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China is good at manufacturing what others have invented but no longer so good at innovation itself. This is the result of political change. China was becoming a leading innovator when it was politically open, before 2012. It still has advantages, but now that it is becoming politically closed, idea creation has slowed, entrepreneurs, investors and researchers are leaving, foreign investment is in decline (because of a perception of increased political risk), and geopolitics frays connections to global research and tech. Under different political leadership, China would be a much more formidable competitor, but China made a political decision that values continued party control over innovation and its ability to innovate is at risk.

Similarly, the EU spends significantly on R&D and has excellent research facilities, but its regulations are a powerful disincentive to entrepreneurship and commercialization. Europe’s major economies have shown flat income growth for more than a decade. It is not positioning itself to compete in a digital economy, since this requires a willingness to accept risk and allow entrepreneurship. Europe values privacy over innovation.

There is no easy way to directly measure innovation, so there can be a tendency to use proxies like number patent issued, amount spent on R&D, number of PhDs and publications. It seems reasonable to assume that more R&D spending, more publications, and more patents correlate with more innovation and one of their attractions is that they are easier to count, but by themselves they do not explain strength in technological innovation. Until the last few years, the United States lagged in investment in basic research (the foundation of innovation) and in the infrastructure to support innovation. Yet it has over eighty years outperformed other economies when the measures are the creation of valuable new technologies and national income. The strength of the U.S. “innovation machine” lies somewhere else.

The discussion of technology and innovation relies on indirect proxy measurements, like the number of patents. Patents are a metric that must be used carefully. The assertion that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” is particularly true for China’s centrally directed economy, where people perform to meet measures set by Beijing, leading to situation where researchers are rewarded for the number of patents issued (or number of publications) even if no one uses those patents.

A better question might be who cares. The number of shoes is not a good indicator of national power. In fact, no single technology is a good indicator of national power. The U.S. economy is vast, decentralized, continental in size, and is guided by actively competitive markets. It has been exceptionally innovative for decades. Leading in a single technology (like railroads in the 19th century or semiconductors today) reflects a common analytical error that misjudges how economies and technology actually create national power. The concept of a “race” itself is a questionable legacy of Cold War thinking – the Cold War had a finish line (identified by Eisenhower and Dulles at the onset), while the current situation does not.

Stories about the United States falling behind are so predictable that they form a literary genre. In 1957, the President’s Science Advisor predicted that Soviet performance in math and science education would give it global leadership in a decade. In 1969, the Departments of Treasury, Commerce and Agriculture warned President Nixon that a powerful new economic entity, the European Union, would displace the United States. Starting the 1980s, assorted pundits announced that Japan would dominate the global economy. And until recently, there were routine predictions that China would displace the United States, predictions that still make regular appearances.

India-Pakistan Ties These developments have the international community worried about the possibility of an all-out conflict, which would seriously challenge security in the Asian subcontinent. However, there also prevails a popular narrative that the elites in both countries use the flare-ups to serve their political agenda. A recent book, written by the former intelligence chiefs of India and Pakistan, goes further and claims that the governments sometimes accommodate each other. At times Pakistan has even allowed India to drop a couple of bombs at harmless places in Pakistan, just to satisfy the Indian public’s opinion. Since the violent 1947 partition of British India in India and Pakistan, both countries have pursued policies that diametrically oppose each other. Pakistan’s military even owes its powerful role in politics to the popular “desire” for competing/defeating India at any cost. The majority of Pakistanis see the military as the only powerful institution that can compete with India. To secure the popular votes, all the political parties in Pakistan currently seem to be on the same anti-Indian page. The scenario is not much different in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is said to have ignited anti-Pakistani sentiments in light of the upcoming elections. Prestige Competition In India and Pakistan, it is the popular sentiment to undermine the other that determines policies. After the recent incident in Kashmir, one can easily notice an ongoing prestige competition on social media, engaging people in all classes from both countries. Even during times of peace, the nations are electronically belittling each other; be it during a sports event or because of a victory in the technological field. A recent visit of the Saudi Crown prince to both countries started a debate about which of the states was more respected by the visitor. This prestige factor has always been present in India-Pakistan relations. After India conducted five nuclear tests in 1998, Pakistan responded with six tests to satisfy the nation psychologically and to prove to the world that “we are no less than India.” This act was in line with the local idiom “Pagg Uchi ho jaye” (the turban must stay high) and implies that Pakistan’s policies revolve around acquiring prestige, with India as a reference point. Humiliation over Elimination It is also worthy to mention that it is humiliation and not elimination that matters in India-Pakistan relations. The two each need their counterpart alive, just to let the other down again and again, and to prove their superiority to the international community. For this reason, the obvious numerical and military might of India is persistently challenged by Pakistan in spite of having lesser capabilities, which always hurts India’s prestigious stance. India suffers from an “I am not respected” syndrome, while Pakistan feels it is not given a proper status. Naturally, when both countries feel they have proven their prestige, tension starts to de-escalate. This appears to be the current stage the states are at after Pakistan returned the Indian pilot the country captured. This is why clashes never lead to the point of no return, despite having had three major wars and several armed conflicts. Even during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, India captured over 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war only to return them safely after India’s prestige had been satisfied. Both nations will continue to compete with the purpose of maximizing their prestige against each other, but it is not likely they will eliminate each other. India and Pakistan need each other as a part of their psychological integrity. Because an all-out conflict would endanger the other’s existence, this is a questionable scenario.

