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The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future

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Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City , Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

223 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 2019

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Ben Green

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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
Profile Image for Julia.
38 reviews
January 28, 2022
a clear, convincing reminder of the dangers of throwing tech at problems that demand political/institutional solutions that center humans. key takeaways: implementing new tech is not equivalent to progress, and cities are not optimization problems! also, using technology to maintain/reinforce the status quo isn’t objective; it’s also a political decision.

loved the overall organization of the chapters as well—only main critique is that the writing was a bit roundabout/repetitive at times.
Profile Image for Ieva Gr.
185 reviews34 followers
July 17, 2019
Was it easy to read: Not really. Almost all of the text in the book is bearing some information so you really need to concentrate when reading it.

What I liked about it: How refreshing the message that it delivers is. Most of the texts I read nowadays are praising new technologies and technical innovations. Yet it is so so valuable to remind people that technology is not a solution to every possible problem and it can actually have harmful and destructive effects. And not only the message itself but how it is delivered – plenty of both good and bad examples of introducing technologies to cities and extensive summaries of the points being conveyed. Furthermore, urban planning seem to be a very good domain to consider the problems with tech-centric mindset. People working on software and technologies in other domains are usually also city dwellers. Showing them how badly applied technologies could affect their daily life could help alter their mindset in work environment as well. Would strongly recommend this book to all the entrepreneurs as a sanity check for their “world changing” ideas.

Ideas/ Quotes:
“Tech goggles are grounded in two beliefs: first, that technology provides neutral and optimal solutions to social problems, and second, that technology is the primary mechanism for social change.”

“Local governments are increasingly making important decisions based on outputs of algorithms. Yet despite of potentially life-altering decisions that these algorithms inform, cities typically provide public with little or no insight regarding how they were developed of how they work. Even if these algorithms can improve the accuracy of certain decisions, they contribute to the creation of unaccountable black-box cities.”

“Many of the advances promised in smart cities rely on data analysis and machine learning algorithms – presented as providing universal benefits – yet these techniques are unable to transcendent historical or current politics. The data used to develop these models does not represent unassailable truths; instead the data embeds information about socially produced outcomes and is shaped by reporting and collection practices. <...> More fundamental than biases within data are the politics embedded within the algorithms. For although designing algorithms appears to be a technical task, the choices made can have vast social and political impacts.”

“As more data is gathered and used by governments and companies, privacy becomes defined less by the secrets that any single piece of information reveals and increasingly by the inferences that large amounts of relatively non-sensitive data make possible – and the power that those inferences grant.”

“The most important innovations come in the form of programs and policies that alter social conditions and relations rather than in the form of new technology, which typically buttresses existing structures and relationships.”

“Technology also cannot provide answers – or even questions – on its own: cities must first determine what to prioritize and then deploy data and algorithms to asses and improve their performance.”
Profile Image for Maria.
25 reviews
March 14, 2021
This is a timely book about a necessary discussion. In recent years, the words "efficiency," "innovation," and "optimization" (among others) have been misleading people into dichotomizing "smart" and "dumb" cities. This has caused decision-makers to ignore aspects of city life that cannot be simplified and explained solely through algorithms. Green discusses how technology "innovations" try to solve issues without even first understanding what the true challenges are, and worse, without knowing how complex and interconnected social interactions and policies are; he talks about how instead of seeing technology as and end on itself, we should use it as a means. Green uses real-life, recent examples to show how the concept of the *smart enough city* is extremely useful in breaking this dichotomy.

The reasons behind why we can't oversimplify city life are not new. Towards the end of the book, Green quotes Jane Jacobs saying "Jacobs recognized that what high-modern planning perceived as 'chaos' and 'disorder in the life of city streets' actually 'represent a complex and highly developed form of order" with "people engaged in 'intricately interconnected, and surely understandable, relationships.'" Given that Jacobs said this in 1961, we must remember that it is not that we don't know what cities are or should be for, but we should strive to innovate with policies that support the way we want our cities to be and look like, to embrace "meaningful deficiencies" (those that allow us to come up with solutions that create more just cities), and to ultimately promote democracy.

