Towards Utopia
A study on people’s visions of the ideal city and how these ideals
relate to the current vision of the smart city
Master thesis for
MA New Media and Digital Culture,
University of Amsterdam
by
Kyra Delsing
Student number: 11019948 Supervisor: dhr. dr. J. A. A. Simons Second reader: dhr. dr. M. D. Tuters Date of completion: June 20th, 2016
Word count: 20121
Abstract
Throughout history, people have been searching for the ideal place to live. Nowadays, the debate about this ideal is triggered by the role technology plays in our daily urban lives. Because people do not know the consequences of a new technology until it has been fully incorporated, these Utopias and Dystopias will influence their choices and thus the way people will use the technology in the future. One very popular ideal in urban planning today is the vision of the smart city. Even though there is no clear definition, technology seems to play an important role in each of the many versions of the smart city. But whether people want, or can control a city completely mediated by technology are questions people are forgetting to ask. On top of that, the smart city is presented to us as if it is the only scenario out there. Therefore, instead of providing a single ‘ideal’, this thesis gives an overview of the many different visions people have of their future cities. The primary question is: How do people, involved in the development of cities, envision the ideal city, what role technology should play in these new cities and how these visions correspond to the vision of the smart city? To answer this question ten participants, working in or with knowledge on urban planning in the Netherlands, are interviewed about their ideal city and its technology. These interviews show that, despite the many differences between the visions of the participants, there seems to be a discursive pattern analogous with the vision of the smart city which people cannot seem to escape from.
Keywords
Smart city, Utopia, Dystopia, Urban Planning, Information Technology
Table of contents
Introduction 4 1. The necessity of a Utopia 7 2. Defining the smart city 9 3. Can IT lead the way to paradise? 11 4. From government to governance 14 5. A short history of urban planning 16 5.1 High modernity 16 5.2 Le Corbusier 17 5.3 A calculable city 18 5.4 Jane Jacobs 18 5.5 History repeating itself 19 6. The smart city as Utopia 20 6.1 Canonical cities 20 6.1.1 New Songdo 20 6.1.2 PlanIT Valley 21 6.1.3 Masdar 21 6.2 The new smart city 22 6.2.1 Madrid 22 6.2.2 São Paulo 23 7. The smart city as Dystopia 24 7.1 Privacy 24 7.2 Autonomy 25 7.3 Equality 26 7.4 The buggy city 26 7.5 Opting out 27 8. Do we even want a smart city? 28 9. Imagining Utopia 30 10. Methodology 32 10.1 Research design 32 10.1.1 Smart city projects in the Netherlands 32 10.2 Interviews 33 10.2.1 Sample 33 10.2.2 Data collection 33 10.2.3 Data analysis 34 10.3 Quadrants 34 11. Findings 36 11.1 Description of the participants 36 11.2 Utopia 36 11.3 Dystopia 39 11.4 Urban planning today 40 11.5 The hegemony of the smart city 42 11.6 Quadrants 43Discussion 46 Conclusion 48 Bibliography 50 Appendix 1: Email to participants 54 Appendix 2: Topic list 55 Appendix 3: Informed Consent 56 Appendix 4: Codetree 58
Introduction
According to cognitive science scholar Edwin Hutchins, modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen not because modern people are smarter, but because they have constructed smarter environments (Hutchins in Hayles 289). At the 1997 World Forum on smart cities it was stated that around 50,000 cities all over the world will develop smart initiatives over the next decade (Hollands 304). This increase in smart initiatives is a result of a new economy where Information Technology (IT) creates global competition, not just for material products, but also for social services. According to Roger Caves, it is an economy in which innovation is more important than mass production, and where people buy new concepts instead of machines (6). Because of these changes, cities are reexamining the way they provide services to their citizens (Caves 6).
Over the past few years, the concept of smart cities has gained even more attention amongst businesses, governments, the media and academia. As stated by new media scholar Rob Kitchin, the phrase ‘smart cities’ refers to two phenomena: on the one hand, ‘the use of information technologies to stimulate economic development’ and on the other hand ‘the extensive embedding of software enabled technologies into the fabric of cities to augment urban management’ (n. page). Even though there is still much uncertainty about the meaning of ‘smartness’, the smart city is believed to help solve a wide range of urban issues and thus improve the quality of city life (Lange n. page). These solutions however, are almost always technological. According to Kitchin, ‘it is almost as if things can be boiled down to a simple equation: technology plus innovation equals urban sustainability’ (Kitchin in Humphries n. page).
The role new technologies play in people’s lives is often seen as a rather practical affair. But Urban Media and Citizen Empowerment scholar Martijn de Waal believes the new urban infrastructure of IT offers more than just a few convenient applications for citizens to organize their practical lives more efficiently, arguing that it changes the way people organize their social, economic and cultural lives (47). The ways in which people use this infrastructure influences the way they move through the city, the places they visit, the meaning they give to these places and the contacts they make and maintain. But the embedment of a new technology is a complex process where the result cannot be determined beforehand. In most cases, the introduction of a new technology goes hand in hand with extensive discussions about its use and social impact. Other times people even claim the new technology will cause a societal fracture or a revolution (de Waal 47). Once people get used to its presence, they incorporate the new technologies into their daily lives until they do not even notice them anymore and it becomes hard to imagine a world where people would live without them or have possible alternatives. This period, between the introduction and the moment of embedment, is the most interesting time for cultural analysis. In that moment, even though people do not yet know how
they are going to use the technology, many different people with multiple interests are trying to appropriate it for their own purposes (de Waal 48).
