Smart Cities, The Learned Cautious and Compassionate Wisdom

For some time now I have been engaged in and observant of conversations about “Smart Cities.” In local and national press, social media, conferences, curricula and advertising the debates & conversations are robust. The assessment among professional city-makers is uniformly positive. Some of the world’s smartest urbanists and technologists are engaged. I admire them greatly.

Captured in the marketing materials, technological dreams and political speeches are notions that urbanization can occur with greater efficiency at lower cost. Perhaps even sustainability, resilience and adaptation strategies critically important to evermore places can be enhanced. These are all positive and necessary. So, is there a reason to proceed cautiously, or at least better embed goals for social justice and opportunity in as an element of smartness? Some, like me, think so. I think it would be both smart and wise to do so.

Smartness

Measuring and optimizing flows of people, things, water, sewerage, waste, energy, communications and emergency management are all part of urban smartness. Maximizing the useful life of infrastructure and facilities through sensor-based risk assessments for rational asset management schemes is another major theme. Recognizing patterns within urban complexity so that scarce public resources are targeted effectively is a key. And, perhaps most controversially, ever watchful electronic eyes and the emergence of facial recognition within the public and private realm have become key strategies for reducing criminality and increasing safety.  

On the hopeful end of things smartness is seen as the means through which human environments at both large and small scales will be have more rational, optimized outcomes. Operators and observers of the systems upon which communities rely get tired and miss things or make mistakes. Intelligent electronic machines will be more attentive and alert thus providing better management with more accurate and timely information for operations, maintenance and investment. Complexities will become less mysterious and problems more solvable. Who would not want the ability for better prediction and more rapid interventions so that our communities work better with less failure?  

Pushback

There are some whom are doubtful not about the technology or its reliability but whom still object. They are instead concerned about what information is captured, what privacy is lost and how information about themselves and their neighbors is enriching others. 

Emergent, in regard to Alphabet’s/Sidewalk Lab’s smart city proposal for Toronto and other similar projects by other developers, is political/social pushback regarding the endangered freedoms described in Shoshana Zuboff and others’ theories of Surveillance Capitalism. In her book -The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Zuboff defines the theory as shown in the box to the right.

Those more doubtful, not yet invested in the vision of smart efficiency as panacea, have reasons of great importance to themselves about the need to be cautious about who is managing the human/infrastructure interface. Invasion by institutions and their agents of the little privacy that remains is part of the problem they see. Transference of control and sometimes ownership of data/information regarding the public and private realm from “the people” to technologists and the private sector to them is menacing. Advocates for smarter cities, the experts, have gotten ahead of those who have learned to be cautious about promises. They are looking for someone to trust to be wise about change and its localized effects.   

A, perhaps, more successful path to Smartness

My thesis is that a necessary precondition to the choice to embrace the machine model of cities is the exercise of compassionate wisdom as the underlying ethic. A city governed with compassionate wisdom is one that purposely frames and delivers smartness in terms of better lives and greater justice rather than better systems alone. Compassionate wisdom is about ends and social outcomes. Smartness is about means,  tools and data. People will buy the tools if they can see with clarity that these meta tools make their lives and the lives of their loved ones better in their terms, not in terms of some anonymous experts. 

Smartness writ large is about the potential of the internet of things[1] (IoT) to connect every node on the internet so that we can achieve “information ambience.”  We would have the ability to know in real time everything about how this relates to that and how they are performing in relationship to their users so that the entire human ecosystem, including urban environments can be managed with precision. For those responsible for managing urban infrastructure and its connections to private and public assets this is an extremely attractive notion. It is also very attractive to those in the business of selling fiber optic cables, wireless systems, sensors, servers, software and owning valuable data about individuals, groups and their behaviors.

How does a highly distributed urban water system become smart, for instance. Sensors can determine where pressure drops are resulting in “non-revenue water” (leaks) that exacerbate water scarcity and deprive utilities of needed income. Dramatic resilience benefits exist system recovery are found in knowing quickly and with specificity where things have broken due to fatigue, operator error or disasters. Since most water systems share rights-of-way with other utilities, predictions for impacts on other essential systems can be known if the sensor data is shared. Sensors that can reliably predict failures due to fatigue or other kinds of stress to can be incorporate into asset management plans and shape capital budgets for maintenance[2]. 

