Is the Smart City dream becoming a surveillance nightmare?

Jordan Wasn’t the City of the Future supposed to be here by now?

Sidewalk Labs Promotional Clip …Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs are partnering to create a new kind of urban community on the waterfront, one that will be an exemplar to the rest of the world of how to build cities that have the greatest impact on our future…

…addressing the challenges that Toronto has requires a different way of thinking. I like the fact that Sidewalk is bringing a different approach that includes both planning and process and community and technology together…

Jordan Those clips were part of a stunning and hopeful presentation from Sidewalk Labs, a division of Google that once hoped to turn a Toronto neighbourhood into one of the world’s most complete smart cities, with technology and data informing everything from stoplights, to snow removal, to density and sustainability. It never happened. Google blamed the pandemic and the cost of real estate in Toronto, but there were a host of other concerns, and it turns out that the same thing has happened to many, huge, so called ‘smart city’ projects around the world. But Interestingly enough, that has not stopped the technology proposed for these smart cities from proliferating in neighbourhoods everywhere, including and perhaps especially artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and the internet of things. You may recognize that these technologies have one thing in common: surveillance. Now, a complete smart city neighbourhood would theoretically make that trade; give up some semblance of privacy in exchange for greener spaces, more diverse communities, better housing density, and livability. Without those things, though, the trade is pretty one sided. The most common adopters of this tech are the police.

So what is the city of the future? Is it still the dream of a better neighbourhood that can offer citizens benefits in exchange for the data that they generate by living in it? Or is the city of the future turning into the kind of city we’ve been warned about in science fiction? And if so, is it too late to change that?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is the Big Story. Anna Artyushina is a research fellow in data governance. She is a PhD candidate in science and Technology studies at York University, and she coauthored a piece on the future of smart cities for Spacing magazine. Hi, Anna.

Anna Hi, Jordan. Thank you for having me.

Jordan You’re very welcome. I’m so glad to talk about this, because a couple of years ago, it seemed impossible that the amazing, inevitable future of smart cities would be here by now. I would have expected at least a few smart neighbourhoods in cities around the world. What happened?

Anna Well, I mean, let me start with the basics. The term smart city comes from the industry. It was coined in 2007 by IBM. It was just one of their marketing campaigns. And for the next ten years they existed this dream of a futuristic new city where everything is automated and robots deliver your mail and every hot surface is a screen.

Specifically, three large scale projects became associated with this idea. It’s Songdo in North Korea, developed by Cisco Systems, Masdar in the Emirates and IBM’s intelligent operations center in Rio. Let me just say a few words about these three, because I think this is something very important and we need to keep in mind what happened to these three projects. So despite enormous public and private funding to these projects, Songdo and Masdar were never completed, they simply failed to attract residents and businesses. And as for Rio’s control Room, which is an operation center, it’s been functional since 2010, but it has not fulfilled its primary goal, making the streets of Rio safe. And then obviously we had the Sidewalk Labs project, which made all the headlines and made people think, do we really want all these technologies in our cities? And who’s running the city now?

Jordan Explain about those headlines and what they were for people who haven’t followed that.

Anna So Sidewalk Toronto in Quayside was the project that existed for two and a half years. It’s never been developed. And there are still discussions, heated discussions about why it failed. There were some Privacy issues, Privacy concerns raised by the public, by activists, lots of well known people here in Canada. And there was also this problem between the company and the municipal government. They could not find the right footing because the company kept dictating its rules, kept offering new demands, and at some point it just became too much. And then right before the city of Toronto was about to… they were planning to scale down the project and before it happened, Sidewalk Labs pulled out.

So that’s an interesting story. And I think I’m talking to my European colleagues and to the colleagues in the States. And I know the story is not known that well, surprisingly, because despite the coverage in New York Times and the Guardian and smaller outlets, they only saw the parts of the story, like specifically how everyone was concerned about the Privacy. But the part where actually you have the company coming in and dictating what the governance is going to be. No one actually knows about this. And I think this is an important conversation we have to have.