But as stated earlier, despite the proclaimed advantages and disadvantages of the implementation of IT in cities, their impact remains unclear (Chourabi et al. 2291). Because of this uncertainty, critics are advocating to open up the debate about the adoption of technology, arguing that the more energy cities invest in running according to ‘smart’ principles, the easier it becomes to neglect the aspects of our problems that have no technological solution (Kirkham n. page). In his novel, ‘Seveneves’, science fiction author Neal Stephenson coins the term ‘Amistics’: ‘the choices that different cultures make as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives.’ (Stephenson in Chatfield n. page). The term is derived from the Amish principle of the selective use of technology. There are about 40 different Amish subgroups, all of whom practice selective use rather than outright rejection, evaluating if a new technology would improve their way of life in the light of their values. According to technology theorist Tom Chatfield, ‘the Amish practice an undervalued discipline: critical thinking about technology’ (n. page.). But because of the acceleration of technological development, an increasing amount of technological breakthroughs are looming in the horizon and it seems people are becoming overloaded with new developments, making it difficult for people to find ways to address the many changes they are likely going to face (Larsen n. page).
Throughout history, people have been searching for the ideal place to live. However, during the past 50 years, there have been multiple moments in which the debate about the future of the city rose above itself. At such a moment the debate does not only incorporate the practical solutions of a new technology or a new policy approach, but it also becomes broader and grows from discussing the development of a city to a debate about the future of the city as a society (de Waal 9). According to de Waal, such a philosophical moment awaits us again at the start of the 21st century. This time the debate is triggered by the role digital technologies and mobile media play in our daily urban lives (de Waal 10). First of all, since the smart city seems to be the dominant, if not the only vision people incorporate in the debates about their future cities, this thesis questions what it means for a city to be smart. Secondly, because of the new role technology, and specifically IT, plays in city development it is important to find out what this role exactly entails and how people believe technology should be implemented in our cities. This brings us to the last element of the thesis in which the question will be answered how people envision their ideal city. Instead of providing a single ‘ideal’, it is important to find out how different people with different backgrounds envision their city in the future. The question central to this thesis is as follows: How do people, involved in the development of cities, envision the ideal city, what role technology should play in these new cities and how these visions
To provide an answer to this question, it is important to first find out why people should study Utopian and Dystopian visions. What do they represent? And how do they influence people’s lives? Even though the smart city vision seems to be the most dominant vision, there is no clear understanding of what the term ‘smart city’ exactly implies. Questions like what it means for a city to be ‘smart’ and what the consequences are of these meanings will be answered in the second chapter. Because IT seems to play an important role in these visions about our future cities, especially in the discourse around smart cities, the third chapter will discuss if and how IT could provide us with a better future. What do people have to keep in mind when developing and implementing new technologies? Besides thinking about what an ideal city looks like and how technology can help reach these Utopias it is also important to discuss who is going to play a role in the development of these future cities. Who should take more responsibility and who less? This will be addressed in the fourth chapter of this thesis.
To get an even better understanding of the smart city vision and where it originated, chapter 5 will provide a historical overview of urban planning starting at 19th century Modernism and the cybernetic view of the city as a system of systems. After this historical perspective, using the views of wellknown futurists and smart city projects, chapter 6 and 7 will describe the smart city as a Utopia and a Dystopia. What do the example smart cities look like and what are the possible pitfalls when IT is used to fix urban problems. Besides the fact that people should be aware of these pitfalls, there seems to be a new trend towards ‘old’ technologies. In this phenomenon, called the postdigital, instead of using the newest digital technologies on the market, people use the technology best suited for the job. On top of that, technology is becoming more complex, making it harder for people to understand the technology, let alone influence its development. For this reason, Chapter 8 will focus on the question whether people still want a smart city.
Chapter 9 will argue that it is important to find out how people imagine their ideal city. This way it is possible to provide an overview of the differences and similarities between these visions. In the empirical part of this thesis, people working in or with knowledge about urban planning in the Netherlands are interviewed to find out how they imagine their ideal city, what role they think technology should play in this Utopia, and where they draw the line between Utopia and Dystopia. After analysing the interviews, the views of each participant are visualized on a graph divided into four quadrants, showing topdown and bottomup on the yaxis and technocentric and humancentred on the xaxis. Concluding, this thesis states that because of the hegemonic view of the smart city, the debate about our future cities becomes impossibly difficult.
1. The necessity of a Utopia
Today, technological development is increasing in speed and is spreading all over the world (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 7). The acceleration and complexity surrounding technological innovation challenges our ability to adapt. More often people have to think about new strategies, interventions and instruments in order to be able to deal with the complex society and the unpredictable processes that lie beneath it (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 9). In this increasingly complex and technology driven society, technologies are more interconnected than ever before (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 7). Not only with each other, but also with the people who use them. This interconnectedness of people and technologies makes the impact of new innovations more tangible, but at the same time harder to fathom, predict or steer in the right direction (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 8). What is certain however, is that there are often big differences in the expectations and the views people have on the consequences of technological innovations (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 7). Nowadays, when a new technology is introduced, people increasingly welcome it with a lot of fuss, communicating either their concerns or enthusiasm for the new innovation. Because people do not know the consequences of a new technology, they fill in this uncertainty with their own expectations. These responses are expressions of their values and morals and show how people envision their future (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 31).
‘The theory of the cultural lag’ by the American sociologist William Ogburn (1964) provides a framework for understanding the extreme responses people express when a new technology is introduced. Because the effects of a technology will not be apparent to people for some time after it is introduced to a society, there is a lag between the introduction of a technology and its cultural adaptation. During this lag, both Utopian and Dystopian accounts of technologies are more likely to reflect people's own preferences and values rather than an account of the technology's impact on their lives (Ogburn in Fisher and Wright n. page). Since these responses differ a lot between people, it is important to consider the discourse surrounding new technological developments as it will affect how the technology will eventually be used by a society (Fisher and Wright n. page). The visions people have about the future influences their thinking, and thus, the choices they make (Vanderbilt n. page). Overall, technological developments are influenced by the societal values, challenges and needs of a society. But on the other hand, the use of technology also influences people’s social and moral values that in turn influence how they perceive the future (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 28). What these values are and their importance differs between people. These
plays in social change is only expanding. In ‘On Utopias and Dystopias’ sociologists Dana Fisher and Larry Wright state that ‘not only is technologically driven social change extending beyond the Western world, it has also become the product of social change as well as the driving force behind it’ (n. page). But just because technological development is getting harder to comprehend, the futures people envision are becoming more important, especially now technology in some places seems to have become a separate (and sometimes invisible) layer between the city and its citizens.
