The elusive smart city

There has been much talk about smart cities over the past decade but much fewer results have been delivered than were promised. Even prior to the pandemic in 2020, smart city initiatives fell short, with single-purpose projects merely centered on reducing city lighting costs, delivering neighborhood Wi-Fi, or providing bike-sharing services. To be fair, there are a few exceptions, and we will discuss a couple of these later in the chapter, but otherwise, many smart city initiatives have tended to fall short of their intended goal.

Google’s Sidewalk Labs in Toronto was a billion-dollar smart city grid loaded with sensors and cameras envisioned to revitalize the post-industrial shoreline. While many will claim the project was shut down due to COVID-19, Bennat Berger summarized in his article Sidewalk Labs’ Failure and the Future of Smart Cities that the real reasons were the residents’ fears of data privacy and the inability to make the...