Sabah Zdanowska - Creativity in Design Blog

Brave New World or Dystopian Nightmare?

The futuristic, impeccable, efficient, smart city is not a new concept. Not only has the city of the future been envisioned by leading technology companies in marketing materials and conference speeches, futuristic worlds have been imagined by writers for nearly three hundred years - and in the last century in films and TV shows.

These stories and visions of the future have become intertwined with the smart city concept, broadening our minds to future possibilities. But they also come with dire warnings about the implications of what technology can enable and how we design can lead to the dystopia they describe.

The Story of Smart City Stories

The first science fiction novel was actually published in 1726. Considered a satirical novel to be infused with science fiction, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels followed Lemuel Gulliver who encountered utopian and dystopian societies, including what can be considered a smart city - the flying island of Laputa.

Laputa is populated by scientists whose experiments are of no useful benefit, oddly reminiscent of some of the PR and marketing hype that surrounds the concept of smart cities as well as some of the projects, where we only learn afterwards that goal was to drive investment and not actually make a city smart.

Fast forward to the 20th century

1927 saw the release of the German silent film Metropolis. In the city of Metropolis, wealthy industrialists and business magnates and their top employees reign from high-rise towers, while the workers toil in the ‘underground city’ to operate the great machines that power the city. Truly dystopian and futuristic for its time, with one of the first robots ever depicted in cinema, Metropolis inspired a generation of filmmakers, with the concept of futuristic and sometimes ‘smart’ cities becoming a recurring theme in science fiction films.

The film’s message leads us to conclude that the ascendancy of humans over nature does not liberate us, but rather it subjugates and corrupts us, something truly relevant today as we see our capitalist society sluggishly attempt to adapt to climate change. It begs the question; where does the natural environment fit into the smart city equation?

In many of the imagery of the smart city we see modernistic, sparkly clean avenues and high-rise buildings with superficial blobs of green here and there. We know about humanity’s impact on the climate and the decimation of animal and insect species. These issues are not agnostic to the smart city.

How smart is the smart city?

Written in 1948, in George Orwell’s 1984, society organized by a totalitarian state where daily life is regimented and Big Brother programs every move for every citizen. In one instance, the main character Winston flings himself out of bed in the morning as soon his TV automatically flicks on to exercise in complete synchronisation with the instructor on the screen. Struggling to keep up, he thinks the instructor has called him out specifically and is panic stricken. Whether anyone can actually see into his apartment, we never really know…

So what if you’re living in a smart city, but you don’t really know how smart it actually is? In 1984 with misinformation and fear being rife, we see how instilling paranoia can become a substitute for clever technology when it comes to making the the smart city ‘safe’ or ‘connected’.

Unintended consequences...

The main character in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian American novel Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag commutes via the city metro. In this story, in addition to books being banned, it is illegal to be a pedestrian!

Guy thinks little about what and gave rise to such laws forbidding walking or why, until he is nearly hit by a speeding car. Guy realises the driver behind the wheel is ambivalent to (and even more disconcertingly) desensitised to the possibility of killing someone by driving them over. It teaches us a lesson about unintended consequences of something as trivial as forbidding people from walking.

In the tech sector, we are known for trying new things and breaking things. It’s called the “fail fast” culture. Consequently, too often we abstain from the responsibility of thinking about the implications of what we are designing and making. You would think that nobody would be silly enough to stop people from walking on our streets, but we already have concerns about cameras, facial recognition technology and the surveillance state. This is something that has been pointed out repeatedly as cause for concern for years and years, but here we are.

A common theme in these stories is the use of technology that always goes too far. Sometimes it’s in the name of efficiency and sometimes it’s because we’re just experimenting. If we look at social credit in China, the reason is because the state wants even more control. As technology becomes more advanced and as we become more ambitious with our projects, for instance designing a smart city, there’s far more than can wrong and harm us.

Is There an Escape?

