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An Inconvenient Truth about Smart Cities
- keganunderwood 9y agoIf one person owns all the land, they (or someone they authorize) can boot anyone unwelcome. This makes life much simpler because you can sidestep a lot of issues and focus on what this really is: a pilot project.
- PeachPlum 9y agoThe utopian dream of a benevolent dictator
- dba7dba 9y agoSuch place exists, and it's called Irvine, California. Irvine company owns all of the land of city of Irvine. Or something like it.
- elygre 9y agoDidn’t Disney build such a city in Florida?
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoCelebration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida A bit like Seahaven Island from the Truman show.
- yardie 9y agoWhich is another planned town in Florida, Seaside: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida
- Tempest1981 9y agoThe full EPCOT plans are interesting. A circular city layout, with layers. Density in the center. People taking monorails to work, and WEDway people movers locally. Designed for biking and walking. Cars only used on weekends. Details about 10 min into this video: https://youtu.be/sLCHg9mUBag https://youtu.be/sLCHg9mUBag
- jdonaldson 9y agoThere's been numerous attempts at "smart" cities, even in Arizona. One example is Arcosanti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti These things always sound amazing on paper. But they're always a bit lacking in person.
- foobar1962 9y agoBack in the day when Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft and was hitting the big money, I remember hearing about his building a huge $5M house (when a million dollars was a million dollars) that would have digital-everything and be 100% buzzword compatible. This was probably the 1990s. I'm wondering 1) how it went then; and 2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years? A house being obsolete in 20 years is one thing, but a whole city being obsolete is quite another.
- im3w1l 9y agoThe important thing will be to build for upgradeability, so that a house/city with 20 year old tech can be upgraded without tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch.
- twobyfour 9y agoTo be fair, that's always been the case with technology. The difference is that digital moves faster than analog and adds an additional layer of incompatibility. NYC is currently learning that lesson all over again (or more likely failing to learn it) with the long overdue and long-dragged-out upgrade of our subway's 80 year old signaling systems. (Not to mention the hundred year old water tunnels that we can't afford to take out of service for repairs.)
- bluthru 9y agoI remember reading about that as well. Something about everyone wearing electronic badges that identified to the smart house who was in the room. Also a trampoline room.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago2) is the house now obsolete after just 20 years? It probably ran on Windows 3.1 and they lost the install disks.
- mtgx 9y agoNot just obsolete. Think about all the security issues appearing only 5 years later. I sure hope all "smart city solution vendors" are required to provide lifetime updates, and there's also a mechanism to switch the maintenance of those products to some other company if the original companies go under. It shouldn't be like "Hey, so now we'll go bankrupt. Good luck with our DRMed proprietary products, though!" This is why it's so important for governments to move towards open source solutions as much as possible despite the "high-cost of switching and training" and whatnot. Technology is going to be ingrained so much more in our institutions in the future. And it's going to be way more expensive to solve issues if there is proprietary products lock-in.
- b0rsuk 9y agoAncient Greeks famously started new cities with a... city square, and built around it. This is because public matters were most important to them and focusing on private matters was the definition of egoism and a bad citizen. Whenever I hear about another smart city project, it seems to be done for show. There are pictures of architecture, vegetation, various mechanical systems or circuits. As if people living there didn't matter. Everyone will fit in and it will be great because concrete will do the thinking for you.
- colmvp 9y agoI feel that as certain cities become more dense, public space is either hard to find or not that well designed (i.e. too loud, dirty, not comfortable). It wouldn't surprise me in the least if cafes like Starbucks have grown in popularity partially because of that issue, as at least in my city, they have grown rapidly and practically every location is busy. I guess we've just copied the French w.r.t. third spaces.
- colechristensen 9y agoCould you elaborate more on your general point or third spaces in particular?
- techsupporter 9y agoThe "third place" is a social space that is distinct from the home and the office. Cafes, bookstores, malls, and restaurants are often these kinds of places because they're distinct from house and work and are easy places to gather and they offer various amenities. (Why are parks less commonly included? Two reasons: One is that parks are often used for other, more active, activities and usually during the day while third places are more seen as an evening and leisurely activity. Second is, especially in more urban cities, that parks are seen as "dirty" or "unseemly" because homeless or vagrant populations congregate there.)
