In the U.S., the smart city of the modern era originated largely in the private sector. In 2010, IBM launched its Smarter Cities Challenge, aiming to help 100 municipalities worldwide with efficient and effective service delivery. By 2015, the federal government had started investing in the work, and it seemed like most major cities in the country were rolling out flashy initiatives, ranging from air quality sensors to smart trash cans that let workers know when they needed to be emptied
While the smart city is no longer the hot new thing in government technology circles, it contributed a lot at its peak, and it continues to do so today. The smart city concept, however, has evolved, and now both the definition of and technologies within smart cities may look different from their early roots.
What's in a Name?
Back in the 2010s, the so-called “smart city” was important to localities as well as the organizations supporting them, and while government is now focused on a new buzzword, artificial intelligence, cities still want to become smarter. The idea is just becoming more individualized. Different cities also now define what makes a city smart in different ways.
Take New York City. Paul Rothman is smart cities and IoT director within the Office of Technology and Innovation, and he defines a smart city as one that gives residents a high quality of life, access to services, and as seamless of an experience as possible for interactions with government.
Rothman described technology as “an enabler” for those goals, and he said that the term “smart city” sometimes gets a bad reputation because in its early days, it signaled a big company selling an off-the-shelf platform. It has now shifted to focus on individual aspects of city government operations, often involving partnering with more smaller businesses and startup companies.
In San Antonio, technology’s impact is an integral part of the smart city, said Emily Royall, the city’s emerging technology division head and senior IT manager. Before her current post, Royall's title with San Antonio was smart cities administrator, and before that it was smart city coordinator. She has, essentially, been working on smart cities with San Antonio since 2018.
“I would say that a smart city truly is one that prepares not only its government but also its community for the impact of emerging technologies,” Royall said.
She emphasized that this involves taking advantage of opportunities that can provide efficiencies and drive economic growth while addressing risk and maintaining a focus on human outcomes.
For some cities, like the Denver suburb Arvada, Colo., everything the city does is smart, said Arvada CIO Craig Poley. He said that “smart” simply refers to something that expands the capabilities of humans.
While the specific technologies that cities are using may be changing, the term “smart cities” is still a way to refer to integrating emerging technologies into city processes, said Kyle Funk, senior program specialist for infrastructure, transportation and solutions with the National League of Cities, an organization which itself can be a resource for smart city growth.
“Since I got into this space, there has been a battle of words and nomenclature over the term ‘smart city,’” said Jake Taylor, design and technology manager for The Connective, a smart region consortium for the Phoenix area. Taylor was also a National Science Foundation research fellow in Citizen Centered Smart Cities and Smart Living.
Despite disagreements about terminology, Taylor said the goal of the smart city remains largely the same: to take advantage of possibilities that exist to support citizens where they are. The use of the moniker, or lack thereof, does not have as much impact on this work as people think, Taylor said. Moving past the battle of words will allow cities to answer what he argues is the more important question: how can cities help their residents?
Community Needs Increasingly Guide Smart Cities
While some smart city projects, like Sidewalk Toronto, have been abandoned, smart city initiatives continue to thrive across the U.S.
Smart cities have certainly evolved to meet the most significant challenges of today, such as improved sustainability. But whereas the movement was primarily industry-led 10 to 15 years ago, local government started to take the reins about five years ago, Taylor said. Today, the work is driven by citizen expectations, which vary based on individual community needs.
The smart city ecosystem is “still vibrant and strong,” said Debra Lam, founding executive director for the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation (PIN). Lam also leads smart communities work at Georgia Tech.
But while the work was once centered around implementing the latest technology into a city, that approach failed to answer some important questions. For example, technologies were sometimes implemented in cities without a clear idea of who was going to manage them and how. Another question some cities failed to ask was whether a new technology could increase existing disparities. Today, rather than looking at a new technology tool like a sensor and trying to find a city application for it, Lam said cities are identifying problems first and then seeking applicable tools, research and solutions.
For some cities, investing in sensor technology networks did demonstrate a tangible payoff in improving cost efficiencies and quality of life for residents, but Lam said it is pairing technology with the community engagement process that makes a project successful. Highlighting the effective smart city work in major cities like New York, Lam noted that PIN works largely with smaller communities, which sometimes have limited capacity to address certain challenges. In some cases, Lam said it can be easier to start small because there is less bureaucracy to navigate. For cities of all sizes, cross-sector collaboration is essential: “It’s no longer just something that the city government has to tackle solely by themselves.”
New York City is working regularly with the private sector through its Smart City Testbed, launched in October 2023. Having netted more than 130 applications, that program is intended to be educational, demonstrating to agencies how technologies available to them can be used. In 2024, the program's first full year, it completed four pilot projects. The city expects to announce new pilots in the coming months, said Rothman.