Pakistan's top nuclear scientist sees "very dim" chances of a nuclear war with neighboring India despite mounting tensions between the two arch-rivals in recent months.

"I won't say a zero chance but there are very dim chances of a war between the two neighbors involving nuclear arsenal despite escalating tensions," Samar Mubarakmand, a former chairman of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and head of a team of the scientists that conducted six "successful" nuclear tests in remote Chaghi district of southwestern Balochistan province on May 28, 1998.

Militarily, diplomatically, politically or economically, achieving anything by force is out of the question. As former Army chief General V.P. Malik said in a conversation with me earlier this month on ThePrint’s ‘Off The Cuff’, it isn’t possible today to achieve any of our territorial objectives, PoK or Aksai Chin, by military force. Besides the capability question, any such adventure would immediately run into global disapproval and force a ceasefire earlier than you can advance a few miles. For clarity, these are my words, not his.

Where do we go from here then? And how did we get here in the first place?

This also shows that Indian politicians and policy-makers have amalgamated the Nehruvian ‘peace diplomacy’ or bilateral partnerships approach of Indian foreign policy with the contemporary geopolitical understanding to alleviate her status as a Global power (Gupta, 2005, p. 14). The US envisages an ‘untapped’ potential in building a strategic partnership with her ‘natural partner’ in both strategic and economic spheres, partly because of the largest democracy and second-largest population (soon to be the first) in the world (Wilson, 2018). India owns the fourth position in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) with an annual growth rate of more than 7%. India is second to Saudi Arabia in the world ranking in terms of importing arms, which makes her a strategic bulwark as well as an economic market for the US (Jabeen, 2012, pp. 75-77). The US recognized India’s huge military, economic and diplomatic weight during the Clinton administration and hence incentivized India to bandwagon with the US, especially after 2001. The nuclear deal is part of this incentivization. The significance of India as an important market is described by Tellis as (2011, pp. 40-41):

India’s rise represents a net benefit for American interests; the growing challenges emerging in Asia will only bring the two countries closer than ever before. Keeping the focus on nurturing the relationship with India — which is the grand prize for maintaining a balance of power that favours the United States in Asia — will thus require committed attention on the part of American policymakers even when they might be otherwise distracted by the necessities of engaging other powers, including India’s competitors such as Pakistan and China.

As the Cold War wore on, Nehru was succeeded eventually by his daughter Indira Gandhi, who continued to speak the language of non-alignment and anti-imperialism but pursued policies that were far more “realist” in substance. This had the effect of undermining some of India’s international legitimacy, especially when India concluded a defense pact with the Soviet Union in 1971. The following two decades were also marked by increasing Indian interventionism in the affairs of neighboring countries, especially Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives. The end of the Cold War, according to one scholar, marked a transition from realpolitik back to softer forms of diplomatic in- 53 tercourse for India, largely due to the realization that hard power had failed to achieve beneficial objectives in the preceding two decades (Wagner 2005). While this might be true in terms of grand strategy, it was certainly not the case that any of the foreign policy gains made by India after 1990 were due to its use of soft power. Increases in investment from and trade with developed economies, rapprochement with the US in the mid-2000s, and improvements in bilateral relations with other South Asian states (including Pakistan, despite setbacks) can all be traced back to the end of the Cold War and India’s economic liberalization and rapid growth since 1991. Soft power has been a very minor aspect – if at all – of Indian foreign policy during this period.

