Defining Smart Cities Seminar: A Guiding Framework

Defining Smart Cities Seminar: A Guiding Framework Deland Chan (deland@stanford.edu) Program on Urban Studies, Stanford University

In the past decade, the smart city has become a ubiquitous phrase, appearing in corporate brochures, conference programs, academic literature, popular media, and educational curriculum. The topic attracts broad interdisciplinary interest from computer scientists, civil engineers, architects, and planners focused on the research and practice of cities. The smart city in particular, has become one of the defining hallmarks of the twentieth-first-century city.

Despite this attention, many questions remain. How does one exactly define a smart city and the specific contours of its scope? Who are the actors and players in the field, and how do they speak of a smart city and their work? What technologies— both new and old— enable a smart city and its applications? Does the smart city offer improvements to existing and new cities yet to be built? And if so, how does one measure the environmental, economic, and social impacts of a smart city? More broadly, is the smart city something new? What does it mean for a city to be "dumb” or “stupid” if not “smart”? Does the smart city serve the public and make everyone's lives better, or is it essentially marketing and serves to benefit a subset of exclusive interests?

The Defining Smart Cities seminar is an effort to bring scholars and practitioners to tackle these questions. If the answers were clear, we would have named the course “The Smart City” and be done with it. Instead, we acknowledge that the arena is messy with both complementary and conflicting attempts to define a smart city. This effort spans across disciplines with scholars and practitioners asserting their viewpoints. What one person believes to be a smart city may vary from with another person’s assertion. In this particular moment of contested definitions and multiple meanings, we find a unique opportunity to find commonalities and advance the field.

This is where the course comes in. We have joined forces across two schools— the Program on Urban Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of Civil Engineering in the School of Engineering— to offer a space to explore these questions and encourage dialogue. By bringing everyone to the table— whether you consider yourself a civil engineer, computer programmer, architect, planner, designer, or a transdisciplinarian— this seminar is an open invitation for you to join the discussion and contribute to shaping the field.

A Definition of the Smart City At first glance, the task of defining smart cities can appear to be a formidable task. The possibilities seem endless. If we were to compare a city to a person and compare this to dating, perhaps you might ask a friend to describe a romantic prospect. Your friend may use adjectives to describe a person such as smart or beautiful. Now, you think about all the people in your social circle who may fit this definition and name a few possibilities to your friend. As your friend politely disagrees with your suggestions, you both realize that your definition of smart and September 28, 2016

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beautiful is vastly different from that of your friend, and the pool of possibilities has not narrowed at all. If you were to replace the characteristics of a person with that of a city, then it becomes clear that there are multiple definitions of a smart or beautiful city.

Fortunately, we can learn from the work of urban historians, architectural critics, and urban thinkers who have attempted to make sense of these elusive definitions to characterize a smart or beautiful city. Many would argue that entire movements have been built and sustained by applying these adjectives to cities. If we consider the definition of a “beautiful” city for a moment, there is an abundance of literature illustrating what has become commonly characterized as the City Beautiful movement. The ideology of City Beautiful dominated North America architecture and urban planning at the turn of the twentieth-century and was a clearly defined way of building cities. Based on grandeur, order, and large scale, the City Beautiful movement led to Daniel Burnham's plan for Chicago and San Francisco, the McMillan Plan for Washington D.C., and the International Fairs and World Expositions, among many other applications and manifestations.

The City Beautiful movement was the ultimate expression of progressivism, which valued efficiency in management, improving the conditions of the urban poor, but above all, it imposed a top-down moral mandate for the “civic realm in order to inspire, educate, and instill proper values by example” (Graham, 2016, p. 52-52). Public and private sector partnerships made these practices possible, as well as prevailing social norms that the city environment should play a role in creating social harmony and order. The City Beautiful movement held specific predefined values, and according to one interpretation, its proponents held a “deep-seated faith in the power of things to change people, a rational-seeming faith in science and management to better order their affairs; a medicalized view of the city as a body subject to blights and cancers, which must be cured with treatments to out the diseased growth and encourage healthy development; plain wishful thinking; and varying degrees of self-interest” (Graham, p 63).

