Smart Cities as the Embodiment of Efficiency: Implications and Policy
With the developments and discoveries in the information technology field and the ever-increasing need for quick and cheap data transfer, the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine to machine interactions (M2M) have gained more importance in the last decade. These two fields drastically improved the productivity of certain applications such as video surveillance, autonomous driving, object detection and traffic management by creating direct communication channels between cameras, radars, and signals without the need of human intervention. The industrial applications of these fields, in addition to the applications mentioned above, constitute a basis for the future living spaces of humankind, namely, smart cities. These new entities are not merely living spaces furnished with various information technology applications, they are designed to be the embodiment of efficiency. Just like the industrial cities that aimed to maximize mass production, smart cities aim to utilize and capitalize on resources in the most efficient way possible. This obsession with efficiency raises various concerns regarding the way of life of the individuals. The question becomes, then, how can smart cities pose a threat to society, and how can we resolve these threats and enhance the efficacious structure of our future living spaces. Smart cities raise various concerns regarding the liberty, privacy, safety, and social ability of the individuals. The smart cities’ focus on efficiency may result in the violation of rights, make a way for cyberattacks, and further increase isolation and fragmentation in society. I will argue that, without proper comprehension, smart cities’ drive for efficiency can harm the society in irreversible ways. First, I will explain efficiency in historical context and correlate it with smart cities and their applications. Second, I will lay out the potential violations of rights and social problems and exemplify them with real life incidents. Third, I will state that the current legislations are not suitable to protect the individuals, and will offer policies to challenge the described threats.
Efficiency has been one of the most prominent concepts in the management theory, and it has been the center of attention in the industrialization process in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the methods to improve efficiency have been theorized by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the frontier of industrial efficiency is considered to be Henry Ford with his invention of assembly lines. In industrialized cities, the concept of efficiency was built on the maximization of the quantity of the product. These industrialized cities utilized efficiency, epitomized by various tools, to create more products, and in return, more capital.
In smart cities, however, the concept of efficiency has taken the form of various mathematical models, namely, Markov decision processes, which are used to infer and extrapolate data to make the best decisions with limited information. Michael de Certeau argues that the city “provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties” (159). In reality, however, the city environment is unstable, random, and vulnerable to external factors. Indeed, to overcome the obscurities and effectively obtain valuable information, smart cities collect large amounts of varied data. However, no matter how large the collected data is, it is never enough to guarantee desirable outcomes. Therefore, to get closer to the desirable outcomes, smart cities have to collect more and more data and try to increase the reliability of the obtained information. This approach ultimately has implications for privacy violations.
Smart cities’ drive for efficiency may violate the right of privacy of the individuals. Smart cities are characterized by the deployment of the latest technologies across various applications of a city such as public transportation, security, resource management, recycling, and infrastructure. Smart cities, although often perceived as a futuristic concept, have example applications from around the globe. For example, cities like Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, and San Francisco employ these technologies in various applications such as smart bus networks, smart parking initiatives, and smart grids (Hayat 180). The advancements in cameras, sensors, and transmitters opened a way for the Internet of Things systems to be operable on smart cities. These systems, with new techniques that differentiate between valuable and invaluable data; require lower rates of information flow, and therefore are more power efficient and cheap, making them the most significant aspect of smart cities.
The usage of sensors in smart city applications, while they improve the efficiency of tasks and interactions, also carry various issues. The ability of these sensors to collect data with surveillance networks raises privacy and data security issues. The data collected from these sensors may accumulate and be used to recognize emerging patterns over time. As de Certeau argues, the cities “. . . have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance” (160). The smart cities, building on the industrial cities’ legacies, have taken the surveillance further into individuals’ lives, and made it even harder to challenge the problem of privacy violations. As an example, the driving data obtained from an accelerometer and gyroscope can be used to learn an individual’s driving patterns, and these data, alongside other data obtained from different sensors such as heart rate sensors, can easily be associated with the individual’s demographics and sensitive information such as habits (Poudel 1013). Such violations of the right of privacy may be used for monetization as well as control over individuals in smart cities. Without the necessary precautions, Internet of Things devices may be enabled to introduce surveillance into the private aspects of the lives of individuals.
The sensitive data collected from the individuals in smart cities can be utilized to profile consumers and citizens. This approach ultimately increases the control of corporations and governments over the individual, and with potential legal gaps in the justice system, cause a threat to the well-being of society. According to Kitchin, “The smart city agenda and associated technologies are being heavily promoted by a number of the world’s largest software services and hardware companies, who view city governance as a large, long-term potential market for their products” (10). As explained, smart city applications are not only a market for corporations, but also a control mechanism for the governments. As the potential concerns of privacy in smart cities have not been addressed by the justice system yet, the legal gaps may be exploited easily. Even if the justice system is quick to respond to the developments in our future living spaces, there will still be some issues. For example, the data collected from various devices can allow individuals to be identified even without their classified information such as identity number, social security number, or address (Poudel 1014). Because the public data can be used to obtain private data, this approach may result in the blurring of lines between personal and non-personal information. The accessibility of highly sensitive information and the blurring of the line between personal and non-personal data may make it harder to establish laws that can protect the individuals. As Agelidis puts it, “While the majority of state legislatures have passed security breach notification laws . . . none have enacted protocols to shield individuals from the newer family of ‘exposure’ data breaches” (1057). The inadequacy of the laws to protect the individuals’ right of privacy necessitates the existence of other protective mechanisms, as will be described later.
