The Impacts of Digitisation and Automation on Citizens of 'Smart Cities'

Introduction'Smart cities' is a loosely used today when describing modern, efficient metropolises. They

are defined by the Smart Cities Council as a city "that has digital technology embedded

across all city functions" (Smart Cities Council, no date). This definition is not universal,

however, as the British Government's view of smart cities is one of a process "by which

cities become more 'liveable' and resilient and, hence, able to respond quicker to new

challenges" (Ministry for Business Innovation & Skills, 2013).

For the purposes of this report, a definition of smart cities shall be derived from a

combination of definitions in order to contextualise points and arguments later discussed in

the report. Firstly, the use of, and investment in technology in smart cities as stated by the

Smart Cities Council will play a key role in the discussion in this report. Next, they are cities

that use this technology to sustainably improve the livelihood, economy and opportunity of

all of its citizens (Ministry of Urban Development (India), 2014). Lastly, it is a city which

dynamically adjusts, learns, innovates and responds to changing conditions (Coe et al., 2001)

based on the collective data of its inhabitants, sensors, and circumstances, for example to

changing economic conditions within the city, country or globe.

Using this definition of technology, sustainability and adaptability for smart cities, this

report will look at a number of aspects about the subject. Firstly this report will look at how

cities have developed historically, and how smart cities are seemingly the next step of

urbanisation. The report will also look at Songdo, the first attempt at a brand-new smart

city, and the part that technology plays in the smart city economy. Following this, the report

will investigate the role that big data plays within the smart city and the limitations it faces,

and more importantly the real reason behind the use of big data and digitisation by

governments to create what Ryan Bishop and Stephen Graham (2015) describe as

"weaponised urban environments." Are smart cities really designed to be the utopias that

they are advertised to be?

Where Did Smart Cities Come From?The concept of what defines a city is, again, never universal. Although a common

assumption is that the reason cities originated is that they are inherently generative of

economic growth and increased quality of life for the inhabitants, it is argued that in reality

cities formed in two layers where the centre is in political and economic control of the outer

urban and agricultural areas, whereby the centre draws wealth from the peripheral regions,

in which "growth in the centre tends to produce not a parallel growth in the periphery, but a

counterpoised decline, stagnation, or at best, lower rates of growth" (Barceló et al.,

2002:44-45).

A corner stone of city development is surplus of food, goods, and materials, by which

citizens are provided opportunity to excel in professions and develop things such as literacy

and science, driving the growth of economies, populations and civilisations (Childe, 2008:3-

17). This still holds true today, such as in London where the economy grows faster than the

rest of the UK (Rankin, 2014), and automated manufacture of goods in today's age of

abundance echoes the growth of the first cities and civilisations.

In the 21st century, cities still follow their historical definitions - as varied as they are - quite

closely. But with the advent of technologies urban areas-and the opportunities within them-

grow exponentially. As Stadler (2008:21) says;

"The railroad lent itself to a radial and linear expansion of the city, the car filled out land surfaces, and electronics gave rise to a borderless expansion."

This borderless expansion, the linking of cities as a network/system that encompasses the

globe and connects everyone among them, is the result of "globalisation of capitalist-

industrial modes of production" (Stadler, 2008:22). The opportunities that urban areas

provide for its inhabitants are driving the urban population higher each day, shown in Figure

1 (UN, 2005). To accommodate such large influxes of people into urban areas, governments

around the world are investing in new construction projects; India for example must build

the equivalent of Chicago every year to accommodate the urban population increase

(Townsend, 2012:2). Perhaps then this globalisation and socioeconomic population drive is

the beginning of the era of the smart city.

Figure 1: The urban and rural Population of the world, 1950-2030 (UN, 2005)

SongdoOn the coast of South Korea, the realisation of concepts for how smart cities should be in

the eyes of city planners, architects, and investors alike can be seen. It will occupy 1,500

acres of reclaimed land, making it the "largest private real estate development in history"

(Lobo, 2014). Songdo, as the self-proclaimed "brand-new city" (Gale International, no date)

in both construction and vision is perhaps the best place to find examples of the technology

being developed and deployed in smart cities.