Essentially, the Beautiful City can be viewed as a way for the elites to assert their virtues, cultural dominance, and practices at the expense of marginalized communities. The “beautiful" city stood in direct contrast to the ugly; it had no qualms about bulldozing and eradicating poor communities that stood in its way and if that was not politically feasible, these seemingly disorderly populations were to be subordinated through physical order meant to instill “good citizenship” (Graham, p. 61). The definition of a beautiful city was made visible through physical investment in the physical form and continue to influence cities today nearly a century later.

In a similar way, the definition of a “smart” city has many origins. According to David Krakauer, a biologist at the Sante Fe Institute who conducts research on complexity, intelligence is the ability to find “very simple solutions to complex problems” (Paulson, 2015). Krakauer goes on to explain that intelligence is the opposite of random, involving rules and processes that allow society to reach a solution efficiently. On the other hand, ignorance stems from insufficient data, or the inability to have enough data to solve the problem. If we apply this definition of intelligence to cities, then smart cities are able to make use of data, adapt processes, and achieve desirable outcomes in an efficient manner. Most recently, the term “smart” has been used interchangeably to describe cities that are efficient, optimal, functional, and resilient.

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Similar to the City Beautiful movement, many have attempted to define the Smart City movement by identifying specific actors and practices. A prevailing definition refers to the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in our urban spaces, creating what MIT Sensible Lab founders Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel call "digitally integrated urban space" (2016, p. 20). Just as the City Beautiful proponents argued for wide boulevards and grand neoclassical buildings, the smart city has its physical manifestations: a vision of a city in which ICT is fully integrated into our environments, our bodies, and societies to the point of receding into the background of our lives. The smart city is often spoken of as a connected city where computers and technology can provide real-time information and responses.

Based on this definition, many authors have defined the smart city in the following terms: In smart cities, an ecosystem of sensors that collects information from urban space, and an array of network-enabled actuators can subsequently transform that space. Data-driven feedback loops turn the city into a reflexive test-bed and workshop for connected habitation in enmeshed digital and physical space, with a common platform of ubiquitous computing.

— Carlo Ratti & Matthew Claudel, The City of Tomorrow, 2016, p. 23 I take a more focused view and define smart cities as places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems. — Anthony Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, 2013, p. 15 What is a smart city? Having outlined the various current stances on the subject, it appears to be both an ideal and a process. As an ideal, it consists of a city whose digital tools allow the optimisation of its functioning and sustainability, as well as of its inhabitants’ quality of life and the types of relationships they can maintain with one another. In doing so, this city demonstrates a form of intelligence with no past equivalent. In the smart city, some mechanisms for learning, understanding and reasoning are internalised; they become intrinsic to the city itself, instead of residing in the minds of the humans who live in it.

— Antoine Picon, Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence, 2015, p. 29

For some scholar, the emphasis on ICT is a result of the “the smart city" being invented as a concept by the largest IT corporations such as Cisco, IBM, and Siemens during the 2008 financial recession in order to pivot and generate demand for new product lines (Picon, 2015, p.

25; Townsend, 2013, p. 31). Tapping into a multibillion dollar market and selling these products to the public sector proved to be lucrative and created an aspirational desire for cities to jump on board. As Townsend notes, the emphasis on “looking smart, perhaps even more than actually being smart, is crucial to competing in today’s global economy” (2013, p. 10).

According to this definition, the smart city requires three layers. The first layer is instrumentation, such as sensors to collect information from the environment. These sensors can collect information about environmental conditions, human activity, and so forth. The second layer involves urban informatics or analytics, otherwise known as systems that combine September 28, 2016

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hardware and algorithms to make sense of the data, find patterns, and predict future scenarios.

