The Decibel - City Space: Are smart cities really such a smart idea?

Episode Date: April 9, 2023

The smart city movement — driven by the idea that we can leverage data and technology to optimize life in our cities — is attractive for many reasons. But critics say that smart cities may not be so wise, and in some cases, they’ve proven to be dangerous for democracy. In the first episode of season three, we’re doing a deep dive into this very concept: What are smart cities, and who are they for? Where has smart-city technology helped, and when does it start to wade into surveillance-capitalism territory ? Adrian speaks to John Lorinc, an urban affairs journalist and the author of Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, about how the perception of smart cities has shifted over the years, and how smart city technology can both improve and disrupt our lives. Plus, Globe and Mail reporter Josh O’Kane shares his reporting from his new book, SIDEWAYS: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, which looks at Alphabet’s failed attempt to build a smart city in Toronto and what that high-profile example tells us about citizen engagement and good governance around the world. 

Hi, it's Manika here. This long weekend, we've got a special listen for you. The new season of the Globe and Mail's podcast, City Space. My Globe colleague, Adrienne Lee, breaks down the big challenges that cities face these days and how we can build them to be more sustainable, affordable, and efficient. The Decibel will be back tomorrow with a new episode. In the meantime, have a listen and subscribe to City Space on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Being smart is good. I mean, that's what my parents told me growing up. And it's also probably

why I like hosting podcasts so much, because I get to sound like an expert thanks to my producers. And conventional wisdom tells us that the more information we have, that is, the more knowledge that we have, the better equipped we are to deal with the world as it is. So the concept of a smart city sounds, in many ways, pretty attractive. It's an urban movement driven by the idea that we can leverage data and technology to make everyday life better for people who live and work in cities. That could mean collecting data around how to manage traffic lights or garbage pickup, or it could mean optimizing how we build or manage city infrastructure more efficiently, or using innovative new ways to minimize the environmental impact

of all of us living together in one dense place. But there are many people who argue that smart cities may not be so wise. They point out that cities built this way might also include algorithms that can nudge human behavior in the name of economic growth over all else. And bigger picture, we're talking here about technology that can circumvent the democratic norms of a city. In an age where we are really starting to grow wary of big data, and hey, fair enough, should we be leveling that concern up to big city data too? Welcome back to City Space, the Globe and Mail's podcast about how to make our cities better.

I'm your host, Adrian Lee. In this episode, we're looking at the concept of smart cities. What are they, and who are they for? Where has smart city technology helped, and when does it start to enter into surveillance capitalism territory? And can good old citizen activism really stand up to technology when it counts? After the break, I'll speak to journalist John Lawrence about how the perception of smart cities has shifted over the years, and how smart city technology can both improve and disrupt our lives. Our first guest today is journalist John Lawrence. He reports on urban affairs and technology for publications including The Globe and Mail,

as well as the Toronto-based magazine Spacing, where he is the senior editor. His latest book is Dream States, Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias. And it looks at how both the potential and the challenges of smart cities have really shaped urban planning over the past decade, and how questions about smart city tech have sparked important debates about surveillance, automation, and how cities and tech companies interact. Here's our conversation. So we should start with a definition of terms. What are we talking about when we talk about smart cities?

So it's a big kind of amorphous term, and it means different things to different people. When I write about it, I'm talking about the technology that is used in these different applications. And they tend to be oriented towards government applications, but not exclusively so. They can be also private sector, but it's essentially digital technology. It's connectivity. It's there are a lot of sensors involved that pick up different things in the urban environment. I mean, no one wants to be against smart cities. People don't want to be pro-dumb cities. So how did this as a movement really begin? I think it dovetails really well with the creative cities movement, which is a term that was coined by Richard Florida, you create cities that are good for people who are in creative industries and, you know, in knowledge industries, then you increase the quality of life. And it's a very contentious idea.

