Where's the Smart City? Still everywhere as a concept, almost nowhere as transformative large-scale reality, most visible in ghost cities built from scratch, gleaming and almost vacant. Cities are absolutely central to civilization and every qualitative improvement in our ability to "do cities" has had seismic, widespread impacts.
Why aren't we seeing something like that now?
The simplest hypothesis is a rarely discussed one: the Smart City pitch is tempting because cities are incredibly valuable but Smart City projects often fail because they misinterpret what makes cities valuable, what constraints this value, and what can be done about these constraints.
Allow me to be obvious: Cities are economic, social, and artistic engines because of their people. Put human beings in comfortable but dense arrangements, give them solid infrastructure, make everything cheap enough to allow the young and the creative to move in, make it possible for families to educate their children, give access to healthcare, affordable college education, and so on and so forth — the boring foundations of life — and people will get together in unexpected combinations and create novel businesses, technical, and artistic breakthroughs even if you can't and shouldn't predict or influence what those will look like.
In other words, the success of cities — measured both in the happiness of their inhabitants and their economic, intellectual, and artistic energy — depends on the slow-moving, old-fashioned issues of cheap housing, good transportation, accessible healthcare, education, infrastructure, and public services.
I said I would be obvious. And yet very few Smart City projects engage meaningfully with these structural constraints. "An app for..." or "real-time data about..." can be useful but will rarely have much of a cumulative, structural impact on a city. At their best they can increase somewhat the efficiency of existing infrastructure — an infrastructure that includes everything from a huge bridge to a rarely used form — but don't contribute to increasing their reach and depth (and in fact a short-term band-aid can make a structural problem more difficult to fix).
The main limitation isn't technological but cultural. Many of the most prominent voices for Smart Cities come from backgrounds dealing with systems of entirely different scale and hybrid complexity: no isolated technical or financial system in the world has the uncanny mixture of physical scale, political dynamics, historical entanglements, economic complexities, and a hundred other facets, of even a mid-sized city. "Collect real-time data, throw it at an AI, and make it available through apps and dashboards" is not a bad thing to do on its own, no. But a city doesn't "think" with its sensors and its apps, at least not at the time scale that makes or breaks them. It thinks with its local bureaucracy and its real state ecosystem, the minutiae of public service investment financing and the strength of local news coverage.
As a collective system a city is vast, a city is slow, a city is institutions and culture as much as hardware and software, and if you come in assuming that those are bugs to be replaced or bypassed with more speed, more raw data, and more software, the city will shrug you off.
The IT industry cannot reliably and consistently make an organization smarter in an existentially meaningful way[source: looking around]. Why should we assume it can do it for an infinitely more complex entity like a city?
This is a depressing fact if you are hoping to buy or sell a silver bullet of a Big Data Internet of Things AI solution. It's fantastic news for everybody else. It means we can do much better than what we are doing, we just need to figure out how. This figuring out is less a matter of raw capital than of setting up the right sort of organization to do it. I recently wrote about the post-AI organization as one that requires people obsessed with the problem: what blocks us right now isn't that the people who run, build, clean, and teach cities don't know enough about AI, but rather than the people who can build AIs don't know even remotely close to enough about what they do. But this is changing and will continue to change. If nothing else because the rewards for success in this quest are almost limitless.
I've argued elsewhere about what I call the dream gap, the moment where the failure of a hazy technological over-promise becomes undeniable but the desires that fueled and were fueled by it remain. The cities of the future — rather, the cities of a good future, one achievable but that won't happen on its own — exist in that gap, which makes today the best moment to start building a bridge to them.
(Originally posted on my blog.)