I was a columnist in the print edition of Governing magazine for about five years. Sadly, the publication closed last year. But the company who owned it has relaunched Governing as an online only publication focused on the intersection of technology and public policy.
I’m delighted to be able to contribute to this new platform. My first column is online and is about how cities lost control of the urban tech movement. In I trace three generations of “smart cities,” and how while the government was in the drivers seat in the first two, they have largely been bypassed by the private sector in the third generation. Here is an excerpt:
For many years we’ve been promised that the marriage of technology and the city, the “smart city,” would revolutionize urban life. But for a long time the term has essentially been a buzzword attached to different concepts over three distinct generations, accompanied by generous measures of hype and, lately, some serious questions about who’s in the driver’s seat.
Major technology purveyors who hoped to sell enterprise-level solutions for things like managing water and sewer systems or automating transit operations backed the first major wave of smart cities. Companies like Cisco, Schneider Electric, IBM and Bombardier sponsored conferences and touted their solutions. And they delivered some impressive showpieces, such as the command center IBM built for Rio de Janeiro, which was featured in a TED talk by then-Mayor Eduardo Paes. Songdo in South Korea was an entirely new urban business district built around this type of technology vision.
This generation of smart cities was the product of companies that had a long history of focusing on client needs. As a result, their solutions were about empowering their government clients. Rio’s command center enabled the city to better manage its operations, for example. But it turned out that there weren’t that many cities willing or able to purchase this kind of very expensive solution. This generation of smart cities continues on: The new fare system being installed by the New York City region’s transit network is an example. But it didn’t revolutionize city life.
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Cover image credit: Shutterstock
I think what it comes down to is that the American system of governing has just become too darn slow. A $10 mistake on your taxes seems to take months to fix, if you’re lucky. And if a state legalizes recreational marijuana stores, for example, legislators can spend a year or more “figuring out” how to implement it – you’d think that they must be using the product too much themselves. And don’t get me started on how electric scooters sharing apps put their brains into an absolute pretzel.
Of course Silicon Valley would run circles around local governments. Most local politicians are still busy trying to figure out where the starting line should be by the time Uber has taken its fifth lap.
Somehow, at some point, it’s as if it became the role of local politicians in society is to agonizingly scrutinize any change over a great period of time, slowing any progress. Perhaps they’re just a reflection of their constituency’s beliefs. But boy, they do seem to move faster when it’s time to give a wealthy developer a tax cut. Handing out millions and millions to football team owners? Easy. Those darn scooters? Not so fast.
City residents and voters are the ones who’ve prevented major new initiatives. They’ve invested a lot of money in the current regime and need it to remain to get their investments back. Much of this is due to deeply dysfunctional local politics and a fetishization of home ownership. The Economist talks about these dynamics in the U.S. and elsewhere in developed countries in a recent issue. Again, culture and social expectations are big part of economic policy and economic results. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/16/home-ownership-is-the-wests-biggest-economic-policy-mistake.