According to Michael Neuman, the way people imagine the ideal place to live, their Utopias and Dystopias, has influenced the modern urban planning movement from the beginning and has played a dominant role in the discourse around planning and design (344). Today, more people seem to believe societies grow because of technological sophistication and social integration. This rather popular but deterministic view of technological development, seems strange when you realise that we live in a time when notions of contingency and social construction of technology are more popular than ever among social scientists and philosophers of technology. However, political theorist Langdon Winner explains that ‘the experience of being swept up by unstoppable processes of technologycentred change is, in fact, stronger than it has ever been’ (998). This way of thinking about technology and its implementation in urban areas plays a central role in the discussions about the smart city. A view that has increased in popularity over the last few years, becoming one of the, if not the, most dominant urban planning vision there is.
Because of the growing role technology plays in urban planning and the enthusiasm for the smart city visions, people’s Utopias and Dystopias are now more important than ever before. Knowing how people envision their future city will help understand what values people have and how the technology will likely be embedded in the future. But, before questioning what these Utopias and Dystopias look like, it is important to find out what role technology can play in urban planning, what do people have to keep in mind when implementing technology in a city, and first of all, what does it mean for a city to be smart? Large technology companies play an important role in the development of cities and therefore also in defining what the ideal city looks like. Especially in the case of the smart city, this influence is clearly present. However, there are many other visions that contrast these corporate views on urban planning. The next chapter will take a closer look at the many different meanings of the smart city.
2. Defining the smart city
Although there is an increase in the frequency people use the phrase ‘smart city’, there is still not a clear and consistent understanding of the concept among practitioners and academics (Chourabi et al. 2289). Moreover, much of the available information and knowledge about smart cities cannot be found in scientific publications and academic journals, but in press releases, technical reports, independent research, or in blogs on the internet (Martín 7). However, this body of information is still rather short on specifics (Greenfield 222) and clearly shows that there is no consensus about what it means for a city to be smart (Hollands 304). Not only are there differences in the conception of a smart city, but the academic, business and government literature is also largely divided with respect to the ideological rhetoric and theoretical orientation underpinning their vision (Kitchin n. page). On top of that, professor of sociology Robert Hollands argues that the label smart city is often used for marketing purposes instead of referring to actual change or improvement (305). As a result, it often implies ‘a positive and rather uncritical stance towards urban development. Which city, by definition, does not want to be smart?’ (Hollands 305). For these reasons, industrial ecologist Carlos Varela Martín believes the smart city should be seen as ‘a social construct of features and trends shared to a different extent by a number of experts’ rather than a formal definition that can be applied objectively (7).
However, when looking at all the different notions of the smart city, one thing keeps returning: the belief that technology, and specifically IT, should be the means to reach Utopia. American writer and Urbanist Adam Greenfield explains that the phrase ‘smart city’ originally referred exclusively to a small number of discrete development projects initiated over the past decade by large technology companies, like IBM, Cisco and Siemens, whose goal is to design urbanscale environments from the ground up with informationprocessing capabilities already embedded in them (65). These new cities are presented as examples of the urban environment citizens might inhabit once their cities have been embedded with IT somewhere in the near future (Greenfield 76). On the other hand, the term smart cities also refers to the drive to retrofit IT into already existing urban places. Although this differs from the smart cities as envisioned by the tech companies in the sense that these are existing cities with a specific history and culture, instead of new cities built from the ground up, the same technologies, techniques and practices are used to upgrade them (Greenfield 111). This second use of the term smart cities seems more accepted in Western countries.
Today, enterprises like IBM, Siemens and Cisco are seen as the most prominent parties involved in the discourse about smart cities (Greenfield 154). Greenfield argues that
“as long as cities have payrolls to run, services to administer, vehicle fleets to track and
revenues to collect, these companies will be somewhere in the mix and, for this reason, so will their ideas about what constitutes a smart city and how we should implement information technology in the contemporary urban environment” (Greenfield 1324).
Their techniques, methods and frameworks are increasingly being adopted by other companies and governments in their views on and policies for smart cities (Greenfield 1324). This influence of enterprises is nothing new, but it seems to be more apparent when it concerns questions about IT (Greenfield 1365). According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault such a discursive regime not only promotes and makes common sense of the message these companies want to send out, but also conditions and disciplines people. The power of a discursive regime is persuading people to start believing in and acting according to this vision. This could make it harder for citizens to oppose the Utopias that the companies have envisioned for them. However, a discursive regime does not solely work topdown, but also through ‘diffused microcircuits of power’, giving citizens the power to change this regime if they would want to (Foucault in Kitchin and Dodge 19).
Besides the rather hegemonic discourse around smart cities, there is a small group of more critically oriented urban scholars. These critics have identified four general shortcomings of the smart city agenda: a lack of a detailed understanding or clear vision of the term and it’s corresponding initiatives, the use of example cities and onesize fits all narratives, the fact that there are no indepth empirical case studies of specific smart city initiatives, and at last, the many differences between smart city developments in different locations and weak collaborative engagement with various stakeholders (Kitchin n. page). A few of the most influential critics are: Adam Greenfield (Against the Smart City), Robert Hollands (Will the real Smart City please stand up?) and Anthony Townsend (Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia). Their views will play a central role in this thesis.
