The Truman Show and Ethical Smart Cities
On visiting smart city projects, I cannot help but think about the Truman Show. As you may recall this 1998 comedic and dystopian satire, starring Jim Carrey, written by Andrew Niccol and directed by Peter Weir, tells the story of Truman Burbank who lives in a small town (Seahaven) which is the set for a TV program.
Truman has been filmed his entire life. He is the only person (everyone else is an actor) in the show who is unaware that his actions are viewed 24 hours, seven days a week by a global audience of 1.5 billion.
Cameras are ubiquitous and everything he does is monitored by the show's creator and executive producer, Christof (played by Ed Harris). Weir described the Christof character as someone who is very happy to exploit another human being for money because his morals and ethics are all shot through, and his sense of reality gone.
Upon recognizing this predicament, Truman must overcome his greatest fear and risk his life to escape. We (both the audience of the TV show and that of the movie) are left with no clear idea of what escape means, except a possible mix of freedom and (hopefully) anonymity.
The movie pre-dates growth of reality TV, social media and what Shoshana Zuboff, in her excellent 2019 book, describes as surveillance capitalism – “a new economic order that claims human experiences as free raw materials for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.”
I appreciate that this is a somewhat unusual way to frame the emergence of smart cities.
Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town
In June 2019, I had the opportunity to visit the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town (FSST) located some 50 km to the south of Tokyo. This award-winning development aims to promote comfortable lifestyles for 1,000 households through the design of smart spaces supported by a layer of smart infrastructure.
With a 100-year vision, the town management company takes “resident views into consideration” and it is assumed that they share “the objectives of the town” and will “live, interact and exchange ideas for achieving better lifestyles.”
There is an impressive list of companies backing the project including Panasonic, Dentsu (Japan’s premiere PR company), NTT, Tokyo Gas, Nihon Sekkei (architecture and urban design), Accenture and Alsok (security services). The local government (Fujisawa City) and Keio University are also supporters.
As I walked around the residential streets lined with detached-houses I had the strangest feeling of being caught up in a scene from the Truman Show, which was actually filmed in a planned community in Florida called Seaside. It is a community designed according to the principles of New Urbanism with a core idea similar to FSST in terms of promoting environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods.
Seaside (left) was the location for the Truman Show and was designed based on the principles of New Urbanism. FSST (right) has a similar look and feel, with a highly walkable layout.
Houses in FSST tend of have solar panels on the roof and there are surveillance cameras sited at eight locations (nowhere near the 5,000 cameras that were presumed to be employed in the Truman Show). The aim is to create a kind of virtual gated community and “security concierges” (love that name!) can arrive in minutes in the advent of an incident.
There are many benefits for those choosing to live in this community. For example, compared to other housing developments, CO2 emissions are estimated to be 70% lower, renewable energy covers 30% of electricity needs and when disaster strikes the community can continue to function for three days until normal local services are restored.
There is a smart platform with user interfaces providing data on energy use, surveillance camera footage, car-pooling and community care to watch over the elderly. A digital hub manages, analyzes and links data to various public and private data services.
This all sounds wonderful but I do worry that there are “Christof-type” characters overlooking everything that happens in the community and I hope they are following some kind of ethical guidelines.
Putting ethics at the heart of the smart city
Discussion on how to incorporate ethical principles within smart cities has been ongoing for some time. Professor Rob Kitchin, from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, is one of the leading thinkers in this field. His January 2016 report for the Irish government on “Getting smarter about smart cities” focuses on questions of data privacy and data security.
Next in his December 2016 paper on the ethics of smart cities and urban science, published with the Royal Society, he called for adoption of ethical principles designed to recognize the benefits of smart cities, while reducing potential pernicious effects. He argues in favour of thoroughly mapping and addressing the ethical dimensions of smart cities.
Most recently, in an April 2019 article for Raidió Teilifís Éireann, he described key ethical concerns for smart cities as including the following: erosion of privacy; lack of public consent on how data is collected and used; limited oversight; data ownership issues; biases displayed in data and AI systems; and differential access to digitally mediated services.
Warning of the potential for “ethics washing”, he argues in favour of consideration of ethical concerns to ensure delivery of more emancipatory/empowering systems and platforms, involving all stakeholders in the development of inclusive and just smart cities.
This has been formulated in the case of the Barcelona Digital City Initiative as the concept of technological sovereignty – a situation where smart technologies and online platforms are oriented to and serve residents, rather than private companies.
Interesting work is also underway in Europe through the EU funded SHERPA project at De Monfort University investigating the ways in which smart information systems (SIS) impact on ethics and human rights issues.
Meanwhile in Canada, students at George Brown College have developed an Ethical Smart Cities playbook that places emphasis on the importance of incorporating ethical values in smart city projects around privacy, sustainability and safety as explained in this video.
The Ethical Smart City Framework developed by students at George Brown College
By far the biggest initiative in this context is the work of the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance bringing together 36 pioneer cities from across 22 countries. They have developed a roadmap for ethical smart cities as explained in the video below.
New Policy Roadmap for Ethical Smart Cities
Typology of ethical smart cities
The figure below presents a typology of ethical smart cities that currently co-exist. The first type tends to overlook or downplay ethical issues that are considered as non-vital variables or negligible side effects.
The second type practices performative ethics giving the impression that meaningful action is occurring, when in fact the governance and other measures implemented are superficial.
With the third type, there is a clear commitment to ethical principles and desire to engage with all stakeholders including local citizenry around how the ethical smart city evolves.
There is still a long way to go in our journey towards the ethical smart city and we can anticipate many more examples of privacy violations occurring when use of citizens' data is not properly regulated.
Likewise, citizen trust in smart city projects may continue to be eroded through instances of unauthorized surveillance (especially using facial recognition technology), data breaches, and misuse of personal information.
Three types of smart cities with different approaches to handling ethical concerns.
Moreover, if we allow algorithms and AI systems powering smart city technologies to be biased or discriminatory, they will reinforce existing prejudices, leading to unfair treatment of certain groups. This would exacerbate existing social inequalities and marginalize already vulnerable communities.
Finally, if we continue to give private corporations complete control over development and management of smart city technologies, they may inevitably prioritize profit over the public good, potentially leading to monopolies and unethical practices.
Ideally, we need to see more examples of the third type of ethical smart city emerging where citizens have greater control over their personal data, with proper measures in place to prevent unauthorized access or misuse of data, and with more oversight of the activities of private corporations backing these projects.
The smart city is like a double-edged sword bringing potentially great benefits while also being associated with some rather significant pitfalls mentioned above. The main point, however, is for residents in smart cities to avoid becoming Truman Burbanks blissfully unaware of their predicament. Rather they need to be engaged and informed, and to act on that knowledge (and to always have the ability to opt-out).