Better yet would be sensors that could predict the ripple effects of failures for all the other types of systems. This is very smart and is being done for new assets in many places, at least system by system. 

This is truly laudable and easily explainable. Technology that enables places to operate more efficiently and effectively are fantastic. Learning systems that understand urban coherence that investment in one system adds value to others are critical to cost avoidance strategies for ratepayers and taxpayers. 

For others, those less willing to surrender to the smartness mystique, the ideas trigger powerful fears drawn from dystopian fiction about control and conspiracy as the internet of things leaves the communitarian ideal of “A City Upon a Hill”[3] behind. Castigated as modern-day Luddites[4], those not jumping on the bandwagon fear smartness as a shift from robust democracies committed to humanities’ perfection (no, I don’t think the ideal exists) to the cold machinations of libertarian technologists and engineers who think they know better about how we ought to live and will shape those futures in ways we might not choose.  

The Technical Thing and the Political Meaning of The Thing

My view is that distinctions between tools, techniques and the products they create need to be unpacked. Knowing what to do (smartness) and knowing what ought to be done (wisdom) are differences that matter. Or, to paraphrase Richard Feynman, there is a difference between definition of a thing and the meaning of that thing. The meaning, and what it ought to mean, depends on the observer in their various civic roles. 

Too often, it seems, the advocates of smartness think of those who don’t buy the vision as dumb and living in the past. However, many people think of their imagined past with fondness. Negative judgements about those who think the past was better creates resistance and feelings of disempowerment.  Rather than denigrate resisters, let’s call these folks who fear smartness regimes something positive.  We need them to want us to be successful, after all. The friction costs of public resistance can be very high.  

The Learned Cautious (TLC)

For the purposes of this paper at least, let’s think about those who become barriers to smarter cities as The Learned Cautious (TLC). These are the folks who have been paying attention and noted that most of the promises on how change will benefit the individual as promulgated by experts and politicians have been too optimistic if not outright falsehoods.

TLC know that change is inevitable. That doesn’t mean that they are predisposed to like it. Some think they should be in charge and are not which to them is maddening. Some are too busy with their own lives to pay attention so change sneaks up and surprises them. Groups would like to ensure that changes are always in their interests but cannot. Having someone else impose the change is even more aggravating. Being told that the way we’ve always done it is no longer good enough suggests that we’ve been wrong, and we don’t like being told we were wrong. Ergo, large-scale phenomena like MAGA and Brexit and community opposition to things about the future in defense of the present and past.  (If I learned nothing else as a Planning Director and local government administrator it is that for most the word “different” almost always has a negative connotation when the concept is originated by “the other.” 

Ends and Means

Smartness, the system tools, is a legitimate end in itself only for the purveyors of technology and the operators of systems. This is natural as they are the advocates and most likely near-term beneficiaries. 

However, selling the benefit of smartness through the lens of tools is like trying to sell the idea a family home through descriptions of the hammers and wiring diagrams used in building it.  For most, the questions will be more like “will I be happy here and will it hold its value?” Home is an emotional idea. It is security, warmth and love. There is a very good reason that Realtors? sell homes through imagery of positive relationships made possible rather than houses as commodities. 

I belabor this because I think realizing a shift to most of the smartness agenda is essential if urban spaces are going to work better for more people. The smartness agenda has the power to accelerate improvements in our current slow slog toward perfecting and protecting human society. It can also reduce what seems to be our perverse commitment to fouling our own nest. 

As a means, an integrated set of tools to enable the exercise of compassionate wisdom, it can help achieve the ends of more just and more safe communities with fairer resource allocation, less consequence for environmental degradation, better environmental health, greater safety and with better capacity for adaptation and resilience in the face of changes in weather and other disasters. If used better, it might even create a sense of shared futures rather than foster divisiveness. 

However, smartness as an end in itself will not build the constituencies necessary to enable the change. If TLC don’t emotionally embrace smartness as a means toward something greater, as an enabler of preferred ends, then the constructive power of the tools will not be realized with the speed needed. Smartness will need to have meaning beyond technology.    