At the beginning of 2014, the development cost of Songdo had reached $40billion (Lobo,

2014). Much of this money had gone into the technology that would make it the smart city

it was conceived to be. Lobo (2014) highlights the advantage of building such a city from

scratch, allowing brand new ideas and technologies to fit seamlessly into the designs,

exemplifying Brasilia as a city built to be as functional as its time would permit. One

hallmark feature of Songdo that sets it aside as a 'new' city is its means for disposing

material waste. As Williamson (2013) describes, rubbish is taken directly from its

inhabitants' kitchens and piped through underground tunnels to sorting facilities, where it is

then autonomously sorted, deodorised and treated for reuse, completely automating the

city's waste disposal and taking garbage trucks off the streets, making the city greener and

more productive with less congestion on the roads. Songdo is a city that is being designed

with technology at its core. Cisco, the multi-billion dollar giant behind much of the city's

technological infrastructure, describes Songdo as "a prime example of a new city that brings

together the world's best technologies, building design and eco-friendly practices to create

the ultimate lifestyle and work experiences" (Cisco, 2011). With this vision in mind, Cisco set

out to create a city bursting at the seams with technology. Townsend (2012) writes;

"Plans call for cameras that detect the presence of pedestrians at night in order to save energy safely by automatically extinguishing street lighting on empty blocks. Passing automobiles with [radio-frequency identification]-equipped license plates will be scanned...to create a real-time map of vehicle

movements and, over time, the ability to predict future traffic patterns based on the trove of past measurements. A smart electricity grid will communicate with home appliances, perhaps anticipating the evening drawdown of juice as tens of thousands of programmable rice cookers count down to dinner time"(Townsend, 2012:24)

Songdo is, after all, a city designed to be a global financial centre and put Korea in prime

location for trans-Asian business to commute through, and perhaps settle in permanently

(Townsend, 2012:23-27). The technology behind the smart city, acting to improve its

functionality, is vital to its success as an economic hub.

The Korea Society (2013)-when hosting a talk about innovation between the US and Korea

with speakers from Gale International and Cisco-drew parallels between the new city and

the success of Silicon Valley. Most notably, Cliff Thomas from Cisco speaks of their desire to

build the technological foundation-the "fourth utility"-that will serve as a base for all aspects

of city life from education to security to healthcare and, perhaps especially, to business

(Thomas, 2013). This parallel with Silicon Valley highlights the impact on which technology-

based infrastructure can have on an area economically.

'In Silicon Valley, the rich social, technical and productive relationships fosterentrepreneurship, experimentation, and collective learning. Thus, the region's social, technical and productive infrastructure is as critical to the successes of local firms as their own individual activities.'(Coe et al., 2001:82)

The Technology EcomonyTechnology, perhaps particularly communications technology, is a major driving factor

behind the world's economy today. In 2010, global spending on technology totalled

$4.2trillion (Rubin, 2011).

"The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is no longer relevant, because a Global New Economy Index assesses the amount of change occurring as a result of digitization, privatization, and globalization, based on measuring such variables as availability of IT human capital skills, technological innovation, export of goods and services, Internet connections, and the development of e-commerce, computer usage, and computing power."This is the 'technology economy'"(Rubin, 2011:3)

By installing technology into every aspect of city life, one can assume that investors and

contractors along with government bodies and city planners are hoping to capitalise on this

willingness (and perhaps dependence) of citizens and consumers to use and interact with

technology in growing capacity. Cisco as the leading technology contractor for the Songdo

project isn't so much capitalising on an investment opportunity there as it is prototyping its

plans for the future, when cities will be dependent on tech-firms to provide the

infrastructure for all smart cities (Townsend, 2012:23-27). Sensors, networking,

programming; all pieces of a puzzle that must be in place for a smart city to function, all of

which are developed by the large tech-firms, and for which governments are willing to pay

to improve the functionality and productivity of their cities.

This conglomerate of sensors, networks, smart devices and every other piece of what makes

a smart city smart is, by its design, one single entity of data-harvesting on a metropolitan

scale. Data that can be used—among other things—to make predictions about disease

outbreaks, such as predicting flu outbreaks through Google searches (Google, no date);

make our lives safer with mobile phone record analysis to find suspicious behaviours; or

help us save money by comparing thousands of flight bookings to detect pricing patterns

(Marcus and Davis, 2014). This expanse of data—big data—has the potential to improve

many aspects of our lives. But by design (Sawant and Shah, 2013) this data is also a treasure-

trove of profitable information being sent directly into the hands of the profiteers and policy

makers.

Big DataAs Marcus and Davis (2014) write; "Big data is here to stay ... But let’s be realistic: It’s an

important resource for anyone analyzing data, not a silver bullet." This summarisation

encapsulates the rhetoric that big data is fast becoming the solution to all of the world's

problems, and that by using big data predictions can be made that can help us avert or

prepare for future problems. But big data does, in fact, have a number of fundamental

problems, and is not the end-all solution to urban problems that smart cities aim to fix.

