What is a smart city? According to Wikipedia:
A smart city is an urban area that uses different types of electronic methods and sensors to collect data. Insights gained from that data are used to manage assets, resources and services efficiently; in return, that data is used to improve the operations across the city.
A Master’s Thesis on Cost Benefit Analysis of Smart Cities has some interesting things about smart cities which I paraphrase.
https://udspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/23818/Xiong_udel_0060M_13359.pdf?sequence=1
The concept of a smart city actually started out in 1998 as a “Digital City”. This digital city was thought of as a virtual community aka a social network with social media.
The Ubiquitous City in Korea 2005 where the objective was to automate the management of various city services like traffic and parking and have access to the network.
The thesis goes into discussing three smart cities: Barcelona,
Singapore, and San Francisco and how they are success stories. Barcelona boasts many similar things as to what was available in 2014 in Fairfax VA and DC. With things like bus stops with screens and bike shares. However, Barcelona does apparently have the most futuristic trash cans!
The containers have subterranean vacuum network through the pipes to suck up trash below the ground.
That is neat, but it leaves me thinking we can do better. Barcelona was doing this in 2014. This is 2021.
Singapore’s smart city is basically google maps in real time just with cameras and state owned. In the US the surveillance is not as obvious, but still present.
San Francisco is supposed to have parking availability and pricing through it’s website: https://www.sfmta.com/demand-responsive-parking-pricing and it does. However, it isn’t the entire city, and not all parking garages actually have info about availability. According to the thesis however SF is doing well on the sustainability front. However, a lot of it seems to have been due to monetary incentives directing people’s behavior rather than an actual education of the inhabitants to better practices. So, in some ways the city is smart and the inhabitants aren’t and are just reacting to market incentives.
The downside seems to be a lack of transparency and investing in improving human smarts.
Also, according to the thesis they found that the costs outweigh the benefits of a smart transportation system in Newark Delaware. One issue that I found in the analysis is that it doesn’t account for the increase in population over the time period projected. So, it seems like it is not actually accounting for the benefits appropriately.