monitor the protests against the FIFA World Cup and Olympics held in Brazil, because it’s easier to watch protesters than it is to listen to them. The result of a nearly $4 billion investment is a thinly-veiled surveillance system.
Or what about the city of Palava? The Indian government spent more than a billion dollars to make it a cutting-edge technopolis. The self-proclaimed “city of opportunity” with thousands of solar panels, modern transportation and sky-scraping glass towers also comes with smart surveillance and identity cards. Why? To make sure poor people don’t get in. Palava is one of many similar projects in India. Laveesh Bhandari, an Indian economist, was quoted in the Guardian: “This is the natural way of things. For if we do not keep them out, they will override our ability to maintain such infrastructure.” And this is in a country with over 300 million of people living in poverty.
A few years ago, Singapore rolled out Siemens’ City Cockpit, advertised by the tech giant as a tool for “Real-Time Government.” The City Cockpit claims to support better and faster decision-making by consolidating information from a wide range of administrative systems. This kind of technobabble is common. The idea is that with tools like these, mayors will be able to track multiple processes that drive their cities in real time, like a player in a strategy game. This arrogance and absence of citizen participation that has long been a theme for the tech industry is now creeping into policy. Technology journalist Om Malik summed it up best when he called out Silicon Valley for what he described as an empathy vacuum:
We talk about the filter bubbles on social networks—those algorithms that keep us connected to the people we feel comfortable with and the world we want to see—and their negative impacts, but real-world filter bubbles, like the one in Silicon Valley, are perhaps more problematic. People become numbers, algorithms become the rules, and reality becomes what the data says.
It’s important to understand that introducing data-driven decisions into our lives and politics is not a sin. On the contrary, it’s an incredible opportunity and we’d be ignorant not to take advantage of it. But we also cannot let tech corporations use urban innovation as an excuse to make a quick buck, consequences be damned. City people are not there to be exploited. Cities are our homes, not an artificial space made for rich tourists and photo-ops.
City people know how to think for themselves, so how about including them in the decisions about innovation? How about governments and Big Tech put technology in place to support and enhance the lives of all citizens, not only the elites with the deepest pockets or the greatest hunger for power?
[Editor’s note: This is part 2 in a series on Smart Cities. Here are parts 1 and 3.]
