Why the Smart City movement fails to address inequality

 

Sometimes Olesya Benedikt goes to considerable lengths to satisfy her curiosity. “I couldn’t help it,” she will later explain. “It was too tempting.”

 

It is 2013 and Olesya is close to finishing her Master in anthropology. She sets her foot in one of the shiny new glass towers that have risen up so quickly on the soil of the South Korean city Songdo in the past 10 years. The language school for Korean on the ground floor comes handy. Olesya picks up a brochure to perfect her camouflage as the innocent, blue-eyed girl from Russia that simply got lost because she doesn’t know the language.

The elevator takes her to the second floor. Holding the brochures up, she deliberately pushes against a door that is marked with Korean signs, reading “Entree only for authorized persons”. It opens.

A two-story hall unravels in front of her eyes, immersed in the light of around 120 screens on one wall. Every 20 seconds the picture switches to another fragment of Songdo, the digital urban organism that is know around the world for being a Smart City that was built from scratch.

Similar to a lecture hall, ranks with desks ascend. Here sits the working class of the new millennium – staring at screens, waiting for signs of imperfection in the machinery of the city, so that they can intervene in real time.

But although the city flickers past the security workers for hours every day, they are only guardians, not inhabitants of the buildings along the generous green spaces and the calm and ridiculously clean streets. The city planners of Songdo put it bluntly, when Olesya asked them: This city is built for “rich men, internationals and talents”. Songdo doesn’t accommodate the lower class.

 

When solutions are exclusive

 

Songdo is one of the most prominent exponents for a new kind of urban development. The so-called “Smart City” promises solutions to climate change, waste management, scarce resources and simply the urge to have a comfortable life. All the answers are inscribed into its detailed city plans and extensive data management systems. Songdo is the type of city that even Ban Ki-Moon envisions as a “gateway to our common future”, as he said in a speech at the Global Environment Forum. Just one thing somehow got missing along the way: The great infrastructure, technology and education only deliver to the upper segment of society.

“You wouldn’t believe it. It seems like a new religion,” says Lars Kabel, a lector at the Danish School of Journalism. He has dedicated numerous hours and flight kilometers to trace the newest development of Smart Cities all around the globe. From what he can tell, the Smart City label only loosely connects the cities he has seen – from the middle sized European city, that implements new mobility programs to exclusive prestige projects like Masdar City in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. But although the concept tackles a wide range of issues with technological solutions, one problem was always left unaddressed: „It is about creating modern, vibrant, effective cities – it is not about helping the poorest in the society, not at all.”

 

This silence is all the more significant behind the background of a growing gap between poverty-stricken people and the top one percent. By 2050, three out of four citizens will live in a city, if estimations hold true. And although they have always been a nourishing ground for hopes for a better life, cities disappoint these expectations more often than the countryside. According to the UN Habitat program, inequalities in the city increase often at a rate above the United Nations alert line.

Unsuccessful city planning and high rents lock poor people in neighborhoods that won’t give them or their children the infrastructure and education to climb the ladder. This is why the UN-program “Habitat” calls for inclusive cities in a position paper from 2013 – cities where policy makers act for the greater good and the poorest have a voice.

 

Smart City as a smart sales strategy

 

As long as city planning exists, it has been entangled with the idea of how the society should work. The broad streets of Barcelona, the functional grid of New York – all the squares, the green spaces and the industrial districts have been brought about by the ideologies of their time. With the Smart City, however, city planning took an unpredicted turn. It is the field of those that produce “smart” phones, “smart” TVs and “smart” cars, according to critic Adam Greenfield. For the first time in history, large parts of the responsibility to create a home and a community have been handed over to IT-firms.

To build a new Smart City or equip an existing city with its technology is expensive. Navigant Research estimates that the costs for the implementation of Smart City technologies will reach $27.5 billion by 2023. Big tech firms smell the deal: Siemens, IBM, Cisco and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, ever so often appear as sponsors of Smart City events.

Have the great ideals of city planning been sold out? Rem Kolhaas, one of the most influential architects to date, answered this question with a clear yes in a speech in front of the High Level Group, a consulting body of the EU in Smart City questions. In a swipe against architects, majors and tech firms, he explains how the commercial nature of the city stands against the very heart of the city, the community.

Following the logic of commerce, the smart city would be built exclusively for elites to live in their bubble. The explanation, however, doesn’t translate well into the social housing policy of many European cities. A major in the Western world would possibly commit political suicide, when exclusively building for the rich class. However, the upper class is only one part of the ideal citizen triad that also Songdo’s officials tried so desperately to attract.

Olesya Benedikt has witnessed Songdo’s empty campus for internationals and the organic food stores. She has walked by the Western café’s and the art projects in the park. What was implicitly present in the stores, institutions and buildings for her, was put very clearly on the websites of Songdo’s housing, schools and universities. They repeatedly asked for “internationals” and “talents”.

 

“The rich will create their own, perfect environment. They don’t need someone to plan a Smart City for them”, says Lars Kabel. “That is why the Smart City is also built for the creative class.”

 

Dance of the construction cranes

 

The attraction of the creative class is also held dear by European Smart City projects. The “Seestadt Aspern” in Austria went all in to get hold of this creative scene that usually mingles in the central districts of Vienna, around seven kilometers away. Poetry slams were held on excavator shovels and forty cranes performed a choreography to specially composed symphonic and electronic music for an evening.

