A tale of two cities: Comparing “smart city” approaches
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
Hello everyone, good evening. This has been a long day for you all and for us too,
00:21
so hopefully this will be fun and enjoyable for you all. So, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom and it was the age of foolishness.
00:44
However, this presentation is not going to be a bargain bin of Charles Dickens copycat. This presentation is not also going to be pushing or praising what some people are calling the fourth industrial revolution. This presentation is going to be about what some people are calling the smart cities
01:02
and the complexity that's found in just two of those cities, Toronto and London. We use Toronto and London in our case to make our point that we as developer and theorists and people who are living in cities need to get away from the kind of good versus evil,
01:21
the innovation versus stagnation themes that are prevalent in smart city and technology discussions that move towards a more nuanced discussion that a complexity surrounding us. We admit that this is not a specially novel point to make that plenty of people specially here at Republica and elsewhere have made this point
01:42
and what we're trying to bring to this discussion is the specific insights we have drawn for our four years of engagement of smart city research and development in the UK, in Canada and beyond. But before we get to all of that, who are we?
02:01
We are Ding Wang and Vanessa Thomas. We're two early career researchers based at Lancaster University. Together with our colleague, Manu Bruggemann, we run the impractical and absurdist research project Lickable Cities, which involves licking cities for science. Separately, I'm Vanessa Thomas,
02:21
a Canadian computer scientist, social and environmental justice activist and former public servant. I spent most of the past four years researching issues that intersect digital technologies, climate change and public policy. I've also dabbled in smart cities and disaster mobilities research. My colleague and co-presenter, Ding Wang, is an ethnographer and design researcher
02:42
originally made in China and refined in Britain. Her research interest has always focused on how technology is used in societies and how it is changing the society that it's being used in and sort of vice versa. Smart cities have been the specific focus of her research for the past four years. So she has a lot of insights
03:01
to bring to this presentation. So as our host has just asked us, what is a smart city and why should you care? Well, you should care because smart city is all around you. Smart city development affects the services and funds in the city you live in and also the city you're visiting.
03:21
It is about where the funds is allocated and also how the city is designed. This one is the new Sando City in South Korea. After years of investment and development, it's still under construction. So by this point in Republic, I'm sure that you've almost certainly have encountered the phrase smart city a couple of times.
03:42
That on Monday, the panelists discussed the smart city in Barcelona and Berlin. On Tuesday, we heard about beyond smart city and smart up the city in both English and Deutsch. Though there isn't a universal definition of what a smart city is that everyone agrees upon, but by the phrase smart city here in this talk
04:03
that we refer to the various application and information technology that's being used in urban development and urban management. Despite the lack of agreed upon definition, there's still a general image that a smart city renders for us. It is normally efficient, technologically advanced,
04:23
grain and socially inclusive city. Because of all these features and promises that smart city are making, it has drawn increasing attention from the government, from industry and also academia. Oftentimes, it appears to be a collective of various smart city projects, such as transportation, energy management
04:42
and smart grid solutions and also pollution monitoring. These are the very basic and standard smart city package you can find in almost every single smart city. When a city decided they're gonna go a bit premium, that there are other add-on items they can add into this, such as disaster response that Dublin is emphasized on the healthcare element
05:03
that London has and also community building elements that's coming from Barcelona. With all of that said, the current smart city concept is still decidedly ambiguous and it leaves the definition up to considerable interpretation. Therefore, that when interpretation and adaptation
05:22
goes just a little bit wrong, it can appear to be the big brother meets big data, which can be the central control room in rail during the Olympic times or it can be the garden bridge in London, which is quite a waste of taxpayers' money.
05:42
So maybe that sounds all a bit too nebulous. So let me try to get a little bit more specific for you. Let's talk about Toronto. You might know Toronto because of its former crack smoking mayor, Rob Ford, or because of its association with the king of memes, Drake. But there is so much more to Toronto.
06:02
It's Canada's largest city. It's one of the most important economic hubs in the country and it's one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse cities in the world. Toronto is built on stolen land, land that was taken through colonialism from the Anishinaabe peoples. British settlers established Fort York
06:21
in the late 18th century for a few hundred people and over time, that grew into the greater Toronto area, which is now home to more than six million people. Supporting those six million people requires considerable public infrastructure and services, which are designed and delivered through a complex network of government consultation processes and funding streams.
06:43
In Canada, three tiers of government affect how services and infrastructure are developed in cities and towns, specifically the federal, provincial, and municipal governments. They each have financial and policy-related powers over the design and delivery of infrastructures and services. Why does that matter?
07:01
Because at times, different tiers of government can hold competing ideological agendas and that alone can create a considerably complex space for urban development projects, whether they are smart or not. I'll try to be a little bit more specific too. Since we're part of Republica's city and mobility track, I'm going to briefly describe
07:21
Toronto's public transportation network and some of the attempts to make it smart. So Toronto's transportation network is huge. Depending on whose estimates you accept, Toronto either has the third or fourth largest public transportation network in North America, definitely after New York and Mexico City and possibly after Montreal.
