cqr smart cities

Smart CitiesAre futuristic metropolises good investments?

Across the globe, major tech companies and multi-

national developers are pouring billions of dollars

into building futuristic “smart cities” designed to

showcase cutting-edge infrastructure and architec-

ture — and serve as models for new cities worldwide. From self-

sustaining energy systems and driverless vehicles to software that

runs metro areas like operating systems run computers, emerging

cities in India, China, South Korea and elsewhere are introducing

technology that backers say can reduce common urban problems

such as pollution, crime and congestion. For cities to survive and

grow, they contend, society must reinvent them. But critics ques-

tion whether building new metropolises is wise when existing

ones need attention. No smart cities are being built from scratch

in the United States, but smart-growth strategies designed to make

existing communities more livable are taking root from New York

to Kansas.

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THE ISSUES ....................647

BACKGROUND ................654

CHRONOLOGY ................655

CURRENT SITUATION ........659

AT ISSUE........................661

OUTLOOK ......................662

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................666

THE NEXT STEP ..............667

THISREPORT

Songdo, South Korea, rises in Incheon on landreclaimed from the Yellow Sea. The New York developerof the project, dubbed the Atlantis of the Far East, saysthe planned city of 65,000 residents will be among theworld’s greenest and most technology-rich urbancenters — and a model to be replicated worldwide.

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CQ Researcher • July 27, 2012 • www.cqresearcher.comVolume 22, Number 27 • Pages 645-668

RECIPIENT OF SOCIETY OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS AWARD FOR

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646 CQ Researcher

THE ISSUES

647 • Does building smart citiesmake sense when existingcities need attention?• Can innovations show-cased in experimental me-tropolises be scaled up tobenefit large, aging cities?• Do smart cities over-relyon technology?

BACKGROUND

654 City Beautiful MovementUrban-revival efforts beganin the late 1800s.

656 Urban RenewalAging buildings, many sig-nificant, were demolishedbeginning in the 1950s.

658 Mixed ResultsSome early efforts at smartgrowth fared poorly.

658 Suburban ‘Utopias’Dissatisfaction with urbanlife led to attempts to recre-ate small-town America.

659 Road to Smart GrowthWalt Disney had a grandvision for a futuristic city.

CURRENT SITUATION

659 Gaining MomentumSmart cities are beingplanned around the globe.

660 Smart Growth StrategiesU.S. cities are focusing onupgrading neighborhoods.

662 Cautionary TalesThe smart city movementfaces numerous problems.

OUTLOOK

662 Here to Stay?Demand for new cities is expected to explode.

SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS

648 Smart Cities Rising FromChina to FinlandChina is planning at leastfour smart cities.

649 Population to SoarSome 9 billion people willlive on Earth by 2041.

652 Cities Experiencing Explosive GrowthDelhi, India, will grow by10 million by 2025.

655 ChronologyKey events since 1893.

656 Technology Brings NewBrainpower to Communities“The city becomes a platformthat allows new forms of in-novation.”

661 At IssueCan smart city technologysave ailing cities?

FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

665 For More InformationOrganizations to contact.

666 BibliographySelected sources used.

667 The Next StepAdditional articles.

667 Citing CQ ResearcherSample bibliography formats.

SMART CITIES

Cover: Reuters/Incheon Free Economic Zone/Handout

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Smart Cities

THE ISSUESOn 1,500 acres of land

reclaimed from theYellow Sea, a gleam-

ing, high-tech metropolis un-like any place on Earth isrising in Incheon, SouthKorea. Dubbed the Atlantisof the Far East, Songdo offersa glimpse into the future ofurban design. 1

Songdo aspires to be amongthe world’s greenest and mosttechnology-rich cities — andalso a utopia devoid of the illsthat plague most metropolis-es. Gale International, a NewYork development firm, envi-sions it as a model to be repli-cated worldwide.More than halfway to-

ward its 2017 scheduled com-pletion, the new city of 65,000residents features a dazzlingarray of innovations:• More than 10,000 touch

screens, developed by Cisco,will be installed in homesand offices and on street cor-ners to enable home tutor-ing and video phone callsand serve as gateways to cityservices. 2

• Wireless sensors trackroad conditions and conges-tion, reroute traffic and ad-just street lights accordingly.• Rooftop vegetation absorbs excess

heat and reduces storm-water runoff.• A pneumatic waste-collection sys-

tem sucks garbage from buildingsthrough pipes.• And to encourage fitness, parks

and other greenery cover 40 percentof the city’s footprint. 3

Songdo, proponents say, will be afull-fledged city with an active econ-omy open to all. Initial demand forhousing, secured via a nationwide lot-

tery system, was overwhelming, withan average of eight people vying foreach unit. 4

In a nod to the world’s great cities,Songdo borrows from the most no-table urban designs. It features thewide, tree-lined boulevards of Paris, a100-acre commons modeled after NewYork City’s famed Central Park, canalsthat pay homage to Venice and a con-vention center inspired by Sydney’siconic Opera House. 5

With a price tag of $35 bil-lion, it is the largest privatereal estate venture ever. 6 Thatfigure covers the master planfor the design and construc-tion of Songdo’s downtown,where some office tenantswere lined up in advance.The Korean government ispaying for highways, bridges,a subway extension from In-cheon and other public in-frastructure.As Songdo rises, other

high-tech cities are sproutingelsewhere. About 10 milesfrom Abu Dhabi in the Unit-ed Arab Emirates, the walledmetropolis of Masdar, with aplanned population of 40,000,conjures images of ancientdesert fortresses and swash-buckling Lawrence of Arabia. 7

(The walls are designed toprotect against desert windsand not marauders.) 8

Inspired by ancient citiesin what are now Morocco,Syria and Yemen, Masdarbroke ground in 2008 butwon’t be completed until2025, at a cost that couldreach $19 billion. 9 Its de-signers tout it as carbon-neu-tral and among the most sus-tainable places on the planet.Solar energy will power thecity, residential buildings willbe designed to minimize water

and electricity use and treated waste-water will be used for irrigation. 10

Battery-powered, driverless pods thateach carry a few passengers run alongmagnetized tracks. 11

In Europe, PlanIT Valley, a futuristiccity envisioned for northern Portugal,is in the conceptual stage. It won’t beready until 2017 at the earliest, at apotential cost of $12.3 billion if all goesas planned, according to Steve Lewis,CEO of the Portugal-based technology

BY DAVID HATCH

AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets withproject director Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber in Masdar, asmart city being built near Abu Dhabi, United ArabEmirates. A UAE renewable-energy firm building the

$19 billion city says it will be among the mostsustainable places on the planet. Proponents say newsmart cities are necessary because overcrowding andpollution are making the world’s biggest metropolisesincreasingly unsustainable. Skeptics counter that

constructing new cities is foolish when existing ones are in dire need of attention.

648 CQ Researcher

firm Living PlanIT, the developer. Thecity, with a projected 220,000 residents— half of them researchers, engineersand family members — will be a test-ing ground for urban projects thatLiving PlanIT is pursuing in China andother countries. It will be run by an“urban operating system” (OS) — soft-ware that controls everything fromtraffic flow to energy consumption. (Seesidebar, p. 656.)These “pop-up” or “instant” cities

represent the leading edge of a rapid-ly expanding global movement to re-define urban space. They are a ne-

cessity, proponents say, because theworld’s biggest metropolises are in-creasingly viewed as unsustainabledue to overcrowding and pollutionfrom factories and fossil fuel.A century ago, almost 90 percent

of humanity resided in rural areas. 12

In 2008, a milestone was reached whenmore than half of the world’s popula-tion — for the first time — lived inurban areas. 13 By 2050, the United Na-tions estimates, the world population,now at 7 billion, will exceed 9 billion,with 70 percent in cities. 14 (See chart,p. 649.)

Housing shortages, abject poverty,overcrowding, asthma-inducing pollu-tion and crumbling infrastructures haveprompted radical solutions, experts say.Without a drastic rethinking of what acity is, and how it should be designed,these problems will worsen, they warn.“It’s very clear that we cannot contin-ue to build cities or use cities in theway that we have over the last sever-al hundred years,” says Karen Seto, anassociate professor of urban environ-ment at Yale University’s School ofForestry and Environmental Studies. Theworld faces an “urban century” that,

SMART CITIES

Smart Cities Rising From China to FinlandChina is pursuing the construction of at least four smart cities, which are designed to conserve energy, water and other resources, reduce pollution and traffic congestion and curb other urban ills. Countries building smart cities also include South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Finland and Portugal.

Source: Annissa Alusi, et al., “Sustainable Cities: Oxymoron or the Shape of the Future?” Harvard Business School, March 2011, p. 21, www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11-062.pdf

Notable Smart City ProjectsNew city Nearest major city Land size Project Estimated Anticipated Completion date (start date) (distance) (acres) leader cost residents Use and status

Songdo Seoul 1,500 Gale $35 billion 65,000 International 2017; under South Korea (40 miles) International business district construction (2005)

Dongtan Shanghai 21,250 Shanghai n/a 25,000 Model Stalled China (16 miles) Industrial by 2010, sustainable (2005) Investment 500,000 city Corp. by 2050

Masdar Abu Dhabi 1,730 Masdar $19 billion 40,000 Clean-tech 2025; six buildings United Arab (10.5 miles) cluster in model operational with Emirates (2007) sustainable city residents; continuing

Tianjin Eco-city Tianjin 7,360 SSTEC n/a 350,000 Education 2018-2023; China (2007) (25 miles) continuing

Nanjing eco city Nanjing 1,280 Singapore- n/a n/a High-tech, 2020 China (4 miles) Jiangsu smart industries (2008) Cooperation in an ecologically Council aware environment

PlanIT Valley Porto 1,675 Living PlanIT $10 billion 220,000 Research 2017; planning Portugal (2008) (20 miles)

Meixi Lake District Changsha 4,20 Gale n/a 180,000 Model future 2020; early planning China (2009) (within city limits) International Chinese city

Low2No Helsinki 5.4 Sitra n/a 60% of Low or 2012; in design Finland (within city limits) space no carbon (2009) designated district residential


without better planning, will furtherstrain cities, she adds.While most metro areas are a hodge-

podge of development and sprawl,nothing is random about a smart city.Every element aims to promote effi-ciency and health. Intelligent cities de-emphasize a hallmark of Americancities and most others worldwide: high-ways. In a smart metropolis, residen-tial areas are near business districtsor easily accessible via mass transitto trim commute times and reducecongestion and pollution. Super-fast,ubiquitous Internet connectivity en-courages telecommuting.Skeptics counter that it’s folly to

spend billions to construct new citieswhen existing ones are in dire needof attention. “Futuristic technology won’tfix many of our basic urban prob-lems,” wrote Kaid Benfield, director ofthe Sustainable Communities and SmartGrowth program at the Natural Re-sources Defense Council, a major en-vironmental organization. “Sprawl willstill be sprawl; disinvestment will stillbe disinvestment; traffic will still betraffic; sprawl-aided obesity will stillbe obesity.” 15