Smart cities, to be more efficient, utilize centralized network systems, which are unfortunately vulnerable to errors that might potentially threaten the well-being of public infrastructure. The smart city systems require constant information transmission and connectivity between its devices. Therefore, in the case when a hacker breaks into such a network system, it becomes easier to grant access to other devices in the network (Kshetri 113). The feebleness in these systems is caused by assumptions of conventional network security. In conventional network security, signals and requests coming from inside the network are treated as reliable (Kshetri 113). Consequently, a vulnerability in an unimportant part of the network may lead to vulnerabilities in the whole network. Applying stronger security protocols on these networks is impossible as the devices in these systems have limited computational memory. Any improvement on these systems is not desirable either, as it would exponentially increase the implementation costs. With more devices connected to these systems, the vulnerabilities will become even more apparent, and the number of cyberattacks will increase. The cyberattacks will not necessarily be of complex nature, as widespread signal manipulation tools such as Flipper Zero can allow anyone to threaten the well-being of public infrastructure. The cyberattacks and hacking incidents are not the only cases these systems can be dangerous. The complicated nature of these systems can cause unpredictable results, false positives, and more security breaches. According to Costigan and Lindstrom, “With devices increasingly communicating instantaneously while managing or monitoring processes, the relationship becomes multidimensional, complex and possibly more stochastic or random” (14). The sophisticated nature of smart city networks will get harder to manage as the network systems continue to grow, and the number of outages and accidents will exponentially increase.
Smart cities, by prioritizing machine to machine interactions over sincere human interactions for the sake of efficiency, can deprive people from social participation, and may result in further indifference and alienation between the individuals. As explained, smart cities can recognize an individual’s demographics or habits, and even foresee the person’s identity. Thus, smart cities, governed by the data collected by various means, can respond to individuals, or in a sense, talk back to them (Griffiths 28). Consequently, the necessity to interact with other individuals disappears in large part as daily tasks can be conducted with less social interactions. This notion carries with itself a recurring concern in industrial societies, namely, social isolation. As Parigi and Henson put it, “. . .sociologists tied isolation to the capitalistic mass society, epitomized by the concept of the city, with its atomization of relationships, instrumental use of others, and detachment” (157). The city, then, becomes a medium of alienation, and it further ascertains the indifference between the individuals, and by implication, between different fragments of the society. As Lefebvre suggests, “the city constructs, identifies, and delivers the essence of social relationships” (118). Smart cities, with the addition of technological devices to the present urban environment, increase the notion of social isolation and detachment. An individual maintaining many ties, made possible by the developments in the communication technologies, does not necessarily translate to meaningful relationships. As the relationships become shallower, individuals will eventually lose awareness of others’ problems, and possibly, become indifferent to them. According to Simmel, this indifference is accompanied by “a mutual strangeness and repulsion” or even “hatred and conflict” (15). The indifference and its accompaniments were amplified by industrial cities and they will further be amplified by the excessive usage of technology in smart cities.
As described before, with the new technologies that smart cities put to use, the collection of varied data, and consequently, the states’ and corporations’ control over the individual, becomes more straightforward. The “mutual strangeness” described above can make it practically impossible for the individuals to come together in solidarity. This fragmentation in the society may eventually lead to even more deprivation of social contact and even more alienation, in an endless loop. The society, more disjoined than ever, may be helpless to make a change.
It now remains to establish a new approach to challenge the threats that smart cities possess. It is important to keep in mind that the policies to be mentioned may only be implemented in democratic states, as they are created with the assumption that people can come together in solidarity, without intervention from the state, and make demands. As described above, neither the current legislations and laws are sufficient to protect the individual’s rights nor it is easy to establish new ones. Moreover, considering that the states and corporations will be the ones benefitting from the legal gaps, it is unlikely that they will take action to engender new policies that protect the right of the individuals. Then, it becomes apparent that, without further hesitation, people should take action. To prevent smart cities from becoming autocratic government mechanisms, people should demand transparency committees and absolute control over the local privacy policies. Indeed, establishing local policies is much easier and fruitful compared to national and universal legislations. Still, as some applications require information transfer from a center point such as a city center, local sources may have to send data to outside sources. In this case, local communities should be able to make decisions regarding their data, and be given the right to stay out of wide range applications of smart cities requiring their own data. In order to protect their rights, people should also establish non-governmental organizations. With these policies, people will be able to form local self-governance mechanisms and protect their rights against the upcoming threats. Fragmenting smart cities to local communities will enhance the sense of connection between individuals and make it easier to unearth the violations of rights and solve them. In this way, smart cities can be proven to be prosperous for the people.
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