Good.
From the aptly titled City Monitor:
Growing backlash against big technology companies, combined with the pandemic, has led to diminishing enthusiasm for a term that once dominated the conversation around the future of cities.
We’re not the first to argue that it may be time to retire the phrase “smart cities”, and the evidence of late suggests that the tech industry itself is waking up to the reality that it needs to rethink what and how it’s trying to sell to local governments.
Smart cities surfaced as a concept more than 20 years ago and served as an umbrella term to describe a large and varied set of emerging technologies that seemed destined to help metros operate more efficiently. The internet of things for municipalities has to date included everything from simple sensors that allow transportation engineers to track cycle lane usage to full-blown smart-city operations centres that brought to mind scenes from Minority Report.
By the middle of the past decade, it was common to see vast sums of grant funding made available to local governments that were keen to join the innovation bandwagon. Smart-city challenges spurred metros of all sizes to adopt new technologies, sometimes to the good but also, it now seems clear, for the sake of becoming a member of the growing global club of cutting-edge communities. Dozens if not hundreds of conferences, marketplaces and expos emerged to showcase the latest gee-whiz gadgets that cities could buy to transform themselves. To pursue a smart-city strategy was to be seen as relevant and forward-thinking, whether or not the problems a local government was aiming to solve would necessarily be best served by an expensive new monitoring system or software package.
Criticism of the culture of the smart city predates the coronavirus pandemic. Concerns around privacy, of who should own or control public data and to what extent technology is always the answer could be heard loud and clear at least a couple of years before Covid-19 changed the world. Backlash against the practices of companies like Amazon and Facebook helped spur the grassroots movement that ultimately contributed to the cancellation in May of a major Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto. That the urban-innovations unit embedded within Google’s parent company cited economic uncertainty amid the onset of the pandemic as its reason for changing course was almost beside the point – the Quayside plan had already been scaled down so significantly in the face of community pressure that its viability was no longer clear.
The pandemic took much of the remaining air out of the smart-cities bubble. Last summer, City Monitor reported that more smart-city project deployments would be delayed or scrapped in the face of budget and revenue uncertainty, and that city governments were in the midst of shifting their priorities towards economic recovery and digital equity. Since then, one of the industry’s biggest players, Cisco, announced it would pull the plug on its flagship smart-city software....
....MUCH MORE
Now salt the earth the idea grew in and never mention smart cities again.
Surveillance cities? Meh, at least that's honest.
