The Origins of the Smart City
The smart city is a phenomenon which is (and has been for the past decade) en vogue. Ranging from globally significant metropolises such as Singapore, to small local hubs, cities across the globe are turning to entwine technology and their infrastructure. The smart city industry is valued to be worth 2 trillion dollars by 2025 and appears to be in a state of perpetual expansion. So where did all this emanate from? What lies below is a summary of the development of the smart city from an outline of underpinning cybernetic theory to its fist conceptualisation in the early 1990’s, up to 2012 as the concept began to gain traction.
For many years there has been a desire for those in charge to be able to control and intimately understand the cities they govern. This desire is what drives the smart city, for if you can understand — ideally in real time — the happenings and goings-on of a city then you can concisely position and utilise the various resources at your disposal. For instance, let’s say a metro line is busy and there is insufficient space available for all the commuters, yet another is quiet, within a ‘non-smart’ city this would be a facet of everyday life. Yet, if a sensor network were to be installed which counts the number of passengers on a metro, then the quiet metro could be rerouted and thus alleviate the stress on the line. Now, this is an obvious oversimplification, but it demonstrates the essence of the smart city; the use of technology to make a city more efficient. This notion has existed before the smart city was even a concept and can be found in a school of thought termed Cybernetics.
Cybernetics according to the author of Smart Cities Anthony Townsend, is premised upon “the idea of using sensing and feedback to optimise performance […] To cyberneticians, everything — machines, organisations, cities, even the human mind — could be seen as a system”. This world view was applied to the city by one of the leading lights of cybernetics, Jay Forrester in his 1969 work Urban Dynamics. Within its pages, Forrester developed a ‘science’ of cities based upon his prior research and cultivation of complex techniques for modelling industrial systems for the aptly named Industrial Dynamics. Forrester argued, whilst being interviewed for Adam Curtis’ wonderful documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace — that “we live in these networks of feedback loops which are controlling us and most things we interact with”, meaning that, in Curtis’ own words, humans are “just nodes in networks acting and reacting to flows of information”.
This is viewing the social realm through the lens of a computer. Urban Dynamics was by all means a bold project, for Forrester did not analyse one particular city, but rather sought to develop an abstract generic systemic model of cities. As anyone will know who has visited more than one city, each locale has its own set of unique issues and therefore, its own set of unique solutions to those problems. Forrester’s models and simulations started off at a base of the ‘generic city’ — according to Townsend, “a stable equilibrium of high unemployment, a surplus of slum housing, and a shortage of housing for professionals” — and would simulate existing policies and interventions. The results were surprising, for measures such as job training for the unemployed and direct federal aid would result in worse outcomes. Instead, the model focused on the environment, stating that slum housing needed to be demolished and replaced by high end residential and commercial units. In short, the solution to many of the generic cities issues was in effect, gentrification. This approach to the city fell out of the mainstream after a disastrous implementation of computing in New York in the late 1960s where cybernetic thought was applied to the city’s fire department in order to streamline public services, which would ultimately recommend and thus, result in, the closure of fire stations in the poorest areas of the big apple. Although not strictly a ‘smart city’ development, the history and thought of cybernetics indeed informs today’s drive towards smart urbanism. So called ‘digital twins’ — “a virtual replica of a city, which [consists] of the digital representation of urban networks” — are becoming an increasingly common feature of many cities’ smart city plans.
However, after the rise of cybernetics, it wouldn’t be until the early 1990’s that the smart city would be born.
The smart city concept first emerged in The Technopolis Phenomenon: Smart Cities, Fast Systems, Global Networks, a work which expands on the authors previous concept of the ‘technopolis’ — a city “that interactively links technology commercialization with the public and private sectors to spur economic development and promote technology diversification”. This proto-smart urbanism shares many characteristics to the contemporary smart city, yet its definition has over the years developed, evolved and diversified, reaching into numerous disciplines and schools of thought. The technopolis concept was cultivated within the boundaries of the University of Texas’ IC2 Institute, a think-tank launched in 1977 with the goal of “combining technology commercialization, entrepreneurship, business development, and innovative education to bring about new economic development opportunities”. Therefore the genus of smart urbanism can be found within the economic research community, not as a continuation of cybernetics. However, it wouldn’t be long before the notion of linking the then burgeoning ICT industry with the city would sprawl into other disciplines. An early example of this comes from the development of ‘urban ICT studies’, a sub-division of urban studies committed to the investigation of “the complex and poorly understood set of relationships between telecommunications and the development, planning and management of contemporary cities”.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Robert E Hall presented The Vision of A Smart City to the 2nd International Life Extension Technology Workshop in Paris where he defined the smart city as the “urban center of the future, made safe, secure environmentally green, and efficient because all structures — whether for power, water, transportation, etc. are designed, constructed, and maintained making use of advanced, integrated materials, sensors, electronics, and networks which are interfaced with computerized systems comprised of databases, tracking, and decision-making algorithms”. This definition is certainly speculative, yet Hall’s prediction is essentially accurate. Firstly, his speculation is rooted in the near future, a fact which increases the likelihood of accurate prediction and secondly, Hall had already been developing the ‘smart cities concept’ for two years and had received funding earlier that year — the smart city as we know it was beginning to emerge.
