Smart Cities
Smart cities are not new, but create added urban complexity
Cities have been “getting smarter” ever since people settled down to share resources and compartmentalized labor. This led to increased productivity gains, resulting in an improved quality of life for city residents. In this context, smart cities are not a new idea. Cities rely on productivity gains, as these gains are a priority to achieve economic growth. Productivity (or technological progress), as shown in the Solow-Swan models of economic growth, along with capital accumulation and labor (population growth), are indicators of long-term economic growth. Smart cities apply technological progress to the built infrastructure, data management systems, and cut across the many dimensions of a city.
While technology is constantly changing, the pace of change in the past 100 years has yielded tremendous gains in productivity, quality of life, longevity, and wealth creation. The technologies of the 1910s, 20s and 30s, for example, resulted in advances in telecommunications such as the telephone, radio, television and movies, alongside transportation developments such as automobiles, airplanes, as well as changes to the home with the introduction of refrigerators, electric irons, vacuums, washing machines, and dishwashers, further transformed urban life is various ways. These technologies allowed for improved connectivity and both social and physical mobility, leading to unmatched productivity gains through the mid-20th century. Yet, this growth did not come without costs.
As populations became less agrarian, the industrial boom in America and Europe drove people into cities in search of work. But as more people moved into cities, urban life, while it offered various benefits, became increasingly crowded, and dirty, and inequalities became apparent.
These externalities, or side effects of commercial activity imposed on those not directly involved in the market, manifested through various forms of pollution, inefficient transportation networks, and visible economic inequality. The unreachable state of rectifying externalities through the reduction in transaction costs was proposed by Economist Ronald Coase. The conditions necessary to satisfy the theorem, such as perfect information and zero transaction costs, simply do not exist in the real world, but the theorem suggests the next best alternative should be sought. However, seeking these alternative solutions have proven to be difficult and often produce additional externalities. Thus, in the context of the city, the Coase theorem supports the notion that externalities are wicked problems, or those not easily solved by market conditions or government regulation.
In addition to the economic burdens increasingly faced by cities, urbanization coincided with shifts in the social order on the heels of two world wars, greater numbers of women joining the workforce, and improvements in social mobility among lower classes. These conditions prompted widespread discontent with the quality of life in cities and calls for change became widespread. Innovators and urban planners of the day proposed various plans to relieve the growing strains on urban life. But visions of technocratic utopias remain as pictures on paper with limited application. From Henry Ford’s Farm City to Phillip Bucky’s Cave Cities and Le Corbusier’s City of Tomorrow new ways of city life were proposed to ease these urban conflicts. But all fell short of connecting the complex dimensions of the city. Smart cities have been proposed in the same way, but if they are considered a retrofit of existing infrastructure enhanced with new technologies, the challenges faced today are little different than those in 1920.
Now, as the year 2020 approaches, instead of the explosion of commercial goods seen one hundred years ago, the latter half of the 20th century saw the development of advanced information and communication technology, collectively abbreviated to ICT, and micro-processors. These technologies are behind the urban technology revolution in the 21st century. Together these advances resulted in the wide spread adoption of the internet and mobile telephones, spurring many new industries and commercial activities. Additionally, technological achievements in areas of transportation, security, and energy from government research and development programs such as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) were further developed for the commercial market.
Today's smart cities, first led by the private sector and commercialization of federal research programs, have now evolved to be being citizen-centric and city-led. This shift in policy objectives away from a technocratic private sector push has resulted in a reckoning for the need for local involvement, and it's creating problems. Small and medium sized cities are struggling to balance existing needs with not being left behind by wealthier, larger cities. With that said, to support the growing needs of the city, the concept now requires increased leadership from the federal government, a greater regional focus, and a collaborative approach at the local level with private partners. No city is an island, in today's interconnected world, we are all part of a greater whole, but local needs vary considerably across regions, states, and nations. So, let's make our cities even smarter by establishing collaborative and innovative approaches to policy making and technology delivery.