This week London hosts a jamboree of computer geeks, politicians and urban planners from around the world. At the Urban Age conference, they will discuss the latest whizz idea in high-tech, the “smart city.” Doing more than programming traffic, the smart city’s computers will calculate where offices and shops can be laid out most efficiently, where people should sleep and how all the parts of urban life should be fitted together. Science fiction? Smart cities are being built in the Middle East and in South Korea; they have become a model for developers in China and for redevelopment in Europe. Thanks to the digital revolution, at last life in cities can be brought under control. However, is this a good thing?
You do not have to be a romantic to doubt it. In the 1930s the US urbanist Lewis Mumford foresaw the disaster entailed by “scientific planning” of transport, embodied in the super-efficient highway, choking the city. The Swiss architecture critic Sigfried Giedion worried that after World War II efficient building technologies would produce a soulless landscape of glass, steel and concrete boxes. Yesterday’s smart city, today’s nightmare.
The debate about good engineering has changed now because digital technology has shifted the technological focus to information processing; this can occur in handheld computers linked to “clouds,” or in command-and-control centers. The danger now is that this information-rich city may do nothing to help people think for themselves or communicate well with one another.
Imagine that you are a master planner facing a blank computer screen and that you can design a city from scratch, free to incorporate every bit of high technology into your design. You might come up with Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates, or Songdo, in South Korea. These are two versions of the stupefying smart city: Masdar the more famous, or infamous; Songdo the more fascinating in a perverse way.
MASDAR
Masdar is a half-built city rising out of the desert, whose planning — overseen by the master architect Norman Foster — comprehensively lays out the activities of the city, the technology monitoring and regulating the function from a central command center. The city is conceived in “Fordist” terms — that is, each activity has an appropriate place and time.
Urbanites become consumers of choices laid out for them by prior calculations of where to shop, or to get a doctor, most efficiently. There is no stimulation through trial and error; people learn their city passively.
“User-friendly” in Masdar means choosing menu options rather than creating the menu.
Creating your own, new menu entails, as it were, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In mid 20th-century Boston, for instance, its new “brain industries” developed in places where the planners never imagined they could grow. Masdar — like London’s new “ideas quarter” around Old Street, east London — on the contrary assumes a clairvoyant sense of what should grow where. The smart city is overzoned, defying the fact that real development in cities is often haphazard, or in between the cracks of what is allowed.
Songdo represents the stupefying smart city in its architectural aspect — massive, clean, efficient housing blocks rising up in the shadow of South Korea’s western mountains, like an inflated 1960s British housing estate — but now heat, security, parking and deliveries are all controlled by a central Songdo “brain.” The massive units of housing are not conceived as structures with any individuality in themselves, nor is the ensemble of these faceless buildings meant to create a sense of place.
Uniform architecture need not inevitably produce a dead environment, if there is some flexibility on the ground; in New York, for instance, along parts of Third Avenue monotonous residential towers are subdivided on street level into small, irregular shops and cafes; they give a good sense of neighborhood. However in Songdo, lacking that principle of diversity within the block, there is nothing to be learned from walking the streets.
RIO DE JANEIRO
A more intelligent attempt to create a smart city comes from work currently under way in Rio de Janeiro. Rio has a long history of devastating flash floods, made worse socially by widespread poverty and violent crime. In the past people survived thanks to the complex tissues of local life; the new information technologies are now helping them, in a very different way to Masdar and Songdo.
Led by IBM, with help by Cisco and other subcontractors, the technologies have been applied to forecasting physical disasters, to coordinating responses to traffic crises, and to organizing police work on crime. The principle here is coordination rather than, as in Masdar and Songdo, prescription.
Is this comparison not unfair? Would people in the favelas not prefer, if they had a choice, the pre-organized, already planned place in which to live? After all, everything works in Songdo. A great deal of research during the past decade, in cities as different as Mumbai and Chicago, suggests that once basic services are in place people do not value efficiency above all; they want quality of life. A hand-held GPS device will not, for instance, provide a sense of community.
Moreover, the prospect of an orderly city has not been a lure for voluntary migration, neither to European cities in the past nor today to the sprawling cities of South America and Asia. If they have a choice, people want a more open, indeterminate city in which to make their way; this is how they can come to take ownership over their lives.
There is nothing wicked about the smart city confab London is hosting this week. Technology is a great tool, when it is used responsively, as in Rio. However, a city is not a machine; as in Masdar and Songdo, this version of the city can deaden and stupefy the people who live in its all-efficient embrace. We want cities that work well enough, but are open to the shifts, uncertainties and mess which are real life.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs