On January 25 the streets of Cairo erupted in protest against then president Hosni Mubarak’s repressive Egyptian regime. Over the next 72 hours the government shut down the country’s Internet service and mobile-phone system in an attempt to squelch the rebellion—to no avail: a rich ecosystem of Facebook conversations, Twitter outbursts and chat-room plans had already unified millions of Cairo’s people, who continued the relentless uprising. The government backed down and restored communications to keep the country’s economy on life support, but the masses kept up the pressure until Mubarak resigned 14 days later.

Just weeks before, during Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution,” dissident blogger and protest organizer Slim Amamou used the mobile social app Foursquare to alert his friends of his January 6 arrest. By “checking in” to Foursquare’s virtual depiction of the jail in Tunis where he was being held, Amamou revealed his location to a global web of supporters and immediately grabbed the international spotlight. The news stories sparked further uprisings, and longtime president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was soon ousted.

Across the archipelago of places where the “Arab Spring” revolts played out, citizens used new Internet applications and ubiquitous mobile phones to wage a battle over the soul of their cities, shifting resources back and forth from cyberspace to “city­space.” Contrast those transformations with a handful of large urban development projects that have been vying to be crowned the model “smart city” of the future. Furthest along is Masdar in the United Arab Emirates, a walled community intended for 50,000 residents in the desert outside of Abu Dhabi, in which every building, streetlight and personal electric “pod” vehicle has been preplanned and preloaded with high-tech gear, largely to maximize energy efficiency. At Masdar, as well as New Songdo City in South Korea and PlanIT Valley in Portugal, real estate developers, global information-technology companies and governments are attempting to build urban centers from scratch that are filled with technologically enhanced infrastructure and services. The designers say their grand conceptions will determine how future cities will be built.

But as models, these top-down projects pale in comparison to the emergent form of intelligence that is bubbling up from millions of newly cyber-connected residents. Truly smart—and real—cities are not like an army regiment marching in lockstep to the commander’s orders; they are more like a shifting flock of birds or school of fish, in which individuals respond to subtle social and behavioral cues from their neighbors about which way to move forward. Although the mobs in Cairo and Tunis appeared unruly, their actions resulted from digital coordination of human activity on an unprecedented scale. Hundreds of thousands of people appeared in Tahrir Square in Cairo because text messages and tweets summoned them—reflecting an immensely powerful, democratic and organic alternative vision of the smart city.

Rather than focusing on the installation and control of network hardware, city governments, technology companies and their urban-planning advisers can exploit a more ground-up approach to creating even smarter cities in which people become the agents of change. With proper technical-support structures, the populace can tackle problems such as energy use, traffic congestion, health care and education more effectively than centralized dictates. And residents of wired cities can use their distributed intelligence to fashion new community activities, as well as a new kind of citizen activism.

Going beyond Urban Efficiency
Why are countries racing haphazardly to implement smart cities? Why is IBM forecasting a $10 billion market in this arena by 2015? What is happening at an urban scale today is similar to what happened two decades ago in Formula One auto racing. Up to that point, success on the circuit was primarily credited to a car’s mechanics and the driver’s capabilities. But then telemetry technology blossomed. The car was transformed into a computer that was monitored in real time by thousands of sensors, becoming “intelligent” and better able to respond to the conditions of the race.

2 Comments

1. 1. forsender 03:41 AM 12/9/11

   Congrats for the ground-up alternative!
   But as far THEY are in command and if in Cairo they just overslept the use of IT by the enslaved population that's rather the exception, not the rule. Police control in and on social networks is vast - our taxes subsidize now DEPARTMENTS for not just surveillance but 'official hacking' - trimming of our cyber activity. The shut down covertly communication to large audiences - your messages don't reach wider world without you even knowing it. It's a misuse of power misusing bumming technologies. So till we don't harness power the few controlling it will harness us. Smartly.

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2. 2. Simon1986 11:12 AM 12/21/11

   "creating even smarter cities in which people become the agents of change"
   
   Granted, New media and networked technologies have the ability to accelerate the process of change, altering the ways in which "we" create sentiment and derive influence. However the article in general seems to create an assumption; the assumption that the majority decision is always the right decision. And while this is arguably true in the case studies cited (Arab Spring), is this always the case?
   
   While the current processes by which society generally instigates change can be cumbersome and lengthy (such as physical democratic ones), these do grant "us" time to consider carefully the decisions "we" are making and who exactly is making them.
   
   While arguably the ability to speed up decision making and instigate social change without barriers is an attractive notion, we must first consider the effects of allowing social change to be controlled by populist decision making processes/structures; processes that can occur rapidly and without much consideration and rely on "sentiment".
   
   Should decisions be made by "experts" or should we rely on a model (potentially increasingly autonomous) that reflects the wants of the majority. For example if the interests of the majority (on twitter) were currently reflected in the content of Scientific American then we'd all be reading about:
   
   #2011was
   #Replacea1Dsongwithsanta
   Alex Day
   John Terry
   Dominick The Donkey
   #ThingsNotToDoAtChristmasParty
   Forever Yours
   Oliver Twist
   What Makes Santa Beautiful
   
   Thats not to say these topics aren't interesting (according to twitter they clearly are), but perhaps they aren't the best recipe for positive social change.
   
   One must also consider the "overseer"; the one who administers the network, defines it structures and provides us with the framework for decision making and communication. It would be foolhardy to assume that any such network (and its users) would be free of influence. Just as naive to assume that those who create and influence popular social networks (Facebook / Twitter) have a diminished ability to influence the very way in which we communicate by making small changes to their systems.
   
   The power of the few will likely always have the ability to influence the many; we see this day to day online and via social networks just like we do in everyday life. Core nodes or points of influence online could be likened to Prime Ministers, Presidents and Dictators with more influence than the average citizen. So has anything really changed? Or has it just got faster?
   
   

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