Those proclaiming the demise of globalization as it was once known are not totally wrong. It is true that the era of “hyperglobalization” that lasted from the 1970s to the 2008 global financial crisis, during which a hegemonic United States drove a top-down process of trade liberalization and global integration, was a unique historical episode. That era is now dead and buried along with globalism, the ideology that propelled it, and unipolarity, the international order that upheld it.

An increasingly inward-looking United States no longer has the political will to serve as architect and guarantor of the world economy. China, meanwhile, is beset with structural economic challenges that limit its ability to promote its own order by means of trade access and investment policy. And no other country or group of countries has the capacity to fill the void.

The excessively simplified theoretical framework of Society 5.0 conceals the complexity of real society, where it is difficult to balance individual and collective interests, making it impossible to meet the needs of everyone. Thus, its theory contains inherent contradictions. At the level of driving forces, Society 5.0 does not have any essential distinctions from the information society and fails to establish a new social form beyond the framework of the information society. From a motivational standpoint, Society 5.0 represents a pessimistic and weak cognition of humanity, and the promotion of its conceptual framework is a form of brainwashing for the public. At the element level, while Society 5.0 claims to be human-centric, it fails to genuinely prioritize the position of individuals. The operation of Society 5.0 exacerbates social inequality, hinders intellectual and moral development, and makes it difficult to achieve the goals of sustainable socio-economic development. Finally, through the observation of failed cases in social practice, it becomes evident that Society 5.0 fundamentally disregards the fundamental needs of individuals and instead becomes a surveillance-oriented society. 3 The root cause of criticism in China The criticism against Society 5.0 suggests that it is a false proposition. The introduction of Society 5.0 is the Japanese government’s effort to address challenges such as population aging, declining birth rates, labor shortages, and regional development disparities through technology and innovation. However, the application of information technology to societal development is a complex process, Fig. 4 The three critical arrays of Society 5.0. Source: author Wu et al. Frontiers of Urban and Rural Planning (2023) 1:12 Page 8 of 9 and Society 5.0 only provides a vague goal without specific paths and strategies to overcome challenges in technology, law, ethics, and society. As a result, the actual progress in implementation has been slow. Although emerging technologies like AI and big data analytics have brought many conveniences and opportunities to society, they have also introduced a series of risks and issues such as privacy breaches, unemployment risks, and social inequality. Society 5.0 overlooks these challenges and fails to provide sufficient solutions.

Yet the history of technological revolutions counsels against alarmism. Extrapolating from current technological trends is problematic, both because technologies often do not live up to their promise, and because technologies often have countervailing or conditional effects that can temper their negative consequences. Thus, the fear that emerging technologies will necessarily cause sudden and spectacular changes to international politics should be treated with caution. There are at least two reasons to be circumspect.

First, very few technologies fundamentally reshape the dynamics of international conflict. Historically, most technological innovations have amounted to incremental advancements, and some have disappeared into irrelevance despite widespread hype about their promise. For example, the introduction of chemical weapons was widely expected to immediately change the nature of warfare and deterrence after the British army first used poison gas on the battlefield during World War I. Yet chemical weapons quickly turned out to be less practical, easier to counter, and less effective than conventional high-explosives in inflicting damage and disrupting enemy operations.6 Other technologies have become important only after advancements in other areas allowed them to reach their full potential: until armies developed tactics for effectively employing firearms, for instance, these weapons had little effect on the balance of power. And even when technologies do have significant strategic consequences, they often take decades to emerge, as the invention of airplanes and tanks illustrates. In short, it is easy to exaggerate the strategic effects of nascent technologies.7

For some, the future is unknown, foreign land that we cannot know until we arrive there—or rather, until it arrives here. But that’s not quite right, is it? Because while you can’t predict the future, you can catch glimpses of it right here in the present if you know where to look.

Optimists like to imagine a future in which today’s problems, difficult as they are, have been solved—and maybe we finally get our flying cars. Pessimists, on the other hand, maintain a darker view, one that’s extremes are replete with gray rhinos, black swans, and boiling frogs.

