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I contacted Anthony Townsend, a leading technology and smart city expert, about his book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia. Here, he gives a brief over about his book and the concept of smart cities, how they can be improved and why they are useful for the future.
Thejas Jagannath: Why did you write the book Smart Cities?
Anthony Townsend: My goal in writing the book was to describe, in plain terms, the effort by many different stakeholders to leverage digital technologies to address urban problems. There are a lot of powerful companies looking to cash in on this trend, and I felt the need to raise a voice in protest, lest they chart the path alone. The book is a wake-up call to civic-minded people everywhere, to educate them about what’s happening and what’s at stake, so they can get involved in shaping the future of our cities.
Thejas Jagannath: Access to Information Technology plays a vital role for a city to become a “Smart City.” Why should today’s leading cities aspire to become smart cities?
Anthony Townsend: In the future, every city is going to be smart to varying degrees.Information technology now plays a role in almost every aspect of urban life, city management and planning. And given that the incremental cost of making things smart — just a few percent of the cost of a building or piece of infrastructure, and it delivers such tremendous value — it is hard to resist the urge to build smart systems.
Thejas Jagannath: Is Songdo the best example of a Smart City?
Anthony Townsend: Hah! Actually I think its one of the worst. It’s a totally supply-side solution. No one was asked what kinds of smart services they wanted, there were no market studies. The whole city’s infrastructure was basically built as a demonstration platform for Cisco and its technology partners. Real smart cities draw on a vast array of big companies, governments themselves, entrepreneurs, civic hackers, and individual citizens to build out smart systems.
Thejas Jagannath: When nearly half of the world’s population, which according to World Bank is more than three billion people, live below the poverty line (less than $2.50 a day), is it conceivable to think of Smart Cities being affordable to the poor?
Anthony Townsend: As I write in my book Smart Cities, the poor might actually be the biggest beneficiaries of these technologies. Mobile phones have created enormous opportunities for the urban poor to earn a living, access banking, receive information about education and health care. As a new array of more intuitive gestural and spoken interfaces make it easier for poorly educated or even illiterate people to interact with information services, we will start to see big gains at the very lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
Thejas Jagannath: The big companies, Cisco, Siemens and IBM, who are investing in city building, are thought to be the backbone of building a smart city. However, to build a successful city, it is necessary that the needs and voices of the community are heard. As you mention, these companies are mostly hiring architects and engineers to fulfil theirmechanical needs. Are these employees really taking the people into account while building smart cities?
Anthony Townsend: I wish they were hiring architects, at least that would be a good start in trying to learn about how cities actually work. In my experience, these companies have no basis for assessing or understanding what everyday people want or need. They are not consumer-facing companies, they sell to enterprises in the private sector, and in government. So they need to be told what to build by city governments that are aware of and listening to the needs of people.
Thejas Jagannath: Will it be possible to be on a “Quest for a New Utopia” with the invention of a Smart City?
Anthony Townsend: What I meant by “the quest for a new utopia” was that we are once again looking to science and technology to solve all of our urban problems, and that this is something that has happened repeatedly throughout modern history, and usually has been a false hope. More often than not, our efforts to create technological fixes actually create many more, often worse problems. The quest for perfect urban technologies is a red herring.