2018 Was the Year of the Smart City Skeptic

In 2018, a hailstorm of data privacy revelations at Facebook shook down the tech giant’s self-branding as a do-gooder enterprise. When the stakes were high, the company repeatedly prioritized growth over the security of its 2.2 billion users, news reports revealed. Facebook’s reckoning rightly grabbed the world’s attention in 2018, but the perils of private tech promising public good were also playing out in the burgeoning arena of “smart cities.”

The smart-city concept was born of the last recession, when the IT behemoths that dominated generations past, like IBM and Cisco, rushed into budget-crunched city halls, software in hand, pitching harried administrators ways to run electricity, water, and transportation systems faster, cheaper, and with data-driven “insights.” Now, thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices, many of the smart-city solutions proffered on the expo circuit are more familiar to regular consumers than you might realize.