Anthony Townsend, research di-rector for the Palo Alto, Calif.-basedInstitute for the Future, a researchgroup that specializes in long-termforecasting, says claims about the levelof technological prowess achieved bysmart cities are sometimes overblown.The “smart” component of Songdo “isonly about 2.9 percent of the con-struction budget” of what is other-wise a “conventional real estate pro-ject,” he says. Cisco Systems, the SiliconValley giant designing much of Song-do’s technology infrastructure, de-clined to comment.Meanwhile, it remains unclear

whether innovations introduced in ex-perimental cities will have real-worldapplicability and can be scaled to ben-efit large populations. There are indi-cations that a few technologies —such as urban operating systems —

could make the leap. But even smart-city enthusiasts aren’t sure others will.With their largest urban areas

grappling with poverty, pollution andan influx of migrant laborers, Chinaand India are investing heavily in “ecocities” that offer new housing and seekto reduce carbon emissions throughwider use of mass transit and renew-able energy. Though new, these citiesare less futuristic in their designs andinnovations, instead emphasizing morepractical solutions, such as recyclingand energy conservation. 16

Smart cities raise a host of worriesabout over-reliance on technology andthe outsized influence of major corpo-rations that stand to profit handsome-ly from lucrative development contracts

and service fees. Critics accuse Lavasa,India’s signature city of the future, ofbeing too pricey for the masses, andsuggest that Masdar was created to de-flect attention from the lack of conser-vation in nearby Abu Dhabi and Dubai.In China, where hundreds of new high-tech cities could be built in the nextfew decades, concerns are growing thatgovernment officials will use the elec-tronic technology to spy on citizens.While newly planned smart cities

are based on cutting-edge technology,many existing cities are adopting moremodest “smart growth” revitalizationstrategies. In a project set to debut in2014, New York City, for example, istransforming traffic-choked Times Squarewith expanded pedestrian zones andreduced roadway access. And in 2007the city released Plan NYC, a blueprintfor making the city greener and morelivable by 2030. 17 (See “Current Situ-ation,” p. 660.)A key driver behind smart cities is

economic opportunity, for both hostnations and major corporations. Inter-national Data Corp. (IDC), a Framing-ham, Mass.-based firm that analyzes in-formation technology, estimates thatspending on smart city technology willsurpass $57 billion in 2014. 18 U.S. cor-porations, meanwhile, are central tothe reinvention of urban life. Cisco andIBM are among the technology heavy-weights that see a winning combina-tion: huge business potential and theopportunity to dramatically improvelives. Increasingly, developing nationsseek their assistance.In promotional materials, smart cities

routinely cast themselves as interna-tional economic zones. The trend ofnew cities being built near or aroundairports to facilitate business opportu-nities is so widespread that Universi-ty of North Carolina business profes-sor John Kasarda coined the term“aerotropolis” to describe the phe-nomenon — and co-wrote a bookabout it. 19 Songdo emphasizes on itswebsite that it’s just 15 minutes from

Population to Soar

The world’s population will grow from about 7 billion today to 9 billion by 2041 and surpass 10 billion by the end of the century, according to U.N. projections. Sub-Saharan Africa and some nations in Asia, the Pacific Rim and Latin America will account for most of the increase.

Source: “Global Population to Pass 10 Billion By 2100, UN Projections Indicate,” U.N. News Service, May 2011, www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=38253

7

Global Population Projections, 2011-2081

(in billions)

0

2

4

6

8

10

2100204120232011

89

10

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Incheon Airport. “I believe smart citiesbecome the competitive weapon forthe growth economy,” says Lewis.Yet tempering the excitement sur-

rounding new cities is a sobering real-ity: The history of urban renewal is lit-tered with visionary schemes that fellshort. A much-cited example is Brazil’scapital, Brasília, heralded by boosters asthe first jet-age city upon its inaugura-tion in 1960 but later mocked for itssterile architecture and desolate streets— a reputation that lingers today. 20

As urban planners, policymakers andacademics ponder the future of cities,here are some of the key questionsthey’re debating:

Does building smart cities makesense when existing cities needattention?Players of the computer game Sim

City design breathtaking urban land-scapes limited only by the depths oftheir imaginations. Skyscrapers, roadsand industrial zones spring to life withmouse clicks. Of course, these idyllicsimulations have imaginary price tags,whereas futuristic cities under con-

struction in Asia and Europe are multi-billion-dollar gambles with real-life con-sequences for investors and others.Critics say the billions being spent

on Songdo, Masdar And PlanIT Valleycould go a long way toward improv-ing the crumbling infrastructure ofmegacities such as Dhaka, Mumbai andLagos that struggle to provide basicssuch as electricity and plumbing toshantytowns.With these large sums at stake, a

debate is brewing among urban plan-ners over whether it’s better to up-grade existing cities or build new ones.Cisco and IBM highlight the divide:Cisco focuses on constructing new,cutting-edge cities from scratch whileIBM emphasizes helping existing urbanareas reinvent themselves.Critics of the rush to build futuris-

tic cities think the exorbitant spend-ing is misguided. “Selling more [infor-mation technology] and sophisticatedalgorithms might help a few of thevery fortunate cities,” wrote Dan Hoorn-weg, lead urban adviser at the WorldBank. “Being really smart about citiesis improving basic service delivery to

the one billion urban poor now goingwithout clean water, or the two billionwithout sanitation,” he added. 21

Smart-city advocates counter thatnew cities deliver basic amenities moreeffectively than older ones. “New citieswith smart capabilities can provide alevel of innovation that I don’t thinkcan be achieved by just retrofittingthe cities that exist now,” says WarrenKarlenzig, founder and president ofCommon Current, a San Anselmo, Calif.-based global consultancy that focuseson sustainability issues.For example, a smart power grid de-

signed for an intelligent city being builtfrom scratch can “seamlessly” generate,control and distribute energy, allowingfor extensive use of renewable fuel, hesays. In an aging city, by contrast, theintroduction of clean energy requiresheavy reliance on fossil fuel as a back-up because grids are less efficient, heexplains. Smart water systems in newcities automatically detect leaks, accountfor weather changes and respond in-stantly during floods — capabilities thatmay be expensive or cumbersome toreplicate in older cities, he says.

SMART CITIES

The history of urban planning is littered with visionary schemes that fell short, such as Brazil’s capital, Brasília. Completed in1960, it was heralded by boosters as the first jet-age city. But critics later mocked its sterile architecture and desolate streets — a reputation that lingers today. Critic Benjamin Schwarz said “the city is quite correctly

regarded as a colossally wrong turn in urban planning,” though he praised it for “some of the most graceful modernist government buildings ever produced.”

AFP/Getty Images/Evaristo Sa


The cost of investing in new citiesseems less daunting when the expenseof the status quo is tallied, reasonedKai Laursen, a consultant with the UrbanLand Institute, a nonprofit educationaland research group in Washington. “Itcan be argued that the cost of urbansprawl is higher, with hidden costs liketraffic congestion, pollution and loss offarmland included in the cost/benefitanalyses,” he wrote. 22

“With the world population expectedto surpass 9 billion by 2050, infill de-velopment alone will not come closeto meeting future housing needs,”Laursen said. “A limited number ofnew medium-size and large cities makessense in countries with extreme hous-ing shortages.” 23 Noting that China isexperiencing “the largest migration inhuman history” from rural to urbanareas, Karlenzig added: “They have tobuild these cities.”Construction of the next generation

of cities and improvements made toolder ones should not be viewed asmutually exclusive, some experts con-tend. “The general consensus is: We’regoing to need both,” says Amy Ed-mondson, a professor of leadershipand management at Harvard BusinessSchool and a leading expert on smartcities. “I don’t think it’s really an ei-ther/or” proposition, says Edmondson,a member of Living PlanIT’s advisoryboard since November 2010.Yale’s Seto agrees, but offers this

caveat: New cities should rise only inareas experiencing rapid urbanization,such as parts of Asia and Africa. “In theUnited States, I would argue we don’tneed to build from scratch,” she says.“China and India, they need new

cities,” affirms Townsend of the Institutefor the Future. “I think these countriesdeserve a chance to build their utopias— to experiment.” Domestically, “ourfocus needs to be on using all thesetechnologies, all these interesting newbusiness models and new governancemodels, and applying them to problemsthat we already have,” he says.

If smart cities make sense for over-populated, impoverished nations, whyare they being built in a sparsely pop-ulated corner of Portugal, and in SouthKorea and the United Arab Emirates,among the world’s richest nations? Evensmart-city proponents acknowledge theprojected population figures for Song-do, Masdar and PlanIT Valley are rel-atively minuscule. 24 “Few places in theworld will be able to replicate Masdar,”wrote Saskia Sassen, a professor of so-ciology and cochair of the Committeeon Global Thought at Columbia Uni-versity. “It is a multibillion-dollar in-vestment for 40,000 residents.” 25

Lewis says PlanIT Valley was con-ceived not as a megacity but as a labfor innovations that can benefit thecompany’s nearly two dozen urbanprojects in China and elsewhere. Song-do will play a similar role. Gale In-ternational, its developer, plans to cre-ate at least 20 knock-off versions inChina and India. 26

Common Current’s Karlenzig saysit’s important to look beyond the lowpopulation figures because prototypecities will spur new urban models. “It’sthe beginning of an era,” he empha-sizes. “These are early days, but they’rescaling up,” he says, predicting thatsome new cities breaking ground nowwill accommodate a million or moreresidents in five to seven years.

Can innovations showcased in ex-perimental metropolises be scaledup to benefit large, aging cities?Attend the annual Consumer Elec-

tronics Show held every January in LasVegas and you’ll see lots of cool gad-gets and designs — including many thatwill never reach store shelves. Criticscontend that the bulk of innovations de-signed for futuristic cities will meet thesame fate: They won’t be mass-producedor survive beyond the confines of anexperimental urban space.It’s one thing to showcase driverless

cars and interactive video screens in acarefully controlled environment, but

another to bring such advances to ail-ing U.S. cities such as Detroit or NewOrleans or a sprawling megacity in Asiaor Africa with spotty Internet coverageand intermittent electrical power.Some urban-planning experts, how-

ever, see encouraging signs that tech-nologies introduced in fresh, new smartcities will make the leap to older,crumbling ones. “We’re probably tran-sitioning to a new place in Americanhistory, where a lot of the innovationfor urbanization is not happening inthe United States, but it’s happeningelsewhere,” Yale’s Seto says. “I thinkthat there is really a huge amount thatwe can learn and really benefit from.”Nevertheless, obstacles abound. “It’s

very difficult to change laws, zoningcodes — the way things are,” Seto says.“We are still in the mindset of tinker-ing on the edges.” Existing cities mustassess whether it’s cost-effective to ripup infrastructure and replace it withnewer versions, she explains. Townsend,of the Institute for the Future, notesthat innovations that don’t require de-molishing buildings, digging up streetsand rewiring metro areas would beeasier for U.S. cities to adopt.Townsend also offers this caveat:

Some innovations that urban reform-ers are most excited about — such assmart power grids and the ubiquitoususe of sensors to monitor services —“are things that may not actually scalevery well when you start involvinglarge numbers of disadvantaged people.”Lack of education, high-speed Inter-net access and Internet-enabled de-vices could put a damper on such in-vestments, Townsend says.An emergency response center that

IBM designed for Rio de Janeiro is anoften-cited example of a smart-city inno-vation that has been successfully adopt-ed by a major city. Colin Harrison, dis-tinguished engineer with IBM’s SmarterCities program, says the company willexplore whether this type of center,designed to help Rio respond betterto weather catastrophes and other crises,

652 CQ Researcher

could be scaled for a state or coun-try. Technically, that could be done,though it might be more effective tohandle crises at the local level. “Whetherthat is an effective method of manag-ing, or helping to manage, a crisis,”he says of a statewide or nationwidesystem, “we don’t know the answer.”Smart-growth advocates empha-

size that Songdo and other innova-tive cities already are influencing urbanredesign projects in older urbanareas. McCaffery Interests, a Chicago-based real estate firm, and Cisco arecollaborating with Chicago city offi-

cials on the Lakeside development,which will transform the site of a for-mer U.S. Steel mill on the south sideinto a high-tech community that usesgreen technology for energy and waterdistribution, waste management andpublic transit. 27

The project brings together new de-velopment and urban revitalization ina way that is harmonious with thelocal community, said Wim Elfrink,chief globalization officer and execu-tive vice president of the EmergingSolutions Group at Cisco. 28 (See “AtIssue,” p. 661.)