What’s interesting about Hall’s presentation isn’t necessarily the techno-positive depiction of the future city, but rather the ‘very human and simple ultimate goal’ of the smart city concept; “a greatly improved living and working environment for our urban populations”. Here within the first ten years, one can see the evolution from the ‘technopolis’ to the smart city — the former a vessel for the accumulation of capital, the latter a direct means of urban improvement. However, Hall’s definition is thin on detail. It doesn’t specify what these sensors, electronics, networks, databases, tracking or algorithms are, setting the conceptual framework of smart urbanism, but not the means of achieving it.
The subsequent ten years saw the smart city concept slowly grow. In 2017 Mora et al published a bibliometric analysis of the development of smart urbanism, revealing that between 1992 and 2010, 49 academic articles and 31 conference papers were produced. In this period a split emerges between “two dominant interpretative models” with, on one hand, “an interpretation that can be defined as holistic [where] smart cities are described as the result of the balanced combination of human, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and technological aspects” and a “second group of publications, [which] provide a techno-centric interpretation of smart cities”.
The former, holistic notion of smart urbanism is greatly informed by Giffinger et als 2007 work Smart cities: Ranking of European medium-sized cities. This city ranking document is “based on a comprehensive catalogue of indicators [and] offers a new view on medium-sized cities in Europe”. What marks this paper out is how it views ‘smartness’. The above examples of the ‘technopolis’, urban ICT studies and Hall’s presentation define the smart city to be a technical undertaking, the use of certain technologies within a city to achieve certain ends — be they economic, managerial or social. However, Giffinger et al identify six characteristics which constitute the smart city — smart economy, people, governance, mobility, environment and living — and define a “Smart City [as] a city well performing in a forward-looking way in these six characteristics, built on the ‘smart’ combination of endowments and activities of self-decisive, independent and aware citizens”. Here an important step has been made in the definition of smart urbanism, for it is argued here that a city can only become smart upon the back of a ‘self-decisive, independent and aware’ citizenry.
However, this is only one side of the definitive smart city coin. The converse to the holistic and academic view of the smart city is the techno-centric view cast by the ‘grey literature’ of corporate smart urbanism and its industry. In 2009 IBM researchers Dirks and Keeling deemed “a smart city as one that deploys technology to transform core systems (people, business, transport, communication, water and energy) and optimise returns from finite resources” (from Taylor Buck & While, 2015) in the pursuit “of sustainable prosperity”. To complement this, Washburn et al — when attempting to ‘help CIOs understand smart city initiatives’ — borrow Forrester’s definition of smart computing to define a smart city as “one which uses ‘real-time awareness and advanced analytics to help people make more intelligent decisions”. This definition of smart urbanism is still the case today, with Cisco proclaiming that a “smart city uses digital technology to connect, protect, and enhance the lives of citizens. IoT sensors, video cameras, social media, and other inputs act as a nervous system, providing the city operator and citizens with constant feedback so they can make informed decisions”.
Throughout the industry grey literature, there is perpetual allusion to sustainability as a cornerstone of the smart city. Jenniffer Gabrys has identified that “commercially led proposals for ‘smart cities’ have focused on how networked urbanisms and participatory media might achieve ‘greener’ or more efficient cities that are simultaneously engines for economic growth”. This notion of ‘smart growth’ towards sustainable ends has been adopted by the European Union, with a considerable proportion of its Europe 2020 strategy, being tied to the promotion of ‘smart growth’ and the ideal of a ‘digital society’. The digital society is premised upon “striving for sustainability through smarter urban transport networks, upgraded water supply and waste disposal facilities, and more efficient ways to light and heat buildings”. Another element of this definition of smart urbanism is the fact that sustainable development is big business. Mora et al argue that “this vision proposes the smart city as an engine that fuels ICT companies and that is expected to generate hundreds of billions of dollars by 2020”.
