There is all kinds of fuss around Toronto over the idea of having a smart neighbourhood, never mind a smart city. Toronto is only dipping a toe into the water, and allowing its Google-related partner, Sidewalk Labs, to put brains into a single waterfront neighbourhood, which is so far only in the planning stages.
Of course Torontonians want a better city. Doesn’t every city dweller wish that some of the obvious local flaws could be addressed? Like pollution? Or unaffordable housing?
But what does ‘smartness’ have to do with building a better city? ‘Smartness’ has already been inserted into most cities where it has seemed appropriately useful — in the technology of water and sewage management systems, in transit, traffic control, emergency management and flood control, to name a just a few instances.
For example, most city traffic systems are already smart, insofar as the stoplights are handled by computers. Sure, they could maybe be handled by better computers, and perhaps become somewhat smarter. But are we just talking about incremental improvements when we talk about smart cities?
Or are we invoking some new level of smartness which somehow provides us with some kind of never-before-known quality of life that ‘dumb’ cities could never provide. More earth-shaking than banning gasoline-powered traffic to clean up air pollution. More profoundly life-enhancing than building enormous numbers of truly affordable homes on city land to solve the affordable housing crisis.
Are we pursuing a smart utopia? That seems to be the hype.
If so, we need to be cautious. Many utopian cities have been planned, not only dumb ones, but technology-enhanced smart ones. Unfortunately, by and large, they have not fulfilled their promise.
Read more at phys.org: Smart Cities: The Promises And Failures Of Utopian Technological Planning