And it follows smoothly from that, that you would want cities that have these kind of technical capabilities to kind of match that, you know, those talent pools and those quality of life indicators that Florida talks about. I mean, walk me through how that argument basically was made. I mean, you start with, yes, cities should be more livable. And then now we've gotten to a place where smart cities, it feels like, are really attached to technology in a way that maybe wasn't the case when it first started. You know, when it first started, I mean, the internet was little, right? It was, you know, there was no social media. The promise of the technology and the promise that is made by these big tech companies that the technology can improve the type of problems that impede the quality of life,

traffic congestion and overcrowding and all of these things, that's how the two fit together, that there's this powerful, robust information gathering technology that deals with the congestion and the sort of crowding of cities. I think there's two ways that smart cities could be applied. And it's kind of based on the kind of city you are. You know, there's sort of more developed Western cities and how smart cities relate. And then there's less developed cities elsewhere in the world, you know, Asia, for instance,

where the smart city application is going to be different. Talk to me first about what a smart city looks like, the pros and cons of those applications for a developed Western city. In a developed Western city, which is not being built from the ground up, you have either municipal procurement, like it's some kind of system that the city buys, or it's a, you know, they're kind of discrete add-ons. And so you have like these smart traffic lights or you have these, you know, smart energy systems, and they become part of some

kind of broader infrastructure. In other places, they are much more integrated into the kind of makeup of the building of the city. And Smart City has become a brand for big development projects. I read about one in Herrera recently in Zimbabwe where the old city is just too crowded and too difficult to live in. And so developers want to create these shiny new, you know, gated communities that are essentially wired to the nines. They've got all sorts of surveillance and security technology. And so that's the other part.

And then, you know, you have places like Singapore, which are very advanced with a lot of these kind of smart city applications. Can you speak to some of the applications that, you applications that most fascinated you over the course of your research, the sort of ways in which people are using smart cities in sort of wild ways? One of the places where I found the most interesting examples of smart city technology is in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, small country, it's underwater. They've long depended

on advanced technology and engineering and civil engineering to kind of remain a country. And so they think about technology and they think about cities because it's a very urbanized country. And the way they do smart city technology there is it's part of a set of solutions to the pressures of urban life in a country with those kind of constraints. And so one example, which I thought was really interesting that I came across was that they have this kind of advanced weather detection system, which predicts high water and flood and so on. And that's kind of wired into a whole network of what's called blue roofs, which are like green roofs,

except that they have like a water retention capacity. And what the idea is, is that you use the advance notice of coming weather patterns to retain water on the roofs to prevent sort of overflow at the street level, which kind of inundates the sewer system. That's really smart. It's a response to a problem that exists. You know, it's interesting

you bring up the Netherlands because we talk about technology as being deeply associated today with the smart city movement. But what, you know, you've described in the Netherlands is happening around water and protection. They've been doing that kind of stuff for centuries, just, you know, through different kinds of things. You know, technology can just be a series of ditches and dikes, right? And what I found in the Netherlands is it wasn't technology for its own sake. It had a purpose. It was, you know, this was an area of inquiry that, you know, that had pride of place, like

they were interested in it, but they were also talking about issues such as the circular economy and how do you, you know, how do you reduce waste through quite innovative methods, right? And so these were all kind of pieces of a puzzle that, you know, to prevent this country from being inundated in an era of sea level rise. So that's what I found was actually smart about it. The other thing that I'll mention about the Netherlands is that they had actually these very practical R&D labs, which are connected to municipalities, there's one in Amsterdam, where they trial these technologies,

they test them out with the public, they see what works, what doesn't work, and then they kind of move from there, right? But it's limited and it's not experimenting on general populations. And I thought that that was a very smart approach. On the other side of the coin we're talking about from the Netherlands, you wrote for the Globe and Mail's opinion section, this sort of cautionary tale from San Diego. Can you speak to that? Yeah. So in San Diego, about six or seven years ago,