- b0rsuk 9y ago
- Heliosmaster 9y agoI'm not sure about either the skepticism or the enthusiasm: we have, throughout history, built cities according to the "modern" standard. From the greek squares, to medieval towns with only space for a small handcart, to the car-centric cities in the US. And as we go, we improve them based on our knowledge: will we get it "right" this time? Of course not! But that's not the purpose of these projects. Can we try, see what comes out, and adjust as necessary? Putting all these posts beforehand sounds to me like waterfall development, where cities are naturally built in an "agile" way. See Rome, for example :)
- jpm_sd 9y agoAh, but Rome was not built in a sprint! I think the main point is that fancy IoT gadgetry counts for very little compared to the things that really make a city work: infrastructure for power, water, sanitation, and transportation; places for people to live, not for gadgets to watch them.
- ddalex 9y ago> Rome was not built in a sprint! Now I have to have this T-Shirt to wear to sprint planning meetings.
- willvarfar 9y agoI like Swedish cities because they are low-rise and had more trees, squares (usually triangles) and pedestrians. I particularly recall a wide tree-lined car-free avenue acting as a buffer zone between two parts of Malmö; people would take nice park walks in this elongated park just a few meters wide. I remember wishing that avenues like that radiated like spokes from the center so I could have had such a walk or cycle ride to work daily.
- perlpimp 9y agoif the city would have underground mostly motorized commute and boring company would supply city with this infrastructure then you may well have a very livable city with almost no traffic above ground.
- null_object 9y agoSweden’s city model hardly represents the ideal: the 1960s thru 1980s intentionally ripped the public center out of almost all Swedish towns, discouraging outside public space and attempting to make city and town centers into purely work and centralized (mostly indoor) retail spaces, with large (often multi-storey) parking spaces to enable easy car-transport to and from the suburbs (where people were supposed to live). Take a look at the center of Stockholm: the area past the old town connecting the southern, central and western islands (Söder, Norrmalm/City, Kungsholmen) is a horrific spaghetti of motorways leading right into the heart of town - impossible to navigate on foot (pedestrians are led under overpasses, through tunnels, up and down litter-strewn stairways, and past 'unofficial’ toilets. It’s a truly dystopian vision of what can happen to a town when city-planners decide that cities are not for living in, and only local activism and historical accident preserved the parts of the old town that tourists now think are so beautiful and charming. Nowadays things are improving, but the center of the city itself is still largely pedestrian and cycle-unfriendly, and many central streets have no doors, windows or stores facing the street itself: the idea was to keep the sidewalks free from people loitering or strolling around. If you want a human-scaled model of a city that’s built to encourage public space, walking and meeting, then almost any southern European town that’s built to radiate from a central (traffic-free) square, ringed by restaurants and cafés, is a better example than anywhere in Sweden.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoThe inconvenient truth about existing cities is we have let them become completely dominated by technology, in particular the car.
- js8 9y agoThe inconvenient truth about anything smart is that it actually takes a lot of caring and feeding from very few experts (expensive) who actually understand the technology. The end result is that economic laws put practical limit on what you can achieve with smart. The smart aspect of things needs to generate enough savings for the economic entity to be able to muster the experts to fix things, as they inevitably break in various ways. And it only happens if the entity is large enough. Every, say, home could be made smarter, and the total savings would be probably big. But we won't do that as individuals, because for each of us, the cost of the expert is scary compared to the tiny savings that we can individually achieve with it. If we would organize (that is, create a larger economic entity), then perhaps it would be possible. But organization causes additional costs, too.
- expertentipp 9y agoHad the same thought once I was looking at a smart system for recovering rain water in a standalone household. Complex and expensive to design, setup, maintain. Pipes, pumps, containers, filters - all these to obtain a miserable couple of hectolitres of undrinkable water. It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind.