Oh, the mistakes I’ve made…

My bone fides in smartness come from urbanization efforts both realized and unrealized. My belief in the need to express smartness as outcome of compassionate wisdom has been learned the hard way – in local planning and international sustainability policy discussions. Combining these, I have learned a number of things and I have had to learn some of them too many times after in getting metaphorically smacked in the face by community groups, political bodies and groups of experts. If I’ve learned anything it is that applications of smartness in greenfield development is relatively easy and cheap if the regulatory environment is ready for it. Smartness in urban retrofit is messy, agonizing, slow and expensive but, given that most of the urban environments of the future are already built, the most important.  

Smartness Roads Travelled

My first exposure to smartness came when I was City Administrator in Redmond, Washington. Influenced by conversations with Microsoft, back when they were in their first 7 small buildings, we decided that every time we opened up a street or sidewalk, we’d throw in some extra conduit in case cable was needed in the future. It seemed wasteful at the time, was prescient during the mostly cable era and now has paid for itself many times over.

In Seattle in the 80’s we did low-tech work in planning such as computer analysis of data in horribly inaccurate County Assessor files to think about housing supply and affordability. Population and employment were going to grow and having to create new infrastructure to support it was going to drive up neighborhood disruption and rates. Many older dwellings had surplus bedrooms as birth rates had dropped. We wondered if this created an opportunity to retrofit those houses with accessory dwelling units (“mother-in-law apartments”) to address cost and supply questions for single person households without the cost of more infrastructure. (Technically yes, politically NO. This turned out to be a career-unwise question to ponder out loud. The question was smart, asking it was not smart.)

I was later involved with S. Korea’s Songdo City. It was new and a wonderful test bed for tech. Amazingly hospitable to orderly electrons and sort of inhospitable to humans who think that life should be a little messier, more robust and less lonely. But very smart for its time.

Then came Dongtan. Dongtan was/is a plan (unrealized but a beautiful plan still) driven by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation to create real estate wealth through the development the world’s “best” eco-city on a Chongming Island site near Shanghai. Very ambitious and profound in its efforts to address complexity, this initiative proposed to integrate cutting edge innovation in design, infrastructure, information management, mobility and access, energy, air quality, water management and quality, habitat, housing, economic development including tourism and everything else having to do with a better life on earth with less harm for earth in the process. A beautiful theory. Then came the quake of conflict between national and local political gods and poof, Shanghai’s Mayor gone and all his projects diminished. It didn’t seem like the market nor the tech was mature enough anyway but still, great ideas. 

After that a peripheral connection to the UAE’s Masdar City, Lord Foster’s somewhat theatrical foray into a deep connection between design, smartness, sustainability and arid environments. In that it remains a group of theories and a few buildings somewhat disconnected from the realities of culture and markets, it is likely that society disappointed his Lordship again.  

Are Smart and Wise Mirrored in Political Theory?

In some ways what is smart and what is wise frames conversations I used to have with a good friend and former college roommate who is a Libertarian. (Remember the good old days when American greatness had in part to do with the ability of friends with different worldviews to good naturedly disagree over a pitcher or two of beer?) We would struggle with the essential flaws of libertarianism and communitarianism. In some senses that struggle is embedded in the smart/wise debate.

As I recall the conversations, and I admit that alcohol and the naivety of youth were involved, we concluded that communitarians have difficulty with and often try to avoid the reality that if humanity is going to survive then someone is going to have to finally make some very hard choices, choices that not everyone will like. On other hand, those libertarians who are willing to entertain the idea that there are limits to the abundance of the global commons upon which human life depends, are tested by the idea that aggregation of individual choices create cumulative consequences that can’t be solved by any single individual. Neither debate without end nor disjointed incremental thinking will get us out of our collective dilemma. It is the same for the idea of “smart.”

Of course, as in all things, this dialectic framing is too extreme and reality slides around somewhere in the middle. It is necessary, given our collective scarce resources and distributed ownership/management of essential infrastructure, that we get “smarter” about how to manage the interfaces between ever more complex natural, economic and technical environments. It is also necessary, I think, that we recognize that there will be greater conflicts in the move to smartness if we fail to recognize that technologists knowing the right thing to do is different than helping stakeholders choose to do the right thing about systems they don’t now understand even in there simplest forms. If stakeholders (citizens, ratepayers, taxpayers, residents, etc.) will want smartness to succeed it will need to clear to the stakeholder that the benefits from the change will need in large part to the themselves those that they love. This is where the idea of wisdom might come into play. 

 A Wiser Approach?

