{"id":5878,"date":"2018-05-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/statescoop.scpnewsgrp.com\/what-it-means-to-be-a-smart-city-in-2018-and-why-we-should-consider-another-name\/"},"modified":"2023-01-08T10:04:52","modified_gmt":"2023-01-08T15:04:52","slug":"what-does-smart-city-mean-in-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/what-does-smart-city-mean-in-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"What it means to be a ‘smart city’ in 2018 \u2014 and why we should consider another name"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1911, Baltimore\u2019s then-new sewer system was the envy of engineers and city planners around the world. At least\u00a0that\u2019s how the local papers described it. Finally, buildings could run their wastewater through underground pipes rather than open-air gutters, and a treatment plant would separate waste from stormwater, freeing Baltimoreans from noxious, debilitating\u00a0odors that permeated their city.<\/p>\n

\u201cExperts have come thousands of miles to see it, and probably every sanitary engineer now living, no matter what his race or nation, is familiar with the system,\u201d the Baltimore Sun gushed.\u00a0\u201cIt is, of course, the latest planned project of its kind, and no similar work of the same magnitude is going on anywhere else. Engineers have come from all over the world to inspect the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

The system’s chief engineer, Charles W. Hendrick, was celebrated with lavish profiles the likes of which city project managers almost never enjoy. “He has not yet reached the age of 46, but when it is considered that he held down big municipal positions just about the time he was casting his first vote, it can be seen that\u00a0his years are outweighed by his experience,”\u00a0the Sun wrote.<\/p>\n

The Baltimore sewers\u2019 admirers visited from Europe, South America, Japan and Australia, along with many U.S. cities, possibly leaving inspired to upgrade\u00a0water\u00a0treatment procedures\u00a0in their hometowns. Baltimore\u2019s early-20th-century modernization, which was credited with relieving the city of what had once been described as a \u201c2,000-horse-power\u201d stench, seems mundane and ordinary in 2018. But at the time\u00a0it was\u00a0on the cutting edge of infrastructure progress.<\/p>\n

These days, if you hear about a city making a great leap forward, it\u2019s likely to involve streetlights, specifically LED bulbs that can be adjusted remotely and mounted on poles that can also sport surveillance cameras or equipment that detects environmental changes. In the past year, big cities like\u00a0Chicago<\/a>, Cleveland<\/a> and San Diego<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0small ones like Yuma, Arizona<\/a>, and West Hollywood, California<\/a>, have trumpeted their\u00a0plans to install hundreds or thousands of new streetlights.<\/p>\n

All of these projects are inescapably touted under the banner of each community becoming a \u201csmart city,\u201d an increasingly catch-all term for any city that\u2019s applying technology to any number of functions typically expected of local government. But smart\u00a0city projects run a gamut that can be as simple as switching out light bulbs to complete overhauls of how municipal agencies function. Becoming \u201csmart\u201d is a trendy \u2014 and strategic \u2014 thing for cities to do. But when a city can claim that mantle for itself with a project as basic as replacing sodium lamps with LED bulbs, it begs asking just what it means to be a smart city.<\/p>\n

“Outside-in” and “inside-out”<\/h4>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s kind of jumped the shark,\u201d says Gabe Klein, a former transportation director in Washington, D.C., and Chicago who now advises city governments on modernization projects. \u201cIf you asked 10 people in a room what a smart city is, you\u2019d probably get at least five different answers.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Klein, smart\u00a0city adopters can be divided between places that view technology as the end point and places that have actual strategies for what they want to do with all those new toys. The cities that have most successfully answered the existential question of what it means to be \u201csmart\u201d might be the ones that are several years into implementing technology-driven solutions that citizens don\u2019t perceive\u00a0as tech taking over their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the first things people saw in D.C. that they could really get their heads around, was [Capital Bikeshare],\u201d Klein says of Washington\u2019s 8-year-old bike-sharing network. \u201cI don\u2019t think people think of it as smart cities. They think of it as this great feature that adds to the flavor, character and lifestyle of the city. But the reality is that it uses RFID, geolocation, solar power, modular design and componentry. It\u2019s an example of good smart\u00a0city technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

But with more than 120 bike-sharing systems around the U.S., having one isn’t as special or “smart”\u00a0as perhaps it once was.\u00a0And the list of potential smart\u00a0city projects seems to have no end. At a recent conference in New York<\/a>, tech-industry executives and city officials from around the world discussed how to make concepts like artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency and self-driving vehicles work for cities. But so many potential applications for all these new civic technologies makes defining \u201csmart city\u201d that much more difficult.<\/p>\n