the city bought about 3,000 smart lights, street lights. And ostensibly what they were, they were all about reducing the energy used in street lighting by using LED lights. And these were remotely controlled. And so it had an environmental promise. And they did a big deal with General Electric, which is a local company that wanted sort of a marquee customer. And it was a $30 million deal. Now, it turns out that these smart streetlights are fitted out with all sorts of other sensors, air quality monitors, shot spotters, right to detect gunshots. They have video cameras, they have microphones. And so essentially what happened is that the city deployed like two or 3,000 of these in various neighborhoods. And they became these kind of surveillance devices

that people in San Diego didn't know the full capabilities of these smart streetlights were until it came out that the police were using them in police investigations. And that created a real political backlash. There was a lot of concern about that. There was a lot of concern in racialized neighborhoods, in neighborhoods with African-American populations and also Muslim populations, both of whom were sensitive about surveillance. To me, it's kind of a parable about a technology that was maybe a little bit too smart for its own good and a government that wasn't frank and open about what it wanted from this technology. I mean, we live in a society where there's a ton of surveillance, right?

Every time you go into a convenience store, you're surveilled. But, you know, it's different when a government buys it. And I think that the, you know, municipality of San Diego had said, okay, well, this is what we want to do with it and have a good debate ahead of time. This thing would have played out differently, but people felt kind of, you know, they felt kind of hoodwinked and the result was what it was. And so from your research, from the reporting that you did in the book, what do you think an average citizen should know about how we can best weigh what might be a value to us as people who live in cities versus the sort of smart city approach of improving them? How do we know when that value tips over into the potential for this kind of surveillance capitalism?

As I was doing the research, as I mentioned, I wanted to take a balanced approach. And it occurred to me eventually that you could sort of divide up smart city technology into two broad categories. There's the smart city technology that's focused on people and on movement. And then there's smart city technology that is designed to kind of optimize systems like energy grids and so on. And a lot of the latter has an environmental benefit. And I have no problem with that at all. I mean, we need a lot more renewable energy. That means we have to do all sorts of retrofits to our grids that involve a lot of digital technology.

And that's smart city technology. And so let's do that. Where we're surveilling people and using very sophisticated devices to track movement and track people flows in public space, there I feel like there's a very high bar. And cities have to be very frank about what they're doing. And people really have to understand what they're buying into. Thanks to John for joining us. After the break, we'll speak with Globe reporter Joshua Kane about his new book that looks at what happened when Google's parent company tried to build a smart city in Toronto. Joshua Kane was covering tech, business and culture for The Globe and Mail

when he started reporting on a neighborhood in Toronto called Quayside. What was interesting about that project is that it was being built by Sidewalk Labs, a company owned by Alphabet, which also owns Google. His new book, Sideways, The City Google Couldn't Buy, is the story of what happened. We discussed why Sidewalk Labs failed and what lessons we learned from that whole roller coaster. Here's our conversation. Okay, so in 2017, Toronto found itself in another tale as old as time, which is a large company convincing governments to buy into a highfalutin plan or, as some might call it, the monorail episode from The Simpsons, right?

Yeah. So the monorail episode of The Simpsons from 1993, written by Conan O'Brien, was basically a huckster played by the late, great Phil Hartman comes to town and tries to sell the city something that will put it on the map. The name's Landley, Lyle Landley. And I come before you good people tonight with an idea. Probably the greatest. Oh, it's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville idea. Now, wait just a minute. We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville.

That kind of thing for cities that are deeply insecure is, you know, quite attractive for them to want to welcome and potentially invest in. And there are a lot of parallels between what happened in that episode of The Simpsons, which also becomes the epigraph of my book on this affair, and the Sidewalk Labs project to develop a neighborhood just a bit a kilometer south of where we're sitting right now in the Globe and Mail newsroom. Well, let's talk about some of those parallels. So how did things go down with Sidewalk Labs? Sidewalk Labs being a subsidiary company of Alphabet, which also owns Google.