Firstly, big data by definition is both the colossus of data harvested from web applications,

web users, sensors, and essentially all internet-enabled devices, as well as the means in

which it is collected, and there are problems lying within both. As Duffy (2012) describes,

data is often generated by users in exchange for a service, but the problem arises that the

data that is generated may not be the data that the services or their partners were looking

for; thus data has been created that nobody is using and the data that was sought still

doesn't exist, and therefore the solution that was needed isn't found. Duffy (2012)

continues, referencing Patil and Tripp (no date), about how big data is often kept locked

behind closed doors; "Companies, said Tripp, are not ready to let go of data, so the people

who can figure out interesting and useful things about data can't get their hands on it"

(Tripp, no date, cited in Duffy, 2012).

Marcus and Davis (2014) also identify a total of nine major flaws in big data. Importantly,

correlations between figures can be discerned but will often be falsely identified, and there

is nothing within big data itself that can disprove the falsifiability of the correlation, meaning

that incorrect conclusions could be drawn from the use of big data alone. Next, at the pace

in which technology—and the way in which data is collected—changes, datasets may be

unintentionally altered such that data collected at one time is not necessarily the same as

data collected at another time, as Marcus and Davis (2014) explain.

Therefore big data, at the heart of planning for modern smart cities by the world's largest

tech-firms and city developers as the solution for infrastructure, logistics and productivity

problems of the city environment (Townsend, 2012), may not be the end-all solution after

all. So why then is big data use and smart cities advertised to consumers as a kind of

socioeconomic utopia?

The Utopia RhetoricRyan Bishop (2015) describes this trend as the super-rich investing in control of cities, while

the corporate-owned marketing and press outlets "tells of a utopian world in a digital city."

In other words, smart cities may in fact be the culmination of an increased desire by the rich

and powerful (i.e. corporations and governments) to control, survey, and profit off of the

citizenry.

Data is a valuable resource, and governments are already reportedly putting plans in place

to take advantage of this fact. In 2014, there were reports that HM Revenue and Customs

(HMRC) were on the path to changing laws that would allow them to sell taxpayers' data to

third parties (BBC, 2014), although HMRC refuted such claims. Regardless of how legitimate

these reports, Emma Carr of Big Brother Watch said on the matter that even the selling of

seemingly anonymous data overlooks the risk that "re-identification" poses to the privacy of

UK taxpayers (Carr, 2014, cited in BBC, 2014). And in that point is the entire argument of

whether smart cities are beneficial to the citizens within them; digitisation versus privacy.

As discussed, digitisation of the urban environment does offer a multitude of advantages. It

allows citizens to live more efficiently such as with traffic-control systems or automated

metro systems with on-time rates of over 99% (Hong Kong); it can lead to better standards

of living by removing rubbish from the streets by piping it to sorting facilities for reuse

(Songdo); and it can help lead to safer streets such as with the use of more advanced CCTV

and surveillance systems (Brown, 2013). But with all of this extra technology comes even

more privacy issues and concerns.

Of course citizens' smart devices connected to public wifi or mobile networks poses privacy

risks to said citizens because their data must pass through the hands of network providers

(town councils, network carriers etc.) and potentially into the hands of third parties before it

reaches the user's intended destination, but these services are optional commodities that

citizens don't have to use or connect to, meaning it is the user who is taking the risk of

connecting (Liran et al., no date). In contrast to this is the mass, automated surveillance

systems and programs that have been developed and implemented in the past couple of

decades, and the level of control that authorities and corporations have over the fourth

utility. Surveillance within the urban system has also received its own share of automation

treatment to match the level of efficiency and integrity as other smart city systems.

"Behind the lens of that surveillance camera lurks a ghost in the machine,an algorithm in the cloud analyzing its field of view for suspicious faces. The world is being kitted out with gadgets like these, whose purpose is unclear to the untrained eye. With unblinking stare, they sniff, scan, probe and query."(Townsend, 2012:xi)

Surveillance and ControlSurveillance techniques have shifted to better fall into line with modern security threats,

moving from "centralised and investigative to being distributed and preventative" (Flammini et al., 2013:1). Preventative surveillance is the means by which surveillance is

used to reduce or deter crime rather than merely a tool used in investigation. As of 2013,

plans were in place in Glasgow for preventative surveillance installations with plans for 400

"super intelligent" CCTV cameras to be installed that would automatically detect suspicious

behaviour and report it to the authorities (Brown, 2013) in an attempt to detect and prevent

crime before it happens. From a citizen's standpoint, when under the gaze of such

surveillance systems one can assume that they are algorithmically under suspicion by an

automatic system; being tracked and traced across an environment and logging that

information for future analysis (Senior, 2009), potentially breaching a citizen's right to

privacy.