Data alone does not result in usable intelligence, and essentially it is necessary to analyze the data and make use of it. The third layer involves urban information architecture, in which intelligence is directly integrated into practices and processes for governments, businesses, and citizens to make use of patterns and turn the intelligence into action (Townsend, p. 32).

In addition to these layers, there are technical protocols, political structures, and societal norms that affect how the layers operate and interact with one another. The smart city can also take form at various scales from the building level to neighborhoods to entire cities. Recently, new technology ventures, such as Google’s Sidewalk Labs and Y-Combinator New Cities Initiative, have already started work to expand the scale of the smart city to entire cities.

Given the constraints of the 10-week quarter, our seminar stems from the foundation of the smart city as ICT-focused. We also acknowledge that taking this definition will reduce the scope of possibilities of what might be considered “smart”. Having the ability to narrow our focus to ground our understanding in something tangible and concrete comes at the expense of limiting the universe of possibilities and theorizing the smart city beyond this definition. While we have chosen a set of speakers whose work, research, and approach is focused on ICT, you are still strongly encouraged to think outside the box and consider what is missing from this definition.

In conclusion, the City Beautiful movement and the Smart City are not value-neutral concepts.

To define a city as “beautiful” and “smart” is an assertion of power, privilege, and resources in terms of who gets to define and create knowledge. If we were to recognize multiple definitions and truths, then we open the possibilities for greater critical thinking. At every step of the way, we should ask: who has the privilege to define these concepts and why is this so? If the city is a physical manifestation of our societal values, then what should a smart city ought to be?

Answering this question is not merely an academic exercise; it broadens our ability to maximize the scope and impact of real opportunities to improve the lives of as many people as possible.

Evaluating the Impacts of a Smart City In the Defining Smart Cities seminar, we will aim to forge beyond the task of defining smart cities but also evaluate the impacts of a smart city on society and the environment. Technology is just one component of a city, and we have yet to truly understand the impact of these technological advances on human behavior at the individual, neighborhood, and city scale. Our challenge, therefore, and your task as an active participant in the seminar, is to grapple with these nascent questions and make sense of future pathways for research and exploration.

In Cities of Tomorrow (2016), the founders of the MIT Sensible Lab Ratti and Claudel present an optimistic view of the smart city. Given new technological advances, they assert two beliefs: first, that the presence of urban big data will level the playing field by empowering citizens to “think, act, and transform their public space,” thereby leading to a “groundswell of urban innovation” (p. 24) and second, that the "public will eventually steer broader technological

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development towards the most desirable future" (p. 8). Quoting Christopher Kelty, a professor of anthropology and information science, the authors proclaim that the cities of the future will witness a “reorientation of knowledge and power” (p. 24). For many, the actual impact of a smart city on society and whether they will be able to achieve the positive outcomes remains unclear.

The availability of data and increasing affordability of technology has indeed opened new channels of participation, but it also raises questions. Researchers have used big data to track mobility patterns amongst low-income populations (Yip et al., 2015), gentrification trends (Hwang and Sampson, 2014), racial profiling in local police departments (Hetey et al., 2016).

We have more information at our disposal to make sense of our urban environments and generate decisions that are informed by intelligence, to borrow the term from Krakauer.

Other thinkers are far less optimistic. The architect Rem Koolhaas notes,” Why do smart cities offer only improvement? Where is the possibility of transgression?” Koolhaas goes on to point out three critiques in the current analysis of smart cities and impact on societies. First, he claims that the current definition of smart city is too narrow in such a way that “discards urban intelligence accumulated over centuries”— or in other words, we should explore “what is today considered ‘smart’ with previous eras of knowledge.” Second, he asserts that the smart city has been presented as largely apolitical and that it is necessary to uncover the politics behind the “improvements on offer.” Lastly, Koolhaas notes that the corporatization of architecture has stopped being about “creating community” and instead reflects the values of the public sector.