07:42
Its network includes trains, trams, and buses, as well as bicycle infrastructure, roadways, and sidewalks. This massive mobility ecosystem is renowned, at least within Canada, for being completely and utterly unreliable and rage-inducing. You could be trapped in your car for hours on Highway 401
08:01
or waiting for a bus that never seems to show up on time. In whatever way you're experiencing it, it just never seems to run smoothly. More worryingly, Toronto's public transit system has been the site of racist attacks and slurs and the equitability of its positioning and accessibility around the city
08:20
has been called into question by scholars and activists alike. The city has been working to address these issues and is currently trying to build a new metro line to help ease congestion and tension, but this has proven to be a difficult and costly undertaking. Toronto has been trying to secure additional funding from the provincial and federal governments of Canada, but it has failed to do so thus far,
08:42
in part because those levels of government are facing other spending pressures that extend well beyond Toronto's borders. Of course, these issues have existed for quite some time and they're certainly not the fault of any smart city initiative specifically, but my point is that any technological intervention in these complex spaces
09:01
builds upon the existing socioeconomic, cultural and infrastructural conditions that already are there. So any smart transportation project in Toronto begins from its position on stolen Anishinaabe land. Toronto launched its first official government innovation
09:23
digital e-city strategy in 2002. This strategy, which relied on aging legacy information systems, paved the way for modernizing Toronto's transportation network with digital support infrastructure, including smart transit cards and a smart traffic management system.
09:41
But by 2012, Toronto's auditor general called for a complete revamp of the e-city strategy, saying that it was woefully ill-equipped to suit the city's complex needs. In 2013, under Rob Ford, Toronto launched its open government by design initiative, which aimed to create an accountable, open and transparent organizational culture
10:02
by the end of 2017. It also launched its first smart city initiative in 2015. So although the government has certainly released a variety of useful data sets, these initiatives have so far fallen short of creating an open government culture within Toronto.
10:20
But, Toronto, as elsewhere in Canada, is starting to look to other countries for advice and guidance on how to move forward and improve our services. One of the places that they're looking is to London. So, London has been experimenting with the smart city idea for six or seven years now.
10:42
It was back in 2011 that when London first published the smart city plan, which is where you can find this, that they're gonna become a smart city. In 2013, in March, smart London board was set up to advise on London's approach using digital technology to ensure London maintains its position
11:01
as the best big city in the world, which is arguable because, I mean, this is clearly the best one, I think. And all the board members who are on this board are either academics or techno experts who have been working in their field for decades in their industry. So, with this strategic plan,
11:21
with a board with very talented experts and a very supportive, motivated municipal government, London, like Toronto, is still facing some challenging that's on the way of getting smart. First of all, they need to navigate through 33 different boroughs. This is like a mini country map,
11:41
but this is a map of London. If you take a walk from City Centre of London from St Paul's Cathedral all the way to Hyde Park, depending on which route you take, you might be able to walk through three to four different boroughs just in that walk. Different, if you happen to look into different people's back garden, you will see different colored beams.
12:01
That indicates different boroughs have their different waste management plans. However, waste and water management plan is at the very heart of smart city London plan, so they have to navigate through all of those boroughs to make them work together. And another layer of complexity comes from penetrating different layers of governance.
12:22
So, as we talked about, they have the Smart City London board, which reports to and is supported by the mayor of London, which is only one third of the authority coming from Great London Authority. The same time, there's also this department for cultural media and sports, don't ask me why, but they are in charge of making policies of smart city,
12:44
which means their regulation's gonna affect how London go forward as smart city, and best part, they've had a parliamentary smart city working group, which is, rest in peace forever, it's folded, to oversee how smart city is moving forward in the UK,
13:01
and this is not the end of the story. So, London's plan of becoming a smart city is supposed to be from 2011 to 2021, which means 2016, which is last year, is the midpoint of London's smart city plan. That is where London's supposed to reach a lot of milestones in their smart city development.
13:22
However, a lot has happened that year. From municipal level, there's change of power from Conservative Party to Labour, from Boris Johnson to Sateke Khan, and also the same time that Brexit happened as well in that year. Because of this change of power, change of political visions and policies,
13:40
different measurements of success is also changed. That means how smart city plan is continued forward, and how it is evaluated is also changed. Currently, the mayor of London's office continued the old plan, but there are some other twists to it as well. The complexity of Brexit also means there are a lot of funding cuts,
14:02
potentially, for London's smart city plan, because currently, a lot of projects in London is funded by EU money. For example, the shared city project is with Ahoos, is with Barcelona, it is with Lisbon. That means when Brexit happens, no one knows whether London will still be part of the story or not.
14:21
And also, the smart parks is also funded by EU money. Then, just in a month's time, UK is facing another election, and however that election's result turn out is definitely gonna have impact on how London's gonna move forward as a smart city. So, hashtag, it's complicated. On top of all of those administrative complications,
14:43
there is also another practical level of things. Making a city smart, especially making an old city like London smart, is not an easy task, because by simply wiring up a Victorian urban infrastructure with ICT technology doesn't really make London a smart city in one go.