- dctoedt 9y ago> It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind. That might be true in some cases. But the motive might be to provide epsilon demand to help develop a market for an embryonic product — in effect, making a small investment in which the hoped-for ROI in the long term is a "better" world — even though in the near term there might be less-costly options available. That's why, for example, for years my household has bought our electricity under Green Mountain's wind-and-solar option, even though it costs a few dollars more per month (although the delta has been dropping). Our choice of electricity providers isn't visible to others, and it's not a subject of everyday conversation for us, so it's difficult to see how there's any virtue-signaling going on. Ditto for why we bought a Prius years ago, even though economically a conventional vehicle made more sense notwithstanding the high gasoline prices back then. While we could be accused of virtue-signaling, I think it's more accurate to characterize it as signaling social acceptability, as in, "you won't be alone if you take the plunge and buy one of these cars instead of the usual [fill in the blank for your neighborhood]." In math terms, you could think of this as trying to help the market to seek a long-term global maximum as opposed to a near-term local one.
- twa19999 9y agoThe real inconvenient truth is that Smart Cities are by definition totalitarian. Big Brother is watching your every move. Everything you do is registered by some networked system and subject to ML analysis. For the next 50-100 years we at least have an alternative of moving to some remote area in rural Pakistan where are no "smart" IoT technologies, and where you can still pay in cash. After that we are doomed to live in some dystopian dictatorship.
- mamon 9y agoTo paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced smart city is indistinguishable from prison.
- baxtr 9y agoReminds me of the smart home, which I’m still waiting for
- ghaff 9y agoEven when things work as designed (which they often don't), the problem with most Smart Home gadgetry is that they solve problems that I don't have like flipping the light switch and don't solve things I'd like done for me like cleaning up the kitchen. The interfaces to electrical equipment is the easy part. The hard part is the interfaces to physical objects and Smart Home stuff does nothing about that.
- baxtr 9y agoThat’s exactly what I think
- jesperlang 9y agoWe are a culture obsessed by the how, not the why. A picture of people walking or biking to work does not fit our idea of the "future" as well as one where we ride around in slick glass pods. We have grown custom to doing even the simplest things orders of magnitude less efficient than they need to be. We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image at the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts, am I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live? What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture? Cities are complex adaptive social systems that we are nowhere near fully understanding. Formulating a vision of a city with its base in a technological ideal ("smart") just shows how disconnected you are from reality and how setup you will be for complete failure.
- panic 9y ago> We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image at the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts, am I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live? What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture? Jane Jacobs addresses this topic at length in Chapter 19 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here are the first few paragraphs (the whole book is a worthwhile read if you have the chance): - When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities. A city cannot be a work of art. We need art, in the arrangements of cities as well as in the other realms of life, to help explain life to us, to show us meaning, to illuminate the relationship between the life that each of us embodies and the life outside us. We need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. It is important, in arriving at better design strategies and tactics, to clear up this confusion. Art has its own peculiar forms of order, and they are rigorous. Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e., of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity from life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence. To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.
- notyourday 9y agoYes, the current system is sooo much better. After all, it supports existence of Kendra L. Smith, the associate director of community engagement in the Center for Population Health Sciences at Stanford University its the lifestyle Kendra L. Smith is accustomed to.
- xvilka 9y agoIt is not only about connectivity. The smarter city becomes, the more question of privacy arise. While it shouldn't be a stopper for further digitalization, cross-integration and overall efficiency tuning, putting it in the recipe should be done right now. I like the solution by Hannu Rajaniemi in his masterpiece Quantum Thief: every citizen in City of Mars had a complex "gevulot" (a complex set of a keychains, like in PKI), where he can decides what to share, with whom and for what time. There were news from Canada about designing similar system for national ID and other important documents. But the part of online-selection every time what to share is important in my opinion. We'll see what future will make of that.
- magicalswami 9y agoCan you tell me more about this device? I'd love a link. I'm writing a story on exactly this issue.
- known 9y agoGetto for the elite?
- nautilus12 9y agoWhats the issue here. I think its implicitly obvious what style of government and particularly political affiliation these cities will have based upon who's starting them. If you think there's a chance that they will take anything from the playbook on the other side of the aisle, you are sorely mistaken. :P