3. Can IT lead the way to paradise?
In a speech entitled ‘Smart Growth for a Smart City: A New Economic Vision for Halifax’, Brian Crowley, the President of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, states that ‘the three most important things now affecting the future prosperity and development of human communities are technology, technology, and technology’ (Crowley in Hollands 307). The digital revolution is a new part of the third industrial revolution. Like any other industrial revolution finds its grounding roots in new technologies and their corresponding infrastructures, the digital revolution is all about Information Technologies and digital infrastructures like the Internet (Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Milieu 1). Today’s leaders of large cities are extremely interested in the development of new ITs to facilitate ‘the best’ social atmosphere for their citizens but also to promote their city to others (Bulu 64). The integration of IT is one of the most mentioned features in the characterization of a smart city, being presented as an evolution, or even as a revolution compared to cities without it (Martín 11). This chapter will therefore look at how IT is implemented in a smart city and what people should keep in mind when implementing these technologies into their daily urban lives.
On the 19th of May 2013, the Boston Globe wrote that smart city advocates envision a future in which ‘techsavvy cities offer better civic services, move us faster through traffic, reduce waste and greenhouse gas emissions, and gather so much data that the complexities of urban life can be understood and smoothly managed’ (Humphries n. page). New IT’s are believed to attract businesses and jobs, create a more efficient environment and boost the productivity and competitiveness of both the public and the private sector (Kitchin n. page). But beside improving the social and economic sectors in a city, IT’s also provide the possibility to monitor, manage and regulate a smart city in realtime. This could make it easier to ‘efficiently control the urban utilities and services, enforce public safety and security and effectively respond to economic and environmental shocks’ (Kitchin n. page). Moreover, these realtime data, can help depict, model and predict urban processes and simulate future urban development (Kitchin n. page). According to Kitchin and Dodge, IT’s enable the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society since they alter the conditions through which social and economic relations take place (Kitchin and Dodge 12).
Even though this all sounds very promising, there are different opinions about the role IT should play in the development of a city (Martín 11). According to Hollands, IT is a very interesting enabler, but it is not the most crucial factor in defining the smart city. Too often the smart city is not defined by the goals that it wants to obtain, but by the means that it uses (n. page). Agreeing with Hollands, Martín argues that ‘having the tools is important, but we should not lose sight of the ultimate objectives a city wants to obtain’ (101). Kitchin expands on this and states that the biggest
running their cities according to these ‘smart’ principles, there is a bigger chance they will neglect the problems that do not have a technological solution. Besides, there has been only little critical reflection on the wider implications of the implementation of IT in urban development (Kitchin n. page). Different ways of implementing technology could create very different cities, but not all of them will be desirable places to live in (Humphries n. page).
According to de Waal, the current debate about smart cities focuses on the possible effects of two specific affordances (deferred uses) of digital media on urban society (282). The first affordance, the possibility to use digital media as a ‘writing tool’, provides citizens with the possibility to save and share their urban experiences, allowing them to annotate spaces with pictures, experiences, stories and reviews through digital networks like Facebook and Twitter. This way, people can expose their lives to others, and connect to people who are not physically at the same location as they are. But citizens are not the only ones who can capture urban life with digital media. Companies, governments and institutions increasingly register everything that happens in a city using sensors. This information is then saved in large databases. Nowadays, even objects, with the help of sensors and communication technology, can describe their experience of a city (de Waal 282). In most cases however, this information gathered by companies and governments is not available to the public. The second affordance is that of a ‘territory device’: ‘a machine or a system which can be used to invoke a spatial territory’ (de Waal 282). Digital and mobile media slowly grow into means people can use to shape the experience of a certain space. For example, people could use their smartphone as a filter or a membrane, allowing access to people who are not physically present on site, or by personalizing their surroundings. But, they can also be guided to places in their surroundings that correspond with their personal profile (de Waal 282). Again, this same technology is also often used by businesses, governments and institutions who have the possibility to grant or deny access, or give priority to people based on whether or not they fit a certain profile. They have the power to shape our surroundings in such a way, that they are attractive to one group of people but unattractive to the other (de Waal 283).
Most people in the Western world are entering an age in which computing has become pervasive and ubiquitous. According to Greenfield, in this new era, referred to as ‘everyware’, software mediates almost every aspect of everyday life (Kitchin and Dodge 9). De Waal describes a similar world, stating that a layer of software and hardware is beginning to function as a so called 'scene machine’. ‘The way urban space is experienced, is not only determined by the physical environment itself and who is present, but also by the interventions that make software and IT possible’ (de Waal 13). In other words, people experience the city around them through the software environments of their computers and cell phone screens. For this reason, people have to keep in mind that the software running on technology, like for example mobile phones, is not a neutral
environment. The way it is programmed, the constraints and opportunities it offers, determines the way people perceive their surroundings and can be seen as what the French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour named a 'mediator': ‘Mediators transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour in de Waal 32). New technological developments make it possible for IT to receive and process information, evaluate situations, make decisions, and, most significantly, act without human oversight or authorization. However, because software is embedded into objects and systems in often subtle and opaque ways, this all happens largely unconsciously and is often only noticed when it performs incorrectly or fails (Kitchin and Dodge 5).
Interestingly, given the increasing power and role of software, resistance to digital technologies has been remarkably low. People do not seem to mind to trade the potential negative effects off against the benefits of technology, which are often seen as substantial and even irresistible (Kitchin and Dodge 11). In this sense, a key aspect of the power of technology lies in how it seduces people. So even if technology, and specifically IT, can bring people many ways to improve urban life, it is important to first of all assess what kind of city citizens want to live in and what problems people have to solve to get there. Technology should not be seen as a goal in itself, but as a means to achieve a certain goal. However, due to the fact that we are already living in a ‘scene machine’, makes it harder for people to be aware of its influence, let alone criticize it. On top of that, people have to keep in mind that the technology is not a neutral environment and often represents the values of the company that developed it. This bring us to the question: who will be responsible for the development of a city? Will technology companies play a bigger role now technology has become such an important aspect of our urban lives? And what role will the government play when a big part of their tasks are taken over by these companies?