The smart city, according to Koolhaas, is a continuation of these trends, selling safety and security at the expense of cities become less diverse and more predictable.

Despite these seemingly divergent viewpoints, we have an opportunity to think critically and evaluate both the positive and negative impacts of a smart city. In these discussions, we should consider what is currently missing from the discussion— whether an explicit emphasis on politics for example— to a more critical analysis of the smart city and whom it serves.

Complementary Pathways of Research With growing interest in the “smart” city, numerous pathways of research have emerged. We will explore a few of these topics in the Defining Cities seminar as outlined below.

One of the key areas of the smart city involves understanding the key actors of the smart city, the environment and processes in which their work takes place and the scale of their actions.

Actors may refer to organizations and individuals who do the work of implementing and executing the smart city. The scale of implementation is also critical. Cisco and IBM’s approach as large IT companies could vary from the work of a relatively new tech start-up that is targeting a specific problem or utilizing data-driven approach to increase a city’s efficiency, or even to individuals operating independently who have become a defined class of “civic hackers” (Tauberer, 2014). Another key question is to examine the ways in which these stakeholders define their work, as it sets the tone for defining smart cities. Finally, we should

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also examine if and how collaboration occurs between and among these actors, as well as the resulting impact of these partnerships.

A second area of research involves examining urban resilience. A smart city, one might argue, should be planned to be resilient. Resilience refers to the ability of individuals, communities, and cities to recover to its existing baseline or higher levels of functionality after a disaster.

Information and communications technology opens up new possibilities for cities to understand and confront global hazards such as seismic, climatic, hydrologic, and other natural and humanmade disasters (Dayal et al., 2015). A key question about smart cities and resilience is how technological advances can increase the resilience of local communities by understanding the drivers of risk, embedding preparedness and risk reduction, and reducing exposure.

A third area of research involves the process of information transfer and learning. Smart cities in this aspect refers to cities adapting continuous learning and innovation (Campbell, 2013, p. 6). Smart cities operate on dense “clouds of trust”, which describe the mechanics and policies to exchange information, retain institutional knowledge, and convert learning into innovative practices (Campbell, p. 11). A technological innovation is only as effective as the process of adoption, and therefore, this area of knowledge is especially rich as we consider the ways in which smart city actors— whether cities, companies, commissions, communities or individuals— share and learn best practices to operate and manage resources more efficiently.

A fourth area of research involves the practicalities of financing smart cities. As cities are lured to the promise of “smart” and engage in the procurement of technology and products, there are many questions involving how to find the money to make this happen. This area of research is concerned with the availability of funding from multiple sources ranging from multilateral and bilateral organizations to various levels of government, to multi-sector partnerships. There is also a strong focus on the establishment of new financial models and technical knowledge to create what can essentially be “bankable” projects through the establishment of well-balanced streams of capital and financing structures (New Cities Foundation, 2015).

We will also examine specific applications of the smart city in improving urban functions, such as urban transport. The focus on urban mobility and the future of transportation involves an understanding of the hardware— e.g., autonomous vehicles, radio-frequency identification (RFID)— and software (e.g., Uber, parking applications). These technological advances have led to new areas of research, such as the emergence of the “sharing economy” and its implications on society, ranging from labor issues, governance, and social trust and cohesion.

We also see a rise of data-driven approaches to approaches to transportation planning and transportation demand management. Lastly, we have an opportunity to examine government taking mostly a reactive— but increasingly proactive— approach to coordinating these technological innovations with zoning, land use, open data, and regulatory frameworks.

The smart city also opens up possibilities for updating planning and design of the built environment. Planners and designers have access to new tools that can inform their practices.

As we have seen in cities around the world, these practices have led to innovative ways to engage the public, improve the quality of civic spaces, and incorporate human-centered design September 28, 2016

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to public infrastructure. In particular, this seminar will examine how we can integrate ICT practices of the smart city to evaluate and incorporate energy efficiency in individual buildings.