But, here’s the rub. If SD is what the world needs now, and is indispensable in addressing global issues which are immune to the application of armed force, why are most international institutions so ill-equipped to deliver? Why is SD so marginalized and obscure? The answer would appear to reside somewhere within a sprawling group of inter-related obstacles, constraints and impediments which together stand in the way of a SD renaissance. These include: A transformed operating environment. Since the heyday of SD during the Cold War12 — when American and Soviet scientists kept talking even during times of great geopolitical stress — everything has changed. Power is shifting from the North Atlantic to the AsiaPacific and the era of state-centricity has ended with the emergence of a multiplicity of new actors in an increasingly heteropolar world. Although intensified globalization has dramatically increased connectivity and convergence, paradoxically it has also accelerated fragmentation and heightened the sensation of difference. Navigation is hazardous and difficult in this new whirled order. It is as if all of our old verities and assumptions have been placed in a blender which is set on high and running non-stop. Image problems. Science and diplomacy each struggle with mixed popular perceptions. In the public imagination, science is widely seen as dense and impenetrable, something that most people could not wait to drop in high school. This orientation has been exacerbated in recent years by the growing skepticism regarding the social value of science, evidence, knowledge and statistics,13 and the inclination to rely on beliefs, convictions, emotion and falsehoods rather than empirical evidence as the basis for policy formulation and political decision-making. Brexit, the Trump ascendancy, climate change denial, the anti-vaccine movement, the explosive growth of “fake news”, and the invention of “alternative facts” all support this observation. For its part, diplomacy is often associated with weakness, waste and appeasement,14 with caving in to power, and with dithering dandies hopelessly lost in a haze of irrelevance somewhere between protocol and alcohol. Think Neville Chamberlain in Munich. This double whammy has impeded the promotion of SD and underscored the desperate need for a new narrative. Institutional crises. A raft of substantial problems has exacerbated the branding debacle sketched above. International organizations, and all three elements of the diplomatic ecosystem15 (foreign ministry, Foreign Service and diplomatic business model) have failed to keep pace with the demands of globalization. Radical reform is required. For their part, scientists are generally loath to leave the lab and enter the political/policy realm, and they tend to communicate among themselves in an esoteric language which outsiders cannot easily apprehend. This combination has proven debilitating. Solitary confinement. Science and diplomacy effectively constitute two solitudes, floating worlds which rarely intersect. The principal elements of the underlying cultural, communications and values divide are summarized below: Diplomacy Science Stability/balancing power Change/unleashing power Convention(s)/conventional Experimentation/discovery Risk aversion Risk tolerance Practice/practical Theory/theoretical Argument (tact, discretion, persuasion, influence) Facts and data Negotiation and compromise Trial and error Political/policy development Empirical/postulation of principles Polis Lab Little wonder that scientists and diplomats feel alienated from each other. Scientists excel at defining problems and performing objective assessments, but are less adept at proposing workable solutions. Diplomats are able to craft compromises and resolve differences, but are subjectively inclined, unschooled in science and often have trouble understanding scientific terms, methods and rationale. Cold War carry-overs. Outdated convictions — that security is best achieved through defence rather than by addressing human needs; that the state, not the human person is the primary referent; that armed force is the ultimate arbiter in international relations — continue to command the attention of many Western leaders. This psychological baggage consists of: a binary world view (then communist world vs. free world; 16 now “with us or with the terrorists”17); characterization of threat as universal and undifferentiated (then “The Red Menace”; now Islamists, insurgents and rogue/failed states); and the militarization of the international policy response (then containment, deterrence, Mutually Assured Destruction; now, the global war on terror18). The prevalence of oldthink is not without its purposes, but precludes meaningful reform. Special-interest dominance. Deeply entrenched defence-related networks19 occupy a dominant place — and commanding political space — in major capitals. These influential interests are served by the persistence of the global war on terror, under whatever guise, and the related perpetuation of the politics of fear.20 When thinking about the foremost risks facing the planet, the received wisdom suggests that people everywhere should all be afraid, very afraid, of religious extremism, political violence and terrorism. While it would be a mistake to understate these threats, the probability for most people of being directly affected by such events is considerably lower than the likelihood of being hit by lightning or drowning in the bathtub.21 Certain quarters benefit from permanent public anxiety and the militarization of international policy, but the tax-paying public is not among them.22 Misallocation of international policy resources. The priority status accorded defence spending has crowded out much less costly, but more cost-effective investments in diplomacy and development. Consider U.S. President Donald Trump’s intention to increase the already bloated U.S. defence budget — larger than the next seven countries combined — by $56 billion at the expense of spending on diplomacy, multilateralism, aid and the environment. Chronic under-funding has weakened institutional and human resource capacity and undercut the delivery of SD both multilaterally and in foreign ministries. In particular, the severe skills, knowledge and management deficits have proven debilitating. Canada, it must be added, faces a singularly enormous challenge in rebuilding its science infrastructure after the “decade of darkness” imposed by the previous Harper government.2 > Make no mistake. Data are of little use in the absence of interpretation, and there exists a desperate need for interpreters, guides, brokers and translators who can bridge the two solitudes. Overcoming these challenges will not be easy, not least with the ascension of a regressive Trump administration in the U.S. Yet, absent radically improved performance, there is a growing likelihood that humanity will arrive, at some indeterminate, but not too distant point in the future, at a global tipping point beyond which recovery may be impossible.