“The scale of the project is extra-ordinary,” added Chris Raguso, whoserved as former Mayor Richard M.Daley’s deputy chief of staff. “The factthat anybody in this economy still wantsto take a shot at developing a site thatis basically a landfill and is basing thedevelopment on retail and housing isalso extraordinary,” she said. 29

Several U.S. cities, including Atlanta,Detroit, Denver, Indianapolis, Milwaukeeand Winston-Salem/Greensboro, N.C., areexploring a popular overseas concept,the aerotropolis — an economic zonebuilt around an airport. 30

SMART CITIES

Cities Experiencing Explosive GrowthTokyo, already the world’s most populous city with about 37 million residents, is expected to reach 39 million by 2025. Delhi, which ranks second with almost 23 million, is projected to grow by more than 10 million over the same period. The New York City-Newark region is expected to drop from fourth to sixth place by 2025, with 15 million fewer residents than Tokyo.

Source: “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision,” United Nations Population Division, March 2012, p. 7, esa.un.org/unpd/wup/pdf/WUP2011_Highlights.pdf

Most Populated Urban Areas, 2011 and 2025 (Projected)(in millions)

1. Tokyo, Japan 37.22. Delhi, India 22.73. Mexico City, Mexico 20.44. New York-Newark, U.S. 20.45. Shanghai, China 20.26. Sao Paulo, Brazil 19.97. Mumbai, India 19.78. Beijing, China 15.69. Dhaka, Bangladesh 15.410. Calcutta, India 14.411. Karachi, Pakistan 13.912. Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.513. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, U.S. 13.414. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 12.015. Manila, Philippines 11.916. Moscow, Russia 11.617. Osaka-Kobe, Japan 11.518. Istanbul, Turkey 11.319. Lagos, Nigeria 11.220. Cairo, Egypt 11.2

2011 2025

1. Tokyo, Japan 38.72. Delhi, India 32.93. Shanghai, China 28.44. Mumbai, India 26.65. Mexico City, Mexico 24.66. New York-Newark, U.S. 23.67. Sao Paulo, Brazil 23.28. Dhaka, Bangladesh 22.99. Beijing, China 22.610. Karachi, Pakistan 20.211. Lagos, Nigeria 18.912. Calcutta, India 18.713. Manila, Philippines 16.314. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, U.S. 15.715. Shenzhen, China 15.516. Buenos Aires, Argentina 15.517. Guangzhou, China 15.518. Istanbul, Turkey 14.919. Cairo, Egypt 14.720. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo 14.5


Living PlanIT’s Lewis is optimisticabout prospects for older U.S. citiesto adopt smart-city innovations. Still,he says cities would have to adapt thenew technologies to existing buildingsand infrastructure.“Los Angeles can’t afford to rip out

every road” and rewire every buildingin the city, but smarter technologycould be added to the existing land-scape to create, for example, an urbanoperating system that might help L.A.operate more efficiently, he says. Itwould be unwise, headvises, for oldercities to balk at thecost of upgradingtheir infrastructure.“You can’t afford notto do it,” he says oftoday’s aging me-tropolises.

Do smart citiesoverrely on tech-nology?In a shocking se-

curity breach, hack-ers infiltrate city-rundatabases in Chica-go and steal sensi-tive personal infor-mation on millionsof citizens.No worries: This

is just the plot of“Watch Dogs,” anupcoming video game that paints adystopian portrait of the Windy Cityas a smart metropolis under siege bynerdy criminals. 31 Yet some expertscaution that this doomsday scenariocould be real if high-tech wizardry insmart cities crashes or is compromised.As intelligent cities catch on, more

questions are being raised about over-reliance on the gadgetry that runs them.Technical glitches, power outages andcyber attacks are a danger for any urbanenvironment, but a hyper-connected citycould grind to a halt, critics warn. An-other concern is that rogue govern-

ments might misuse the wireless sen-sors and interactive video monitors de-ployed in new cities to spy on citi-zens and suppress dissent.“It’s always a risk,” acknowledges

Living PlanIT’s Lewis. “Regardless ofhow robust you think anything is, itcan always be improved,” he says. Heemphasizes that there are ways tobuild in redundancy so that fallbacksystems take control in response to apower failures or other mishaps. “Onthe one hand,” says IBM’s Harrison,

“we are creating new dependencies”on technology. But he concurs withLewis that it’s possible to mitigate theimpact of any failure with secondarysystems.Townsend, of the Institute for the

Future, is not convinced. “It’s goingto cost a lot,” he says of backup net-works. “There’s a steep learning curve.”He cites the work of Yale sociolo-gist Charles Perrow, who concludedthat accidents are inevitable with com-plex technologies because it’s im-possible to model every scenariothey might encounter. 32 The 1986

meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclearreactor in the former Soviet Union,Townsend says, began with a botchedsafety test. 33

Townsend is particularly worriedabout the impact of a cyber attack.“Every day, new threats are being docu-mented,” such as electronic bugs thatmess with the operations of infra-structure such as elevators, power linesand water pumps, he says. “It’s a wholenew category of infrastructure vulner-abilities that nobody anticipated.”

Yale’s Seto cautionsthat it’s not only tech-nology that can becomeoutmoded or marginal-ized — it’s companiesas well. “Technologyleaders of two years agoare not the technologyleaders today,” she says.Privacy and govern-

ment surveillance con-cerns are particularlyacute in China, whichis rapidly building newcities. With sensorsbeing used in manypilot cities to monitortraffic patterns, powerconsumption and evenpedestrian levels, it’s nota giant leap for a gov-ernment to use theseinnovations to monitorpolitical opponents and

citizen activists, experts say.“We could slide into a managed space

where ‘sensored’ becomes ‘censored,’ ”warned Sassen, the Columbia profes-sor. 34 “Privacy is a big issue,” adds Har-vard’s Edmondson. “I sometimes lookaround and think, has the horse alreadyleft the barn on that one?” Citizens willhave to gauge whether increased risksto their privacy are worth the benefitsof innovation, she says.Lewis, whose company does consid-

erable business with China, says peopleinteract with Living PlanIT’s urban soft-ware through a “virtual identity” similar

The emergency response center that IBM designed for Rio de Janeiro,Brazil, coordinates 30 city departments and is an often-cited exampleof a smart city innovation that has been successfully adopted by a

major city. The company’s Smarter Cities program will explore whetherthe facility, designed to improve Rio’s response to weather catastrophes

and other crises, could be scaled for a state or country.

Courtesy of International Business Machines Corp.

654 CQ Researcher

SMART CITIES

to an avatar and control how much per-sonally identifiable information to share.He emphasizes that his company com-plies with all U.S. export regulations gov-erning which technologies can be dis-tributed to foreign countries and recognizesit has an “ethical responsibility” to de-ploy smart-city innovations in ways that“benefit society.” Still,“There’s only somuch of that you canphysically enforce,”he acknowledges.On a conciliatory

note, he thinks somecountries are unfair-ly presumed to havemalicious intentionsfor innovations thatcan benefit their cit-izens. “Societies [that]we understand less,we tend to be fear-ful of,” he says. Whiletechnology can beused by govern-ments to suppressdissent, it also canbe used by citizensto spread democra-cy, he notes. 35

Given the swiftpace of change,urban planners warnthat smart cities riskoverreliance on pro-priety systems thatcould be difficult toreplace or upgrade.Once a city has been wired to the hiltby a Cisco, IBM or Siemens, can itswitch to a competing vendor? IBM’sHarrison says it’s possible, but not easy.Two trends could help facilitate a switch:growing reliance on industrywide stan-dards and cloud-based services that storesoftware and databases on the Internet— rather than on computer hard drives.“These are quite complicated systems,so it’s not something you would doover a weekend,” he says. “It would re-quire a lot of planning” and take a few

months, “but I don’t see any absoluteobstacle to doing it.”The bottom line: Risk of catastrophic

failure of smart-city technology can beminimized but never eliminated. “Sincehumans are involved in the buildingprocess, there will always be errors,”Lewis says.

BACKGROUNDCity Beautiful Movement

Smart cities represent the latestchapter in the history of urban re-newal that had its origins at the turnof the 20th century. The City Beauti-ful movement of the late 1800s and

early 1900s was a nationwide effort tostrengthen civic pride by sprucing updowntowns with grand architectureand wide boulevards. The effort ini-tially was driven by civic associationsand later by city leaders and plannerseager to boost property values throughredevelopment. 36

Jane Jacobs, author ofThe Death and Life ofGreat American Cities, aseminal book on urbanrevitalization published in1961, wrote that the aimof the movement was tocreate “monumental”cities featuring classicalarchitecture. “City after citybuilt its civic center or itscultural center,” she wrote.These buildings were“sorted out from the restof the city, and assem-bled into the grandest ef-fect thought possible.” 37

Jacobs argued, how-ever, that the imposingarchitecture had a limit-ed impact on the urbanlandscapes it was sup-posed to rejuvenate. “In-variably, the ordinary cityaround [these buildings]ran down instead ofbeing uplifted” and in-evitably attracted “an in-congruous rim of rattytattoo parlors and second-hand clothing stores, or

else just nondescript, dispirited decay,”she wrote. People also tended to avoidthese city centers, despite their newstructures. 38

The remnants of the City Beautifulperiod can be seen across America,along, for example, Philadelphia’s Ben-jamin Franklin Parkway and at San Fran-cisco’s Civic Center. High-minded struc-tures such as the Philadelphia Museumof Art, the Rodin Museum and a statuteof Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century

Continued on p. 656

American urban-planning scholar Jane Jacobs wrote a scathingcritique of the urban-renewal policies of the 1950s, The Death and Lifeof Great American Cities, published in 1961. Jacobs argued that the

monumental structures being built to replace old and oftendistinguished buildings had a limited impact on the urban landscapes

they were supposed to rejuvenate. “Invariably, the ordinary city around[these buildings] ran down instead of being uplifted” and inevitably

attracted “an incongruous rim of ratty tattoo parlors and second-handclothing stores, or else just nondescript, dispirited decay,” she wrote.

Library of Congress


Chronology1890s-1950sUrban makeovers aim to beau-tify cities.

1893City Beautiful Movement aims torevitalize U.S. cities with grand,inspirational architecture.

1898Garden City Movement models smalltowns after quaint English villages.

1949Housing Act accelerates urban re-newal with federal funds to clearslums and replace them withhousing developments.

1954Congress amends the Housing Act tofree up more funds for demolitionand construction in urban areas.

•

1960s-1990sUrban experiments, plannedcommunities have mixed success.

1960Inauguration of Brazil’s ultramoderncapital Brasília prompts criticism ofthe city’s desolate streets and im-posing architecture.

1961Briton Robert E. Simon Jr., spear-heads creation of Reston, Va., nearWashington, D.C., in early exampleof planned-community design.