A wiser approach might abandon the notion that people will buy concepts such as “trust us, we know what you need” and “this change will be good for you even if you don’t now understand it” and “we do understand the breadth of potential consequences.” Instead it might start from the position “ with regard to water, electricity, gas, cable, the internet, education, security, mobility, safety, transportation and the other services that on a daily basis can make your life better or worse, what would you change first?” People’s cynicism is a learned mindset. Be more honest about the role that companies are playing In pushing this idea because it serves their interests. The public understands everything is eventually about money or power. A wiser approach to smartness would be deeply embedded in gainshare[5] partnerships with those affected by the changes. 

First, most people are made nervous by “the new.” Everything about smartness is framed as “the new” as enabled by technology. People, if they haven’t changed much from my planning director and city manager days, likely complete the thought as “This newness is developed by people whom I very likely don’t know and whom I doubt understand my life or share my values and no matter what they say will likely not be good for me.” And, the stories about why things need to be different are poorly developed. 

That said, when generational issues are incorporated, many seem to comingle the concepts new and better. One has only to look at smartphones where industry has very successfully linked new technology with the value of identity. â€œI have this new phone; therefore I am better than you!” Does admiration associated with personal tech translate into a community’s willingness to invest in smartness? 

Smartness could as easily be described to communities as a better, less screwed up version of the present of that they already know. We’ve always had maps, for instance. Few members of the public know that almost no urban place has accurate as-built drawings or geographic information systems (GIS) of their infrastructure. They know, or at least have strong suspicions, that departments within a government or other users of the public rights of way for their infrastructure (electrical utilities, communications, cable companies, water utilities, etc.) don’t easily share the resources necessary to make comprehensive infrastructure maps or coordination of work possible. It is embarrassing for institutions to admit but they know as well. Ask any utilities’ public information officer or city council staffer who has had to try to explain why the cable company or gas company came and dug up the street two weeks after it was repaved and they will be able to describe the difference between smart ideals and wise application.      

Conclusion

It is necessary, given constraints to natural resources, increasing populations and infrastructure evermore at risk that we be smarter about what we do and how we do it. It is also necessary, given the capacity of society to resist change they don’t see as necessary or they perceive as harmful to their interests, to be more wise and honest about the pros and cons beyond the tools themselves. The fears of oppression associated with some possible outcomes of smartness are real whether people ought to have fears. It may be irrational, but then there are evermore lessons about how turning over information about our lives is not a universal good so it might not be wholly irrational. 

Simply put, we need to have smarter new and retrofitted urban environments. To do so the public will need to want to get there. Back in my city and county management days we would often try to figure out what we called the friction cost of any policy or practice changes we wanted to make. By that I mean what would be the political consequences, or the organizational consequences, that citizens or employees would exact in order to get the change accomplished. I think one could today ask the politicians and city employees about smart city friction costs.

I first understood the concept when I was an assistant county executive thrown out in front of a county-wide surface water management utility proposal. This was low-tech but required billings based upon impervious surface. There was a lot of flooding and we needed the money. The cost per parcel was very low. I was na?ve. When stopping off for some coffee on my way to a public meeting – the first in a rural area – I had chance to look at a neighborhood weekly newspaper. The headline was that the County was now proposing to “tax the rain” and a committee was being formed to recall the County Executive. They meant it. The local Posse Comitatus was mobilizing. A “rain tax” is a pretty powerful meme in a Pacific Northwest County. The utility was dead on arrival.

Someone is going to turn the intellectual concept of Surveillance Capitalism into a more accessible and powerful meme, making smartness more difficult. Someone good at it will create a more universal version of the rain tax that had me looking bug-eyed in front of TV cameras staring at the Posse Comitatus with their rifles lining the back of a Grange Hall. We need smartness and we need it quickly. But I think it will only come with wisdom and a reorientation toward the achievement of the public goods, justice and citizenship. 

[1] From Wikipedia – “he interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data”

[2] This makes the rather large assumption that rates can support maintenance when it is needed.

[3] John Winthrop in The American Yawp Reader from 1630 “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

[4] a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16)

[5 Extrapolating from the private sector concepts of rewarding employees for the value of productivity increases or cost avoidance, carve out a portion of private sector profit or government avoided costs and put the money in a pool for communities to get some of the amenities they want to offset the hassle of retrofits of the public realm required by changing systems.