4. From government to governance
Today, the discussions about city planning do not only incorporate what a city should look like but also who will be responsible for what part of the development of these cities. Especially in the case of a smart city, where IT plays an important role in the development of the city, questions like who controls the projects or who owns the data should not be ignored. Not only for privacy reasons but also for issues related to democracy and control (Mason n. page). Because of the growing amount of networks in combination with an increasing diversity, societies become fundamentally differently organized. According to smart city advocates the triple helix cooperation between the private sector, knowledge institutions and the government is becoming outdated and will evolve into a so called ‘quadruple helix’, where the citizen is an important source of experience, knowledge and interests (Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur 24).
But the past few years, under the postmodern turn, there have been important shifts in the relationships between the state, market and society. Because of these shifts, urban entrepreneurialism emerged as the city had to redefine its position in relation to a new kind of capitalist development. The globalization and competitive urbanism gave rise to ‘neoliberal governance’: a shift from government to governance, where most policy initiatives aim at stimulating local economies through privatization, deregulation and liberalization. Or as Greenfield states:
“I understand neoliberalism to be a political philosophy that: calls for most essential citizen services to be privatized, on the theory that private operators are accountable to their shareholders and are therefore likely to be less wasteful, and more efficient and responsive, than publicsector bureaucracies; argues for the deregulation of activity between private actors, a sharp reduction in public oversight of business operations and limitation of the state’s legal apparatus to that sufficient to enforce contracts and property rights; maintains that the goal of prosperity for all is best served by frictionless global trade, with few or no limits on foreign investment or ownership and the elimination of tariffs; and entails the reduction of taxes to the absolute lowest level consistent with the maintenance of a minimalist state, chiefly consisting of the juridical apparatus described above and a military robust enough to ensure favored enterprises unimpeded access to markets and resources.” (Greenfield 885, 886)
As a result, the relationships between state and society have changed drastically. Professor of Geography Ronan Paddison argues that ‘the governing of cities is now shared between a complex array of institutions, many of which lay outside the conventional play of local democracy’ (n. page). Some corporate enterprises already play a big role in the development of modern cities. Besides
providing people with the tools to build the city, they also influence them with their visions of what an ideal city should look like, presenting the ‘canonical cities’ like Songdo in South Korea, Masdar in Abu Dhabi and Living PlanIT in Portugal. Chapter 6 will get to the core of the specific visions these projects represent.
According to Paddison, this shift changed politics into ‘postpolitics’. The term postpolitics does not mean the end of politics. Rather, postpolitics is defined as ‘a political formation that actually forecloses the political, that prevents the politicization of particulars’. In other words, what is discussed on the political agenda is determined by fundamental axioms like power relationships and the way the economy should be organized. This makes the political agenda unquestioned and unquestionable and triggers ‘a managerial approach’, where the government becomes a management function and loses its proper political dimension (Paddison n. page). Because of this loss of political debate, the postpolitical is believed to undervalue the role of human agency and of resistance. The visions people have of their ideal cities, how they should accommodate the diversity of political demands and how they should be planned, all form the basis of city life for its citizens, and are inevitably the subject of conflict since people’s visions differ. According to Paddison, this is exactly what city politics entails: political debate about our Utopias and Dystopias. But allowing the political agenda to be determined by power relationships and economic growth takes away this crucial element of city politics.
However, leaving the development of cities in the hands of the citizens themselves can lead to problems as well. There are not many people prepared to do the same tasks as, for example, IBM’s engineers are asked to tackle (Townsend 487). Already many civic projects show difficulties trying to expand. In most cases, they are able to solve a problem for a small group of people, but fail in trying to design a sustainable project that can connect to a larger audience (Townsend 360). And exactly these problems in scaling turn out to be the kind of tasks that big companies and professional engineers are particularly good at. According to Townsend, ‘finding ways to effectively integrate industrial engineering and grassroots tinkering is one of the keys to building smart cities well’ (Townsend 362). In his eyes, this challenge is up to the mayors of the cities and their teams, trying to mediate between both sides. So when this does not work out, they are still able to create their own initiatives, ‘doing whatever it takes to get the job done with the limited resources mayors have’
5. A short history of urban planning
During the economic crisis of 20082009 cities realized they were in competition with other cities in ways that they had never experienced before. As a result of the Internet and globalization, this competition extended from neighbor cities to cities on the other side of the world. Cities were not only competing for investments and jobs but also for new inhabitants: the Generation Y and Generation Z, who were believed to bring ‘developers of new economic strength’ (Harrison and Donnelly 5). To be able to compete with other cities, a city had to be the most attractive to live in. The vision of the smart city seemed the perfect solution for this. Although the phrase has been used very often during the past few years, there has only been a small amount of genealogical excavation of the smart city concept and how the term has been formulated and deployed over time. According to Greenfield and Townsend, the initial roots of the smart city vision lie in the high modernist urban planning of the mid20th century and the urban cybernetics of the 1970s (Kitchin n. page). Both periods and its most influential people will be discussed below.
5.1 High modernity
According to Greenfield, the core principles of the smart city were originally advanced between 1880 and 1960: ‘a period that saw the gestation and ascendancy of high modernism in urban planning’ (1145). The only innovation the smart city discourse offers, Greenfield states, is the affinity with neoliberal values (1145). During the early stages of nineteenthcentury modernization, people believed science and technological innovation would free them from the restrictions of nature and other human beings. New technological developments would improve urban living standards and social environments, and were going to lead to a better world. ‘As long as there was progress, there was no fear of going backwards, no question or doubt about the positive trajectory of fulfilment of history’s destiny, if not mission’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw 125). As a result, networks of technology became the embodiment of progress; ‘signs and wish images of a better society that was yet to arrive’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw 82).