1963American urban planner James Rouseinitiates design of Columbia, Md., ascluster of self-contained villages andalternative to suburban sprawl.

1968New York City contracts with

RAND Corp. to predict where fireswill occur, but faulty data result indeaths. . . . Urban-renewal effortscoincide with escalation of riots ininner-city neighborhoods.

1974Brazilian city of Curitiba introducesrapid-transit bus system that functionslike a subway.

1982EPCOT opens as a theme parkrather than the futuristic city onceimagined by legendary film pioneerWalt Disney.

1992Agenda 21, a comprehensive planfor reducing human impact on theenvironment, is adopted by morethan 178 nations at U.N. conference.

1997First residents move to Celebration,Fla., a suburban “utopia” created bythe Walt Disney Co. that criticsmock as contrived.

•

2000-2009Smart Cities and smart-growthmovement take shape.

2003To curb pollution and congestion,London charges drivers who enterbusiness districts during peak periods.

2005Songdo, South Korea, breaksground and is heralded as a modelfor new cities in China and India.

2007New York City adopts a sweepingenvironmental plan that seeks to cutgreenhouse gases by 30 percent,add parks and overhaul mass transitby 2030.

2008Construction begins on Tianjin Eco-city in northeast China to add hous-ing for 350,000 people by 2020.

2009Living PlanIT announces northernPortugal as location for PlanIT Val-ley, a futuristic city to be run bysoftware. . . . Gujarat InternationalFinance Tec-City, a global financialhub planned for India, selects Ciscoto design its tech infrastructure. . . .Gale International and Cisco an-nounce plans for the Meixi LakeDistrict eco city in southeast China.

•

2010-PresentFuturistic urban developmentaccelerates, particularly inChina and India.

2010IBM establishes data-operationscenter in Rio de Janeiro thatshares crucial information among30 government agencies.

2011Economic uncertainty forces Masdar,a futuristic city in the United ArabEmirates, to slash its budget, scaleback innovations and delay comple-tion by a decade. . . . Lavasa, asmart city in India, prompts com-plaints that its housing is too ex-pensive for the country’s middleclass. . . . Japan commits $4.5 bil-lion to $90 billion Delhi-MumbaiIndustrial Corridor in India that willconstruct 24 cities in six states.

2012Cisco chosen to create technologymaster plan for Chicago Lakesidedevelopment that will transform avacant steel-mill site into a high-tech neighborhood.

656 CQ Researcher

mathematician and astronomer, line theparkway. In San Francisco, a clusterof historic buildings that includes CityHall, Symphony Hall and the WarMemorial Veterans building comprisesthe Civic Center. 39

The movement, also known as CityReform, coincided with the Garden CityMovement, begun in England in 1898by British urban planner EbenezerHoward. It sought to model small townsafter quaint English villages. His approachemphasized family homes, gardens andwalkable communities. Well-planned,middle-class garden-city suburbs flour-ished in the United States in the early1900s, as the idea “soon became the

bible for suburban town planning inAmerica,” wrote Douglas E. Morris in It’sa Sprawl World After All. 40 By the late1930s, the Garden City model was over-taken by other designs, or modified intovariants of the original concept. 41

Urban Renewal

A t mid-century, concerns about de-teriorating downtowns prompted a

wave of urban renewal that resulted inthe widespread demolition of aging build-ings, many of them architecturally sig-nificant but ill-used, as commerce andresidential areas shifted to far-flung sub-urbs. “By the late 1930s and early ’40s,

it was clear downtown was in trouble,”Robert M. Fogelson wrote in Downtown,Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. In mostcities, [the downtown’s] daytime popu-lation was still below pre-Depressionlevels. So were its retail sales.” 42

By the 1950s, Americans were hear-ing a steady stream of alarming sto-ries about the decline of downtowns.Vacant storefronts, decaying buildings,loss of manufacturing and downwardspiraling retail sales contributed to thesense of doom, fueling calls for large-scale redevelopment. 43 In response,the federal government provided bil-lions of dollars for highway construc-tion and urban-renewal projects in the1950s and 1960s. 44

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Continued from p. 654

Operating systems such as Windows and Android al-ready run computers, smartphones and tablets — sowhy not sprawling metropolises?

That’s the thinking behind the “urban operating system”(UOS), which uses sensors and software to monitor and ana-lyze the main functions of cities, including traffic levels, powerconsumption and water usage. The possibilities for this bur-geoning technology seem endless: Vehicles instantly reroutedaround accidents; office windows automatically tinted at the firsthint of sunshine; and excess solar energy diverted to batteriesfor storage.Even residents’ health could be monitored. Wireless sensors, ei-

ther placed in homes or worn, could track vital signs such as heartrates and insulin levels to immediately detect medical emergencies.Steve Lewis, CEO of Living PlanIT, a Portugal-based devel-

oper of smart cities that coined the term “urban operating sys-tem,” likens the technology to the human nervous system. “Itsenses what’s going on around it and acts to support variousfunctions” and maximize resources, he says.Living PlanIT, which also has offices in Britain and the Unit-

ed States, is working on the software with Microsoft, whereLewis previously was an executive, Cisco and other partners. 1

Living PlanIT is designing a futuristic city in northern Portugalcalled PlanIT Valley, to be run by a UOS upon its completion,projected for 2017. To be built on uninhabited land, PlanIT Val-ley is slated to be the third-largest city in Portugal, after Lis-bon and Porto, and was designated a “Project of National In-terest” by the Portuguese government. Lewis says all constructionpermits and land rights are in place.

Similar to the software “apps” for Apple’s iPhone, apps de-signed by third parties could supplement the urban softwarewith additional tools and services, Lewis says. “The city be-comes a platform that allows new forms of innovation to meetthe needs of the citizens,” he says. While much of a UOS can beautomated, human intervention is sometimes required to analyzethe data, Lewis explains.In Porto, on Portugal’s northern coast, Living PlanIT is test-

ing the traffic-related components of its UOS software with theUniversity of Porto. A wider test is under way in the SouthLondon district of Greenwich with financial backing from theU.K. government, Lewis says. 2

Living PlanIT, meanwhile, will add operating systems to citiesit is developing in China, and to Almere, an Amsterdam sub-urb to be reinvented as a “smart society” with help from IBM,Cisco and Royal Philips Electronics, Lewis says. And in SouthKorea, Songdo, a smart city under construction from scratchalong the Incheon waterfront, will be run by similar technol-ogy that its designers describe as the city’s “brain.”Half a world away, in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, a citywide op-

erations center designed by IBM functions similarly to an urbanoperating system. Mayor Eduardo Paes sought IBM’s help aftermudslides and flash floods in the city of 12 million peoplekilled dozens in April 2010 and left Paes without a central com-mand center to oversee the crisis. 3

The $14 million center, which opened in late 2010 andwas expanded a year later, analyzes and shares data abouttraffic and weather conditions, infrastructure needs, crowdsand security among 30 government agencies, including pub-

Technology Brings New Brainpower to Communities“The city becomes a platform that allows new forms of innovation.”


Alison Isenberg, author of DowntownAmerica, noted a racial and socioeco-nomic undercurrent to the era’s urbanrestoration, as retailers sought to attractmore white, middle-class housewives todowntowns populated mostly by mi-nority and low-income citizens. 45 “Re-developers persistently argued that theresidents of ‘slums’ adjacent to the down-town threatened to ‘cheapen’ and ulti-mately destroy the vitality of urbancommercial life,” she wrote. 46 Down-town business interests and their alliessought to curb the blight. 47

The response was to raze down-town storefronts and dilapidated neigh-borhoods and replace them with hous-ing projects, multilane expressways

and large-scale retail developmentssuch as enclosed shopping areas thatreplicated increasingly popular sub-urban malls.Revitalization, however, didn’t al-

ways achieve its intended goal ofrestoring ailing cities. “By the late1950s, as more Main Street buildingsfell to renewal, a countermovementinvigorated by . . . Jacobs assertedthat old, diverse, small stores had eco-nomic and aesthetic value,” Isenbergrecounted. “The contradictions of urbanrenewal quickly became evident,” shewrote. As businesses and govern-ments praised redevelopment, the pic-ture on the ground was less clear.Cities lost longstanding businesses

and inner-city neighborhoods, someof which would become the focalpoint of civil rights riots that destroyedentire blocks in the 1960s. 48

The demolition of older buildingscontinued into the 1970s but didn’tturn most cities around. In an effortto reinvigorate their downtowns, manycities welcomed shopping malls andmixed-used office developments as theystruggled with a growing number ofvacant, abandoned storefronts. Duringthis period, a new idea began to takeshape that would intensify over thenext two decades: preservation of his-toric buildings and Main Streets de-signed to reconnect cities with theirpast and foster nostalgia. 49

lic safety and law enforcement. 4 Forexample, data about a broken watermain and corresponding flood is im-mediately routed to all relevant de-partments, says Colin Harrison, dis-tinguished engineer with IBM’sSmarter Cities program. If police of-ficers detected the break, they couldtransmit information about it to pub-lic works officials and, if necessary,the transit system could reroute buses.“It just helps everybody to have

a common version of the truth,” Har-rison says. “This is really all abouthelping people to make decisions.”The center already has been

used for crowd control during theannual Carnival festival, serving asa test run for the 2014 World Cup,to be held in Rio and other Brazil-ian cities, and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. IBM hascreated similar centers elsewhere, but the one in sprawlingRio is the largest. 5

While the Rio surveillance is on par with security measuresin the United States, urban innovations elsewhere have raisedprivacy concerns, particularly in China, where some plannedcities will deploy ubiquitous wireless sensors, purportedly tomonitor traffic and weather, that could be co-opted to spy oncitizens.

As with any technology, challengesabound. For IBM, Rio presents information-gathering hurdles in the form of the city’smountainous topography, dense popula-tion and poverty. 6 And it’s still too earlyto gauge whether the software that LivingPlanIT envisions will perform as planned.Computer users have long encounterederror messages and system crashes, prompt-ing the view in some circles that a UOSwon’t fare much better.

— David Hatch

1 For an overview of Living PlanIT’s UOS, seehttp://living-planit.com/UOS_overview.htm.2 For background, see Katia Moskvitch, “Willchatting smart cars become a reality soon?” BBCNews, July 9, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18608730. Living PlanIT, “Living PlanITLed Consortium Receives UK Government Fund-ing for £3m Project,” press release, Nov. 10, 2011,

http://living-planit.com/pr_SA_TSB_Award.htm.3 Natasha Singer, “Mission Control Built for Cities,” The New York Times,March 3, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/ibm-takes-smarter-cities-concept-to-rio-de-janeiro.html?pagewanted=all.4 For background, see IBM press release, “City of Rio de Janeiro and IBMCollaborate to Advance Emergency Response System; Access to Real-Time In-formation Empowers Citizen,” Nov. 9, 2011, www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35945.wss.5 Singer, op. cit.6 Ibid.

Steve Lewis is CEO of Living PlanIT, thePortugal-based developer of PlanITValley, a futuristic city envisioned fornorthern Portugal with a projected

220,000 residents.