Jordan Well, that’s the kind of conversation we’re going to have today. And it’s really interesting to hear you discuss them kind of as not to put words in your mouth, but as like a branding exercise for these projects, as opposed to, like, just collections of technology. And I assume and please correct me if I’m wrong, that the actual tech that Alphabet with sidewalk labs or the other companies planning to do smart cities, the actual tech they were planning to use is still in demand, right? It’s just not being used in a kind of holistic everything put together in a smart city type way.

Anna Yes, this is a great question. So one thing we need to remember is that calling something a smart city is not always a question of labelling. We’ve seen this over the last 15 years. Municipalities in Europe would market something, like a certain project, as a smart city, and it helps attract private capital. There’s nothing bad about it. And the smart City challenge is very popular in the US, and you can see American citizens actually compete for the attention of technology vendors. If we talk about this project, this would be open data repositories, city dashboards, and often these tiny apps that allow residents to report potholes. So it’s not exactly bad using this label. And it’s not exactly bad using this type of branding for a specific tag. It’s just the problem is that quite often in all these marketing pitches, we forget what’s actually happening.

In the article that Alina Wernick and I just wrote for Spacing magazine, we argue that it’s time to redefine the concept of smart city to include all these new technologies that have been quietly invading our public spaces. In the article, we discussed some very disturbing examples. For instance, in Santiago, the Police use Smart Street lights to identify, investigate the protesters during the protests last year and in Los Angeles for the very same purposes, law enforcement agencies used train cameras. In Canada, we’re quite used to police using drones with facial recognition technology during public events. And this is very important that we go back to the conversation about what a smart city is, and what kind of smart cities we want and kind of step back from the marketing, branding pictures that promote the futuristic vision of the city.

Jordan We’ve talked about this stuff on the program before, especially facial recognition and where it’s used, how it’s used. And the one thing I keep coming back to which I think gets at some of the stuff you guys wrote in the article is that I don’t know that our governments, and I could be speaking municipally or provincially or whatever, I don’t know that our governments can create regulations smart enough or fast enough to keep up with the pace of this kind of technology that’s being implemented now. And that seems to me to be the biggest problem with again, turning a part of our city over to Alphabet or somebody else.

Anna Yeah. Absolutely. So we’ve been having lengthy discussions with Alina about it because she’s looking at several European examples and what they’re trying to do, they actually use GDPR as a framework to approach every smart city project. I mean, the municipalities they use GDPR…

Jordan And that’s the European Union Privacy regulations, right?

Anna Yes. Sorry. It’s general data protection regulation. It was enacted in 2018 and a few years in we can see that it actually works, despite some companies treating it as a matter of compliance. But for municipalities, for cities, it actually helps to start asking the questions about what is it exactly you’re doing what kind of data you’re collecting. And an important step forward is the data regulation act, which was released several months ago in the European Union. So what they offer the cities to do is that they actually become responsible for the data governance part, because the way it works now in Canada and the U.S., everywhere, basically, the city outsources specific services or hires a company to handle some public service on their behalf. And then the company does something with the data. Nobody quite knows what they’re doing. And when something bad happens, there’s no liability because the city is not aware of this part of the project, and they don’t have the capacity, they don’t have the experts who could be advising on such projects.

Jordan Could you maybe give me an example of a time that that’s happened or a technology that’s happened with?

Anna Yeah, absolutely. I think the most interesting example, recent example would be PayIt. So when the city of Toronto wanted to invite this American company to handle the digital payments on behalf of the city. And on the face of it, the idea is great. Instead of having all these pieces of paper and actually having to do something, you just go on the Internet, tap the button, you’ve already saved all your financial information and they can actually automatically process your payments. The problem is, and I think I have to credit Bianca Wylie here because she did a great job explaining why this is wrong and why the city was not doing the job good enough in understanding what was actually happening. Because the usual problem with this kind of project is that companies would say, well, we’ll handle this part for you, but in exchange, we want to be able to charge people for our services, and we want to have access to all the personal information of cities, Toronto residents.

And these demands, cities treat them as unimportant, because even now they do not understand the value of the data they’re giving away. And, well, nobody knows what happens to this data afterwards because another problem we have here, once you give away your data, you give it away. They never delete it. And what happens is it’s probably going to transfer somewhere. It’s going to be marketed to someone else.

And so the story of PayIt. I think it’s another very sad story. I mean, just to give credit to the city of Toronto, I think what they’re doing now with the digital infrastructure plan, I find it very important. And I think this is a step in the right direction.