15:02
Never alone, it's not gonna happen overnight either. So, in order to test out the technology, whether it works or not, they start to experiment wherever they can. One of them is they start to work in parks. So, London has been working on this Queensland Elizabeth Park for a while to test out the crowd management,
15:22
crowd moving sensing technology, which arguably, if it's successful, they're gonna deploy it in other busier parts of London, and potentially, it has the ability to be scaled up to traffic management. However, as test beds, parks are not perfect. Though there are a lot of parks in London,
15:41
parks alone do not make London. And however, you know, were they gonna go out and test more smart technology? Where are they gonna do it? How are they gonna do it? I don't know, I have no idea. But what I do know is when they were trying to test out even the technology in parks, they had a fiasco.
16:00
So, a couple of years back, when they tried to first put sensing technology in Hyde Park, what happened is little did they know that by placing plastic boxes all around the trees, it can get chewed through by squirrels who are the real residents in the parks within a week. So, at last, what I also wanna mention is the problematic term of Londoner.
16:23
Citizens, people, residents, who are we on about? So, one, Londoner, to me, is a very central cultural identity. Not every single person lives in London, works in London, who are residents they associate themselves with. However, this is the term that London Smart City Plan
16:42
constantly talking about they gonna engage. So, Smart City is a very complex project. It involves many interested parties. However, from the story we discussed of the folded Smart City working group and also the previous story that Marco and Andreas shared
17:00
about Kuzberg development, that not every single party or interest groups who are in the Smart City have the same level of influence because one tech firm complained a parliamentary Smart City working group can be folded. But what about concerned citizens? What about the critics who don't agree with this? And what about those squirrels who just protest
17:21
by chewing through the technology? So, you know what, hashtag, it's complicated. And so, as we've been working together over the past four years, we've been having long detailed debates and conversations about this, and we found ourselves wondering what can we do in the face of this complexity?
17:41
But this question is a bit of a trap. Obviously, any solution we attempt to offer will need to be tailored to the unique setting of the unique city that we're thinking of trying to work with or that we're discussing. But we believe that a great starting point would be for us to openly acknowledge, discuss, and embrace the complexity of our urban spaces.
18:03
The world is messy. Cities are messy. People are messy. Or at least we, Ding and I, are willing to admit that we are messy. And the reductive nature of many of our existing digital systems obfuscates the messiness in ways that have subtle yet real implications.
18:20
In our research, we have spoken with many government employees and public policy experts who raise questions and concerns about Smart City development and who call for more sensitivity to the messy complexities of urban governance, but we have not necessarily seen that reflected in discussions amongst technologists or in the solutions offered by tech companies. Perhaps the clearest sign of this
18:42
is the seemingly pervasive longstanding insistence on digital system scalability. Every city has a uniquely complex ecosystem of actors to engage with, and in many ways, the concept of globally scalable technical infrastructure undermines those unique urban ecosystems.
19:02
Perhaps a potential, if woefully limited solution, which we have also been pursuing in our careers, would be to have more policymakers and politicians come to tech events like they do at Republica, but which is certainly not common at all tech events that I have been to. And more technologists and designers
19:21
embed themselves in policy-related events or in policy-making teams. Fusing these communities might help them both understand the complex political curation processes involved with their work, because there are complex political curatorial decisions in both urban and digital technology development processes.
19:40
By curatorial decisions, I mean decisions about accessibility, about what to include and exclude, what sort of materials to use, what design decisions mean in terms of their environmental, like climate change-related costs, and so on and so on. As you've heard throughout Republica, those types of decisions carry real,
20:01
long-term implications for the intergenerational equitability or iniquitability of urban spaces, experiences, and labor markets. Where we live in a decade, where the next generations live in four decades, those places are gonna be built on the infrastructural, technological, and policy-related decisions we're making now.
20:22
Change doesn't always stem from large-scale democratic, no, dramatic events like Brexit or war. Rather, it can emerge in our daily lives through serendipity and through intentional partnerships. Our interpretation of Republica's theme, Love Out Loud, is that it calls for us to establish partnerships,
20:42
to work together, to build the world we wanna see, and that in the complex context of smart city development means more partnerships, more collaboration between and amongst digital technologists, policymakers, and urban designers, and not just those working in traditional or corporate settings either. We don't mean to suggest that we should be happy with Uber representatives
21:02
partnering with policymakers or urban designers. Critical practitioners, cooperative business members, nonprofit organizations should all be involved, or perhaps for those of you who just caught Sylvia Lintner's keynote, we could aspire to learn from the Shenzhen model of maker slash policymaker symbiosis
21:22
and yes, we acknowledge that this would be an enormous undertaking, possibly slowing the pace of the already slow urban development cycle, but as we find ourselves in the midst of severe climate change, in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, perhaps a slower development cycle would be of value.
21:40
There's certainly one way to find out. Let's get out there and love out loud. Thanks so much. Thank you. We have five minutes left. Do you want to accept some questions? No, we don't want any questions. You don't want any questions? We'll get it wrong. No, of course.
22:01
Any questions. If there's someone there, no? Some sort of sign, no, he's just brushing his hair. I was kidding, we do want questions. That would be great. So let's wrap it up. Okay, sure. Yeah, sure. Okay, thank you. Thanks. Thank you.