After the First World War, sciencebased industries became the norm and the economies of European countries turned to the principles of scientific management (Kaika and Swyngedouw 131). During this period, as a result of the working conditions in the new industries, people started to comprehend that the technological fix was not going to realize their dream of freedom and progress (Kaika and Swyngedouw 131). Only the people who had control over the means of production seemed to be profiting from the technological progress and innovation (Kaika and Swyngedouw 131). The Second World War accentuated this ambiguity and multiplicity of technological systems even more,
revealing its destructive side. Technology went from being a desire to being a necessity (Kaika and Swyngedouw 132). As a result of these developments, urban technology networks and constructions were put away underground. High modernity emerged from the 1930s onwards ‘with its obsession with clarity of form, purity, functionalism and cleanliness’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw 132). All visible connections between urban life and the domestic space were removed. ‘The ideal city, the new utopia, was clean and sanitized, both in visual and literary terms’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw 134).
5.2 Le Corbusier
Technological developments had changed the world immensely and triggered a new liberating awareness that was going to deal with all kinds of historical oppression. The new architecture and city type of high modernism was a natural outcome of these developments (de Waal 186). One of the most influential people representing the ideas of high modernism, and whose work is extremely resonant with the discursive productions of the smart city, is the SwissFrench architect, theorist and visionary CharlesÉdouard Jeanneret, better known as ‘Le Corbusier’ (Greenfield 1155). In ‘Toward an Architecture’, le Corbusier describes how his society in the 1920’s was in crisis because of the new kind of economy and society triggered by the incredible speed of technological change. Although most people of his time were quite critical about their urban lives, especially industrial workers, le Corbusier was very optimistic. In his eyes, people working in the new industries should be proud to be part of a bigger process. All the products leaving the assembly lines were theirs as well. But the citizens of this new age were not yet aware of this collective experience. To make people aware, Le Corbusier believed a completely new architecture of the city was needed (de Waal 187).
Le Corbusier named a few conditions for these new cities. First of all, instead of changing the already existing cities, the new urban environment should be built on a clear site. Secondly, the architects were only allowed to use geometric structures. This way, the human being and its surroundings could be in harmony with the universal laws. In Corbusier's eyes, the mathematical algorithm forms the basis of the city: ‘Everything is possible with calculation and invention when you have tools of sufficient perfection and these tools exist’ (Le Corbusier in de Waal 189). He believed it was possible to reduce every societal problem to a simple equation thanks to the developments of modern science. But over the decade that followed, it became clear that urban environments built on Corbusian principles were incapable of supporting anything people would recognize as a high quality of life. ‘At very best, they proved to be anonymous, sterile and utterly dominated by technology’ (Greenfield 1233). During the Second World War, an important development occurred: the static mathematics were replaced by the dynamic cybernetics (de Waal 191).
5.3 A calculable city
Just like IBM turned to cities for new business during the 2008 financial crisis, the defence industry started looking for new markets for military computer technologies almost as soon as they were invented. As early as 1957, connections were being drawn between the similarities of military planning and urban planning. Not knowing how long the cold war would last, defence contractors started publishing studies in urban and public administration journals, showing their techniques and technologies like system analysis and computer simulations (Townsend 178). A wellknown example is the cybernetics research led by Norbert Wiener, who made use of wartime research on antiaircraft targeting techniques to improve predictions of an aircraft’s future position (Townsend 169). According to cybernetics, ‘everything (machines, organizations, cities, even the human mind) is a system, a balanced network of things connected by information flows. The components of any system, and the flows between them, could be represented as a set of equations that together could replicate the behavior of the whole’ (Townsend 170).
Other implementations of this kind of thinking emerged in Forrester’s ‘Urban Dynamics’, where he composed the interactions among abstract systems, like traffic, into mathematical models based on their strengths, nonlinearity, and delayed impacts. Forrester developed equations that described how various parts of the city operated and how they interacted with each other. These relationships were then programmed into a computer to create a simulation that could be used to explain how cities grow, stagnate, decline, and recover (Townsend 176). Rather than studying one city in particular, Urban Dynamics was an attempt to abstract ‘a generic system model of cities’ (Townsend 176). In these models, the complexity of a city becomes very apparent, with some models having more than thousands of variables. For a short time, these models gained some attention from the urbanist community as they were sometimes seen or portrayed as oracles that could be used to predict the future of a city. Later on however, they were mostly used by researchers to test hypotheses or confirm ideas (Harrison and Donnelly 7). But the growing amounts of data available today are blowing new life into the possibilities of creating system models for urban processes.
5.4 Jane Jacobs
One of the most influential theories on urban living and critique on high modernism originates with Jane Jacobs. According to her, modernistic planners never understood how the city really works, thinking they can create an urban environment by pushing a spatial order onto it. Modernistic planners seem to see the city as a single static entity in which spatial problems can be fixed simply by identifying a number of variables and running a fine looking calculation on them. But Jacobs
disagrees: ‘As if cities were problems [...] understandable purely by statistical analysis, predictable by the application of probability mathematics, manageable by conversion into groups of averages’ (Jacobs in de Waal 93). Rather, the city is a complex system in which order arises as a result of the interaction between multiple individual actors. In return, this order influences the lives of the individual actors (de Waal 93). At first site, the everyday life often looks chaotic, but Jacobs believes that is the beauty of it. Because of this, citizens start trusting each other and economic and cultural innovation arises. The city should be understood as a process, and to understand this process urban planners should try to study it through the lens of a microscope instead of a telescope (de Waal 94).
5.5 History repeating itself
Overall, there are indeed a lot of similarities between the original views of high modernism and cybernetics and the vision of the smart city. Take for example the idea that a smart city should best be built on a clear site, which is the case in all three canonical cities. Or the fact that with the possibility to gather immense amounts of data people can simulate the city as a whole, and use this newly gained information to understand and even predict urban processes. The critique of Jacob's on the other hand is something that, since a short period, can also be found in the discourse around smart cities, stating that the development of a city should not be forced topdown but instead should arise from the interaction between its citizens. It seems that two completely different and even contrasting views form the basis of the smart city. In the next chapter of this thesis, each side of the smart city vision will be explained in more detail while describing some example cities.