This was a company that sort of was proposing something for the Quayside neighborhood, right? Yeah. So what they – Sidewalk was sort of the urban design subsidiary of Alphabet and they wanted to, in their words, reimagine cities from the internet up with a significant amount of connectivity so that a lot more processes could be automated, a lot more data could be collected to learn about how people move about cities because if you know that Google is a company that has sort of tracked and understood how we move around the internet, the physical world really is the next frontier for that kind of understanding about human behavior that in this particular capitalistic model can also be a massive moneymaker for a company that has already a lot of money to invest in these sorts of things. And so they were proposing a neighborhood that was going to be filled with sort of AI-powered heating and cooling on a building and neighborhood-wide scale.

Sensors at intersections might adapt to higher or lower traffic by – be they for vehicles or bicycles or pedestrians. There was going to be a network of underground garbage sorting robots that might also move freight from place to place so they can manage your package delivery and maybe even sneak in your door and drop off your Amazon package so it doesn't necessarily need to be at risk of being stolen. And so a lot of just really interesting processes that would have been sort of made more efficient or automated and allowed for the ability to collect data in such a way that they could improve the product, much the way that Google collects data about how people search in order to be able to improve the search results. If you learn about how people are moving about a

city, you can think, oh, well, maybe we can design a new technology to make that easier. A lot of this on its face sounds pretty good, right? Building from the internet up, cool robots, making cities better or improving the data we have about cities so that we can make them better. What could go wrong, right? Well, when the second you start talking about data collection, you start bringing up pretty significant and realistic privacy concerns because we're in a world now where data is compromised pretty

regularly. Data is sold in open marketplaces, stuff that we didn't even realize was being collected about us in our travels online or stuff that we did consent to being collected about us that might wind up in nefarious hands and details about ourselves are now pretty consistently at risk to bad actors. And as a result, the stakes are so much higher. And a lot of controversy was generated because of that. But that might not actually be the biggest controversy. Because there was also issues around this about land and who gets to own and develop

some of the most valuable underdeveloped real estate in North America. This is adjacent to downtown Toronto. But then there was a third major issue that a lot of people got very frustrated about this. And this one's almost a little bit more esoteric, a little bit more philosophical, which is who gets to decide what the future of cities looks like? Because we are in this thing called a democracy where people work together. They elect people to devise rules about the society that we live in. And in a lot of ways, that takes the form of policy. Now, when a private sector company comes in and says, we would like to do X or Y, often a policy needs to be designed to guide that that is designed by the people so that the people's rights and freedoms are protected.

But there were a lot of issues that came up where Sidewalk Labs was proposing policy, including around privacy. And as a result, people started worrying about what happens when the private sector encroaches in public sector decision making. So there was a whole lot of controversy and a whole lot of, I think, was associated with Google. At that time, there was a lot of tech optimism. Obviously, things did not work out with Toronto and Sidewalk. When did things really start to fall apart and why? Things started flipping in mid-2018, right around the time when this quote-unquote tech

lash began with the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, people started realizing that just because you can collect all this data doesn't mean that it's going to be entirely positive. And that sort of created this rift in society in general, but that also changed the tone of the public reaction to a certain degree against the Sidewalk Labs saga here in Toronto. So the Keysight project ultimately fell apart in 2020 and Sidewalk Labs itself dissolved in 2021. Was there a way this could have worked out in Toronto that this wasn't necessarily the inevitable outcome? Yes, if Sidewalk Labs had taken a bit of a different approach to the city.

A lot of the people who were quite frustrated with Sidewalk Labs were frustrated just a bit the way they argued that the company was sort of steamrolling in, promising the world but expecting the world to be handed to them. If they had come in and worked with governments or if governments had said we would like to do a quote-unquote smart city, how should we go about this? And what are we looking for in the future of cities? I think they would have avoided a lot of the controversies around, particularly the power dynamic between the public and private sector, but also about data collection. If the government is saying, what kind of data could be collected? And can we set up guardrails before we even invite a company to come in and say, this is what the future of cities could look like. But at the end of the day, the project didn't work because Sidewalk Labs wanted to work with more land than it was ever promised.