ALTHOUGH the book does a good job explaining the smart enough city, do notice that it is focused only in US cities. WE CANNOT assume that other cities, which are more urbanized (like in some countries in Latin America) or that will become megacities in the near future with incredible population sizes and densities (like in South Asia and West Africa) will experience nearly similar challenges with innovation. Algorithms, AI, the Internet of Things, and other technologies (such as GIS and remote sensing) will be integral in helping sort through data and information in megacities. Thus, we need to take the concept of the smart enough city to the real world and not just think that because certain conditions exist in the US the rest of the world is going to follow it.

In short: this book is good and discusses important topics, but if you read it, please do not forget that the US is only one in nearly 200 nations in the world - some of which are already leading in technological, political or social innovations.
Profile Image for Nineveh.
132 reviews6 followers
April 17, 2022
I really enjoyed reading through all the case studies of the problems addressed and the problems created as analytics had increasingly played a role in urban settings, Ben Green does a great job explaining some technical aspects in a relatively accessible way. Most of the content was not new to me, as this book is essentially a written version of Merham Sahami, Rob Reich, and Jeremy Weinstein’s course CS182W: Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change — but still, I really appreciate the way things are brought together in Smart Enough Cities with a focus on technology in cities and I found the case studies in chapter 6 to be especially interesting. Only 4 stars instead of 5 as it got a little repetitive at times.

Though I haven’t read it, curious how similar this is to Sahami, Reich, and Weinstein’s recent book
68 reviews
February 3, 2023
This book was very good, and in some parts, excellent. The arguments against a data driven and technological mindset (“tech goggles”) towards urban development and city planning were very well explained, and I thought it did great justice to the complexities of cities and proposed many good counter arguments to overly simplistic tech-driven solutions. The examples were very well explained and chosen, and touched on the need for both capacity, building within government and civic institutions, as well as the limitations of “efficiency“or “optimization driven” approaches to thinking about how to improve cities. The example of how data analysis and cross-department collaboration helped solve the legionnaires disease outbreak in New York City, as well as the example of how teams built trust and skills around data analysis and data standardization in San Francisco were really fun to read, and I thought the discussion of traffic optimization for autonomous vehicles and how those conversations repeated mistakes of the past around designing exclusively for cars at the expense (and erasure) of other modes of transit were really interesting. Would recommend to anyone willing to go into a slightly academic read on pros/cons of smart city examples.
Profile Image for Bobby Chambers.
4 reviews
February 5, 2023
A good reminder that technology does not inherently create a better society. Ben Green provides many applicable examples of the limits, downfalls and benefits of technology in urban life. It hits on a central question “What are we trying to optimize in society?”
Profile Image for sky.
49 reviews1 follower
Read
July 10, 2024
read selections of this for a class last year, really enjoyed especially relevant as a berkeley student where tech is often always seen as the answer. a more nuanced approach to the smart city concept. marking as read for now but i hope to come back to this to read the whole thing in the future!
Profile Image for Ryan.
25 reviews4 followers
February 15, 2021
Excellent book for proponents and skeptics of technology alike. Not hugely theoretical (a drawback for me), but jam-packed with many excellent examples and a breadth of thinking.
Profile Image for cara.
72 reviews3 followers
August 19, 2020
none of the key concepts were new to me - critiques of high-modernist approaches to urban planning, the importance of contextual knowledge in constructing algorithms, the relationship between technical and social-political architectures - but all the case studies helped me understand how they work in practice. i don't have a lot of tolerance for reading about the same concepts more than once, but this book has made me realize that there's a lot to be learned if you keep paying attention
Profile Image for Rachel.
13 reviews2 followers
February 29, 2020
Ben Green does something very important by writing his book, connecting the smart cities movement to the many, many lessons learned from poor city planning throughout history. What we call “top down” approach to planning is simply one person’s view about how many people should live, with or without their input, and treating the problems of populations of people from an engineering rather than a social perspective. When the go-ahead is given to just a few planners without due civic discourse, a whole lot of unforeseen damage can be done.

This book reads as optimistically centrist, finding the good, the bad, and the ugly in smart cities. He promotes discussion and paying close attention to lessons learned. The amount of information collected about individuals is gravely scary if used inappropriately, but has tremendous potential when utilized for good. Knowing where that line is drawn is going to be one of the most important debates going forward.