6. The smart city as Utopia
The desire to design and construct smart cities is often driven by an optimistic view of technological innovation. It is argued that implementing smart technologies will lead to more innovative and sustainable cities, greener living spaces, more democratic modes of governance and will dramatically improve urban life through better health. But how this technology is used in urban planning differs a lot. To get a better understanding of what a smart city could look like, a few example cities will be described, starting with the three canonical cities and ending with the rise of a new kind of smart city. This new form has only just started developing and is often described as the nonneoliberal smart city, and thus, the opposite of the canonical cities.
6.1 Canonical cities
New Songdo, PlanIT Valley and Masdar are often seen as the three canonical smart cities. Since all three cities have been built from scratch, on what urban planners call ‘Greenfield sites’, they are often seen as smart cities in their purest form (Greenfield 254). Besides being built on clear sites, all three initiatives are profit making projects that are initiated topdown. Although they have been criticized quite often, they are representations of what a smart city would look like without having to compromise with already existing urban areas. Or as Kitchen states: ‘they provide idealized visions of possible futures, while avoiding the messy realities of established cities’ (n. page). People have to keep in mind however, that these cities are either initiatives of private companies or private companies play a large role in their development. All three initiatives will be discussed briefly.
6.1.1 New Songdo
On the fifth of October 2005, The New York Times describes New Songdo City in South Korea, as a large ‘ubiquitous city’ where all important information systems exchange their data, and computers are built into almost everything (O’connell n. page). New Songdo is located on a manmade island of six square kilometers and is believed to be the largest private realestate development in the world. When completed, it is estimated that this $25 billion project will provide homes for 65,000 people and create another 300,000 more jobs (O’connell n. page). According to John Kim, the leader of New Songdo's Ucity planning, ‘the city's hightech infrastructure will be a giant test bed for new technologies, and the city itself will exemplify a digital way of life’, the so called ‘Ulife’. (O’connell n. page). Although digital technology is a big part of the city’s infrastructure, Ulife will not be used to test every new technology that is available. All digital services will be designed around people's needs rather than around the technology (O’connell n. page). To realize the project, Ulife teamed up
with Cisco, who is responsible for wiring every part of the city. The city is promised to ‘run on information’, with Cisco's control room as New Songdo's ‘brain stem’ (Lindsay n. page). As described by Cisco, the living lab is a way to extract real time usercentric data for analysis to stimulate innovation, increase business agility, and seize the opportunities in today’s fastchanging economy (Chan n. page).
6.1.2 PlanIT Valley
PlanIT Valley in Portugal is an initiative of the startup technology company Living PlanIT, founded by Steve Lewis and Malcolm Hutchinson in 2006. The company developed an integrated system that acts as an operating platform to manage every single element of city life. According to Rachel Keeton, this ‘Urban Operating System allows service providers, that first only functioned in a completely independent manner, to share information and streamline city management’ (n. page). The second goal of PlanIT Valley is to comprehensively reengineer the processes and systems involved in planning, building, and living in the city, aiming to reduce the resources and to increase the flexibility and adaptability of the environment that is built. Or in Steve Hodgkinson’s words: ‘enabling it to evolve as the city evolves, without the wasteful construction processes and cycles of building, demolition, and rebuilding, that occur in traditional cities’ (18). Their last and third goal is the distribution of sensor technology throughout the entire city and its systems, making it possible to monitor and feed the captured data to the Urban Operating System to enable automated and remote control (Hodgkinson 18). To make this all possible Living PlanIT has created a platform that is licensed to partners such as Cisco, Accenture, and Buro Happold. The partners drive the platform themselves, while Living PlanIT earns profits from four revenue channels: an annual partner fee, royalties from UOS usage, a one percent Living PlanIT participation fee, and a percentage of total sales revenues (Keeton n. page).
6.1.3 Masdar
Masdar City is a carbonneutral, zero waste urban community in the heart of Abu Dhabi and one of Masdar’s largest initiatives and most significant projects. Masdar city is completely powered by renewable energy, and covers an area of more than seven square kilometers. When finished, it will have the capacity to house 40,000 residents, and employ 50,000 more people by hosting a range of businesses and institutions. Besides proving to the rest of the world that it is possible to live comfortably with minimal environmental impact, Sam Nader argues that Masdar City will provide a home to a ‘vibrant, innovative, community of academics, researchers, startup companies and financiers’ all focused on developing renewable energy and sustainable technologies (3952). Masdar
ADFEC is a subsidiary completely owned by the government of Abu Dhabi through Mubadala Development Company (a Public Joint Stock Company established in October 2002). Mubadala’s only shareholder is the Government of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (Reiche 380).
6.2 The new smart city
During the past few years different cities, among others New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris and Bogotá, elected a mayor who chooses to offer affordable public services instead of privatizing them. Even though these cities are named ‘smart’ as well, they represent almost the opposite of the canonical cities. Two of these examples are discussed below.
6.2.1 Madrid
The capital of Spain, Madrid, has about 3.3 million inhabitants which makes it the third largest city in the European Union. In 2014 the city initiated a smart city program under a contract with IBM’s subsidiary INSA. With this project, the city started implementing a digital platform called ‘Madrid iNTeligente’ (MiNT). As stated in the UK Authority, a smarter Madrid was promised to ‘enable 3.25 million citizens to instantly communicate with the city about issues, receive instant feedback and track progress or the status of an event or issue’ (Cross n. page). However, their newly elected mayor, Manuela Carmena, has realigned the project completely. Stating that, even though a lot of money was spent on new technology, the project was failing because it did not have a clear design of what the project wanted to achieve with these technologies. According to Carmena, ‘smart cities and technological structures should always support citizenship.’ Instead of seeing the city as a system that has to be automated and controlled, the city should be seen as an ‘ecosystem of diverse, competing and uncontrolled human networks’ (Carmena in Mason n. page). And instead of asking which of the city’s grids and networks have to be automated and connected, Manuela Carmena asks what social problems have to be solved (Mason n. page).