This notion of science as a diplomatic tool – its use as an entry point to a recalcitrant society that simultaneously breaks down politically steeped preconceptions and offers tangible benefits – is a promising mode of development and a constructive brand of international relations. The Obama Administration understands the value of science diplomacy; last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the expansion of the Science Envoy program, appointing Barbara Schaal of Washington University in St. Louis, Bernard Amadei of the University of Colorado, and Susan Hockfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the position. These prominent scientists represent the third class of envoys – the program began in 2009 and has sponsored visits to nearly 20 countries. The philosophy behind the envoy program is noble, but its current directive is a bit vague. As noted in the State Department’s official release, “the science envoys travel in their capacity as private citizens and advise the White House, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. scientific community about the insights they gain from their travels and interactions.” A recent assessment of the program by envoy Elias Zerhouni noted the challenge of following through on initiatives predicated on the personal credibility and contacts of the individual envoys. Leveraging the networks of world-renowned scientists within the framework of a coherent policy of international relations is difficult, particularly when funding for longer-term projects is uncertain. The trust of international partners requires a predictable political and financial environment.

That pivot should sound alarms for those concerned about climate change or the future of cities. While self-driving cars have advanced far beyond the playthings that Koopman encountered at Carnegie Mellon 30 years ago, their societal benefits remain speculative at best. Meanwhile their downsides are very, very real — especially if they become widely available to purchase.

To understand why, consider an experiment in Northern California a few years ago, in which 13 people were given a chauffeur to take them anywhere they wanted for a week, effectively replicating the experience of having their own autonomous vehicle. Freed from the hassles of driving, test subjects traveled a whopping 83 percent more miles than when they had to drive themselves.

“Over the last decade, the smart city has gone from a corporate buzzword, to an all-encompassing techno-utopian vision for urbanism in the 21st century, to a rather cautious descriptor of what municipalities attempt to accomplish with digital technologies,” Baykurt and co-author Christoph Raetzsch of Aarhus University, Denmark, write. “Anticipatory visions undergirding the smart city may simply be a marketing strategy on the part of tech companies, or a totalizing promise by Silicon Valley that does not quite understand the politics of the city. Our analysis took a different turn and examined the variety of ways these visions are mobilized and altered by tech companies as well as municipalities.”

Drawing on fieldwork in aspiring smart cities, Baykurt and Raetzsch argue that the development of smart city initiatives has followed divergent paths in the United States and Europe.