Key Quotes:

“One of the smart cities's greatest and most pernicious tricks is that it misappropriated the role and meaning of innovation. First, it puts innovation on a pedestal by devaluing traditional practices as emblematic of the undesireable dumb city. Second, it redefines innovation to simply mean making something more technological"

"What does not get measured is dismissed as unnecessary and detrimental” (in the analysis of the problem)


"technophiles perceive cities as little more than abstract staging grounds for efficient mobility solutions and service delivery. The persistent desire of technologists is to build smart cities from scratch. Despite the significant challenges faced by early smart city efforts such as Masdar City in UAE and Songdo, South Korea, both of which remain largely desolate, not to mention the similar failures of earlier tabula rasa cities such as Brasilia, today's technologists have heelessly taken up the cause.”

Ben interviews and cites technology professionals primarily from the northeast USA but also from Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago.

Interviews:
Jascha
Franklin-Hodge
Boston
MA
USA
Chief Information Officer
Open Mobility Foundation
Ben
Green
Boston
MA
USA
Journalist
Harvard
Douglas
Rushkoff
New York
NY
USA
Journalist


Bruce
Schneier
Boston
MA
USA
Cryptographer
















James
Vacca
New York
NY
USA
City Council Member
City of NYC
Virginia
Eubanks
Albany
NY
USA
Associate Professor
SUNY at Albany




Chicago
IL
USA
Array of Things
City of Chicago
Michael
Mattmiller
Seattle
WA
USA
Director of Govt Affairs
Microsoft, City of Seattle
Nigel
Jacob
Boston
MA
USA
Co-founder and Co-Chair
Mayor's Office of
New Urban Mechanics
Kristopher
Carter
Boston
MA
USA
Co-founder and Co-Chair
Mayor's Office of
New Urban Mechanics
Amen Ra
Mashariki
New York
NY
USA
Chief Analytics Officer
City of New York
Joy
Bonaguo
San Francisco
CA
USA
Former Cheif Data Officer
City of San Francisco
Christina
Grover-Roybal
Seattle
WA
USA
Fellow
Harvard Government
Performance Lab
Tom
Shenk
Chicago
IL
USA
Chief Data Officer
City of Chicago
Dan
Doctoroff
New York
NY
USA
Founder
Sidewalk Labs
James
Holston






Author
The Modernist City
Eric
Jaffe
New York
NY
USA
Author
CityLab












InLinkUK
















Profile Image for Jess.
290 reviews2 followers
June 13, 2019
I was really glad to read this. Green sheds light on the pervasive and the misguided notion that all of the messy problems in our cities could be cleaned up if we just had the right datasets. That is clearly not realistic as most non-technologists that live in cities could attest. Green frames this discussion with a historical tradition devoted to efficiency going from German industrial forestry schemes to Corbusier and Moses. There are plenty of precarious smart city endeavors Green analyses, but I particularly appreciate the book isn’t solely devoted to tearing down efforts to integrate technology in cities. Instead Green looks to initiatives that have benefited cities and their residents seeking to better understand how best technology can be engaged in civic life. Green raises ethical questions around private companies’ role in the era of the smart city and highlights the critical engagement between technologists, subject experts and citizens.

Gave it 4 stars because sometime its was a little dry - took me longer than expected to get through and I really like learning and reading about this stuff. But will absolutely recommend it to anyone I think maybe interested.
Profile Image for MIKE Watkins Jr..
116 reviews3 followers
March 19, 2020
1. This book isn't just a technology book...but rather this book covers politics, infrastructure etc. and how technology should be used as but one of the many tools to resolve issues in those areas.

2. The author does a brilliant job of showcasing how to resolve issues with technology isn't a neutral solution that is free of biases and free of errors. As the author showcases in the chapter about algorithms utilized to promote predictive policing...people design algorithm....people design technology....thus it's not neutral but it's geared towards whatever the designer designs it for.

Cons:

1. The author is very repetitive at times. In fact I find myself struggling to focus during the last 6 or so pages of each chapter because those last pages aren't that different from the 6 pages before it.

