A smart city, like so many of today’s buzzwords, is somewhat indefinable.
At its simplest level, it is a city that uses data and digital applications to improve the lives of its citizens. But go deeper and you could find that an advanced smart city uses data to effect changes on every aspect of urban life from traffic flows to the behaviors of its residents.
New York, Stockholm and Singapore are trail-blazers. And other cities are eager to catch up and benefit from the plethora of digital technologies that reduce air pollution, cut building emissions and help the police protect all neighborhoods and identify crime hotspots.
Digital overload
Everyone is getting in on the act: If your company uses digital technology you can probably run it in a city, and it can go into the pot of smart-city wannabe apps that developers promise will make your life just a little bit better.
It gets tricky when the overall vision kicks in. One company can push the benefit of its car parking app so you can quickly find a space next to your destination, while another firm can offer a bicycle-rental app that encourages you to slide out of your car and get some exercise instead.
Mobility is a good example. One vision of the smart city of the future has autonomous vehicles gliding up and down urban streets. Another sees “Mobility as a Service,†or MaaS, where pedestrians hail a taxi or rent a bike to reach an electric-bus stop where they can catch the next ride into town — all organized seamlessly on apps lined up on everyone’s little electronic companions.
The technology is coming at us from all sides now. And if you’re an engineer in the city’s transportation department, you are presented with choices: Should you design a MaaS app that speaks to a popular taxi firm or integrates with a bicycle firm or even with a bus company? Apps beget apps and add-ons. Who on earth is going to get all that data and make use of it?
It’s an ever complicated world, where technological choices are underpinned by human wants and needs.
Smart thinking
So in a thought-provoking articleOpens a new window in the British publication The Engineer,Opens a new window  urban affairs expert Professor Henrietta Moore of University College London refocuses minds on the important matters: For her, smart cities make life better because they are supported by technology rather than suffering from it.
And, she believes, it is time for us to step back and ask what we want from our cities rather than adapt them to a myriad of technological advances that may, or may not, make life better.
We need to put ethics at the heart of engineering, she argues, and think about the challenges that modern cities and their 10 billion inhabitants worldwide face, rather than embracing the latest tech fix.
She’s on to something: We need to be smart about smart cities and really focus on the end goal of what we want to achieve.