Wonderful Smart Copenhagen

Now I'll Have Nyhavn TV.McKin cc by: NC-SA

Last weekend I had the pleasure of making my first visit to the aptly described wonderful Copenhagen. Truly the smartest city I have ever visited and one of the politest. A place that is so obviously networked both virtually and geographically, with just a 20 minute metro ride from the airport to the city centre, as well as technologically driven but not technologically determined or is it?. I observed that the use of cash is a rarity, financial exchange for goods is often via a card or quite commonly via a smart app. Cyclists have safe parallel carved highways through the city, eradicating competition with motorists.  The WiFi in our apartment was superfast, and ubiquitous, on coaches, in shops and bars. I even saw a Bluetooth  app driven coffee machine in one of the bars, the barman was under-impressed by my over-impressed comments, "it's just a box, bluetooth and an app, it's not that difficult" he said.  Even the commentary on our pleasure boat cruise around the city was GPS driven. (By the way did you know that Bluetooth invented by Ericsson was named after the tenth-century Danish king Harald Bluetooth).

Needless to say when I got back to the UK I did a little bit of research on Copenhagen's Smart City credentials. In 2014 Copenhagen won the world's smart city award for its Connecting Plan, using of wireless data from cell phones, GPS’s in busses and sensors in sewers and in rubbish bins to reduce, congestion, air pollution and CO2-emissions. There is also the ambition that by 2018 travel time on buses and by cycling will be reduced by 10%, where as car travel will remain the same. (Smart Circle Becoming a Smart City is not a goal in itself)

However, the fear associated with this, is the challenge to individual privacy. Liv Holm Carlsen's 2014 article Copenhagen's Smart City Plans Pressure Citizen's Privacy in http://www.kommunikationsforening.dk/ argues that Copenhagen's strategic implementation requires a "substantial surveillance infrastructure diminishing the sphere of privacy" for the citizens.  She states that the objects that we carry are plugged into this infrastructure with every transaction logged therefore citizens should have an opportunity to debate how this data is being used.  Carlsen contends that the Copenhagen's Smart City pre-feasibility report focused on the economic and social benefits but "did not did not particularly shed light on the political, human and psychological parameters that will be affected by a smart initiative."

Another 2014 article in the Guardian "The truth about smart cities: ‘In the end, they will destroy democracy"   reporting on the Future Cities summit also commented on the challenge of Smart Cities to individual privacy. Referring to Jonathan Rez of the University of New South Wales, who suggested "that a smarter way to build cities might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team.” so that technologists can get a better understanding of citizens.  Last week Max Opry's article "Adelaide to become Australia's first smart city but could lose out on privacy" again in the Guardian also outlined the fears of the misuse of data.

For many this may seem far away from home but already MOOCs are awash with references to Smart Cities, IOT and Big Data. Last year the Digital Economy Minister Ed Vaizey's oppening address to The Telegraph's Smart Cities Conference 2015 referred to a range of Smart City initiatives throughout the UK. The Nesta Report Rethinking Smart Cities From the Groundup  proposes that the smart city vision often fails to recognise the role that behaviour and culture play in the way cities work (p.14). However, the word privacy only appears once in the description of D–CENT a Europe–wide, EU–funded project creating decentralised and privacy–aware applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment.

The smart city is an extremely challenging digital paradigm for our time. It is evident how accessing data can improve the environment making it greener and leading the way to more sustainable urban initiatives. However, the privacy debate adds even more challenges identifying a need for more public consultation.

So next time you switch location on, on your mobile device, think about how your data is adding to the big data pool, what do you think about this, does it matter, do you care? For me I am now slightly ambivalent reflecting on how my short visit to to the fabulous city of Copenhagen has contributed to its smart analytics via my digital footprint and whether this really matters to me if the result is an improved city experience.