But surveillance doesn't simply apply to public spaces any more. Since 9/11, the US and its

allies governments' desires to implement broader and decreasingly restricted surveillance

programs have led to agencies such as the NSA (USA)—"the largest, most costly, and most

technologically sophisticated spy organisation the world has ever known" (Bamford, 2009:1)

—GCHQ (UK) and BND (Germany). These agencies, in cooperation with telecommunication

carrier corporations (Electronic Frontier Foundation, no date), all use electronic surveillance

to systematically collect hordes of information collected from phone calls, emails and other

online interactions to detect anything that their systems may consider a threat (Bamford,

2009). This threat prevention sounds like a positive thing on the surface, after all everybody

would agree that terrorism and serious crime should be prevented, but it isn't just potential

terrorists that these agencies spy on; as Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers have

made it clear in recent years, it is essentially anyone with an internet connection (Soghoian,

no date, cited in MacAskill and Dance, 2013) and thus citizens can assume at any point while

connected to the internet or a phone network that there is at least a possibility that their

actions are being recorded, and thus their privacy invaded.

In addition to surveillance, the level of access to digital infrastructure that smart cities gives

to governments gives even more control over systems and functions of city life that they

wouldn't otherwise have. In 2011 San Francisco, transport authorities used their

connections with telecommunications providers to disrupt cell phone service within metro

stations in order to help prevent a possible protest (Bell, 2011). Governments have the

ability now to use its influence and control over technological infrastructure and networks

to control and manipulate the population.

ConclusionAs a result of this research, it can be concluded that smart cities—cities that use networks of

integrated technology to produce a more functional urban environment—are seemingly the

inevitable next step for city planning and renovation projects. The massive technological

foundation, the "fourth utility" as Cliff Thomas of Cisco calls it will gradually control,

enhance, accompany and compliment most processes of our daily lives. Technology will

permeate our homes, the streets, workplaces, transport systems, buildings. The city will

scrape every shred of data it can from the technology, and use it to enhance our lives; or so

it is advertised.

In reality it appears there is a much more calculated drive towards smart cities from

governments and corporations alike. As Townsend (2012) described; Cisco, as one of the

largest tech-firms in the world, a major player in the digitisation of cities, and a beacon of

urban-utopia advertisement, is heavily invested in ensuring the future of cities lies in

digitisation. It is so heavily invested because it is aiming to secure its future at the heart of

an ever-expanding (and profitable) economy; by cementing itself into the core of digital

cities, so that the cities and their governments must rely upon them for functionality, and

pay them to do so. It is this business plan that is drawing tech-firms of all sizes into the mix,

all trying to grab a piece of what is shaping to be a massive, lasting, and profitable

undertaking.

But it is not just money that is driving the development. Today there is already mass-

surveillance of the internet and phone networks, as well as physical surveillance

technologies (CCTV etc.). With the huge influx of technology that smart cities would

engender, paid for and overlooked by government bodies and agencies, it can be argued

that this implementation of technology would simply allow governments and corporations

to have even more access to our daily lives and information, breaking down privacy even

further. It becomes clear then that the idea of a smart city is not as utopian as face value

would suggest, and some have even suggested that this image of smart cities is in fact being

sold to us by those who aim to profit by them. While the technology itself would more than

likely lead to at least small improvements in the functionality and productivity of urban life,

the privacy concerns and the true motives of the bodies in charge of their development

could be said to outweigh the benefits of living in a smart city.

Following this research and the conclusions drawn from it, an interesting exhibition piece

could be one that plays with the idea that seemingly harmless technology could very quickly

turn against a citizen in order to enforce control over them by an authority. This piece would

use facial recognition (displaying the camera feed to a monitor), either through the use of

Python, Processing, or a combination, to detect whether or not the viewer is smiling and

therefore "complying with the rules/law" or some such rhetoric. If the user does not smile

when warned by the installation, then a message would be displayed to them graphically

stating that they are non-compliant with regulations and have been automatically

(important feature of the installation) detected and marked for investigation/detainment.

The purpose of using smiling/not-smiling as a trigger is to emphasise to the viewer the level

of discrimination and abuse that authorities may have over citizens in a world where

technology is used persistently to spy on the population.

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