EPISODE 004
Barcelona Smart City Congress and Expo 2022
Last week, our team and I visited Barcelona Smart City Congress and Expo 2022. In this post, I offer some of my thoughts on the current state of smart cities and on how to shift the tech-dominated ecosystem towards Mindful Smart Cities, which is at the core of our DNA at Triple AI SA:
“Urban Anatomy” by Alexander Hirka
1- Big Tech is, unfortunately, Still Very Big in the Smart City Space:
The current state of research, solutions and formulation of smart cities remains highly technology-centric and dominated by Big Tech. Last year’s online discussions and sessions were almost identical to this year’s. And to those of the 2015’s Lisbon Tech Summit. In addition, many technologies remain isolated from the reality of urban life and the city’s complex socio-technical landscape. The ‘silo style’ can be corrected if a systemic chart or road map of smart cities or vision statement exists.
In my book, Mindful Smart Cities, I endeavoured to offer such a comprehensive vision by implementing a modular system of thinking and design where smart city-making is an evolutionary practice geared towards complex systems design principles rather than rigid top-down methodologies and solutions.
The comprehensive Mindful Smart Cities roadmap consists of the following:
Five Human Urban Digital Rights
Ten Philosophical and Design Principles
Three Building Blocks
Seven Levels of Smartness
Building Blocks of Mindful Smart Cities
Mindful Smart Citizens
Mindful Smart Interfaces
Mindful Smart Living Spaces
During our visit to the expo, we were shocked by how the SMEs took up little space. Technology developers, startups and younger-generation developers remained limited to only a few developers (mainly represented by men!).
2- Men Dominate the Smart Cities Landscape: Smart for/by Men?
Men dominated almost 90% of the expo salon. Participation of women in leadership positions and expert advice was almost zero. I only could find one woman in the Belgium expo section from the Future-proofed group that was there to present her ideas as a City Climate Coach. Annabel Vanhoven invented her job position as a city climate coach herself, and when we asked her what a city climate coach does or means? She replied like a coach; I help enterprises realise what is blocking them from becoming sustainable and climate change resilient. Annabel’s idea of a City Climate Coach was the smartest part of the expo. We saw a large collection of AI-assisted smart city solutions. Here with City Climate Coach, we found a real human being tapping into human intelligence to bring a more human approach to the table. The cognitive gap in the smart city space is rarely brought to the attention of developers simply because the smart in the smart city conceptualisation is highly linked to the use of artificial intelligence, not human or crowd intelligence. In my book, I addressed the problem of gender inequality in the smart city space as one of the main barriers to unlocking the full capacity of technologies. Men and Women design and use technologies differently, and connecting all these versions enables a more balanced notion of smartness.
3- People Centricity as an Advertising Strategy:
Many use “people-centricity” as a selling slogan rather than an actual value proposition. I believe the main issue here is that the city authorities search for short-term returns on investment (i.e., for political reasons, for instance) when it comes to choosing which technology solutions to go for and with which tech provider work. This short-sightedness, in return, favours tech giants such as IBM, Cisco, Toyota, and Google, to name a few, to invade the civil space of cities. See also this article on our website: what are smart cities?
4- Most Smart Cities Suffer from a Lack of a Long-term Vision.
Smart cities are entangled with the political climate. Each time governments change, there is a risk of the total revision of previous visions and ideas. I believe this issue goes back to the early conception of smart cities in the 1990s. Smart cities first appeared in the literature during the 1990s. As I presented in my book-section history of smart cities:
“…Van Bastelaer (1998) in digital cities and transfer-ability of results put forward an argument on the seemingly increasing gap/distance between the so-called traditional public and private sector, increasing distance between people and the government, and the radical shift in the degree of globalisation and changes in the classical tendencies of the public sector in general….”
4- Lack of System Thinking
Amongst the vast range of technology developers, there were only less than five developers with a quasi-system level vies of smart cities. Many still suffer from the idea that adding up smart components yields a smart city. In one of the examples, the government was given a “menu” of smart solutions from which they could choose; the menu did not show any trade-off or how by choosing one solution over another, the city becomes smarter. A city is a complex system of interacting parts; these parts are adaptive, meaning they change in response to internal and external changes.
5- Maintenance of Smart Cities and Civil Responsibility of Private Sector
The question of who is responsible for the technological infrastructure and under what kind(s) of standards, protocols and plans they should be maintained remains open. Many exhibitors demonstrated their solutions without showing their resilience and security plans. It seems there is an epistemic difference between what a technology-enabled smart city is and what a smart move is to make cities better equipped with the best technologies. This immediately is connected to the question of cyber-security and privacy rights should private companies be given active power in shaping the civil space of cities.
6- The Smart City Audience is Not People!
While the Barcelona Smart City Expo was mainly framed based on a traditional model of expos, aka big halls and exhibitors, it would have been interesting and perhaps smart to locate parts of the exhibition in the city itself and open it to the public. This way, people, the smart city's real audience, would have been invited to see the developers and technologies that will run and impact their daily urban experience. A single visitor pass was priced at 100 Euros, which could have been ranged at a more accessible range to welcome citizens to the exhibition. Public participation in smart city-making and formulation has always been an issue in the current smart city paradigm. Most smart city visions and solutions are designed and written by scientists, experts or big technology companies.
7- The Non-existing Role of Blockchain Technologies in Smart Cities
Blockchain technology may be the only technology that can be framed as a smart city solution due to its decentralised nature. However, no blockchain solution, developer or representative was present at the expo hall, to our surprise. While surprised, we felt truly grateful to be among the first, if not the world’s first, blockchain company that offers mindful, smart city solutions to citizens worldwide.
We left the expo with our mission statement at the forefront of our minds, and we hope to present our message at the next year’s expo and engage with people with our decentralised and democratic platform:
“Our main mission at TAI/T SA is to heal cities from their previous maladaptations and point them towards the best possible avenues of resilience, sustainability, and thriving. This collective journey of the desire for change, the rapid pace of urbanisation, and the increasing spread of digitalisation are deeply intertwined. Inspired by the timeless story of the Conference of the Birds by Farid-Al-din Attar, a Persian poet and Sufi mystic, the TAI/T Seventh City Model is the first comprehensive smart city roadmap to deliver people-oriented, mindful, and technologically advanced solutions for the future of smart cities. As societies evolve into a deeper appreciation of this interconnection, the new world more and more resembles a collective-level conference of birds, humans, the environment, and the built systems. This conference of the new world belongs to everyone. Integrating ancient wisdom with the technological drive of current times is our best chance of guiding humanity in this complex yet highly rewarding journey”.
Read the full Vision Statement: https://tai-therapeutic.com/about
INSPIRING PEOPLE AND RESOURCES TO LEARN FROM
Co-founded by Tristan Harris, the Centre for Humane Technology's mission is to align technology with humanity’s best interests.
The World in 2050: Pathways towards a sustainable future
The World in 2050 project was launched with a two-day workshop at IIASA in Austria to consolidate the state of knowledge on these difficult questions, with modelling teams from around the world, including international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the International Energy Agency.
The workshop confirmed that outstanding long-term forecasting tools are available across a broad spectrum of sustainable development challenges, but they have yet to be combined into an integrated approach to understanding how the Sustainable Development Goals can be achieved in every major region. This is the gap that will be filled by the World in 2050 project. "Sustainable development calls for robust economic development and a long-term convergence in living standards between rich and poor countries in ways that are socially equitable and respect planetary boundaries," said Sachs at the launch. "This project will establish how these objectives can be achieved in an integrated manner in every major region of the world."
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