Jesse Berst, the chairman of the Smart Cities Council, a research group that advises city on how to get smarter, says it\u2019s easy\u00a0to get caught up in slick new hardware like police body cameras, connected bicycles, electric-vehicle charging stations and, yes, streetlights.<\/p>\n

\u201cCities are at the intersection of two massive technology trends that are affecting everything else in the world,\u201d he says. \u201cI think of them as outside-in and inside-out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside-in, Berst says, is the so-called Internet of Things \u2014 internet-connected devices that collect data and can be adjusted remotely. The inside-out is just as important to a modern city\u2019s livelihood, if not more so. A city can\u2019t really call itself \u201csmart\u201d unless it\u2019s doing something with all that data its new devices are harvesting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the digital transformation,\u201d Berst says. \u201cYou can\u2019t find a company bigger than 10 people that isn\u2019t in the middle of its digital transformation. Same with cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with LED streetlights, open-data portals are another staple of any basic smart\u00a0city program. Consolidated data websites tend to please good-government types, but Berst says they\u2019re also essential for making governments work more efficiently.<\/p>\n

Albuquerque, New Mexico, for instance, launched a website called \u201cABQ View\u201d<\/a> in 2010 with a limited glance of salary information about the city\u2019s 250 highest-paid workers. A year later, it expanded to include all 6,000 city employees. Since then, it\u2019s been expanded to include city contracts, ongoing construction projects and audit reports from municipal agencies. By 2014<\/a>, Albuquerque estimated it was saving $180,000 per year from its 311 call center, with locals able to go online to find information rather than jam a city-hall switchboard.<\/p>\n

Saving taxpayer dollars and offering operational transparency are things people expected of their local governments long before anyone started using the term \u201csmart city.\u201d And digitization of city operations, instead of being as novel as smart-city evangelists like Berst say, are perhaps framed better as the natural progression of capitalist civilizations.<\/p>\n

Getting smart to get rich<\/h4>\n

In an Atlantic essay earlier this year titled \u201cThere Is No Such Thing as a Smart City,\u201d<\/a> the cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling wrote that cities will install the hardware whether or not there\u2019s an official smart-city movement afoot.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe digital techniques that smart-city fans adore are flimsy and flashy \u2014 and some are even actively pernicious \u2014 but they absolutely will be used in cities,\u201d Sterling wrote. \u201cThey already have an urban heritage. When you bury fiber-optic under the curbs around the town, then you get internet. When you have towers and smartphones, then you get portable ubiquity. When you break up a smartphone into its separate sensors, switches, and little radios, then you get the internet of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sterling\u2019s upshot of all that deployed tech is pretty cynical: \u201cThe future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed by City Hall, mostly for the sake of making towns more attractive to capital,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s already happening across the United States, as cities chase tech firms and the high-income workers they bring in. And those companies aren\u2019t looking to expand to cowtowns. Klein says the contest for Amazon\u2019s second headquarters\u00a0\u2014 a project the\u00a0digital commerce giant says will bring 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in investment to the winning bidder \u2014\u00a0has been a great motivator for cities and regions trying to modernize themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s good and bad about it,\u201d Klein says of the “HQ2” bidding war, which has largely become a measuring contest for local governments to show off the tax incentives they\u2019d offer Amazon. \u201cCities that were firmly against new money in transit, all of a sudden, they got religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

After years of being divided on the issue, the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia \u2014 all of which are finalists in the Amazon bakeoff \u2014 recently acted to create\u00a0dedicated funding sources<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0the Washington-area\u2019s subway after years of clashing on how to pay for the chronically underfunded system. Klein is not alone in attributing this change to the region\u2019s chances to land Amazon, and he says similar phenomena are underway in other places angling for the HQ2 project.<\/p>\n

Indianapolis, one of the 20 finalists on a shortlist Amazon revealed in January, is aiming to land the project by highlighting the solar array at its airport and Blue Indy, an electric-vehicle-sharing program modeled after a similar operation in Paris. Those improvements helped the city reel in companies like cloud-computing firm Salesforce, which has its second-largest office there.<\/p>\n

Even if Amazon picks one of the other 19 sites on its shortlist,\u00a0Indianapolis \u2014\u00a0a long shot, at least\u00a0according to oddsmakers \u2014 is unlikely to ditch its investments in solar power,\u00a0electric vehicles and data collection. There are\u00a0other potential\u00a0corporate deals out there.<\/p>\n

“You may not win Amazon,”\u00a0Klein says. “You might get 10\u00a0more 2,000-person Salesforce deals. What you have to do is follow through on what you committed to on HQ2, because all these companies want the same thing.”<\/p>\n

