Big Idea: Competing With Data & Analytics

Smart Cities and Economic Development: What to Consider

As metropolitan areas across the globe embark on “smart city” initiatives, new research points to areas of concern — and provides recommendations to move forward.

Renee Boucher Ferguson Reading Time: 3 min 

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Image courtesy of Flickr user Blog do Planalto.

Centro De Operacoes Prefeitura Do Rio

Image courtesy of Flickr user Blog do Planalto.

Rio de Janeiro is one of a growing number of cities that want to become smarter about what is happening and is about to happen within their city limits. “Smart cities” are popping up around the globe — from China, where 193 smart cities are being piloted as part of the country’s urban renewal plan, to Europe, the U.K., and the U.S. The development of smart cities involves a wide scope of technology, everything from renewable energy, green buildings and smart grids to traffic management, urban security and medical technology.

Beneath the giant Christ the Redeemer statue that towers over the City, the “Centro De Operacoes Prefeitura Do Rio,” [Rio Operations Center] monitors the life of the city in real time, 24 hours a day — everything from the traffic on main roads (with hundreds of live cams), to the city’s social mood, to the weather. It takes 400 professionals working in three shifts around the clock to help process and integrate information from 30 different government agencies. Data is visualized on an 80-square-meter screen in a central control room.

The goal: urban sustainable development and economic growth. Opportunities abound for businesses and entrepreneurs to be part of this global urban revitalization effort. The question is, what are the management risks of more smart cities?

A recent paper, The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism developed by Rob Kitchin, a researcher at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland, raises three concerns regarding managing smart cities:

  • Technocratic governance: Smart-city proposals are based on an approach that is narrow in scope, reductionist and functionalist, derived from a limited set of particular kinds of data. They fail to take into account the wider effects of culture, politics, policy, governance and capital that shape city life and how it unfolds. At the same time, command systems centralize power and decision making into a select set of offices and make elements of data publicly available.
  • “Corporatization” of city government: Smart-city agendas and associated technologies are being heavily promoted by a number of the world’s largest software services and hardware companies.

Topics

Competing With Data & Analytics

How does data inform business processes, offerings, and engagement with customers? This research looks at trends in the use of analytics, the evolution of analytics strategy, optimal team composition, and new opportunities for data-driven innovation.
More in this series

About the Author

Renee Boucher Ferguson is a contributing editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s Data & Analytics Big Ideas Initiative.

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Comment (1)
Jagdeep Prabhudesai
Smart Cities and Economic Development: What to Consider
The concerns highlighted in this article are very real. The ultimate goal of a smart city endeavour is sustainable urban development and economic growth. However, a growing city is like a living organism with multiple intelligences, diverse cultural agglomeration and an evolving mind of its own which stamps its unique signature on our perception.
To "smarten" this urban organism would mean to tame it by stifling its emerging trends and outlying behavior with huge data-based sanitizers to put it into what the author aptly terms “one-size-fits-all smart-city-in-a-box” solutions.
A "Technology-State" controlled, top-down approach would sacrifice a lot of bottom-up creative, organic and purpose-driven initiatives at the altar of mindless, discipline-driven standardization. If we time-travel a bit in history, we should do well to remind ourselves of the success of the swarm concept....of how swarms of PCs defeated monolithic mainframes or the internet defeated centralized supercomputers. Are we about to make the same mistake by appropriating the "smart" tag for centralized data-driven solutions, as against the smarter swarm-driven intelligence? 
Technology does solve major problems, but here's a caveat to channelize its application in a more human-friendly way, to ensure it doesn't create new problems in its wake.

- Jagdeep Prabhudesai