Dumb' Cities

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‘Dumb’ Cities

Cities are dynamic, they grow and shrink over time – sometimes millennia, sometimes decades. Building infrastructure for a new city is difficult. It’s even more difficult when a city is located in the middle of nowhere. The buzz term of the past years is smart city, yet we have witnessed the rise and fall of some quite un-intelligent cities that failed along the way and eventually disappeared from the map.

In India, the city of Lavasa was projected to grow from zero properties to thousands. The idea was to put India on the map by creating a smart city from scratch. The Lavasa project was to be built as a theme park in a location quite far from commercial Indian routes. This was probably the beginning of the race down the roller coaster hill. The city was built over a number of years, and though initially designed for 250,000 inhabitants, only 10,000 actually remained, and those who stayed, aren’t very happy with the city’s disorder. Now, Lavasa requires massive government spending, and developers and investors are both bankrupt. Ordos has been dubbed as the ghost city of China. Also founded in the middle of nowhere, and costing US$ 200 billion, the city was designed for one million inhabitants. It was only in 2019, 16 years after the commencement construction, that satellite images began to show vehicles parked near the endless rows of houses. The city is coming to life but is doing so very slowly with great struggles. The properties in Ordos are of higher quality than the Chinese average, making them too pricey for the majority of the population. And those who can afford the properties opt for nearby cities that are not unpopulated and built in the middle of the desert.

Located in the north of Spain, Santander became famous for having the highest number of sensors in the world. Last year, it had 20,000 sensors. The issue is that smart cities don’t work based on the number of installed sensors, especially when these are simply pilot projects. Sensors can be revolutionary, but in addition to their functioning, trained technicians must be able to understand the sensors and maintain them. Without this component, the investment in developing a smart city is lost. Smart city projects have the potential to develop exceptional plans for the future, but these require collaboration between public and private stakeholders. The smart cities in India, China, and Spain are just some of the failed attempts at building smarter, greener, and more inclusive cities from scratch. Without proper consideration of residents’ needs, smart city developers were unable to create suitable governance and infrastructure to stimulate growth of an innovative urban community.

In comparison, there are established cities, like Dubai, that are enabling the transition swiftly but gradually, which are actually becoming smart. These cities and their governments have highlighted the importance of embracing advanced technologies to design services and experiences for residents’ and visitors’ happiness. Essentially, developing a smart city is more than planning and building. Any city, including the smart ones, will not succeed without its citizens, the core component of a thriving urban ecosystem.

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