The Smart City of Your Imagination

I’m currently reading Daniel Wortel-London’s book The Menace of Prosperity which goes deep into many of the possible alternative ways New York could have adopted more egalitarian economic development structures. Rather than allow public property to generate value, the land owning voters and machine politicians sold the city’s land and bonded to within inches of the city’s life to fund infrastructure that supported increases in private property values.

They thought the individual knew best and the result was private franchises for every type of potentially public service and the city would operate off the surplus. Now cities are funded through property and sales taxes that depend on land valuations and property exchange, but as DWL mentions, they don’t get at the true value of cities and they benefit very few.

This struck me because DWL’s thinking that there are better ways to create prosperity and govern cities runs against why many moguls and billionaires want to create cities today. Joe Mathews in his column this week decries this lack of imagination from these individuals on governance structures. They can’t imagine a structure where people have a say in their economic futures and prosperity, and so they just don’t talk about it, instead sharing glitzy images of possible yet impossible futures.

The folks behind any number of city building schemes from California Forever to NEOM and more are still stuck in the property value creation and extraction model. And aside from making more money or create personal value for them, they also want these cities to do something that may not be possible; make sense out of humans and their needs.

Songdo Smart City in South Korea tried setting up really intricate sensor systems for trash and transportation but came up short because coordination was so hard. Markus Levin shared why this central control is so hard…

“Many current smart cities fall into one of two traps. Some rely on fragmented control, with siloed agencies managing their own sectors efficiently but failing to coordinate across the system. Others, like Songdo, are built around such centralized control that they become rigid and slow to adapt as conditions shift. In both cases, these tightly controlled systems struggle to evolve alongside the unpredictable, organic growth that defines truly prosperous cities.”

People aren’t predictable and they want different things. Maybe the best way to get people what they want is not to create a domain to control, but rather allow them to collectively decide what they want without moneyed interference. For example in the small German hamlet of Etteln “connection not connectivity” seems to be the key to success after they banded together during the pandemic to build fiberoptic cable to every building in the village. They were recently voted smartest city in the world.

We could imagine something different, but flexibility of the mind is key.

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