The Adoption Gap: Ethics, Citizenship, Institutional Factors, and Standards for Smart Cities

Abstract

Over the past decade, many cities have adopted policies and rolled out programs and projects designed to transform them into a smart city. This has been accompanied by the formation of active smart city epistemic communities and advocacy coalitions, the insertion of a new cadre of smart city professionals into city administrations, an extensive apparatus of social learning, and numerous funding mechanisms to facilitate uptake. It is clear from the plethora of initiatives underway globally that the idea and ideals of smart cities is quite broadly conceived. Critically, in all cases, digital technologies are front-and-center as a vital ingredient for addressing the major issues facing city managers, businesses, and citizens. Core technologies include city operating systems, performance management systems, centralized control rooms, digitally mediated surveillance, intelligent transport systems, smart grids, predictive policing, sensor networks, building management systems, and civic apps. While these technologies offer solutions to urban problems, they also raise a number of concerns relating to surveillance, dataveillance and privacy, predictive profiling, social sorting and redlining, anticipatory governance and nudging, and control creep and security. Along with three other key issues, these concerns mean that while smart cities are in the process of being created their formation has been slow and piecemeal, and in most cases a smart city vision has only partially been embedded within city administrations or been greeted with apathy or resistance. In other words, an adoption gap has developed with city administrations proceeding cautiously with smart city initiatives. This gap is significant enough that some enthusiastic, early corporate promoters of smart cities have pivoted their endeavors into other related markets. This paper explores this adoption gap examining four sets of factors that have stymied their rollout and considering whether smart city standards might be a means of narrowing the gap.