Reflecting on the stories above, they feel like real warnings from history about possible futures we are designing and developing today. They are ‘what if…’ stories, or rather thought experiments that make us think more deeply about the society we live in and the unintended consequences of smart cities if we don’t carefully consider what we are doing, why we are doing it or how things could work out differently to what we expected.

I have a strong sense of wanting to reject the entire concept of the smart city. It also makes me wonder: can we opt out? Develop workarounds? Is it possible to escape from the smart city altogether?

In George Lucas’s 1971 cult classic THX 1168, the populace is controlled through android police and mandatory use of drugs that suppress emotions. The main character (actually called THX 1168) attempts to escape. Initially he is pursued and looks likely to be captured, but in a surprising twist, the Central Command ceases the chase on the grounds that the expense of his capture exceeds the allocated budget! It’s a satisfying tale of ‘computer says no’, but the human getting the better of the system - even if it does appear to be a one off.

Finding ways to cheat the system or workarounds for individuals is far from ideal when designing a smart city. So how to approach such a complicated concept when designing? How do we know that our collective actions are not leading us down a path to dystopia? How can we come up with a concept when each and every individual potentially has a different idea of what the smart city is or should be?

Back to basics?

The smartest of all smart cities can be found in the Iain M. Banks sci-fi novel, The Hydrogen Sonata where the Gzilt civilisation is about to ascend to a higher plane of existence.

I’ve chosen this as an over the top metaphor for the utopian smart city, and while The Hydrogen Sonata is not dystopian novel I think I can justify it because Banks poses a highly thought provoking question:

“Once you could reliably model whole populations within your simulated environment, at the level of detail and complexity that meant individuals within that simulation had some sort of independent existence, the question became; how god-like, and how cruel, did you want to be?”

We know that power corrupts, so a smart city where there is too much control in the hands of the few, surely is undesirable.

Reflecting on what Banks is asking, perhaps the best way to design for a smart city is not to think about lofty utopian goals, but rather to start by thinking about our values and intentions and design to meet those. For instance:

Do we want to empower people, or do we want to control them?
Do we want to see more or less equality?
Do we want to be cruel and uncaring or progressive and sympathetic?
Do we want to be a small clique of people that gets to decide the future of a city or do we want communities to share this responsibility?
Do we genuinely want to enable nature and animals to thrive in the smart city or not?

Designing upfront for empowerment, sustainability and equality and confronting these themes rather than leaving them as an afterthought will lead to a different concept of the smart city than those we see today.

Reflecting on the Power of Stories

These stories not only provide a social commentary of their time, they also stimulate us to imagine different possible futures. Each new story has been influenced by ones that have come before, making the series of smart city stories a story in itself.

We know from Daniela Rosner in her book Critical Fabulations that “ideas have histories and can only be understood in the context of those histories”. My concern and fear stems from the feeling that the idea of dystopia and the history of this idea has not been considered by the thinkers behind the smart cities concept.

Building on each new concept and each new story, we can see that there are no easy answers when designing the city of the future and impossible to be all things to all people. There are also so many lessons in these stories and more that should be considered when designing for how people could live, work and play in harmony together and in a sustainable way. From Gulliver’s Travels I took that the smart city should not be a vanity project, from Metropolis there were many messages including the importance of equality and sustainability. From 1984, the message was how we can slip into a Big Brother state and the paranoia it induces. From Fahrenheit 451 there is a lesson about surprising consequences. In THX 1168 we are made to think about the control AI can have over our lives. In The Hydrogen Sonata we are asked poignant questions about power, corruption and cruelty.

The story of smart city stories also shows us how varied these futures are and with so many possibilities, so many things that can go horribly wrong. With the observation that the ‘smart city’ term itself remains unclear to its specifics and therefore open to many interpretations, why do tech companies try to make it look so easy?

The smart city is a socio-technical concept and my strong sense is that we need to displace the ‘authorised’ technologist-only led accounts of what a smart city should be. One way is to use ‘what if…’ stories to constantly challenge and iterate what we think a smart city should be based on values that are important to us.

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