Conclusion: I recommend this book because it will change the way you look at technology and it provides a proper and democratic lens for evaluating the technology. There are better books out there...but this book is still a really good book and worth the read.
Profile Image for Martine Delannoy.
84 reviews8 followers
January 16, 2020
For all those working on policy in cities as an engaged citizen, civil servant, policy maker, politician or partner in any city endeavours I highly recommend this book. In clear comprehensive language it explains what make a city a "smart enough city".
Ben Green clearly explains how looking at the city with tech goggles or other simplifications like just in terms of efficiency will lead to undesired results.
The integrated strategic glue or city DNA is missing but the following lines were developped in a very convincing manner:
1. Address complex problems rather than solve artificially simple ones;
2. Implement technology to address social needs and advance policy, rather than adapting goals and values to align with technology;
3. Prioritize innovative policy and program reforms above innovative technology;
4. Ensure that technology's design an implementation promote democratic values;
5. Develop capacities and processes for using data within municipal departments.
Profile Image for Sydney.
33 reviews
January 3, 2020
Provides a refreshing and important perspective on how making cities more inclusive and democratic places and solving the root causes of problems their residents face really requires more innovative policy change rather than innovative technology by itself. For instance, I appreciate that it discusses how the use of technology, purportedly to better predict and prevent crime, will actually just reinforce the racist nature of policing since its predictions are based off of an already clearly racialized pattern of policing.
1,219 reviews6 followers
April 12, 2020
This book is somewhat skeptical about the smart city concept. The author compares lifeless planned cities to more traditional cities that just grew and have places for night life and such. He points out how attempts to create "logical" traffic flows did not allow time for pedestrians to cross the street. And so he predicts planners of smart cities will have similar blind spots. Instead he advocates for a middle ground, a smart enough city.
Profile Image for CL Chu.
280 reviews15 followers
October 12, 2020
A timely & accessible work (the fact that such a techno-optimist culture exits at all proves the urgency of this book).

However, the book can talk more about how to weave social science & community building into our STEM education. Currently it's so difficult for "good-will" technologists and city officials to even start a dialogue. Besides, the historical review of previous (failed?) visions of utopian cities is somewhat awkwardly put in the last, rather than the first, chapter.
Profile Image for Christopher Mitchell.
360 reviews7 followers
December 22, 2019
This is an important book for anyone working in areas where tech and local governments overlap. It pulls together many important ideas with evidence regarding how to incorporate new technologies into existing or new processes. At the very least, the people making these decisions should be aware of how "tech goggles" can lead government investment and processes astray.
14 reviews
May 10, 2021
A look at ways technology can be used by cities to address problems. Also examples where it failed because of pure focus on technology rather than asking users what effect could be on them and the city.
1 review2 followers
May 29, 2019
This is a remarkably heartening book -- very accessible and super smart. Green is the rare data scientist who is both a first rate writer and a genuine fan of urban America's messy vitality.
Profile Image for Cami.
30 reviews56 followers
October 24, 2020
To be honest one of the best books I have read on the “Smart City” topic.

It’s one of those were I wish I had been the one writing it because it is so good.

Go read it now!
Profile Image for Mykyta Kyrychek.
10 reviews
May 4, 2021
An excellent book to take off technical glasses and see how to create products that address real social and democratic issues.
1 review
May 31, 2023
Great read!

I loved the authors perspective on technology usage for city improvement, super important and insightful read in the era of AI
Profile Image for Anjuli.
218 reviews7 followers
August 29, 2022
The book sets the ‘Smart City’ as a cautionary tale. A focus on pursuing alternate visions: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, an innovative city. I like that Green confirms that technology can be a powerful tool.
Profile Image for Alan.
5 reviews3 followers
Read
July 21, 2021
A critical take on the overly-spread excitement to disrupt for the sake of it without reasonable, less so humane, goals in mind. Green advises being wary of tech-goggles that lead to ‘solving’ problems by throwing technology at them. The book goes over some less-than-ideal situations that unchecked or biased tech has led to. In doing so, the need for more inclusive processes in defining and solving challenges becomes apparent. More sensible approaches could make urban systems more responsive/resilient, and overall produce better cities to live in!
Profile Image for Cynthia.
1,318 reviews32 followers
June 22, 2021
Quite informative but ends up too tech-centric and not community-focused enough. It often (rightfully) laments the (often total) lack of accounting for people in many smart city initiatives (aka corporate products/contracts) but ends up not truly integrating them as well.
Profile Image for Eliza Shaw.
27 reviews
August 14, 2020
Good content, useful for those in the built environment space. But the reading is so dry, I had difficulty maintaining focus.
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