Smart Cities (2013)

For our book club at OEF we’re reading the book Smart Cities (2013) by Anthony Townsend. I just finished the Audible audio book and wanted to get my notes down in writing before they slip away.

The book covers the deployment of digital technology for managing and understanding the city. There are a two main themes of the book: the top-down deployment of technology by big companies and city governments, and the bottom-up development of technology by individuals, ad-hoc groups, non-profits, and startups, often in loose partnerships with other parts of the same city governments.

I was surprised to find out that much of what we consider the “smart city” market for software only arose after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. Companies like IBM and Cisco, unable to continue selling technology to a private sector that was freezing or reducing budgets, turned to municipal governments as a new market. They were largely successful, and the book covers their impressive success.

In the same decade, new projects for citizens to understand and managed their experience were being deployed online by individuals and small groups. I’d forgotten how common this was in the 2000s; just putting up a Web site with some dynamic functionality and organizing a community around it.

The book was written in 2013, and it’s interesting to see the different perspective. Townsend has a whole section on the promise of video conferencing, which was just a dream in the early 2010s, and now has become ubiquitous. Another topic that seems anachronistic was municipal WiFi, which seemed like a much bigger deal at that time, and which has been largely obviated by low-cost cellular service.

For companies and non-profits that want to deliver technology to cities and urban communities, there are a lot of helpful examples, both successful and unsuccessful. Probably the most important, to me, was the strong emphasis on local providers for citizen-facing services. Townsend’s great example here is parking apps, which are usually developed by companies in each city, and which are very hard to sell to other cities.

Overall, I liked the book. It was a nice bit of nostalgia about the technological optimism of the 2000s and 2010s, and an astute investigation of how cities and technology mix. It would be great to see an updated version or even a sequel that deals with cities’ use of deep learning or generative AI, or their dependence on proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter to engage with citizens. The story of cities and technology continues to evolve, and it would be good to be able to trace it.