Living PlanIT SA

658 CQ Researcher

Mixed Results

A s urban renewal swept the na-tion, two early experiments in

smart growth — Brazil’s much-panneddesign for its new capital and NewYork City’s unsuccessful use of com-puters to predict where fires mightbreak out — wereprecursors to thesmart-city experi-ments of today, withless than impressiveresults. But a third,in another Braziliancity — Curitiba,founded by Por-tuguese explorers in1693 — has beenhailed by urbanplanners as a bril-liantly simple and ef-fective idea for citieslacking subways,and an early exam-ple of smart growth.An endur ing

symbol of a failedurban environmentis Brasília, the cap-ital of Brazil, which was heralded byits architects in the early ’60s as thefirst city designed for the jet era. “Inan effort to cleanse itself of its colo-nial past, to flee its burgeoning so-cial afflictions, and to fulfill its long-prophesied emergence as a greatpower,” Brasília’s planners designeda capital that was supposed to be atribute to modernity, The Atlanticsaid. “Here was a city without a traf-fic light, containing thoroughfares with-out crosswalks.” 50

The result was a city with fewpedestrians and architecture widely re-garded as imposing and sterile. Re-flecting a widely held view among ar-chitectural critics and city planners, thearticle’s author, Benjamin Schwarz, con-cluded that “the city is quite correctlyregarded as a colossally wrong turn in

urban planning,” though he praised itfor “some of the most graceful mod-ernist government buildings ever pro-duced.” 51 Added Greg Lindsay, a wide-ly published expert on urbanization, inan essay in Fast Company, “Brasília, ofcourse, was an instant disaster: grandiose,monstrously overscale, and immediate-ly encircled by slums.” 52

In 1968, New York City contractedwith the RAND Corp. to use comput-er models to predict the location offires in an effort to deploy firefightingresources more effectively. Because ofinaccurate data and misguided as-sumptions, the models recommendedreplacing large firehouses across thecity with smaller ones. RAND neverforesaw the tragic result: 600,000 resi-dents in low-income areas would losetheir homes to fire over the next decade,Lindsay, a visiting scholar at the RudinCenter for Transportation Policy andManagement at New York University,wrote in The New York Times. 53 Wors-ening the situation, he said, RAND re-frained from cutting services to well-off communities to avoid complaints,forcing poorer areas to compete forlimited firefighting resources. 54

Despite the missteps in Brasília, an-other urban initiative in Brazil was asuccess. It occurred in the 1970s inCuritiba, a fast-growing city of almost1.8 million in southern Brazil near theAtlantic coast. “The mayor came in,and over a very short period of aboutthree years, transformed the trans-

portation sector in thatcity,” says Seto of Yale.Among the most inno-vative designs, she says,was a low-cost, low-techsolution to congestedstreets: a rapid-transitsystem modeled after asubway, but with buses.Riders board on plat-forms and the busdoors slide open like ona subway, she explains.The buses also operatein dedicated lanes. “Thisbus design was very in-novative because it ad-dressed the issue of whypeople didn’t want toride the bus” — they’reslow and get stuck intraffic, she says. 55

Suburban ‘Utopias’

S uburbs took root more than a cen-tury ago and have been expand-

ing ever since. The advent of the au-tomobile and the street car encouragedAmericans to move outside cities be-ginning in the late 1800s and early1900s. “By 1930 every American cityhad rings of suburbs like the skins ofan onion, and beyond that, usually,other rings of platted fields,” observedhistorian Alan Gowans. 56 As sprawlmushroomed in all directions, somevisionaries sought to redefine small-town America in response to growingdissatisfaction with both urban andsuburban life. 57

In the early 1960s, Robert E. SimonJr., a Briton, led an effort to create a

SMART CITIES

A bird sanctuary surrounds Dongtan, a so-called eco city planned forChina’s Chongming Island, near Shanghai. The huge model sustainable

city, being developed by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corp., isslated to have 500,000 residents by 2050. Work on the project, which began in 2005, currently is stalled. Dongtan is one of

at least 20 new cities being planned in China.AFP/Getty Images/Mark Ralston


self-contained community in NorthernVirginia in which residents would notonly live but also work. He persuadedlocal authorities to cluster homes to-gether to preserve open space, fieldsand wooded areas. He also urged themto dam streams to create lakes and con-struct village centers to serve as shop-ping destinations and gathering places.The result was Reston, located west ofWashington, D.C., and considered amongthe nation’s first large-scale planned com-munities. The Reston Town Center, ded-icated in October 1990, furthered Simon’sdream with an urban-like center ofshops, restaurants, offices and upscaleresidential buildings. 58

At about the same time, James Rouse,an American urban planner who laterdesigned the Faneuil Hall marketplacein Boston, was developing the plannedcommunity of Columbia, Md., whichfeatured several small villages, eachwith its own shopping areas. “It’s notan attempt at a perfect city or a utopia,but rather an effort to simply developa better city, an alternative to the mind-lessness, the irrationality, the unneces-sity of sprawl and clutter as a way ofaccommodating the growth of the Amer-ican city,” Rouse said in 1982. 59

In the mid-1990s, the Walt DisneyCo. created the planned communityof Celebration, Fla., which aspired tobe an economically diverse environ-ment, with million-dollar homes nextto rental apartments. 60 “The townfelt like a movie set,” Douglas Frantzand Catherine Collins, husband andwife co-authors of a book about Cel-ebration, wrote in a New York Timesessay. Rocking chairs sat along theman-made lake, houses were basedon a limited number of designs andexterior paint colors were dictated bya community rulebook, wrote thecouple, who moved to Celebrationwith their children in 1997. A returnvisit a few years ago revealed signsof trouble for the experiment, in-cluding encroaching sprawl and homeforeclosures. 61

Road to Smart Growth

L ong before Masdar, PlanIT Valleyand Songdo, there was film pio-

neer Walt Disney’s grand vision for acity of the future. The ExperimentalPrototype Community of Tomorrow,or EPCOT, was originally planned asan actual Florida town rather than thetourist attraction it became. Twentythousand residents would live underan enormous dome and travel by mono-rail to skyscrapers that would be partof the community. All the residentswould rent their housing from the Dis-ney Co. Disney said the town wouldbe “starting from scratch on virgin landand building a special kind of newcommunity that more people will talkabout and come to look at than anyother area in the world.” Disney diedin 1966 before he could implementhis vision, and EPCOT opened in 1982as a theme park. 62

More than two decades later, Dong-tan, originally conceived as China’s firsteco city, is a stark reminder of the risksassociated with engineering the nextgeneration of metropolises. Envisionedas a car-free, Manhattan-size city onChongming Island near Shanghai, theproject received a green light fromlocal authorities in 2005 and wassupposed to welcome its first in-habitants in time for the 2010 Shang-hai World Expo. 63

Dongtan’s troubles started soon afterits launch. Other than a wind farmand bridge-and-tunnel connection toShanghai, little has been built. Con-struction permits have expired. There’sa dispute between Arup, the London-based engineering firm designing thecity, and Shanghai Industrial Invest-ment Corp., a state-controlled devel-oper, over who should fund the pro-ject. 64 Dongtan took another hit whenits main political proponent, former Shang-hai Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu,was sentenced on corruption charges in2008 to 18 years in prison. 65 Today,

the project is indefinitely stalled andserves as a lesson on the challengesahead for smart cities.

CURRENTSITUATION

Gaining Momentum

F uturistic cities and neighborhoodsare being planned around the globe

— typically in Asia or the Middle East,but increasingly in the Americas andAfrica — and often with backing byU.S. developers.Yet, smart cities face daunting chal-

lenges and the reality of scaled-backambitions. The global economic crisisalready has taken a toll, prompting Mas-dar to trim its budget by 15 percent to$19 billion, delay its completion dateby nearly a decade and abandon itsdream of being powered exclusively byits own solar panels and other clean-energy technology. 66

Three years ago, rumors circulatedthat Songdo, now two years behindschedule, might have been in troublebecause of difficulty securing loans.Incheon Mayor Ahn Sang-soo down-played concerns at the time, saying,“The current global economic crisiswon’t deter us.” At various points,some construction was halted, con-firms a spokeswoman with Gale In-ternational, Songdo’s developer, but thefinancial situation has since stabilized,she says. 67

In fact, many smart-city projects wereannounced “right at the beginning of aglobal recession,” says Karlenzig, theurban consultant. “The timing couldn’thave been worse in some ways.”Still, a booming business in smart-

city conferences may be the clearestindicator of growing interest in thesubject. Recent gatherings include Smart

660 CQ Researcher

SMART CITIES

Cities World, inDubai; Smart Citiesand Communities,in Brussels; SmartCities Summit, inDurban, South Africa;and City Age, inToronto. 68

At least 20 newcities are plannedfor China. Lewis ofLiving PlanIT sayshe expects a private-equity investmentfund, in which Liv-ing PlanIT is a part-ner, to help finance300 more over thenext 25 years.Among the no-

table projects sched-uled in China, Indiaand Russia: 69

• Meixi Lake:An eco city devel-oped by Songdo de-velopers Gale International and Cisco,planned on 1,675 acres in Changsha,the capital of Hunan Province insoutheast China. The project will ringa lake but emphasize water conser-vation. 70

• Tianjin Eco-city: A low-carbonmetropolis, rising on once-polluted landless than an hour from Beijing by train.Designed to house 350,000 by 2020, itis a collaboration between the Chineseand Singaporean governments.• Lavasa: India’s best-known smart

city, located between the economichubs of Mumbai and Pune and nestledin a lush valley. Guided by the prin-ciple of New Urbanism, which pro-motes sustainable, pedestrian-friendlycommunities, Lavasa is designed to bewalkable and to minimize traffic con-gestion. 71 At least two other smartcities are under construction in India— SmartCity Kochi and the GujaratInternational Finance Tec-city.• Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Cor-

ridor: A planned $90 billion project

that will create 24 cities in six stateswith Cisco’s participation. 72 The firstseven cities are scheduled to open in2018 or 2019. 73

• Skolkovo Project: An innova-tion hub near Moscow inspired bySilicon Valley and developed jointlyby Cisco and the Russian govern-ment. It will house 30,000 entrepre-neurs and researchers to facilitatetech start-ups. 74

Perhaps the boldest urban visionsbelong to two impoverished, violence-wracked nations: tiny Honduras, inCentral America, with the world’s high-est murder rate due to drug traffick-ing, gangs and crime, and Nigeria, amajor African oil producer at warwith Boko Haram, an Islamic ter-rorist group. Both hope to build ver-sions of Dubai, the ultra-sleek Mideastcity known for its stunning archi-tecture and the Burj Khalifa, theworld’s tallest building.Nigerian developers want to create

Minna Airport City, a self-contained

“aerotropolis” in avolatile region 90 milesnorthwest of the capital,Abuja, that would be safefor foreign workers andtheir families. 75 Similarly,Honduras is exploring a“charter city” with itsown laws and legal sys-tem. New York Universi-ty economics professorPaul Romer espouses theconcept, arguing that poorcountries saddled by out-dated laws and corrup-tion need to create securebusiness environmentsthat attract foreign invest-ment. 76 Romer told TheNew York Times thatsome critics have sug-gested his view “reeks ofcolonialism” or falls shortof what countries need toovercome poverty. 77

Smart Growth Strategies

N o gleaming city of the future is inthe works in the United States.