The HQ2 scenario, though,\u00a0fulfills Sterling\u2019s indictment of the smart-city movement as a series of corporate inducements.\u00a0Yet the tier of cities big enough to pursue an Amazon-sized investment is small, while the need for greater connectivity is global.<\/p>\n

That means cities of all sizes have to look at ways to stay current with how government functions and how government\u2019s end users \u2014 residents and businesses \u2014 use technology in their lives. That\u2019s been a challenge for cities well before the internet or computer ages.<\/p>\n

It’s all infrastructure<\/h4>\n

\u201cTwo hundred years ago, there were a bunch of narrow-gauge railroads,\u201d Berst says. \u201cThe railroad would stop just short of the Massachusetts-Vermont border, and they would unload all the cargo, carry it a few hundred yards, and load it onto the next train.\u201d<\/p>\n

Railroad designers eventually realized tracks couldn\u2019t connect without a standard gauge. Similar standards exist across nearly all modes of transportation. \u201cToday, if a developer wants to do a new subdivision,\u201d Berst says, \u201cstreets have to be a certain width, signs have to be a certain way. You can\u2019t make up your own stop signs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of rail ties and stop signs, cities now need fiber-optic cable and cell towers to keep up. But it all still falls within the big tent of critical infrastructure. That doesn\u2019t mean every community needs to barrel head-first into new streetlights or replacing every car in town with a self-driving Tesla, but there is a minimum of what local governments should be investing in, Klein says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t know as a city what to do, enable the ground-level infrastructure,\u201d he says. \u201cMeaning you gotta have enough fiber and small-cell densification so other people can build on top of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mandate for cities to build out the infrastructure to survive in an increasingly digitized culture and economy is a contemporary echo of previous waves of modernization. Standardized gauges made transcontinental railroads possible. The invention of the automobile caused roads to be paved with tar and asphalt. Baltimore was choked by the stenches of human and industrial\u00a0waste\u00a0before its sewer upgrades.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no guarantee any of these decisions\u00a0is a permanent path toward success, but not modernizing is almost always the less attractive option.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt goes back to infrastructure,\u201d Berst says. \u201cWhether it\u2019s a canal to Lake Erie or interstate railroad or electrification or a telephone network. It\u2019s the same for smart cities. You might think of it as infrastructure for prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the term \u201csmart city\u201d gets bandied about so much, it could be a brand name for a very specific set of implementations, despite the fact that the word \u201csmart\u201d could mean one thing in Albuquerque and something else in Washington. A citywide promotion of electric vehicles like Columbus, Ohio\u2019s might not be feasible yet in a place where the power grid is still being upgraded.<\/p>\n

So what, then, to call all these communities that are investing in new technology and automating more government functions? Klein suggests \u201cconnected cities.\u201d Or maybe in a few years, what we currently call \u201csmart cities\u201d will just be known as typical cities.<\/p>\n

\u201cTen or 15 or 20 years from now it\u2019ll be so obvious, just like it\u2019s obvious looking back at 1868,\u201d the year before the first transcontinental railroad was completed, Berst says. \u201cIt\u2019s not obvious when you\u2019re in the middle of it, but it\u2019ll be apparent the cities that made the transformation will be the winners.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From railroads to sewers to paved roads, cities must improve their infrastructure to avoid fading away. “Smart city” upgrades add a different dimension to the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":200,"featured_media":39356,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20650,20649,20647,4676],"tags":[12,10792,5274,4720,436,433,432,431,430,237,175,174,168,137,130,51,25,4],"people":[],"special-report":[23758],"authors":[4697],"class_list":["post-5878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-analytics","category-emerging-tech","category-modernization","category-city","tag-state-local-news","tag-autonomous-systems","tag-amazon","tag-albuquerque","tag-baltimore","tag-infrastructure","tag-jesse-berst","tag-gabe-klein","tag-body-cameras","tag-internet-of-things","tag-open-data","tag-open-government","tag-civic-tech","tag-self-driving-vehicles","tag-mobility","tag-emerging-technology","tag-smart-cities","tag-tech-news","special-report-themonthly-may2018-category_news","author-benjamin-freed"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat it means to be a 'smart city' in 2018 \u2014 and why we should consider another name | StateScoop<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/what-does-smart-city-mean-in-2018\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What it means to be a 'smart city' in 2018 \u2014 and why we should consider another name | StateScoop\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From railroads to sewers to paved roads, cities must improve their infrastructure to avoid fading away. 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