CityReads | The Smart Enough City

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The Smart Enough City

Unchecked smart cities are surveillance cities. What we need are smart enough cities.

Ben Green, 2019.The Smart Enough City ：Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, MIT Press.

本·格林著，李丽梅译，足够智慧的城市：恰当技术与城市未来，上海交通大学出版社，2020.

Sources:

https://smartenoughcity.mitpress.mit.edu/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/opinion/cities-privacy-surveillance.html

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/unchecked-smart-cities-are-surveillance-cities-what-we-need-are-smart-enough

http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/ruth-miller-smart-cities-book-review

Smart city is watching you

Walking through urban streets, you can feel the thrill of being lost in the crowd. As throngs of people filter past, each going about their days, it seems possible to blend in without being noticed.

But as municipalities and companies pursue the dream of "smart cities," creating hyper-connected urban spaces designed for efficiency and convenience, this experience is receding farther and farther from reality.

Facial recognition exemplifies the trend in Chinese smart cities today. Some facial data collection requires your consent, but more facial data collection happens without your awareness, because face recognition can be done silently from a distance.

When you go home and be back at the neighborhood gate, you find that you have to swipe your face to get in. Finally you get home and open your mailbox to find a ticket from the Traffic Administration Department: at a certain time on a certain day in a certain year, you violated traffic rules by running a red light to cross the street. Facial recognition determines your identity and address, based on which the ticket is sent accurately.

Today cities are deploying technologies that expand the collection of personal data by government and corporations. Certainly, this data can be used for beneficial outcomes: reducing traffic, improving infrastructure and saving energy. But the data also includes detailed information about the activities of everyone in the city — data that could be used in numerous detrimental ways.

Whether we recognize it or not, technologies that cities deploy today will play a significant role in defining the social contract of the future. And as it stands, these smart city technologies have become covert tools for increasing surveillance, corporate profits and, at worst, social control. This undemocratic architecture increases government and corporate power over the public.

First, smart city technologies make it easier than ever for local and federal law enforcement to identify and track individuals. The police can create and gain access to widespread surveillance by acquiring their own technology, partnering with companies and requesting access to data and video footage held by companies. In Los Angeles, for example, automatic license plate readers recorded the location of more than 230 million vehicles in 2016 and 2017, information that, through data-sharing agreements, could have found its way into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Similarly, the police in suburban Portland, Ore., hoping to aid crime investigations, have used Amazon's facial-recognition software to identify more than 1,000 people who have appeared in camera footage.

Second, the smart city is a dream come true for companies eager to increase the scale and scope of data they collect about the public. Companies that place cameras and sensors on Wi-Fi kiosks, trash cans and streetlights will gain what had been unattainable insights about the behavior of individuals. And given the vast reach of hard-to-trace data brokers that gather and share data without the public's knowledge or consent, one company's data can easily end up in another's hands. All of this data can be used to exclude people from credit, jobs, housing and health care in ways that circumvent anti-discrimination laws.

Once these smart city technologies are installed, it will be almost impossible for anyone to avoid being tracked. Sensors will monitor the behavior of anyone with a Bluetooth- or Wi-Fi-connected device. Given the expansive reach of cameras and the growing use of facial-recognition software, it is increasingly impossible to escape surveillance even by abandoning one's personal digital technology. If you want to avoid being tracked in a smart city, you must stay out of that city.

The urban poor and minorities, who are already the most vulnerable to online tracking, face the most severe harms of smart city surveillance. For instance, while well-off New Yorkers who do not want LinkNYC to track them can forgo free Wi-Fi in favor of a personal data plan, poorer residents may have no alternative to LinkNYC's free Wi-Fi and must accept being tracked in exchange for this access. This amounts to a "data tax" that the poor must pay to use the basic infrastructure necessary to engage in modern society.

Smart cities thus are in a position to provide welfare offices, law enforcement, employers, data brokers and others who use data with a new tool for surveillance and exploitation. An undocumented mother could be flagged for deportation because she was identified at a protest by camera footage. A black teenager could be identified for surveillance by the police because he connects to a public Wi-Fi beacon that is often used by people with criminal records. An older citizen could be targeted for predatory loans because his car was identified by automatic license plate readers as it was driven into or out of an impound lot.

Yet instances like those are not inevitable outcomes of new technology. The way to create cities that everyone can traverse without fear of surveillance and exploitation is to democratize the development and control of smart city technology.

To do this, municipalities must ground their decisions about technology in democratic deliberation that allows the public to have a voice in shaping its development, acquisition and use.

But it is not enough for cities merely to reach out to the public — the public must have meaningful oversight of municipal technology. To that end, surveillance ordinances that passed in Seattle; Oakland, Calif.; and Cambridge, Mass., in recent years require every municipal department to hold public meetings and obtain City Council approval before acquiring any surveillance technology. San Francisco passed a full ban on the municipal use of facial-recognition technology in May.

Cities must also use their leverage to assert themselves as market makers and demand that technology companies respect the public's privacy. Municipalities can require enforceable privacy standards in partnerships with companies. The Spanish city of Barcelona is a pioneer in this approach, restructuring contracts with several major technology vendors to enhance the public's ownership and control of data. Municipalities may also be able to emphasize privacy as a condition of a company operating its services in the city.

Whether you truly are anonymous in the crowd on your next walk in the city will depend on whether that city is serious about protecting your privacy and creating a democratic social contract for urban life.

Why we need to build the smart enough city?

Rushing to become a smart city may lead to new insights and efficiencies, but at the cost of creating cities in which the government and companies wield immense power to exploit and manipulate the public.

We must interrogate the smart city because, through the technologies we deploy, we are going to answer some of the most fundamental social and political questions about twenty-first-century cities: Whose needs should urban design prioritize? What is a desirable relationship between a government and its constituents? How should society address crime? How much autonomy should individuals have in their relations with governments and companies? 

In his book, The Smart Enough City ：Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, Ben Green proposes an alternative vision: the Smart Enough City, where technology is embraced as a powerful tool to address the needs of urban residents, in conjunction with other forms of innovation and social change, but is not valued for its own sake or viewed as a panacea.  Rather than seeing the city as something to optimize, those who embrace the Smart Enough City place their policy goals at the forefront and, recognizing the complexity of people and institutions, think holistically about how to better meet their needs. To bolster his arguments for Smart Enough Cities, Green explores how cities in the United States have used technology to create a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. Together, these stories will demonstrate why cities must strive to be "smart enough" rather than "smart," thereby repositioning technology as a means to improving cities rather than as an end in and of itself.

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