Jordan Explain the digital infrastructure plan and how it’s different from PayIt.

Anna This is something that has been in discussion for the last year, and there have been public discussions about that. They ran a public campaign. And I wouldn’t rush to give a conclusive analysis of that. But I would say that what the city wants to do is they want to provide guidelines for all public departments procuring smart technology or any digital technology to help them evaluate this project as to what kind of data is being used. What is the technology exactly? And can the city use this technology by itself without the company? Because another problem highlighted by the exit of Sidewalk Labs, when the company decides to bail out, what should we do? What if they already started this project?

Digital infrastructure plan, it advises that the government agencies procuring these technologies, they would choose the technology that they can support and maintain themselves, which probably should run on open data. So this means that the data is not proprietary, it’s not owned by the company that runs the service, and also what they’re trying to do, they want to have internal capacity, people who actually understand these technologies to evaluate these projects to help have a better position in negotiations.

Jordan Not something governments are great at when it comes to this technology.

Anna No, frankly, we cannot blame them because quite often with these technologies, even people who work on these projects, they are not certain how certain algorithms work, and they may not fully understand the results of their work. This is a big problem.

Jordan If the idea of a smart city is never really going away because it makes for great branding, it’s a nice ideal to think about. I think a lot of us like to imagine the cities of the future. What do we need to be doing now in order to make certain that when we create these cities, when we finally get our ducks in a row and have companies buy in and we do it properly, that they’ll be safe for people’s privacy and data?

Anna Well, two things. First of all, I think we need to be vigilant. There is a body of research on smart cities on Privacy issues associated with the digital tracking in public spaces and with the EU and the US seeking to use smart cities to address environmental problems, we need to actually evaluate each technology case by case and to implement new, robust legal protections. And I’m speaking about Europe and the US, but it’s quite obvious that this is coming here, too.

I mean, I think if we decide to scale these projects down and if we are smart enough to give our cities the ability and the internal capacity to deal with the companies in a very transparent way, we can get some great results. So one of the projects I’ve been following here in Canada, actually here in Ontario, is the city of Guelph, in the county of Wellington, won the smart City challenge. The project is called Our Food Future. So what they do is they collect data about the food waste specifically in the region, and they use this data to address the imbalance between the amount of food being produced and the demand for them, and they try to use digital technology to find better routes for delivery. And I think this project is a good illustration of how on the local level we can actually make a good use of big data and why we need a lot of open data. Why we need actually data collected by the government, some of it to be shared with the public.

And this also can be used as a business opportunity for someone, which is also not necessarily a bad thing. I would say these three things, scaling down, introducing new legal protections and making municipalities responsible for the data governance in these projects. I think this will add greater transparency to these projects and we cannot impact Alphabet, but we can vote out a politician. So having someone in the government held responsible for that, I think this may be a way forward.

Jordan Do you think the ambition exists both in the levels of government and also within the companies themselves, to still try to get all their ducks in a row for that big picture, idealistic dream of a smart city? Or is that just something that doesn’t make sense at scale, and it makes much more sense to concentrate on these scaled down, smaller smart projects?

Anna I see a lot of interest in it and especially when it comes to health data, and this has been facilitated by the pandemic obviously. There is a lot of interest within the companies primarily, but also the governments. They want to find a way to use the data to introduce new services, to show that we are actually moving forward. There is a push for the digitization of public services in Canada. And I mean, if you think of Canada, there is a great interest in smart cities in the federal government, and it doesn’t exactly translate into specific policies yet, but it will soon. It can be a good development for Canada. It can be a good opportunity.

I would say we need to be cautious and not to buy into this commercial dream, the dream that has been marketed to us and it’s been around for, I don’t know, 15 years, this futuristic city that was built from scratch by a private company. But finding a way for us to locate the problems we can address with technology, this is good and this can be interesting. I think it’s very much alive in Canada and everywhere.

Jordan Anna, thank you so much for this. I learned a lot.

Anna Oh, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Jordan Anna Artyushina of York University, writing for Spacing magazine. That was the big story for more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can even search for smart cities and see the work we’ve done in the past on this constantly evolving and terrifying topic. You can also talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN or email us at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

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Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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