“I think that’s kind of what we’re bringing to the agencies: myself and the team are trying to unlock more capabilities in terms of the emerging tech space that maybe agencies don’t always have time to pursue on their own,” Rothman said.
In San Antonio, the work has been institutionalized, said Royall. The smart cities program there was initially housed in the Office of Innovation as an experimental initiative. Now, the program has transitioned into the city’s IT division, and insights it brought are being applied more broadly to help the city prepare for emerging technologies. This shift helps accelerate the work by bringing city leaders together to address policymaking and financial questions around technology implementations, she said. While some efforts, like the SmartSA Sandbox, are no longer active, she emphasized that the city’s SmartSA partnership continues.
One smart city strategy in San Antonio is what Royall refers to as “rapid prototyping,” through which a department can test a new technology to assess its readiness prior to procurement. This delivers cost savings to the city because it is not investing in technology without having done the preparation, from a data governance and readiness standpoint. For example, the city has tested using AI to help the procurement department read contracts.
In Arvada, the city’s enterprise resource planning upgrade is helping it be smarter, because it enables real-time data integration, Poley said. And, notably, the city has invested in and is currently piloting the deployment of thousands of smart city water meters. Their adoption was a result of the technology’s potential to impact city operations.
Smart cities in five years will likely be defined in the same way that they are now, said Lam: initiatives that help cities meet community needs. City governments, and their smart city divisions, will increasingly play a role in preparing for emerging technologies’ impacts, she predicted.
Smart Cities Are Evolving
Smart cities have evolved from their early dominating focus on the Internet of Things. While many cities still use smart sensor networks as a key part of their smart city initiatives, AI is now increasingly playing a role, said Funk.
Other technologies such as drones — both ground and aerial — are also in play. City leaders are good at interacting with the community and getting feedback on their specific needs, Funk said. As such, smart cities are likely to increasingly focus on emerging technologies, which are inherently always changing.
The focus with emerging technology is on outcomes in San Antonio, too, explained Royall. The city is exploring the use of an AI-powered translation tool in emergency response to better serve the community.
Technology solutions are rarely as simple or “turnkey” as vendors might make them seem, Poley said, because they need to be intentionally integrated into existing systems. As vendors try to sell governments “smart” technology, Poley said there is a need for government to better understand exactly what is “smart” about technologies before adopting them, focusing on how they may address city challenges.
In some ways, AI has become the new “smart city marketing badge,” Poley said, and it is poised to play a bigger role in smart cities because it can help augment the work of the human workforce.
AI and data management play a big role in the smart city portfolio in New York City, too, as AI can support city efforts to make use of available data, Rothman said. The city is conducting public engagement sessions through libraries to help ensure future work addresses community needs.
While investments in sensor networks have helped cities gain insights about issues such as air quality or heat island effect, the sensors themselves typically do not solve problems, said Taylor. The data helps cities make informed decisions, but more solutions are still needed to make use of the data such sensor networks provide, he said.
Looking ahead, Taylor expects smart cities to exist more so within the experience economy. This might mean a blend of digital and physical experiences focused on improved citizen engagement. Whether it's a gamified approach to completing forms or a virtual reality space for city meetings, he said technologies will be more experiential for humans using them.
Another shifting component of smart cities is the acknowledgement that “people don’t end at city borders,” as Taylor explained. His organization supports collaborative solutions between cities, which he said is also an important consideration for communities across the country. Someone could live in one city and work in the neighboring city, and they would have a very different citizen experience without a collaborative approach to smart government. Taylor said he sees this commonly in terms of mobility, air quality and accessibility.
“We as people are not limited by the constraints that municipalities have, so approaching this from a human-centered perspective means regional,” Taylor said.
A Smart City Without Technology
“When we say ‘smart,’ we tend to think about the technology, but it’s really about the people,” Lam said. She argued that a smart city can also be low- or no-tech if it prioritizes more efficient processes and better outcomes.
While smart cities are still largely approached from a technology standpoint, Rothman underlined that there are many other holistic components that make a city smart; in New York City’s case, this includes dedicated bike lanes, composting, and trash containerization.
Technology itself is not necessary for cities to do things smarter, Taylor said. In fact, he pointed to one Connective member city reducing its reliance on certain technology as an example of smart government. Examining technical debt and pinpointing unnecessary things is smart in and of itself, Taylor said.
“We never pursue technology for technology’s sake,” said Royall, who added that she addresses technology proposals by asking what problem they solve and for whom. “I think that’s the role and purpose of a smart city: to constantly ask that question in order to channel and steward public taxpayer dollars and investments in technologies as effectively as possible.”
This story first published in GovTech. Read the original here.
