Should we even Bother?

With all of these concerns, then, should we even bother with smart city technology? The answer has to be yes. The increasing urbanization of the world’s population, environmental concerns, and budget challenges demand that we do. But we need to do it safely.

Doing smart cities safely will cost more money in the short term. That is the reality. Such technology will ultimately usher in monetary savings and benefits for the larger community and the environment, but not as much as if systems were installed without the necessary security features and design. These features are necessary, and installing smart city technology without a security mindset and tooling raises too many risks. It is time to dedicate resources to answering the tough questions that go along with the benefits of technological innovation.

This economic reality—that a responsible and safe smart city is more (perhaps much more) expensive than just implementing smart technology immediately—must also be balanced against one of the more important realities of cities in the current era: that cities are struggling for resources. In the United States, cities are facing a series of important financial hurdles. Cities often face declining budgets or revenues,¹ shrinking state and/or federal support,² increasing pension obligations,³ and ultimately more financial uncertainty.⁴ Thus, at a time when we would prefer cities to be investing in making smart applications safer and more secure, they will often be in a financial situation that makes such investments much harder to justify. This resource challenge exacerbates the mismatch between city contracting capabilities and needs and the differing bottom lines and goals of cities and their vendors.

There is further research needed in multiple areas to make smart cities a truly “smart” reality.

Some of these key questions have been identified in this paper, and others will continue to pop up over time as new devices, systems, applications, and functionalities are introduced in smart cities. Cities will have to answer some, but they will not be able to do so alone. Other organizations and individuals—federal and state government agencies, legislatures at all levels, academic and research institutions, private sector companies, technologists, ethicists, lawyers and courts, and stakeholder and community organizations—will all have to play a part in working with cities to understand what smart city implementations truly mean for society and how to make sure the benefit is an overall positive one. In that sense, the project of making smart cities safe, stable, secure, and sustainable will be a national and communal one as much as a municipal one.

We have made amazing progress on the technical questions around smart cities and smart city applications. However, the technical questions are not the only ones we face. There are still areas of concern, each of which will include not individual questions but large portfolios of questions—ethical, financial, social, logistical, political, demographic, economic, bureaucratic, and otherwise—that are decidedly not technical.

That said, there is a series of broader functions that define what it is that cities provide and are expected to provide for the people who live in them, work in them, and visit them. These functions can manifest as services—fire or emergency response, snow removal, trash collection, or education—or aspects of community—social justice, safety, or urban development. Each of the following broad areas of expectations have implications for smart cities and public policy, and each raise both broad philosophical and ethical questions as well as narrower, practical questions. Below are some of those broad philosophical questions, along with a non-comprehensive sampling of more specific ones.

• Sustainable Finance: What business models and investment or pricing strategies will make smart cities feasible and sustainable?
  • Should vendors be able to offer lower-cost smart city implementations in exchange for owning or monetizing the collected data?
  • Will the city or the vendor be responsible for the cost of maintenance, sensor calibration, and/or maintaining stores of spare components?
  • What will the exploding cost of data storage and processing needs that come with smarter cities do to city budgets, and how will that balance with potential savings?
• Social Justice: How will the implementation, management, and automation processes of smart cities differentially impact various communities, constituencies, and stakeholders in the city, and what responsibilities do cities have to mitigate these impacts?
  • What neighborhoods will get pilot or phased smart city implementations first? Will it be those with most needs or those that contribute the most to the city tax base?
  • What populations—domestic violence victims, the homeless, and/or the elderly—will face what risks from automated personal data collection in smart city applications?
  • Should companies be given tax credits or incentives for installing smart city applications, and where does that funding come from?
• Security and Safety: Can cities and their partners (from vendors, to state and federal government agencies, to third sector partners) really secure the data and systems that are likely to come with smart city growth?
  • Are city network operators going to be able to effectively monitor the alarms on intrusion detection systems when the number of devices on their networks doubles, triples, or increases by a factor of 10?
  • Will smart city transportation applications fail over into a manual mode, or will computer failures on the systems mean that city transit grinds to a halt? (And would the city even still employ drivers or train operators to do the manual work if there was a failure like this?)
  • How resistant to flooding are the sensor networks that operate a city’s smart parking infrastructure? Can such systems be installed in flood prone areas?
• Effective Municipal Operations: Can cities improve their cross-agency, cross-disciplinary, and cross-jurisdiction coordination, as well as their contracting and acquisition processes, sufficiently to make smart cities viable?
  • When fire departments respond to calls at facilities with smart city infrastructure, will they know what infrastructure is where, and will they know how to avoid damaging it in the course of firefighting?
  • When a driver crosses the line between two municipalities, will they need a second smart parking token or beacon, or will the systems in adjoining communities be interoperable?
  • When parking meter data can be used to show who parks at or around hospitals or medical service providers, will parking management officials recognize that data as sensitive and valuable?
• Consequence and Liability Management: When people are injured, killed, or otherwise negatively impacted by automated systems that are part of a smart city, will cities, the courts, the insurance industry, first responders, and others be able to reasonably manage the consequences, understand the technologies and systems sufficiently to assign blame, and take steps to mitigate such negative impacts?
  • When buggy code results in the derailment of a subway car, will the court system be able to parcel out blame and responsibility among the city transit agency, train operators, vendors and system integrators, hardware and software producers, and other key stakeholders?
  • If tens of thousands of smart city devices from across a dozen cities are used to conduct denial of service attacks on a company across the globe, what is the city’s responsibility?
  • If algorithms determine that it is more efficient to send trains more often to some neighborhoods than others because of traffic volume, but some percentage—30, 50, or 70 percent—of the less-served neighborhoods are among the more accessible ones, could that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Each of these broad research areas is underdeveloped but key to answering a broader question about the viability and sustainability of the smart city ideal. We have to answer many of these questions to get a sense of the kind of smart cities we will end up with. The initial impulse will be to pursue the strategy of implementing smart cities “fast” and “cheap.” Answering these questions will be an important part of changing the strategy to push toward optimizing for “good” smart cities.