Panelists (from left): Nestor Davidson, Constantine E. Kontokosta, Arnaud Sahuget, Dan Wu, and Geeta Tewari.
This is Part 1 of our 2019 Cooper-Walsh Colloquium Round-up. The 2019 Cooper-Walsh Colloquium, Urban Intelligence and the Emerging City, took place on Friday, October 25th, 2019. Fordham Urban Law Journal’s City Square team will briefly summarize each panel and then highlight a relevant topic discussed at each panel.
Panel 1: The Evolution of Urban Intelligence
The first panel of the Cooper-Walsh Colloquium held by Fordham’s Urban Law Journal centered around the evolution of urban intelligence. A riveting conversation on urban intelligence and smart cities shed light on both the costs and benefits of a society continually implementing technology in new innovative ways.
The conversation started off with a discussion about the distinction between urban intelligence and smart cities. According to Arnaud Sahaguet, smart cities take on a more specific meaning than urban intelligence. Specifically, smart cities tend to be more focused on cities and residents of the cities, where urban intelligence is vested largely in technology meant to improve urban life for communities, businesses, government, and the environment. However, Sahaguet notes that the term “smart cities” is evolving and may perhaps need to be changed to accommodate shifting ideals.
Throughout the discussion, there were a number of benefits pointed out by the speakers regarding urban intelligence. It has the power to make daily life much simpler and intuitive for the average person. According to Constantine Kontokosta, urban data may affect evacuation systems during natural disasters in a positive way leading to more efficient evacuations in times of peril. Further, data may be used to improve decision-making processes in the public sector as well as to track patterns of urban development.
Nevertheless, despite the seemingly endless potential of urban intelligence, there of course exists possible downfalls and challenges as well. For instance, according to Daniel Wu, urban data used by municipalities can be abused to keep a closer eye on the average citizen. This is the ever-looming fear of “Big Brother” surveillance. Such apprehension , Wu notes, causes a lack of trust between governments and people.
All is not bleak, however. According to Sahaguet there is a plethora of ways in which urban intelligence may be improved, including privacy-friendly initiatives, transparency, reproducibility, explainability, and fairness in the implementation of urban intelligence.
Panel Spotlight: Sidewalk Toronto
Sidewalk Toronto, an urban development project by Alphabet Inc., promises to usher in a new age of urban intelligence. The project, initiated in 2017, aims to utilize technology to transform Toronto’s neglected eastern downtown waterfront into a smart urban area that improves the quality of life of its residents.
The innovative project promises:
- Transportation: Roads optimized for self-driving cars as well as rentable scooters and bicycles
- Sustainability: Creating climate-positive communities that pursue negative carbon emission through thermal power grids, green-roofs, and clean-tech building materials
- Waste-Management: Freight-management system aided by underground tunnels and smart-containers
- Housing Affordability: 500-800 affordable housing units
- Community & City Services: Connecting people through digital technologies that allow them to communicate better and empower the communityHowever, this exciting new project has its critics. The deep integration of a digital layer raises a number of data-privacy concerns discussed throughout the Colloquium. The digital sensors built into the Alphabet Inc. infrastructure are meant to optimize public resources and improve the operation of the smart-technologies, but they will also have the much broader ability to capture massive amounts of privacy-infringing data about the citizens who live in or pass through the new urban hub.
In response to privacy concerns, Alphabet Inc. has proposed the creation of an independent, government-sanctioned “Urban Data Trust” to oversee the collection, storage and use of urban data. But questions remain as to how citizens will be notified of the increased surveillance and how meaningful consent could possibly be attained.
Sidewalk Toronto promises new technologies that could undoubtedly improve our daily lives and usher in a new era of urban intelligence. But at what cost? Will the smart city become a state-of-the-art success or an Orwellian failure?