So, by the end of the 2000s there were two strands of opinion when it came to the smart city; one embodied by Giffinger et al by placing the citizen as an integral part of the smart city, the other championed by the likes of IBM and Cisco which leads with technology to improve the livability of citizens and improve the environment. At this point in time, as alluded to earlier, 49 academic papers had been published on the smart city, yet according to Mora et al’s work, between 2010 and the end of 2012 — the smart cities 20th anniversary — there were 271 smart city articles, 356 conference papers and 213 examples of grey literature published, with a combined authorship of 2584 individuals. This relative explosion in smart city literature demonstrates the increased focus of the urban studies field on smart urbanism. Before the decade concluded, two other documents were published, that when combined with Giffinger et al form the backbone to the ‘holistic’ grouping of smart city literature.
The first was Robert G Hollands’ paper Will the real smart city please stand up? (2008), within which he asserts that “first and foremost, progressive smart cities must seriously start with people and the human capital side of the equation, rather than blindly believing that IT itself can automatically transform and improve cities” — this clear assertion of position has been cited at least 2700 times according to Google Scholar. Hollands builds upon the prior work of Nicos Komninos and his 2002 work Intelligent Cities, through referencing his observation that intelligent cities are “territories with high capacity for learning and innovation, which is built-in the creativity of their population, their institutions of knowledge creation, and their digital infrastructure for communication and knowledge management”. This is subsequently developed into “a critical interrogation of the concept of smart (intelligent) cities, and through an analysis of a range of (self) designated examples has subjected the idea to a polemical critique”, revealing that “many cities from around the globe have been keen to adopt the smart city mantle and emphasize its more acceptable face for self-promotional purposes [however] beneath the emphases on human capital, social learning and the creation of smart communities, lay a more limited political agenda of ‘high-tech urban entrepreneurialism’” (ibid).
The second paper was Caragliu et al’s Smart Cities in Europe. To begin, the authors argue that “urban performance currently depends not only on a city’s endowment of hard infrastructure (physical capital), but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure (human and social capital). The latter form of capital is decisive for urban competitiveness”, but the “main focus [of smart city research] seems to be on the role of ICT infrastructure”. Through a literature review of the pre-existent smart city literature and a quantitative analysis of European cities, Caragliu et al combine the six ‘categorisations’ from Giffinger et al (2007) and the critique offered by Hollands (2008) to produce an operational definition of smart urbanism. The authors
“believe a city to be smart when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance”.
This definition stands in clear difference when compared to the definitions provided by industry. Rather than promoting the smart city as an urban panacea, a magic digital bullet for all of the world’s urban problems, Caragliu et al situate ICT and smart technology as a component to operate alongside investments into human/social capital and transportation.
What the first 20 years of smart city research and development has produced is the emergence of a potentially vast industry on one hand, and an alternative view of a socially guided inclusion of digital technologies into the urban realm. Over the subsequent 8 years, the grey literature has hardly changed, with big industry still promoting a technology first view of smart urbanism — as can be seen above — which is broadly indebted to the removed perspective of Jay Forrester and cybernetics as a whole. The ‘holistic’ branch of smart city though has expanded into a series of off-shoots and emergent theories such as the human smart city and the smart city 2.0 — which both place community and citizen participation in the development of the smart city as essential.
From the early days of cybernetics, the use of technology in the pursuit of objective understanding has been a growing component of our cities. This trend, as I began this essay by saying, is not going to abate, the smart genie is out of the smart bottle. Yet, what the above words and paragraphs show is a split within the essence of the smart city. Industry will always propose the use of urban technologies as an austere means of saving resources and money, whilst sections of academia will promote the participatory powers contained within its use. 30 years after it was first coined, the smart city is still a complex and emerging phenomenon which has the ability to alter our cities as we know them. The question is will the next 30 years be steered by the techno-centricism of the smart city industry, or by the holistic ideals of academic research? Perhaps a third way will emerge? Only time will tell.
Will Brown
Doctoral Researcher
Loughborough University
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