Urban planners cite several reasons:American cities are relatively new, there’sa housing oversupply and populationgrowth is stable, leaving little incentivefor investors to build new communitiesfrom scratch.As a result, several U.S. cities, large

and small, are pursuing so-called smartgrowth strategies that involve upgrad-ing neighborhoods and infrastructurewithout building new metropolises fromthe ground up.In New York City, a smart-growth

plan adopted on Earth Day in 2007seeks to reduce greenhouse gases30 percent by 2030 by phasing outdirty heating fuel, expanding and re-zoning mass transit and transitioningtaxis to cleaner fuel. Other goals in-clude adding green space by turning

Continued on p. 662

Impoverished Honduras envisions the creation of a sleek, new “chartercity” with its own legal system. The tiny, Central American nation hasthe world’s highest murder rate due to gangs, drug trafficking, andother crime. New York University economics professor Paul Romerargues that poor countries saddled by outdated laws and corruption

need to create secure business environments that attract foreign investment. Above, a decaying neighborhood in

Tegucigalpa, the capital.

Getty Images/Spencer Platt

no


At Issue:Can smart city technology save ailing cities?yes

yesWIM ELFRINKCHIEF GLOBALIZATION OFFICER ANDEXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, EMERGING SOLUTIONS, CISCO

WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2012

w hile no one factor will save an ailing city, Cisco be-lieves that connected technology is key to urban re-vitalization. With more than 60 percent of the world

projected by the U.N. to live in cities by 2030, the challenge ofretrofitting cities for future growth is vital.Two major waves of “network” innovation characterized

20th-century development: In the early 1900s, electrical net-works proliferated, and at mid-century the wide availability oftransportation systems spurred suburbanization and createdtransportation networks that facilitated mobility of citizens andmore efficient distribution of goods. Today, Internet-enabledcommunications are as essential as utilities like gas, water andelectricity, and there is an opportunity to help build futurecities that are capable of meeting population-growth challenges.Take Chicago as a bold example of urban revitalization. The

470-acre Lakeside project site — the largest undeveloped site inthe city — was once home to a U.S. Steel mill that employedmore than 30,000 workers. The site, more than 75 percentlandfill, is undergoing a 30-year redevelopment that will yield13,575 market-rate and affordable homes serving 50,000 resi-dents; 17.5 million square feet of retail and commercial space;125-plus acres of parks; a high school and a marina.Cisco is the master information and communication technol-

ogy (ICT) planner and will supply the in-depth ICT infrastruc-ture assessment for the development. The benefits of commu-nities that are smart and connected include alleviating trafficcongestion and pollution, helping residents and businesses useenergy more efficiently and improving safety and security. Weknow from other projects worldwide that such communitiesempower users and create borderless opportunities that canhelp drive economic development.Local organizations that know Chicago the best, and have been

working to improve it for many years, agree that ICT is a keypart of revitalization. Daniel X. O’Neil, executive director of theSmart Chicago Collaborative, wants broadband adoption in Chica-go to be as “ubiquitous as the power grid,” and the Local Initia-tives Support Corp.’s Smart Communities program works to ensuredigital access for families, businesses and other organizations.It’s important to note that technology doesn’t have to be

implemented in spite of citizens’ wishes. In fact, as socialmedia have demonstrated, technology can enable citizens togain more power — including accessing information morequickly and effectively, voicing their opinions on existing ser-vices and crowd-sourcing ideas to generate innovation in bothprivate and public spheres.no

ANTHONY TOWNSENDRESEARCH DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE

WRITTEN FOR CQ RESEARCHER, JULY 2012

c ities fall into decline for a host of reasons that don’tyield to quick technological fixes. Take Camden, N.J.,where I worked in affordable housing many years ago.

Camden is among the nation’s poorest cities. Over the last50 years it has lost its industrial employment base, tax baseand human capital. Its schools and health care are inadequateand underfunded. Corruption is rampant, and the infrastructureis crumbling. No technology can reverse that kind of systemicdecline overnight. What Camden needs is infrastructure, jobsand a totally new system of government. Or, as in the case ofDetroit, it needs to think seriously about planned shrinkage.The city can’t even afford its 311 hotline anymore.The smart solutions being sold by big technology compa-

nies can address pieces of these challenges. There are oppor-tunities to cut costs, waste and corruption and improve ac-countability by tracking municipal assets and service-deliverymetrics. But despite big promises and marketing hype fromcompanies like Cisco and IBM, I worry that these improve-ments are too incremental to reverse steep decline.We are just beginning to understand the opportunities for in-

novation in health care and education. But without broadbandaccess, computers and training, declining cities are likely to missout. We face not one digital divide of access to technologytoday, but a proliferation of new barriers to literacy.Industry has focused mostly on growing cities. Rio de

Janeiro, Incheon, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco andother “smart cities” are boomtowns. They are taking off-the-shelf solutions developed over the last 20 years for global lo-gistics — tools for managing expanding businesses — and ap-plying them to the operations of city government. How doyou reduce traffic congestion? How do you grow while reduc-ing carbon emissions? These are not problems faced by mostcities in decline. If proponents of smart cities have a technolo-gy for revitalizing declining urban areas, they are keepingquiet about it.There is hope, however. City governments and citizens are

building smart solutions on their own. Cutting-edge technologytoday tends to flow from the bottom-up: open-source softwareand hardware, and open data. Even former corporate smart-city boosters see the opportunity. John Tolva, Chicago’s chieftechnology officer, is re-engineering city government by min-ing the city’s data with open-source statistics software. Ironical-ly, Tolva’s previous job was as IBM’s chief evangelist for itsSmarter Cities initiative.

662 CQ Researcher

vacant or underused lots into parksand improving energy efficiency inbuildings. The city estimates that theproposed changes to mass transitalone could cost $50 billion over theplan’s duration. 78 The initiative hasreceived city, state, federal and pri-vate funding. 79

Meanwhile, after a tornado wiped out95 percent of rural Greensburg, Kan.,in 2007, the town of about 1,400 resi-dents has transformed itself into a modelof sustainability. Highlights include awind farm and a solar-powered city hallwith a vegetated rooftop. 80

Holyoke, Mass., which lost itsmanufacturing base decades ago, hasjoined with Cisco, EMC Corp. and fiveuniversities to create an “innovationdistrict” anchored by an energy-efficient,high-performance computing centeroperated largely by clean hydroelec-tricity from a nearby dam. The $95 mil-lion center, to be used for researchby Boston University, Harvard, MIT,Northeastern University and the Uni-versity of Massachusetts, is scheduledto be ready in November. 81 To ben-efit the community, Cisco created avideo-conferencing center that allowsworking students to take college cours-es remotely.

Cautionary Tales

While the smart-city movement isattracting billions of dollars in

investment capital, developers ac-knowledge the challenges of bringingprojects to fruition.Lewis says the economic down-

turn has made it tougher to securefinancing for PlanIT Valley and saysa scaled-down version is possible.With its completion pushed back atleast two years, PlanIT Valley will bebuilt in 22 phases, allowing for aneasy cessation of construction if fund-ing dries up, he says. “Whether itends up scaling to its full capacity,

I don’t know,” he says. “We’re in theworst economic crisis ever. Peopleare looking at confidence in marketsand delaying decisions.”Yet Lewis remains optimistic about

the project, in part because it’s ex-pected to cost far less than compara-ble smart cities. He’s also bullish aboutbusiness prospects for his company,particularly in China, because of thatcountry’s growth trajectory and insa-tiable demand for more cities. “Popu-lations are growing dramatically aroundthe world,” he adds.Economic challenges aren’t the only

hurdle for smart-city developers. InIndia, critics charge Lavasa with a lackof transparency in the selection of adeveloper and say housing prices aretoo expensive for most Indians. 82 Thecheapest apartments, between $17,000and $36,000, are beyond the meansof most middle-class Indians. 83 Sen-sitive to its image, Lavasa addressesthese and other critiques on its web-site in a section called “Facts vs. Mis-conceptions.” It says the city “will caterto the entire spectrum of population”and has not received special treatmentfrom local authorities. 84

In China, the Tianjin Eco-city is grap-pling with smog drifting from nearbyBeijing. 85 In response to public pres-sure, authorities set up an air-quali-ty monitoring station to track smog inthe region, but the move failed to quelllocal outrage as the smog continuedunabated. 86

Underscoring the difficulties inbuilding big, new cities, Pegasus Glob-al Holdings scrapped plans in Julyfor a billion-dollar project in south-east New Mexico that was to be usedas a test center for solar panels, smartenergy grids and other innovations.Pegasus ran into last-minute compli-cations in its efforts to acquire 24 squaremiles for the site from a privatelandowner, says Robert Brumley, thecompany’s senior managing director.Brumley maintains the setback is

temporary. “We’re just doing a pivot

to another site, that’s all,” he says. Hesays other New Mexico communitieshave expressed interest. Still, Brumleyacknowledges the challenges of build-ing a city from the ground up.“Any project of this size, you’re going

to run into delays,” he says.

OUTLOOKHere to Stay?

N ew smart cities, and retrofits toexisting ones, seem destined to

play a significant role in shaping thecourse of urbanization as nations des-perately seek an alternative to over-crowding and pollution.Demand for new cities, particularly

in the developing world, is expectedto grow significantly as urban popu-lations surge. By 2025, China alonecould add another 250 million peopleto its cities, with more than 200 citiestopping one million. 87 These popula-tion pressures will coincide, expertssay, with the evolution and expansionof smart cities. As a result, CommonCurrent’s Karlenzig concludes, new me-tropolises will be “part of the futurein terms of digital infrastructure andenergy and water — and our dailylives.”“The real smart cities we’re going

to see aren’t these model cities” likeSongdo and Masdar, predicts Townsendof the Institute for the Future. “It’s goingto be the hundred other big devel-opment projects that come in the nextfive to 10 years that borrow the suc-cessful elements of a Songdo or a Mas-dar and basically harvest the thingsthat actually work.”Urban planners widely agree that

new cities will supplement, rather thanreplace, existing ones, which will grad-ually become smarter as they adoptnewer technologies and designs. Yet

SMART CITIES

Continued from p. 660


impediments remain. Seto of Yale warnsthat a glut of new cities could stretchinvestor resources, while one-size-fits-all urban designs might not address cul-tural and regional needs. A 2011 Har-vard Business School report cautionsthat expensive new cities will need suc-cessful economic models to thrive. “Everynew city needs an economic founda-tion based on jobs. Not every new ecocity can be a research center whosepurpose is the development of newtechnologies for building other eco cities,”the authors wrote. 88

Of course, the deeper questionsthat underlie the push to reinvent citiescan only be answered with time. It’sone thing to pour foundations, erecttowers, flood man-made canals andwire every home and office to a dig-ital hub. It’s another to create a senseof place — the accents, traditions andstyles that instantly distinguish NewYork from New Orleans. For now,Masdar operates like a theme park,limiting public access from 8:30 a.m.to 10 p.m. 89

And with architecture drawn fromdestinations as varied as Savannahand Sydney, Songdo seems at risk ofan identity crisis. Plans to use Song-do as a template for at least 20 pro-jects in China and India already arefueling debate over whether citiesshould be duplicated and commodi-tized like McDonald’s. 90

It remains unclear whether Chinaor other countries will seize the op-portunity presented by hyper-connectedcities to surreptitiously monitor citizensand suppress dissent, or if privacybreaches, technical glitches or cyberattacks will wreak havoc. Any of thosescenarios could create a public back-lash that might dampen public en-thusiasm.In his 2011 book Triumph of the

City, Edward Glaeser declares that “theera of the industrial city is over.” Notevery city will succeed, “because notevery city has been adept at adaptingto the information age, in which ideas

are the ultimate creator of wealth,” hewrites. 91

Intelligent metropolises seem poisedto fill the void, and history may beon their side. Cities, Glaeser notes, havebeen “engines of innovation sincePlato and Socrates bickered in an Athen-ian marketplace,” a view echoed byrenowned urbanist Jane Jacobs. Shewrote in 1961 that “cities are an im-mense laboratory of trial and error,failure and success.” 92

The words of Glaeser and Jacobsresonate with dreamers from SiliconValley to the Arabian Peninsula to theYellow Sea and beyond, who are stak-ing billions on a wholesale reinven-tion of one of civilization’s most en-during creations: the city.