There are three principles at the centre of this new program: openness, democratic participation and a clear policy that makes the data generated from public services free for citizens to use. These three principles are not often found in the smart city plans of highprofit tech companies. According to the new program, the first deployment of new technology should provide citizens with the opportunity to “raise issues of corruption, equity in the distribution of resources and open the question of access to power” (Mason n. page). According to economic journalist Paul Mason, what is happening in Madrid, is something unique in the developed world: a real debate about what we want
technology to do for our cities, and who should control the technology. Some people already see Madrid as the city that reclaims the smart city agenda from large IT companies.
6.2.2 São Paulo
São Paulo is a sprawling urban agglomeration and the engine behind the Brazilian economy. But the last few years it has gone through tremendous change. Suddenly the city has bright colored biking trails, sidewalks, express bus lanes and a maximum speed for cars. Central to these changes is mayor Fernando Haddad. As described by The Wire, a man who is called an urban visionary by people abroad and a communist by the citizens of his own city. But the former professor in political science is determined to make São Paulo a smart city by democratizing the public space (Saxena n. page). When Haddad became mayor in 2013, he started the biggest programme for participative development in the world. One hundred thousand citizens from São Paulo were involved in the decisionmaking process of their city. As part of the programme, the citizens came up with 117 unique proposals for the improvement of the urban infrastructure. A smart city, according to Haddad, is made by investing in public services and choosing for fair growth. Not by handing over the keys of the city to building companies and hightech corporations. It is all about ‘intelligent interventions’: developing a smart city with innovations that are not too expensive. ‘The most important part of this process is knowing what your citizens want from their city’ (Haddad in Saxena n. page).
7. The smart city as Dystopia
Big technology companies like Cisco, Siemens and IBM are pitching smart technology as the solution for all our urban problems (Townsend 602). But what if these new technologies do not live up to their Utopian expectations and instead lead us towards our own Dystopia? The views of key critics are used to identify the possible blind spots, failures and consequences of the smart city, and will be discussed separately.
7.1 Privacy
New technologies make it possible to gather large amounts of data on cities and especially its citizens. These data are often seen as a valuable tool to improve urban living and are thus included in most of the smart city plans. The debates about smart cities show two different use cases of data analysis: the ‘urban operating system’ approach in which a central brain solves the city’s problems, and a more selforganizing system in which technology gives citizens more control over public services by allowing them to gather data about relevant subjects like crime (Humphries n. page). However, this application of largescale data analysis creates a dilemma: how do we balance the privacy rights of individuals and small groups against the larger public good (Townsend 417)?
Data from cameras, sensors, and other tracking technologies are able to reveal a great deal about someone’s life. For example, sensors used to collect and transmit data on energy consumption, can help citizens to monitor and control their energy use. But on the other hand, they can also reveal their habits, the kind of information companies value since they teach them who their customers are but also make it possible to influence them. New legislation governing what kind of data can be shared with third parties and how customers can ‘opt out’ has already been adopted in countries all over the world (Humphries n. page). While other parts of the world have accepted the gathering of personal data on citizens. China for example, has implemented two of the largest urban surveillance projects ever attempted (Townsend 589). In most cities, the sensors necessary to create a powerful working control system are already there, but the data are scattered over many different organizations (Townsend 583). Townsend believes that sensors can become instruments of surveillance when they are used without people knowing or against people’s will. Most technologies provide an option to stop the device from capturing data. For example, people can turn off location tracking on their mobile phones. But through systems that monitor the unique wireless beacons phones send out as they communicate with nearby towers, it is still possible to track people passively, without their knowledge or consent (Townsend 586).
Besides the dilemma between our privacy rights and the greater good, there is another aspect that has to be dealt with. As stated before, large data sets containing personal information about
citizens are very valuable, and therefore, an interesting target for criminals. It has happened before that millions of records were stolen, like the theft of over 75 million user records from the Sony PlayStation Network in April 2011 (Townsend 594).
7.2 Autonomy
Another aspect of the application of data analysis, especially when it is used to give advice or answer questions, touches upon the subject of autonomy. A lot of applications already use personal data to make life just a little bit ‘easier’. Take for example the idea of smart parking. The convenience of problemfree parking requires people to park only in the spot reserved for them by the system’s software. However, Humphries questions, ‘is the freedom to park where we want, to make our own choices, not the one thing that gives meaning to our lives? And are the challenges of city life not what makes urban existence so attractive?’ (n. page).
In ‘Ambient intelligence and Persuasive technology’ Peter Paul Verbeek states that the influence of objects on people is not something new, but new technologies seem to make this influence more subtle and extensive. They do not change people organically, but create intimate connections between people and their surroundings (Verbeek 55). However, according to Verbeek people are still able to act autonomously since technology is the result of our intention to create it. And as long as people have these intentions and they can reflect upon their behavior, technology is no threat to their autonomy. But what happens when people lose this awareness? Nowadays, technology and people are so interconnected it becomes almost impossible to study the interaction between the two. In many cases, people do not even notice technology’s presence. Also, the complexity of the technology itself makes it difficult for people to understand the processes behind the technology.
At ‘The Next Web’ conference in 2013, data editor at ‘The Economist’ and coauthor of ‘Big Data’, Kenneth Cukier, stated that one of the riskiest consequences of Big Data is ‘propensity’: the phenomenon that algorithms will make choices for people. Big data is believed to be able to tell you what the ‘right’ choice is, and steer you in the ‘right’ direction. But if this direction is really the right one depends on the values of the company that created the algorithm that is analyzing the data. Algorithms are the basis of every computer system and consist of a series of instructions that lead to a certain goal. For most private companies this goal is to make as much profit as possible. People outside the company almost never have access to these algorithms, forcing them to trust the ‘good intentions’ of its creators. Today, most gathering and processing of data is done by commercial companies. In his book ‘FeedForward’ professor of literature and art, Marc Hansen, explains that this capacity to gather massive amounts of data about people’s likes and dislikes, gives these companies a huge informational advantage, allowing them to use the information to influence people long before
