Smart cities are neither, 2021 edition

“Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition).”

The lockdown was a chaotic time for “smart cities.” On the one hand, the most prominent smart city project in the world — Google’s Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto — collapsed thanks to the company’s lies about privacy and land use coming to light.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/07/just-look-at-it/#ding-dong

On the other hand, the standalone vendors that promise smart city services that you can graft onto your “dumb” city saw their fortunes surge, as the world’s great metropolises sleepwalked into a surveillance nightmare.

From license plate cameras to facial recognition to fake cellphone towers to location data harvested from vehicles and mobile devices, city governments shoveled billions into the coffers of private-sector snoops in the name of crimefighting and technocratic management.

The smart city has long been criticized as a means of quietly transforming public spaces of democratic action into private spaces of technological surveillance and control. Recent books like Jathan Sadowski’s “Too Smart” (2020) make the case in depth.

http://www.jathansadowski.com/book

Books can set out a long argument and cite examples in support of it, but those…