Reframing the Futures of Smart Cities in a Post-Pandemic World
Questioning Smart City Futures
The “Smart Cities” movement, an intellectual activity focused on better-employing technology in city operations while cutting operational costs and simultaneously improving citizen satisfaction, failed to achieve expectations set by industry in the early 2000s. Many leading mayors in places like New York City, Los Angeles, Kansas City, MO, Columbus, OH, Pittsburgh, and others deployed pilot projects, but very few efforts were expanded to cover all of a community’s residents and visitors. By 2020, many industry leaders believed that the movement was almost overcome due to “death by 1000 pilots.” Then came Covid-19.
The world was caught off guard by COVID-19’s multiple societal and economic impacts. The unprecedented scale of the crisis has tremendously changed the way cities are lived, managed, and envisioned. The virus that has spread precipitously in cities has prompted many to question and probe that if we indeed have entered the era of pandemics and existential threats, how might we reimagine the smart cities of tomorrow? What will a post-COVID-19 smart city look like? How would you build a smart city that is robust, resilient, and anti-fragile? How might we make smart cities of the future efficient, safer, sustainable, and habitable in a post-normal world?[1] The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been strongly asymmetric, affecting cities more than any other geographies[2] The global pandemic significantly impacted US smart cities and smart city projects. The policy challenges surrounding the adaption of smart technologies and the drivers that push the need to be ‘smart’ like climate change, rapid urbanization, socio-economic inequality, and digitalization that were urgent before the crisis remain essential if not very crucial today.[3]
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted city authorities to stretch public sector budgets, repurpose existing projects, rethink future funding decisions to help recover disadvantaged populations, and shift to remote working among other innovations. Existing geographic information systems, enterprise data, and analytics were leveraged to provide critical support, and, in many cases, were found insufficient for the task. Near-term technology plans and small innovation systems became major investments due to budget limitations.
Cities are beginning to see the economic necessity of investing in digital acceleration in a COVID-19 normalization scenario to meet both operational and societal demands. The upside of the crisis “has boosted the use and development of digital tools in cities, especially in public services.” The pandemic also paved the way for city designers and smart city implementers to reframe smart as “not just about IT infrastructure, but also about organizational and civic maturity, transparent data usage and trust.” It also revealed the “discriminatory effects of the digital divide, in terms of access to the internet and skills.” As city budgets are stretched, likely, cities will now focus both on smart city investments and fight for digital inclusion to make society more resilient.”[4]
What role does governance play in developing smart cities? Are the citizens benefitting from it? Is there a connection between smartness, sustainability, and resilience? What is a smart city? How do people and organizations define it? How might smart cities emerge in a post-pandemic world? What might the future of smart cities look like say in 10, 20, or 30 years? What might a day in the life of a person feel like in a world where emerging technologies and platforms such as big data, analytics, robotics, artificial intelligence, speculative design, social networks, and cybersecurity issues drive smart city futures? What might disrupt the futures of smart cities? What are the emerging issues? What restricts or prohibits US cities from becoming smart? Is there a future beyond smart? Or can we change the conditions of change that drive smart cities and reframe them in a way that positively impacts the most vulnerable sectors of society? Are digital companies taking over as city development leaders? How can we ensure the security of our personal and sensitive data in a data-driven world? How can we mitigate the risks of exposing people to the known and unknown risks of smart city futures? Is a smart city a far-off dream? In the rush for smart cities, are we asking the right questions? Are smart city plans or roadmaps forward-focused, long-term driven, and authentic? Or are they merely influenced by trends or shaped by short-term constraints?
These among others are the questions that futurists, experts, stakeholders, advocates, scholars, and citizens often asked when they think or imagine the implicit and explicit benefits, threats, and impacts of “smart cities.” While there are a variety of definitions, cases, experiences, and intent on how smart cities are built or developed, the futures and contexts of smart cities continue to evolve. Several governments at the national and city levels, the private sector, think tanks like the East-West Center, and international funding agencies like the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, etc. have leveraged futures thinking and strategic foresight tools and methodologies to design participatory engagements, civic innovation and build collective intelligence to envision the futures of smart. But what exactly are smart cities and what is futures thinking?
Futures Thinking in Brief
Futures thinking is not about prediction. It is a method used to help people and organizations frame new ways of thinking, map a range of possibilities and create alternative and preferred futures.
Futures thinking offsets short-term thinking and is less concerned or looks beyond the immediate constraints. Futures thinking is a long-term thinking mindset, and it offers us a tool to re-perceive the now and to reframe our ways of knowing reality to create alternative and preferred futures. It is a method for informed reflection on drivers of change and emergence that could disrupt and shape the future say in 10, 20, 30, or more years [5] It is the critical exploration of possible, probable, and plausible including wildcards and desirable futures.
Futures thinking as an action learning practice enables people and organizations to scan, prospect and probe possible, probable, and plausible futures including the values and myths that underlie each future. As a skillset, it is the ability to ‘use the future’ as a resource or asset to innovate in the present. The value of futures thinking builds agility, sustainability, and antifragility into ideas, policies, programs, and design as it considers the invisible and the unexpected including their consequences.
Futures thinking is a “framework for making sense of data generated by structured processes influenced by knowledge of the past and the present to think about the future” [6]. Futures is a dynamic field and some countries have formalized strategic foresight agencies and employed anticipatory tools and methods to explore and create the future like the governments of Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Finland, Malaysia, and Thailand to name a few. Several Fortune 500 companies and UN Agencies have employed futures thinking to navigate uncertainty and complexity in a post-normal world.
By Shermon Cruz, Chief Futurist and Director of the Center for Engaged Foresight, and Bob Benett, CEO and Smart City Expert, Cities Today Institute
References
[1] “The post-normal world is characterized by uncertainty, rapid change, realignment of power, and chaotic behavior. An in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying and new ones have yet to be born and very few things seem to make sense. It is the transitional age where we could no longer return the past that we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future.” Zia Sardar, Welcome to Post Normal Times. Retrieved from https://ziauddinsardar.com/articles/welcome-postnormal-times on August 26, 202.
[2] Bianca Tavares, Key messages from our city dialogue on mitigating the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 in cities. Retrieved from http://www.eurocities.eu/eurocities/news/Key-messages-from-our-city-dialogue-on-mitigating-the-socio-economic-impact-of-COVID-19-in-cities-WSPO-BPDMD4 on August 26, 2020.
[3] Kris Hartley, Smart cities in a post-pandemic world. Retrieved from https://www.policyforum.net/smart-cities-in-a-post-pandemic-world/ on August 26, 2020.
[4] Lara Williams, How Covid-19 is shifting smart city priorities. Retrieved from https://www.citymetric.com/business/how-covid-19-shifting-smart-city-priorities-5223 on September 1, 2020
[5] OECD Futures Thinking in Brief, Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/site/schoolingfortomorrowknowledgebase/futuresthinking/futuresthinkinginbrief.htm on September 1, 2020.
[6] OECD Futures Thinking in Brief, Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/site/schoolingfortomorrowknowledgebase/futuresthinking/futuresthinkinginbrief.htm on September 1, 2020.