Redefining What A Smart City Means.
Are you saying my city isn’t ‘smart’?
That’s the response I got from a city leader after, while sitting on a panel, I’d said ‘I think city x needs to take a smart city approach to the future’. I couldn’t say ‘yes’ (even if I thought the city wasn’t smart in the technological sense) and I couldn’t say ‘no’ (or my 5-minute diatribe before the question would have been rendered pointless. This was in my heady days of technology utopianism. I asked the city leader, ‘what would you say makes a smart city?’. And he proceeded to redefine smart cities for me with one phrase; humane technology.
Our traditional definition of a ‘smart city’ has always been a modern urban area that uses information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve operations. In the Nature article ‘Smart Cities and the Urban Digital Divide’ by Andrea Caragliu & Chiara F. Del Bo, the authors analyze whether Smart City characteristics increase the digital divide within cities. They found that higher urban ‘smartness’ is associated with lower digital divides. Suggesting that smart cities, in the traditional sense as defined above, actually worsen inequality.
What the paper did differently is measure smartness using indicators like human capital (an addition), infrastructure, and e-government. It calculated the digital divide by looking at gaps in owning and using digital devices and the analysis of 181 European cities shows that urban smartness - increasing the capacity of your human capital in your city through digital technology access - reduces the divide.
These findings suggest a few things about how we actually build smart cities
Integration of digital infrastructure like public WiFi into new projects. The image below from Twitter shows how NYC has managed to provide better wifi for its residents and increase its human capital capacity. This inclusive connectivity helps cities like NYC be smarter and more equitable. We need to prioritize projects in underserved areas.
Urban planners should couple smart technology with extensive digital skills training. Workshops in libraries and schools can promote effective tech use. Planners can also zone to cluster mixed-income housing near digital amenities.
Policymakers should expand broadband, provide subsidies for devices, and fund digital literacy programs. Low-cost municipal internet helps connect the disadvantaged. Programs at community centers can teach digital skills.
Overall, the study indicates smart cities need not widen inequality. But cities must proactively foster digital access, adoption, and literacy. Forward-looking policies and planning can spread the benefits of technology more equally. Only then can smart cities improve opportunities for all residents. We need to redefine our definition of what truly makes a city smart. As I will start to say to end all my articles, we already have the technology what we need is empathy.