"Mesa, Arizona, is developing a smart city strategic plan to better serve its citizens. The city is currently soliciting input from citizens and local businesses and the objective is to focus on public safety, transportation and responsive services."
Now how does that work? Not at all . . .
A Citizen Innovator Workshop ? >>
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The quotation above is an excerpt from a report saying that the massive collection of personal data is now the norm.
It was originally published by Strategic Partnerships, Inc. on Nov 7th 2018. You can scroll down farther and read more)
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Tech and the city
The truth about smart cities: In the end, they will destroy democracy'Cities is supported by
The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzz phrase that has outlived its usefulness: ‘the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people’.
So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place? . . .
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The digital techniques that smart-city fans adore are flimsy and flashy—and some are even actively pernicious—but they absolutely will be used in cities.
They already have an urban heritage.
When you bury fiber-optic under the curbs around the town, then you get internet.
When you have towers and smartphones, then you get portable ubiquity.
When you break up a smartphone into its separate sensors, switches, and little radios, then you get the internet of things.
These tedious yet important digital transformations have been creeping into town for a couple of generations. At this point, they’re pretty much all that urban populations can remember how to do.
So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place? . . .
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The digital techniques that smart-city fans adore are flimsy and flashy—and some are even actively pernicious—but they absolutely will be used in cities.
They already have an urban heritage. When you bury fiber-optic under the curbs around the town, then you get internet.
When you have towers and smartphones, then you get portable ubiquity.
When you break up a smartphone into its separate sensors, switches, and little radios, then you get the internet of things.
These tedious yet important digital transformations have been creeping into town for a couple of generations. At this point, they’re pretty much all that urban populations can remember how to do.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent - these are the true industrial titans of our era.
That’s how people make money, . . . it will be how they make cities. However, the cities of the future won’t be “smart,” or well-engineered, cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, affordable, or resilient. They won’t have any particularly higher ethical values of liberty, equality, or fraternity, either.
The future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed by City Hall, mostly for the sake of making towns more attractive to capital.
Whenever that’s done right, it will increase the soft power of the more alert and ambitious towns and make the mayors look more electable.
When it’s done wrong, it’ll much resemble the ragged downsides of the previous waves of urban innovation, such as railways, electrification, freeways, and oil pipelines. There will also be a host of boozy side effects and toxic blowback that even the wisest urban planner could never possibly expect.
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Stop Saying 'Smart Cities'
Digital stardust won’t magically make future cities more affordable or resilient
. . . I used to imagine that time was on the side of the internet’s infrastructure providers—that we were in for a flat world of torrenting, friction-free data. That could well have happened, but it didn’t pay off fast enough; instead, today’s surveillance-marketing business model set in, and with it the realization that “information about you wants to be free to us. . ."
This silo-izing and digital balkanizing is sinister and unfair in many ways, but it also tends to add regional character. It’s about as flat and fair as a billionaire’s penthouse. . .
> Smart cities will use the techniques of “smartness” to leverage their regional competitive advantages. Instead of being speed-of-light flat-world platforms, all global and multicultural, they’ll be digitally gated communities, with “code as law” that is as crooked, complex, and deceitful as a Facebook privacy chart.
I didn’t expect to see this, but neither did city planners.
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Back in the internet days, the fact that everybody had broadband and cellphones made it look like city government would become flat, participatory, and inclusive.
You still see this upbeat notion remaining in the current smart-city rhetoric, mostly because it suits the institutional interests of the left.
Community leaders, grassroots activism, the people who want to “participate”—to point, click, and fix the potholes—there are plenty of such people around. However, they’re always the people who think a city-council meeting or a labor-union rally are interesting. They’re not interesting. They’re important, but they’re dull.
That’s why smart cities, in this new digital era of Big Five and China-BAT industry consolidation, drift away from open public websites and popular comments.
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Instead, they’re adopting that new surveillance-marketing paradigm of “data extractivity.” Why trouble to ask the “citizens” what they want from urban life, when you can accurately surveil the real actions of city’s “users” and decode what they’re actually doing, as opposed to what they vaguely claim they might want to do?
Historically, this is a rather typical drift for a left-wing mass-democratic ideology—from the unwieldy awkwardness of rallying the entire people, and toward the semi-covert vanguard of the revolution. Throw in some engineering degrees and a whole lot of police software, and this is the basic model for modern Chinese cyberspace sovereignty. The new Chinese smart-city model isn’t London at all, but rather “Baidu-Macau,” where the state-approved social-media giant shows up in the sleepy ex-Portuguese gambling town, and offers to ramp up the local action. For instance, embedding Chinese AI facial recognition into all the town’s police security cameras.
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This silo-izing and digital balkanizing is sinister and unfair in many ways, but it also tends to add regional character. It’s about as flat and fair as a billionaire’s penthouse. . .
> Smart cities will use the techniques of “smartness” to leverage their regional competitive advantages. Instead of being speed-of-light flat-world platforms, all global and multicultural, they’ll be digitally gated communities, with “code as law” that is as crooked, complex, and deceitful as a Facebook privacy chart.
I didn’t expect to see this, but neither did city planners.
_________________________________________________________________________
Back in the internet days, the fact that everybody had broadband and cellphones made it look like city government would become flat, participatory, and inclusive.
You still see this upbeat notion remaining in the current smart-city rhetoric, mostly because it suits the institutional interests of the left.
Community leaders, grassroots activism, the people who want to “participate”—to point, click, and fix the potholes—there are plenty of such people around. However, they’re always the people who think a city-council meeting or a labor-union rally are interesting. They’re not interesting. They’re important, but they’re dull.
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Historically, this is a rather typical drift for a left-wing mass-democratic ideology—from the unwieldy awkwardness of rallying the entire people, and toward the semi-covert vanguard of the revolution. Throw in some engineering degrees and a whole lot of police software, and this is the basic model for modern Chinese cyberspace sovereignty. The new Chinese smart-city model isn’t London at all, but rather “Baidu-Macau,” where the state-approved social-media giant shows up in the sleepy ex-Portuguese gambling town, and offers to ramp up the local action. For instance, embedding Chinese AI facial recognition into all the town’s police security cameras.
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Collection Of Massive Amounts Of Public Data Is Now The Norm
Smart city spending worldwide is projected to reach about $81 billion in 2018. The best case prediction is that this amount will only rise in the near future.
Tech enthusiasts are elated but a recent IBM assessment of three top smart city vendors found a total of 17 significant vulnerabilities in products from the top three technology firms. Eight critical flaws were also detected
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The Privacy Act of 1974 guarantees “the right of individuals to be protected against unwarranted invasion of their privacy resulting from the collection, maintenance and use of personal information.”
HERE'S WHAT THE AUTHOR OF THAT ARTICLE IN STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS SAID:
This act is being used by civil liberties groups in some cases to halt the adoption of smart city technology.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California joined with other privacy advocates last year in calling on the San Jose City Council to pass an ordinance that requires a robust public discussion related to surveillance technology, including video cameras, audio sensors and LED streetlights
This act is being used by civil liberties groups in some cases to halt the adoption of smart city technology.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California joined with other privacy advocates last year in calling on the San Jose City Council to pass an ordinance that requires a robust public discussion related to surveillance technology, including video cameras, audio sensors and LED streetlights
Strategic Partnerships, Inc. is one of the leading procurement consulting companies in U.S.