At first glance, the Seestadt Aspern at the outskirts of Vienna has little to do with the futuristic appeal of Songdo. If their homepage is to be believed, the neighborhood rather wants to be a place for people, where a community can form – a place that unites a green surrounding with an urban vibe. The Seestadt Aspern management worked hard to create this reputation. When the first cranes started to build up the 20.000 thousand residents quarter stone by stone in the year 2011, image by image was put together on websites, in brochures and on billboards to attract residents.

But although the website promises a “city for all”, the list of desired companies in what is planned to be the “smartest” neighborhood in Vienna reads exactly like the one of Songdo: Headquarters of international companies are warmly welcome, as well as health and green-tech companies or research centers. Aspern excludes the industries, the smog, the dirt. Also their branding concept speaks the same language as Songdo’s city planners. Aspern wants to be ahead in the global competition. Therefore the “performers” which can live their “sustainable and modern lifestyle” there qualify as citizens of the prestigious and expensive project.

How all of the sudden can the word “performer” appear so prominently in the context of a Smart City project in Vienna, a city with a long tradition for social housing for the working class? What drives Songdo and Vienna in the same direction? A famous name in Asperns branding paper gives a hint: Richard Florida.

 

It’s the creative economy, stupid

 

Richard Florida is an economist and journalist who has been named as the most influential thought leader in 2013 by a MIT-study. The reason for this success is his manifesto for a knowledge economy called The Rise of the Creative Class. This class consists not only of artists and musicians, as the name might suggest, but also architects, researchers and software-developers.

Just to be clear from the beginning: Blaming Richard Florida for supporting elitist city planning would be unfair criticism.  “We have to get over the class divide, that is starring us in the face!” is a programmatic statement he made.

What he proclaims is a certain way out of a precarious situation for cities. According to the UN settlement program, urban areas have never been so dependent on their local economies. At the same time, the globalization of markets made it easy for those companies to set the sails and move to the other side of the globe. If cities want to strive or simply survive in this competitive environment, they have to attract people that will create revenue and jobs. In this setting, a citizen is not simply citizen. To put it in Florida’s words, he or she becomes an “extremely mobile factor of production”.

Ideas and knowledge become the clean, innovative fuel for a flourishing economy in Florida’s narrative. The figures support his point: Among the top 25 companies, that the magazine Foreign Policy recently labeled as “more powerful than many states”, ten fit into the category of creative industries. This is also the formula of the much admired and often copied Silicon Valley. Also Songdo subscribed to the idea of becoming the Asian version of the Californian tech-dream, just as the “Malaysian Silicon Valley” and Smart City Cyberjaya, or the “European Silicon Valleys” like Tallinn or London’s Tech.

 

No class is an island

 

However, this formula doesn’t add up for the large parts of the population – not even in Silicon Valley itself. It is a costly environment, with fewer female leaders than on average in the United States and an especially low share of black and hispanic minorities. Middle class worker like teachers are forced to commute around 90 minutes each day, because housing in the area has become simply unaffordable. This makes clear, that the creative economy produces winners and losers, instead of bringing about the good future for everyone.

The lack of equality in the Smart Cities is a symptom of a bigger trend, that World Press Foto Award winner Peter Bialobrzeski documents. His photos portray the radical changes in the urban landscapes, that he witnessed in his lifelong liaison with the city. Concrete and glass buildings take over informal, simple houses. There is no judgment in his pictures, but Bialobrzeski is not hesitant to express his opinion in words: “We are dealing with extreme loser classes. The people of slums get pushed further and further out of the city.”

He also makes a strong visual point against Richard Florida’s notion of creativity as something that serves economic growth. His photos of slums in the Philippines don’t show poverty and misery, but their ability to built a home for themselves with as little as the waves wash onto the shore. “It was a celebration of the enormous creativity of those slum houses”, he says. The photos express that creativity is not a characteristic of a class and it is not something that can be planned. The ideas of the creators didn’t serve a commercial logic – they served the people.

 

Korean protest music heralds change

 

If newly built Smart Cities like Songdo and Seestadt Aspern claim to be a model for the future, then they have to built this future for everyone. All this money spent on sustainable solutions and on schools, on green areas and seamlessly working traffic has to profit more then just a chosen few. The future of the city must be inclusive – or it won’ be a durable solution for a society as a whole. Bialobzreski’s photos show that it might be wrong to specifically address the creative class in order to have a creative environment – creativity flourishes everywhere, if you only leave people space to experiment and create.

The solution could be to regulate the city in the right ways: When traffic, water and waste are monitored so closely by the security workers of Songdo, then shouldn’t it also be possible to control the flow of money and the prices for living? UN Habitat already suggests this strategy to majors: Allow participation, create affordable housing and allocate opportunities for education to everyone.  There is no reason, why this strategy for existing cities should not also be the right way for the Smart City. It just needs some political will. And this might come with pressure.

Olesya Benedikt explains that Songdo’s planners have underestimated the power of their citizens in many ways: The sleek city for the rich, the creative and the internationals is today filled with people that don’t fit this image. On the weekends, the parks are full of young families from Seoul that use Songdo as their green paradise, where their children can play in the meadow. And she has seen many construction workers that do the kind of work that the city of Songdo wants to replace with more “valueable”, knowledge-based work. Being surrounded by Songdo’s impressive environment, those people started to ask for their rightful share: Six times Olesya has seen them marching to the headquarters of the city officials. Old Korean protest music was blasting out of loudspeakers, while they demanded their right to the city, asking for affordable homes.

“This is, what was really smart in this city”, she says. “That it is a place where people can be close to nature, with clean air and wide public spaces.” And when they keep on fighting, the locals might breath this air by simply opening their kitchen window in a few years.