbanOS away from seeing citizens as data-based products, to seeing them as co-creators who are equally engaged in the “place-based complexity of social and ecological problems” which the city sits at the forefront of (Ghosh and Arora, 2021). This means making smartness more participatory, focussing on dissenting, divergent and marginalised voices.
A new vision of the Smart City and UrbanOS
Once the relationship of the smart city concept and the modern Urban operating system has been clarified governments can begin managing the relationship between citizens and the technological urban environment. City governments and citizens need to work together against their commodification and make citizens more than data points, and frame subjects as “a proposer, cocreator, decision-maker, or leader” (Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio and Kitchin, 2019). What this will require is a reorientation of the concept of smartness which centres people rather than technology. This means governments must take back the reigns of innovation and invest in ownership of smart technologies. This will involve greater communication and co-working between cities, to pool together knowledge and power. This would also mean working against the increasing corporatisation of the city. This is a difficult task and means working against the logic of neoliberalism, which is the defining ideology of the modern world, and specifically cities. This will necessitate truly participatory urban technological development, making a more democratic smart city. It is important to think of the real time policy options city governments have available to them to democratise the smart city and take back control of the UrbanOS.
Currently governments do not have the policies in place to regulate smart city development. To successfully do this, any procurement of contracting in smart city development and urban operating system control must be an open and transparent process, which can be put against public scrutiny. Secondly, the public must be made aware of their place within the smart city and UrbanOS. This means education about how citizens are “datafied” and who profits form that datafication, as well as who owns the systems that control the city. This will then lead to greater processes of public consultation, where the public are seen not just as subjects but as co-producers of the city. Governments should also take data governance more seriously, and it should be a clear governmental responsibility. Modernising policy to make sure it is equipped to deal with modern technology and its effects on citizens lives is crucial. This will then mean “smart cities” are viewed not as technological issues, but as inherently political issues. This requires better governance and more agile policymaking which can keep up with the pace of change and technological development. Shifting away from shrinking governments and the neoliberal orthodoxy which underpins the corporatisation of the city space is a difficult task. Saskia Sassen (2011) has written about imagining a different form of the city. She rejects the smartness and intelligence of modern smart cities and says cities should look to “recover the incompleteness”, and look to an open-sourced city, where citizens have control in production of the city they live in (Sassen, 2011).
“Technology is culture; it is not something separate; it is no longer “I.T.”; we cannot choose to have it or not. It just is, like air.”
(Hill, 2013).
Governments and Citizens must begin to see technological development as inherently political. In the context of urban operating systems, governments must reclaim the concept of smartness from the corporations. This will then take back control of the UrbanOS. City governments can then democratise these technologies and work with citizens to think not just of technology, and the lure of optimisation and efficiency, but focus on the lives that citizens want to live with technology in a city. However, corporations have a tight stranglehold over the types of lives they want citizens to live within cities. Challenging this requires democratic participation and properly funded city governments, that include the marginalised in their decisions. Policy must foster digital innovation in the public sector, championing open-source planning, and co-working between cities. This means changing government culture, civic engagement, and civic innovation in broader ways across city governments. Those striving for a better future for Smart City imaginaries and manifestations, and therefore a more inclusive UrbanOS should be reminded of Deleuze’s closing statement in Postscript of Societies of Control. “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill” (Deleuze, 1992).
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