Surveillance state
In the digitalization frenzy, somehow everything is supposed to become smart: Smart Economy (when everyone knows what individuals know and collaborate digitally), Smart People (when digitally networked people get involved and care), Smart Government (when everyone understands everything in a digital democracy and can participate in everything), Smart Mobility (when transportation, tickets, times and routes are provided via apps), Smart Environment (when everyone gets what they need, but not from their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren) and Smart Living (when electricity, heat and food are generated locally).
Many see great opportunities in this and associate digital networking with the solution to all the problems of post-industrial societies: whether environmental pollution, demographic change, population growth, financial crisis or scarcity of resources, everything can be turned for the better with cameras, sensors and digital networking. The sharing economy (sharing ris, bicycles, tools, housing) or citizen participation (many people are asked and have a say) are also part of the discussion about the city of the future. I also have hopes for this.
The smart city will become the Internet of Things and Services: The entire infrastructure will be equipped with sensors that collect an endless amount of data and, in the best-case scenario, make it available to everyone in the cloud. The permanent interaction between residents and technology means that citizens are virtually becoming part of their technical infrastructure.
Sensors have now become so cheap that they can be spread across the entire city and actually installed everywhere (“Have you chipped your dog yet?”). The resulting euphoria is strongly reminiscent of the enthusiasm for technology in the 1960s (“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” John F. Kennedy, 5/25/61).
With such revolutionary changes, however, questions must always be asked as to how and where the widespread technologization of urban space makes sense, who benefits from it, who does not, who initiates and controls it and what risks are associated with it. What about data security? Who has data sovereignty? And who does what with it?
A look at China helps to clarify this.
In Shanghai, water, gas and electricity consumption is already being read smartly from passing cars. Saves a lot of unnecessary effort. But the danger of misuse lies in monitoring by cameras and sensors. In Suzhou, consumption is also analyzed by AI. There is a signal in the event of deviations. After all, there could be illegal people in the apartment. Traffic offenses are to be recorded and evaluated centrally in China (“social scoring”). If you don’t wait at a red light, you won’t get a job or a loan. Exaggeration? No, a “social credit point system” is being tested and is to be introduced nationwide by 2020. A nightmare. The smart city as a search engine in the hands of the surveillance state.
Let me put it this way: innovations are good when they support vitality and creativity, diversity and the wealth of different ideas about life. Innovations that work against this are bad.
Corporations and consumers
Multinational corporations with a lot of money are represented in large numbers in the smart city advisory bodies of the EU and the individual states. Civil society initiatives, on the other hand, are barely represented.
And now this is happening: Google is currently building an entire city, Alphabet City, right in the middle of Toronto’s harbor. The company will not only build the infrastructure, but will also centrally manage and operate the new city for thousands of residents according to its own rules. Delivery and waste robots, self-driving cabs and ubiquitous networking are intended to make life “greener, more efficient and more convenient”. The project is financed by trading in residents’ data.
The state and elected representatives remain outside. A private company with commercial goals takes over. The experiment could be the beginning of the end of the pluralistic, mixed and conflicting urban society that builds its own environment through moderated cooperation. But it doesn’t have to be, if the democratic institutions take the lead in such a revolution.
Unfortunately, politics, administration and the real estate industry in this country do not yet have much to show for it. Neither thought nor done. It is clear that digitalization in administration has not even begun in most municipalities.
But the smart city of corporations or autocracies does not stop at Germany’s borders. Europe’s constitutional states, with their public institutions, the real estate industry and their civil societies, still have every opportunity to develop open, fair, democratic, pluralistic and symmetrical visions for the city of the future. But if they do not actively tackle this major issue, their rules and conditions will be made by others. Not a nice idea for me.