This article was taken from the December 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Over the last five years, salespeople from a handful of global technology and engineering companies -- IBM, Cisco and Siemens, among others -- have fanned out across the planet. Their mission?
To convince our mayors of the urgent need for a digital upgrade to our cities and towns. Cities need to become "smart" in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century, they say. The pitch for these shrink-wrapped solutions is hard to resist in a world of emissions mandates, tightening budgets and rising citizen expectations. But what about citizens themselves?
For much of modern history, citizens have been sidelined in the planning of cities. Their shape was dictated by titanic figures with big plans. But, by the 60s, the engineers' vision of "progress" was called into question by neighbourhood activists.
Perhaps unwittingly, they held a view presaged at the turn of the 20th century by Scotsman Patrick Geddes, an evolutionary biologist turned sociologist who argued that urban revitalisation of industrial Britain would only work if the entire citizenry took part. "Civics", as Geddes called it, was a toolkit citizens and planners alike could use to understand and rehabilitate the metropolis. As we think about building smart cities, to counter the misleading promises of technologists, I propose a new civics:
Opt in to smart: Don't default to digital technology. Most of our problems can, in fact, be solved through policy, better plans or more clever design.
Roll out your own network: Cities around the world have built or taken control of their electric power grids. The same economics apply to broadband - don't shy away from stepping in when markets fail.
Build a web: The race is on for control of the protocols and choke points of smart-city infrastructure. But, instead of building a rigidly unified urban operating system, build a web of open technologies.
Extend public ownership: Everywhere, governments are privatising and reducing their role. But cities can and should take a more active role as data brokers, to improve management and to safeguard citizens from misuse of personal data.
Model transparently: The most powerful information in the smart city is the code that controls it. Expose the algorithms of its software and decision-support tools to public scrutiny.
Fail gracefully: The smart city is unmanageable without a computer at the helm. Set high expectations for reliability and invest in manual backups.
Build locally, trade globally: Don't just cut and paste smart solutions from one place to another. Build for local conditions, but modularise your designs so translatable pieces can be shared around the world.
Crowdsource with care: Without heed, crowdsourcing is often tantamount to privatisation, and leaves vulnerable citizens behind. Don't use it to replace government, but to augment and supplement it.
Connect everyone: Smart cities leave people out - until they connect, register and log in. Take extra care to ensure no one is left out of the loop.
Slow data: Amid all of today's "big data", we often forget we can design things to collect the important bits.
Wire cities to collect just a few bits that can change the way we behave and get us off the energy treadmill - the harder we work at efficiency, the more we consume.
Anthony Townsend is the author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for A New Utopia *(WW Norton
& Co)*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