Notes1 Gale International, “Korea’s Songdo Interna-tional Business District — One of Asia’s LargestGreen Developments — Surpasses Milestoneof 13 Million Square Feet of LEED CertifiedSpace,” press release, June 27, 2012, www.songdo.com/songdo-international-business-district/news/press-releases.aspx/d=386/title=Koreas_Songdo_International_Business_District__One_of_Asias_Largest_Green_Developments__Surpasses_Milestone_of_13_Million_Square_Feet_of_LEED_Certified_Space.2 Cisco, “Cisco and New Songdo InternationalCity Development Join Forces to Create Oneof the Most Technologically Advanced Smart+Con-nected Communities in the World,” press re-lease, July 4, 2011, http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=426592.3 Charles Arthur, “The Thinking City,” BBC Sci-ence Focus, January 2012, www.songdo.com/songdo-international-business-district/news/in-the-news.aspx/d=360/title=The_Thinking_City.4 David McNeill, “New Songdo: Atlantis ofthe Far East,” The Independent, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/new-songdo-city-atlantis-of-the-far-east-1712252.html.5 For background, see Songdo’s website, www.songdo.com/songdo-international-business-district/why-songdo/a-brand-new-city.aspx.6 James Day, “Songdo in South Korea lead-ing charge to become city of the future,”

Metro (U.K.), Jan. 10, 2012, www.metro.co.uk/tech/886852-songdo-in-south-korea-leading-charge-to-become-city-of-the-future.7 For background, see Masdar City, Frequent-ly Asked Questions, “What has already beencompleted and when will the whole city befinished? www.masdarcity.ae/en/110/frequently-asked-questions/.8 For more on Masdar’s design, see descrip-tion by World Wildlife Fund, http://wwf.panda.org/?204438.9 Cost estimate is from “Frequently askedquestions” about Masdar, op. cit.10 Ibid.11 Jonathan Glancey, “Inside Masdar City: aModern Mirage,” The Guardian, May 10, 2011,www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/10/inside-masdar-city-modern-mirage.12 Adam Davidson, “Who Wants to Buy Hon-duras?” The New York Times, May 8, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/who-wants-to-buy-honduras.html?pagewanted=all.13 See United Nations Population Fund, “LinkingPopulation, Poverty and Development,” www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm.14 See U.N. News Centre, “Global population topass 10 billion by 2100, UN projections indicate,”www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=38253,and IDC Government Insights, “Business Strat-egy: Smart City Strategies” report, April 2012,p. 6, www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23452612 (access to limited to clients).15 Kaid Benfield, “Is there a Downside to In-telligent Cities or Smart Cities?” The Atlantic,March 8, 2011, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/is-there-a-downside-to-intelligent-cities-or-smart-cities/72068/.16 Malcolm Moore, “Chinese move to theireco-city of the future,” The Telegraph, March 18,2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9151487/Chinese-move-to-their-eco-city-of-the-future.html.17 For background, see Michael Grynbaum,“A New Look Is Coming to Times Square:Minimalism,” The New York Times, Sept. 27,2011, and the Plan NYC homepage, www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml.18 See “IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for2020,” http://cdn.idc.com/research/Predictions12/Main/downloads/IDCTOP10Predictions2012.pdf.19 John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aero-tropolis, The Way We’ll Live Next (2011).20 Benjamin Schwarz, “A Vision in Concrete,”The Atlantic, July/August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/a-vision-in-concrete/6846/.

664 CQ Researcher

21 See Dan Hoornweg, “Smart Cities for Dum-mies” posting, World Bank Sustainable CitiesBlog, Nov. 30, 2011, www.linkedin.com/pub/dan-hoornweg/6/876/627.22 Kai Laursen, “Are Satellite Cities the Key tothe Future?” The Atlantic Cities, March 13, 2012,www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/03/are-satellite-cities-cities-future/1468/.23 Ibid.24 For background on smart city populations,see Annissa Alusi, et al., “Sustainable Cities:Oxymoron or the Shape of the Future?” Har-vard Business School, 2011, www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11062.pdf.25 Saskia Sassen, “Talking back to your in-telligent city,” McKinsey & Co., Feb. 1, 2011,http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/cities/talking-back-to-your-intelligent-city.26 Greg Lindsay, “Cisco’s Big Bet on New Song-do: Creating Cities From Scratch,” Fast Com-pany, Feb. 1, 2010, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/the-new-new-urbanism.html.27 “McCaffery Interests Announces Chicago’sLakeshore Drive Will be Extended ThroughChicago Lakeside Development,” press release,McCaffery Interests Inc., April 5, 2012, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mccaffery-interests-announces-chicagos-lakeshore-drive-will-be-extended-through-chicago-lakeside-development-146355525.html.28 “Cisco Selected by Chicago Urban Real Es-tate Developer to Develop Technology MasterPlan for Smart+Connected Communities Pro-ject at Chicago Lakeside,” press release, Cisco,Feb. 29, 2012, http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=678356.29 Robert Sharoff, “Chicago to Redevelop U.S.Steel Site on Lakefront,” The New York Times,

Dec. 28, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/realestate/commercial/29chicago.html?page-wanted=all.30 Roger Yu, “Cities build airport cities ‘aero-tropolises’ for growth,” USA Today, April 20,2011, http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/2011-04-19-airports-as-commerce-hubs.htm.31 Nate Berg, “The Dark Side of the SmartCity, in Video Game Form,” The Atlantic Cities,June 5, 2012, www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/dark-side-smart-city-video-game/2184/.32 For background on Charles Perrow, see www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/perrow/.33 For background on Chernobyl, see www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/chernobyl.html.34 Sassen, op. cit.35 For more on technology and democracy,see José Antonio Vargas, “Spring Awakening:How an Egyptian Revolution Began on Face-book,” The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2012,www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/books/review/how-an-egyptian-revolution-began-on-facebook.html?pagewanted=all, and Mark Engler, “TheInternet: Tool of Revolution — or Repres-sion?” Foreign Policy, April 29, 2011, www.fpif.org/blog/the_internet_tool_of_revolution_or_repression.36 Alison Isenberg, Downtown America, A His-tory of the Place and the People Who Made It(2004), p. 36.37 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities (1993), p. 33.38 Ibid., pp. 33-34.39 For background, see websites for Philadel-phia’s Parkway Museums District, www.parkwaymuseumsdistrictphiladelphia.org, and SanFrancisco’s Civic Center Community Benefit

District, http://sfciviccenter.org/.40 Douglas E. Morris, It’s a Sprawl World AfterAll (2005), pp. 6, 176.41 Ibid., p. 176.42 Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown, Its Riseand Fall, 1880-1950 (2001), p. 227.43 Isenberg, op. cit., pp. 168-169, 171.44 Ibid., p. 171. For background on housinglegislation in the 1950s and ’60s, see the De-partment of Housing and Urban Develop-ment, www.hud.gov/offices/adm/about/admguide/history.cfm.45 Ibid., p. 188.46 Ibid., p. 167.47 Fogelson, op. cit., p. 319.48 Ibid., pp. 195, 252-253.49 Ibid., p. 256.50 Schwarz, op. cit.51 Ibid.52 Lindsay, op. cit., Fast Company.53 Greg Lindsay, “Not So Smart Cities,” The NewYork Times, Sept. 24, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/not-so-smart-cities.html.54 Ibid.55 For background on Curitiba, visit www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/brazil1203/.56 Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: GreenFields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (2003),p. 97.57 Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Cel-ebration U.S.A., Living in Disney’s Brave NewTown (1999), p. 28.58 History of Reston, Greater Reston Cham-ber of Commerce, www.restonchamber.org/visiting-reston/History-of-Reston.aspx.59 Paul Goldberger, “James W. Rouse, 81, Dies;Socially Conscious Developer Built New Townsand Malls,” The New York Times, April 10,1996, www.nytimes.com/1996/04/10/us/james-w-rouse-81-dies-socially-conscious-developer-built-new-townsand-malls.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.60 Frantz, op. cit., p. 29.61 Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, “It’sa Small Town After All,” The New York Times,Dec. 3, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/opinion/04frantz.html.62 Frantz, “Celebration, USA,” op. cit., p. 2863 Annissa Alusi, et al., “Sustainable Cities:Oxymoron or the Shape of the Future?” Har-vard Business School, 2011, pp. 7-8, www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11062.pdf.64 Hillary Brenhouse, “Plans Shrivel for Chi-nese Eco-City,” The New York Times, June, 24,

SMART CITIES

About the AuthorDavid Hatch is a veteran technology journalist based inArlington, Va., who previously served as a staff writer withthe National Journal Group and Crain Communications inWashington, D.C. His publishing credits include U.S. News& World Report, The Daily, Dallas Morning News, Adver-tising Age, Crain’s New York Business and the Boston Her-ald.Hatch’s previous CQ Researcher reports include “Google’sDominance,” “Drug Company Ethics” and “Media Owner-ship.” He holds a B.A. in English from the University ofMassachusetts at Amherst.


2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/business/energy-environment/25iht-rbogdong.html.65 Ibid.66 Peter Savodnik, “Masdar City Offers Visionof Carbon-Neutral Future Amid Delays, Storms,”Bloomberg, Dec. 8, 2011, www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-08/masdar-city-a-vision-of-a-greener-future-or-emirati-excess-.html.67 “New Songdo City: Atlantis of the Far East,”op. cit.68 For background, see www.terrapinn.com/middle-east/smart-cities-world-mena/index.stm(Dubai); http://eu-smartcities.eu/content/launch-conference-smart-cities-and-communities-communication (Brussels); www.smartcities-africa.co.za/ (Durban), and www.cityage.org/theinnovationcity/ (Toronto).69 Saskia Sassen, “Talking back to your intelli-gent city,” McKinsey & Co., Feb. 1, 2011, http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/cities/talking-back-to-your-intelligent-city, and home pagefor China’s Smart City Fund, www.smartcityfund.com.cn/index.html.70 Aleksandr Bierig, “Meixi Lake Master Plan,”Architectural Record, 2010, http://archrecord.construction.com/ar_china/China_Awards/2010/meixi/default.asp.71 For more on Lavasa, see www.lavasa.com;for background on New Urbanism, see Con-gress for the New Urbanism, www.cnu.org/performs_better.72 “Cisco Selected as the Networked Heart ofCity and Community Developments Aroundthe Globe” press release, Cisco, Feb. 21, 2012,www.marketwire.com/press-release/cisco-selected-as-networked-heart-city-community-developments-around-globe-nasdaq-csco-1621992.htm.73 Arati R. Jerath, “Delhi-Mumbai industrialcorridor to spawn 7 ‘smart’ cities,” Times ofIndia, http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-01-15/india/28364347_1_delhi-mumbai-industrial-corridor-dmic-development-corporation-industrial-hubs.74 Boyd Cohen, “The Skolkovo Project: CanRussia Recreate Silicon Valley?” Fast Company,Feb. 27, 2012, www.fastcoexist.com/1679376/the-skolkovo-project-can-russia-recreate-silicon-valley.75 David Francis, “Will Nigeria’s ‘Airport City’Dreams Take Flight?,” Pacific Standard, Feb. 20,2012, www.psmag.com/business-economics/will-nigeria-s-airport-city-dreams-take-flight-39836/.76 Davidson, op. cit.77 Ibid.

