Blue-sky thinking: outsmarting the smart cities bandwagon

Currently reading:
Laura Bliss, 'If Google Were Mayor' (10 January 2018) The Atlantic. 

Bliss notes that we've reached an interesting tipping point: at the 2018 Consumer Electronic Show, she observed 'more vendors listed as selling "smart cities" technologies than gaming products or drones', reflecting the growing urban-tech focus.

Sidewalk Toronto (the joint venture of Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto) is working on the proposal to revitalise a 12-acre waterfront site (Quayside) to test: (among other things)

• '“outcome-based” zoning code focused on limiting things like pollution and noise rather than specific land uses';
• 'sustainable neighborhoods';
• 'autonomous transit shuttle''; and
• solutions that address climate change.

Challenges / legal issues identified include:

• 'all-seeing urban omniscience' and (where subsidised housing is provided) whether those reliant on such subsidised housing have a choice on how much privacy they relinquish in order to stay at Quayside; and
• how data will be shared / sold and the impact of (what Pamela Robinson, Prof. Urban Planning, Ryerson University) the 'blurring [of] public and private interests' in the creation of Quayside will have on the data harvesting processes.

Bliss also notes that other 'top down' approaches to designing smart cities have not delivered in their 'tech-utopian promises' (ie Masdar and Songdo). However, she captures a punchy soundbite from Rohit Aggarwala (Sidewalk Labs) that quite deftly distances the Toronto project from its 'smart city' label (and, in turn, these other less successful projects) by noting that a lot of the planning that's occurred on these projects reflect 'early-21st century arrogance... that all that's gone before is obsolete' (or the overly convenient tabula rasa approach to designing cities).