'Smart cities' have gradually developed something of an image problem – to some members of the public, the term invokes visions of a dystopian surveillance society and raises concerns about how their data will be used. That's if people are aware of the concept at all.
This is despite the fact that most technology projects are deployed with the aim of making life in cities better – cleaner, greener, less congested and more prepared for the shocks and stresses that they increasingly face. Many succeed or offer great potential but others, such as Sidewalk Labs' now-abandoned smart city project in Toronto and San Diego's deactivated smart streetlights, serve as cautionary tales.
To rectify these disconnects, the multidisciplinary Urban AI think tank formed earlier this year and recently launched a Call to Urbanize Technology.
It says that technologies should be developed and deployed with the 'social contract', culture, geographies and complexities of cities in mind.
In practice, this could mean doing away with utopian smart city imagery where all the wires are hidden, and actively fostering friction rather than removing it altogether.
So far, the Call has over 150 signatories, including Nigel Jacob, Co-Founder, Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, City of Boston; Akim Oural, Deputy Mayor, City of Lille; Francky Trichet, Vice-President of Nantes Métropoles; Carine Bachmann, Director, Department of Culture and Digital Transition, City of Geneva; and Ernest Kwan, Head of Data and Analytics, Water and Waste, City of Winnipeg, alongside many academics, architects and technologists.
The Call is made available under a Creative Commons licence so it can be adopted and adapted. It outlines the key qualities of cities which must be respected by technology, including that they are owned by people, incomplete and ever-changing, complex and diverse, and puts forward six principles for 'urbanized technologies': situated, open, decentralized, frictional, meaningful, and ecological.
1. Situated: They emanate from a social contract, a culture and a geography.
2. Open: They are accessible for all and evolutive.
3. Decentralized: They empower communities and are equally distributed.
4. Frictional: They encourage exploration through interactions.
5. Meaningful: They amplify human speech.
6. Ecological: They are frugal and low-carbon.
Highlighting the invisible
One example could be sensors, says Hubert Beroche, who founded Urban AI after he spent six months pre-COVID travelling the world and meeting with city leaders, urban planners, philosophers and technologists to better understand how artificial intelligence (AI) will transform our cities.
"I think we are beginning to understand that something is wrong with how sensors are designed. They are mostly invisible," Beroche told Cities Today. "We propose to reverse this paradigm and say that sensors should become an interface."
This means not just making them visible but also understandable and 'senseable'.
In the case of environmental or water quality sensors, for example, the data could be automatically displayed and visualized in and around the city.
Beroche said: "When working on an interface, you're not only making progress from a privacy point of view, but you're also creating an augmented environment."
"You have to create connections between people and not just take value and information," he said.
For example, in a small village in the Netherlands, sensors have been placed with newly planted trees and the data is made available in a local café. If the dashboard shows red, café visitors can go and water the trees with hoses and buckets placed nearby.
Another emerging example is the open source Digital Trust for Places and Routines (DTPR) communication standard, which was piloted in Boston last summer. The work on a unified taxonomy and visual language for technology is now stewarded by Helpful Places but its origins come from the Sidewalk Labs initiative – suggesting that for all the flak the Toronto waterfront plan received, it put forward a number of innovative ideas which could still be pursued.
Social contract
Highlighting sensors and putting up signs won't fix everything, though. The foundational element for getting urban technology right, Beroche says, is creating a "social contract" of trust with local residents and other stakeholders.
According to Beroche, there aren't any fully developed examples of such a contract yet but some progress is being made. He cites the Go Boston 2030 campaign, which used public engagement to shape the city's transport plans, and the AI Registers launched by the cities of Helsinki and Amsterdam.
Beroche said: "When you put people around the table, you have discussions and you create a kind of local social contract. The idea of the deliberations is to have friction in the process and between people, not make it frictionless."
Those listed as contributors and advisors to the Urban AI think tank include Steve Grimes, Assistant Director of Data Analytics at the City of New York; Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer, City of London; Maarten Sukel, AI Lead, City of Amsterdam; and Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief of Research and Development at The GovLab, New York University.
The scientific committee includes Alex Pentland, Director of MIT Connection Science; Saskia Sassen, Professor at Columbia University; and Carlos Moreno, Scientific Director of the ETI Chair – Paris 1 – Pantheon Sorbonne University, where Beroche is also a project manager for a programme related to AI and the 15-minute city.
The think tank will run workshops and carry out research on urbanizing technology. Forthcoming papers will look at AI and low carbon cities, as well as city surveillance and social contracts.
This article first appeared on Cities Today.