78 Ron Scherer, “New York City’s mayor wantsto turn the city green,” The Christian ScienceMonitor, April 23, 2007, www.csmonitor.com/2007/0423/p03s02-usgn.html.79 For background on the New York City plan,see www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml.80 U.S. Department of Energy, “Rebuilding itBetter: Greensburg, Kansas,” www1.eere.energy.gov/deployment/pdfs/53539.pdf.81 Erin Ailworth, “New data center focuses onusing less energy,” The Boston Globe, July 9,2012, http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-09/business/32586590_1_computer-centers-efficiency-industrial-site, and Gov. Deval Patrick, “Gov-ernor Patrick Celebrates Completion of FirstPhase of Massachusetts Green High PerformanceComputing Center,” press release, Nov. 29, 2011,www.mass.gov/governor/pressoffice/pressreleases/2011/111129-holyoke-center-toppingoff.html.82 Jeremy Kahn, “India Invents a City,” TheAtlantic, June 7, 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/india-invents-a-city/

8549/, and Makarand Gadgil, “Lavasa Project:CAG report faults Maharashtra govt.,” LiveMint.com/Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2012,www.livemint.com/2012/04/17235037/Lavasa-Project--CAG-report-fa.html.83 Kahn, op. cit.84 See “Facts v. Misconceptions” about Lavasa,www.lavasa.com/high/facts.aspx.85 Moore, op. cit.86 Shi Jiangtao, “Smog station fails to satisfypublic,” South China Morning Post, Dec. 5, 2011,http://topics.scmp.com/news/china-news-watch/article/Smog-station-fails-to-satisfy-public.87 “Urban Sustainability Index,” McKinsey &Co., 2011, www.mckinseychina.com/2012/05/07/2011-urban-sustainability-index/.88 Alusi, et al., op. cit.89 For background, see www.masdarcity.ae/en/105/visit-masdar-city/.90 Lindsay, op. cit.91 Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (2011),p. 40.92 Ibid., p. 1, and Jacobs, op. cit., p. 9.

FOR MORE INFORMATIONCongress for the New Urbanism, The Marquette Building, 140 S. Dearborn St.,Suite 404, Chicago, IL 60603; 312-551-7300; www.cnu.org. Promotes sustainable,healthy communities and mixed-used development.

Institute for the Future, 124 University Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94301; 650-854-6322;www.iftf.org. Research group that helps organizations make informed decisionsabout the future.

Masdar City, Khalifa City ‘A,’ Opposite Presidential Flight, P.O. Box 54115,Abu Dhabi, UAE; +971-2-653-3333; www.masdarcity.ae/en/. Smart city under de-velopment near Abu Dhabi.

PlanIT Valley, Living PlanIT, Vale Pisao — Clubhouse, Rua das Laranjeiras, 1,Agua Longa Santo Tirso, 4825-102, Portugal; [email protected]; http://living-planit.com/. Smart city under development by Living PlanIT in northern Portugal.

SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT 9-209, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA02139; 617-324-4474; http://senseable.mit.edu/. Research initiative at the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology that studies the evolving urban landscape.

Smart Growth America, 1707 L St., N.W., Suite 1050, Washington, DC 20036;202-207-3355; www.smartgrowthamerica.org. Advocacy group that promotes smartgrowth practices nationwide.

Songdo, Gale International, Songdo Office, 6-1 Songdo-Dong Yeonsu-Gu, Incheon,South Korea, 406-130; +82-32-850-1500; www.songdo.com. Smart city under devel-opment in South Korea.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

666 CQ Researcher

Selected Sources

BibliographyBooks

Ehrenhalt, Alan, The Great Inversion and the Future ofthe American City, Knopf, 2012.A leading urbanist examines how inner cities, once rele-gated to the poor, are morphing into high-rent districts, whilesuburbs are attracting more low-income families.

Glaeser, Edward, Triumph of the City, Penguin Press, 2011.In this contrarian book, a Harvard economics professor ar-gues that cities are generally healthier and greener than mostpeople realize and provide gateways to job opportunities.

Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great AmericanCities, Random House, 1993.First published in 1961, Jacobs’ critique of urban develop-ment was hailed by The New York Times as “perhaps themost influential single work in the history of town planning.”

Kasarda, John, and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The WayWe’ll Live Next, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.A business professor (Kasarda) and a journalist document therise of planned cities built around airports.

Articles

Benfield, Kaid, “Is There a Downside to ‘Intelligent Cities’or ‘Smart Cities’?” The Atlantic, March 8, 2011, www.the-atlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/is-there-a-down-side-to-intelligent-cities-or-smart-cities/72068/.The director of the Sustainable Communities and Smart Growthprogram at the Natural Resources Defense Council argues thatfuturistic technology won’t solve most urban ills.

Knight, Helen, “The green city that has a brain,” New Sci-entist, Oct. 11, 2010, www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827814.800-the-green-city-that-has-a-brain.html (subscriptionrequired).PlanIT Valley, a futuristic city in northern Portugal, will berun by an “urban operating system” that will serve as its “brain.”

Lindsay, Greg, “Cisco’s Big Bet on New Songdo: CreatingCities From Scratch,” Fast Company, Feb. 1, 2010, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/the-new-new-urbanism.html?page=0%2C4.Cisco focuses on building state-of-the-art new metropolisesaround the globe while IBM pursues a different strategy:retrofitting existing cities.

Norton, Leslie P., “Dawn of the Smart City,” Barron’s,Oct. 3, 2011, http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748704783104576599051649765770.html.Norton argues that the market for smart cities is set to ex-plode as urban areas undergo major makeovers.

Savodnik, Peter, “Masdar City, Castle in the Sand,”Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Dec. 8, 2011, www.businessweek.com/magazine/masdar-city-castle-in-the-sand-12082011.html.A planned utopia rising in the desert near Abu Dhabi mustovercome not only the global economic downturn but alsorelentless sandstorms.

Singer, Natasha, “Mission Control, Built for Cities,” TheNew York Times, March 3, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/business/ibm-takes-smarter-cities-concept-to-rio-de-janeiro.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=smart%20cities&st=Search.IBM has implemented a citywide system in sprawling Riode Janeiro, Brazil, that allows 30 agencies to share data andrun the metropolis more efficiently.

Reports and Studies

“Is Your City Smart Enough?,” Ovum, 2011, www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/Is_your_city_smart_enough-Ovum_Analyst_Insights.pdf.This Cisco-sponsored report by a London-based technolo-gy research firm outlines the motivations for building smartcities, such as pollution and congestion control, and high-lights major projects under development.

“Smarter Cities Series: A Foundation for UnderstandingIBM Smarter Cities,”IBM, 2011, www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4733.pdf.IBM details its strategy for using technology to help citiesovercome challenges ranging from limited availability of waterto inefficient use of electricity in buildings.

Alusi, Annissa, et al., “Sustainable Cities: Oxymoron orthe Shape of the Future?,” Harvard Business School,2011, www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11-062.pdf.Scholars at Harvard University’s Business School delineatethe goals and challenges of eight major smart-city projectsunder development around the world.

On the Web

“Designing Healthy Communities,” Media Policy Center,2012, www.designinghealthycommunities.org.A four-part public television series investigates links betweenenvironmental conditions and diseases such as asthma, diabetesand obesity and spotlights cities that are designing healthier,more sustainable environments.

“Smarter Cities,” Natural Resources Defense Council,http://smartercities.nrdc.org.The Web portal features news on smart growth initiativesin the United States and across the globe.


Spending and Investment

Carter, Jamie, “The Rise of the Smarter, Cleaner City,”South China Morning Post, March 9, 2012, p. 12.About $40 billion is expected to be spent on smart city tech-nology worldwide by 2016, a fivefold increase from 2010.

Jung, Jayne, “Utility Endesa Recasts Malaga, Spain As aSmart City,” Institutional Investor, April 2012, www.institutionalinvestor.com/Article/3007985/Utility-Endesa-Recasts-Mlaga-Spain-as-a-Smart-City.html.Private investment and government support have helpedmake Malaga Spain’s most energy-smart city.

Singh, Malminderjit, “Nusajaya to Be Turned Into anICT-Powered Smart City,” Business Times Singapore,July 28, 2011.Two investment groups are joining with Cisco to makeNusajaya, Malaysia, a smart city.

Wai, Cheong Suk, “Ideas for a Smarter Singapore,”StraitsTimes (Singapore), July 10, 2012.Singapore has accepted IBM’s offer to help turn its JurongLake district into a smart city.

Technology

“A Smart Connected City Stimulating Innovation,” Birm-ingham (England) Post, Feb. 16, 2012, p. 14, www.thefreelibrary.com/A+smart+connected+city+stimulating+innovation.-a0280136460.The City Council in Birmingham, England, aims to makedigital technologies available to all city residents.

McDonald, Mark, “To Build a Better Grid,” The NewYork Times, July 29, 2011, p. 10, www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/business/global/to-build-a-better-grid.html?pagewanted=all.South Korea hopes linking smart technology and green en-ergy will result in larger power grids for cities.

Pulakkat, Hari, “IT Cos, Developers Embracing SmartTech in Indian Cities,” Economic Times (India), Nov. 22,2011, economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/special-report/developers-it-cos-embracing-smart-technologies-in-indian-cities/articleshow/10823415.cms.An increasing number of Indian cities are using advancedtechnology to solve problems posed by population growth.

Tanikawa, Miki, “Getting Smart in the Suburbs of Tokyo,”The New York Times, Nov. 27, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/global/28iht-RBOG-SOLAR28.html.Panasonic is building a Japanese eco town with information-technology systems.

Toda, Yu, “ ‘Smart Cities’ Envisioned,”Daily Yomiuri (Japan),Sept. 13, 2011, p. 6, www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/T110912004466.htm.Japanese corporations and municipal governments are ex-amining several high-tech green-energy projects to makeareas devastated by a 2011 earthquake environmentally smart.

Tuluy, Hasan, “Why Inclusive ‘Green’ Growth Can SustainGains in Latin America,” The Miami Herald, June 19,2012, www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/19/2857914/why-inclusive-green-growth-can.html.Latin America is exploring innovative environmental pro-jects to help cities fight poverty and preserve resources.

Urban Growth

“The Growth of Cities — a Thousand Monsters Stir,”U.N. Integrated Regional Information Networks, March 9,2012, www.irinnews.org/IndepthMain.aspx?InDepthID=63&ReportID=73999.Increased urbanization often leads to crime and other prob-lems for cities unable to handle population growth.

“Towards a ‘Smarter’ Nairobi,” The Nation (Kenya), Nov. 3,2011, allafrica.com/stories/201111030923.html.The population of Nairobi, Kenya, is expected to doublewithin the next decade, straining infrastructure and services.

Fitzgibbon, Rebecca, “Smart Move To Redesign Cities,”Hobart (Australia) Mercury, Dec. 16, 2011, p. 42.The United Nations projects that 70 percent of the world’spopulation will live in cities by 2050, but few cities are pre-pared to handle the increase, says an Australian columnist.

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