The request for proposals was for 12 acres. It promised the potential for more down the road. They wanted that more upfront because it would have been an enormous investment. That makes sense from a business perspective. So in the end, I'm not sure if Sidewalk Labs could have ever the project was approached in a different way, it could have been a grand success. But again, it's really, really hard to speculate. So who knows? I want to talk a bit about the public response to Sidewalk Labs and the Keysight Project.

And I've been to a few of your book Q&As, and there tends to be this question that gets asked, and it goes something like this. Isn't this a story ultimately about the success of civic action, that Toronto should be proud that Torontonians stood up to rebuff the efforts of some nefarious corporation? That's not really what happened here though, right? Yeah. I mean, for all of the efforts that Sidewalk Labs did put into its own PR campaign, there were also, you know, people who were actively a part of opposing it. And in some of them, but not all of their views that, you know, Sidewalk walked away because it felt citizens said we don't want this. Sidewalk Labs didn't really pay that much heed to the

opposition. They would respond to the individual criticisms, but they were still planning on going forward with this pretty strongly right until the end when they realized that economically couldn't work. So Sidewalk Labs didn't build in Toronto because Sidewalk Labs couldn't make a business case for itself fundamentally. The book is not necessarily pessimistic about civic activism and civic pushback, right? I mean, the smart city movement is a going concern. We're going to see developments maybe not as high profile as Keysight, but these kinds of efforts are going to be continuing to crop up around the world.

Civic action still has a place in that, right? Absolutely. And what happened here in Toronto, it took a lot of the opponents of Sidewalk Labs to really clarify what issues were at stake for the future of cities so that future generations, when they look at what happened here in Toronto, can take a look at what happened and say, okay, well, these are the issues that wound up being at stake. Can we learn from what happened here in Toronto? And if there wasn't such a sort of robust public discussion about this project, you know, these sorts of things could happen again. But now that these sort of, I guess, you could characterize it as mistakes have been made, but people can learn from those as they try to think about how they want to work in embedding new technologies in other cities or just, again, the same sort of broad philosophical question of what is the role that private companies should have in the future of cities.

And all these issues were really raised by a lot of the activists and the opponents who were against the project. Then why do you think people are looking for this kind of narrative? Why do you think people are coming to your book readings and saying, didn't Toronto do good? People are always looking for a David versus Goliath story. And I think that's a very easy story to imprint upon what happened. People really, you know, who are looking at big tech, you tech, a lot of people from before the tech lash, but even more people since the tech lash began in roughly 2018 are looking to see how everyday people can push back against what they see as an enormous concentration of power in the hands of the few in the private sector. And so, you know, it's easy and a convenient narrative to absolutely imprint that upon what happened here in Toronto.

And to some people, I think that will be helpful in their understanding of cities going forward. I can't, you know, shoot down that interpretation, but it certainly is, you know, something that has happened a lot and something that a lot of people have been sort of taking away from this story. Well, it makes sense. People want to understand it with a story they know. After all, Main Street's still all cracked and broken. Sorry, guys.

The mob has spoken. Thanks, Josh, for joining us. Thanks for having me. On the next episode of City Space, we'll be speaking about the future of emergency medicine in our cities. ER visits in Canada are increasing at a much higher rate than population growth. This is leading to packed waiting rooms, dangerous treatment delays, and mounting staff shortages.

We'll take a look at the conditions that have led to this crisis and talk about whether it's time to rethink the way we are asked to rely on emergency departments. City Space is produced by Julia De Laurentiis Johnston and Kyle Fulton. Our theme song is by Andrew Austin. Our executive producer is Kieran Rana. Thanks to John Lawrence and Joshua Kane for joining us today.

If you like what you heard, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and tell your favorite city dweller about City Space, too. I'm Adrian Lee. Thanks for listening, and talk to you soon.