A Planet of Civic Laboratories
If the risk of visions like Masdar is their elitism and singular focus on efficiency, their advantage is clarity of purpose. The bottom-up smart city is a continual work in progress; its organic flexibility is also its biggest flaw. But as civic laboratories for urban innovation, these seemingly chaotic places are becoming part of a global movement. To make rapid progress, we need to build mechanisms for scanning, evaluating and cross-fertilizing good ideas—ways to spread the best methods for crowdsourcing public services or using citizens as sensors, just as we have in the past spread the best ideas for bus rapid transit or bike sharing.

Here is where mayors, architects, planners and technologists might play their most effective role in shaping truly smart cities—by marshaling and integrating the great engineering resources of top-down approaches with the innovation of grassroots initiatives. Governments in cities as diverse as New York City, London, Singapore and Paris are taking tentative first steps by making formerly private government data warehouses public. These resources are empowering entrepreneurs to come up with mobile software applications that meet citizen needs. But it is not clear how the entrepreneurs will sustain these efforts. The grassroots developers bring engagement and creativity to the table, but corporations and politicians are needed to scale and sustain the large systems that the innovations run on. After all, the revolutions of Cairo and Tunis played out on a mobile infrastructure built by Vodafone and other global companies.

It is also up to civic leaders to listen to citizens and together frame their own smart city vision. Every community faces a unique set of circumstances, as well as resources to address them. Some local experiments will morph into “best practices,” data sets, computer models and visualizations that can be repurposed elsewhere, but many of the best smart city solutions will be like the best urban experiences: unique, local and unreplicable—as they should be!

Smart Cities for All Time
Is Masdar really a glimpse into how we will live tomorrow? Or will it suffer the same fate as the machine universe of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis—another vision that will inspire designers but will ultimately fail to materialize? Masdar is perhaps a bit of both. It is providing an effective template for how to use pervasive computing to optimize urban systems, from transport to energy. Yet after five years and more than $1 billion, Masdar is also showing shortcomings of the centralized approach; a large replanning exercise will effectively turn it into a more conventional real estate development. More than smart systems that improve efficiency are needed to make the city “smart.”

Taking a more bottom-up view of how cities actually develop gives us an opportunity to radically rethink what intelligent, connected communities of the future could look like and how they can be designed, built and lived in. By empowering people to devise ways to run their daily lives as smartly as possible, we can make their extended community—the actual embodiment of a city—smarter, too.

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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