A final area of research involves the ethics and theorization of the smart city. As noted in the Atlantic, big data offers the promise of improving lives but its “single-minded efficiency can further isolate groups that are already at society’s margins” (Waddell, 2016). The Federal Trade Commission has also highlighted how big data can exclude low-income and underserved communities (2016). As others have pointed out, big data contributes to both a utopian and dystopian view of the smart city—the latter involving privacy infringement, surveillance, and increased state and corporate control (Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015; Boyd & Crawford, 2012). In this view, we must recognize that the smart city is not a value-neutral concept, and there are many remaining questions about how the smart city defines and serves the public interest. As we have seen in computer glitches that resulted in the grounding of thousands of Southwest and Delta flights during the summer of 2016, the technology underlying our operations are subject to failure. In what ways does the smart city provide safeguards and protections against hacking, terrorism, or failure? Lastly, what are the mechanisms in which the smart city is accountable to the public and who is actually checking and monitoring?

Trajectory of the Course We will begin the course with a brief orientation to the Defining Smart Cities framework, which has been outlined in this paper. Throughout the seminar, we will hear from speakers who will address these areas of inquiry. At the end of the seminar, we will focus on you. What will be your future involvement in the smart city, and how will you contribute to this field? How will you define smart cities in your future research and practice? We encourage you to bring your curiosity, questions, and critical thinking skills as we embark on this journey together.

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Works Cited Boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, communication & society, 15(5), 662-679.

Campbell, T. (2013). Beyond smart cities: how cities network, learn and innovate. Routledge.

Dayal, A., Berkowitz, M., and Brown, A. “A Smart city must learn to be resilient too.” Business Today. Available online at: http://www.businesstoday.in/opinion/columns/how-smart-citiescan-become-smart-and-resilient/story/220844.html Federal Trade Commission (2016). Big Data: A tool for inclusion or exclusion? Available online: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/big-data-tool-inclusion-or-exclusionunderstanding-issues/160106big-data-rpt.pdf Graham, W. (2016). Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World. HarperCollins.

Hetey, R. C., Monin, B., Maitreyi, A., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2016). Data for change: A statistical analysis of police stops, searches, handcuffings, and arrests in Oakland, Calif., 2013-2014.

Stanford University, SPARQ: Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions.

Available online: https://sparq.stanford.edu/opd-reports Hwang, Jackelyn, and Robert J Sampson. 2014. “Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods”. American Sociological Review 79 (4):726-751.

Koolhaas, Rem. (2014) My thoughts on the smart city. Speech given at High Level Meeting in Brussels. Edited transcript available online: http://ec.europa.eu/archives/ commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/my-thoughts-smart-city-rem-koolhaas.html New Cities Foundation (2015). How will we finance the city infrastructure of the future? Available online at: http://www.citymetric.com/business/how-will-we-finance-city-infrastructurefuture-836 Paulson, S. (2015). Ingenious: David Krakauer: The systems theorist explains what’s wrong with standards models of intelligence. Available online: http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/ ingenious-david-krakauer Picon, A. (2015). Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence-AD Primer. John Wiley & Sons.

Ratti, C., & Claudel, M. (2016). The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life. Yale University Press.

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Sadowski, J. and Pasquale, F. (2015). The spectrum of control: A social theory of the smart city.

First Monday. Available online at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/ 5903/4660 Tauberer, J. (2014). “Civic Hacking” in Open Government Data: The Book. Available online at: https://opengovdata.io/2014/civic-hacking/ Townsend, A. M. (2013). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia.

WW Norton & Company.

Waddell, K. (2016). How big data harms poor communities. In The Atlantic. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/how-big-data-harms-poorcommunities/477423/ Yip, N. M., Forrest, R., & Xian, S. (2016). Exploring segregation and mobilities: Application of an activity tracking app on mobile phone. Cities. Available online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/pii/S0264275116300142

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