Better than a Smart City?A Caring City
The Smart City used to be trendy. There was a lot of hype around it, which provided an excuse for vendors and politicians to talk about solving problems in the cities. Typical examples included Smart Waste Management Systems, Gunshot Detection Technology, Smart Traffic Control Systems, Smart Air Quality Sensors and Smart Street Lighting. As you can see, it was enough to add the word Smart and voila, a solution for Smart City was born. Marketing dollars were poured in, products were rebranded, PowerPoint presentations were created and sales people descended on City Halls around the world.
The only problem was that all the solutions required massive investments, which cities didn't have the resources to fund. Soon, companies realized that there was no money in Smart Cities and started exiting from that market. One of them was Cisco, in January of 2021. Or their solution just wasn't welcomed - like Google's Sidewalk Labs in Toronto.
If you check Google Trends, you can see that in Canada the trend peaked in 2018 and the US is seeing a similar decline as well. Talk about a leading indicator.
Since companies can't make money off the Smart City, they started using another term, AI. This time, AI will be able to solve our remaining problems. From 10 ways AI can be used in Smart Cities: The Environment, Energy Tracking, Traffic Management, Waste Management, Public Transportation, Parking Systems, Controlling Pollution, Predicting Future Needs... You can see the recurrent pattern.
Is the idea for Smart City dead then? I would say quite the opposite. Now that the hype and empty promises are over and we drop the word 'Smart', we can focus on the real questions - How can we make our cities more liveable? How can we make our cities welcoming for new citizens?
The inspiration for this post came from an article App to help blind people navigate public transit to debut in Washington and highlights all the good areas where technology can help us. Waymap app is your GPS on steroids. It started as an experimentation in audio navigation in the UK by the Royal Society for Blind Children and has been tried and tested in cities across North America and Europe. Imagine the freedom of movement for the blind or visually impaired who can move around the city (and inside the buildings) with ease which others take for granted. It’s not a Smart City as we typically think about it, but it is a Caring City.
A similar mobile app was built in 2015 in Hungary by Route4U, where people using wheelchairs helped to map city streets and sidewalks from their perspective. That app provided data back to the City Hall. It showed where people with wheelchairs travel and which parts of the city were not accessible.
The recurrent pattern? When you remove all the hype, the artificial labeling and you find a technology which helps people with their problems, improving their lives and well being. That’s when magic happens.