As of 2019, 55 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas and this number is growing every year. It is expected that by 2050 this number will reach a staggering 70 percent. With the above said, it is not hard to assume that cities are and will be engines of economic growth. Currently, cities are accounting for nearly 80% of global GDP, but are also responsible for 70 percent of global greenhouse gases and are often suffering from poor air quality. Therefore, as their populations grow, cities will have to find smarter solutions to improve the quality of life and meet the needs of their residents. Internet of Things (IoT) is an important part of this strategy, as it turns the cities into fully connected environments. Urban planners and city managers are getting more and more interested in the use of IoT technology combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to sense the streets at micro levels, to automate their services and to improve their quality, efficiency, and effectiveness. With rapid advancements in sensor and communication technology and the emergence of AI and 5G into IoT, ‘Smart Cities’ seem closer than ever. ‍ Why Don't We See More of Them? The question is: Why aren’t we seeing more cities use smart outdoor lighting, intelligent traffic management, or intelligent surveillance for public safety? What are the challenges preventing wide-scale adoption of such solutions? Although there are various technical, social, and business challenges that cities and city leaders are facing at the moment, here, I have tried to list 3 major ones: ‍ Smart City Project Cost: Infrastructure and Technology In general, investing in a smart city project is not an easy job for the cities, especially when, for example, a project has socio-economic impact and it is hard to convert this benefit to a monetary value or show potentials to generate revenue. You can read more about this on ‘The challenge of paying for smart cities projects’ report published by Deloitte. Furthermore, investing in new technologies and infrastructure can be very cost-intensive. For example, China has invested over $17 billion of capital into 350,000 5G sites since 2015. On another note, Greensill, a company providing working capital to industry estimated that the global cost of 5G infrastructure investment will run to $2.7 trillion by the end of 2020. Needless to say, the cost factor is followed by other concerns such as technology risk (i.e. when a city is an early adopter of new technology). Constrained by tight budgets, cities will face challenges to finance their smart city projects, which, in my opinion, will force them to go for low-hanging fruits: better utilization and monetization of the already existing infrastructure. Also, to build new infrastructure, cities need to think of business models that can attract public-private partnerships and investments. Here, we have a lot of private investors that are ready to join, as long as they see revenue-generating business models behind the projects. Let us also not forget about the private businesses such as system integrators, telecommunication companies, or even car manufacturers that are willing to contribute if this infrastructure helps them to create and monetize their own use-cases and applications. ‍ Integration and Interoperability A smart city tech ecosystem can be quite complex, consisting of sensor, communication, and computation (Cloud and Edge) infrastructures, as well as applications. Here, there are different technologies to use and different vendors to work with. In an ideal world of smart cities, these should work together seamlessly and increase their collective power. To be more specific, we are talking about breaking silos and cross-sharing the infrastructure and resources including data, applications, storage, and computation power. For example, better public transport scheduling with the help of surveillance infrastructure and traffic management systems. However, such integration and interoperability do not come easy. It requires adequate standardization and proper security and privacy measures. We will talk about infrastructure sharing in another article, so stay tuned. Another important challenge is the ownership structure of the city elements. To this date, the ownership status of the elements of the increasingly integrated city is still unclear. However, there is little to no doubt about the multiparty-ownership nature of it. For example, the camera infrastructure that is used by the city can be owned by different city departments (e.g. public transportation, police, etc.), businesses and even households (a good example is Project Green Light). ‍ Security and Privacy Smart Cities are dealing with critical infrastructure and large amounts of citizens’ sensitive data. This makes them an attractive prey for hackers. Also, the distributed nature of the IoT systems increases the vulnerable surface area for hackers to do their work. In April 2019, Florida city was the victim of one such attack in which ransomware crippled their email, payroll, and other critical functions. The city finally agreed to pay attackers over $600,000 (65 bitcoins) three weeks after the attack. There was a similar attack on the City of Baltimore in which the city refused to pay the attackers 13 bitcoins. This one ultimately cost the city over $18m. This is only the IT infrastructure of the city causing damage due to lost or deferred revenue and slowed payments. The scope can be even larger when talking about compromised security systems, medical monitors, and autonomous cars which could pose life threats. Clearly, the governments and private-sector players need to establish the required safeguards and protocols about handling and protection of the IoT network (i.e. sensitive assets) and the sensitive data. Privacy is another key factor that can affect the public perception of a smart city project and therefore slow down the entire process. Citizens like the idea of a smart city collecting data which can increase their day-to-day life quality. However, in many cultures, it takes not long before the attractiveness of such a project deteriorates, as soon as the citizens feel that the “big brother” is watching. [image omitted] Imagine a surveillance camera network. Given the already existing wide-spread infrastructure and the power of video data combined with computer vision, smart cities are looking into vision-based technologies to provide applications in fields of urban mobility or public safety. Nevertheless, before being able to do so, they need to win the public perception by assuring the citizens that the employed solutions are compliant with national and international guaranteed privacy rights. Technology advancement such as Mantis, one of the world’s most powerful cameras that can capture you sneeze from 1.2 km away, might make this job even harder. Therefore, apart from cities enforcing privacy regulation, smart city solution providers should understand the privacy concerns of the citizens and create systems that output anonymized data that cannot be linked to any particular person. To conclude, smart city technologies can help improve numerous quality-of-life indicators. Nevertheless, to see a large scale adoption of such technologies, the truly complex nature of the city and it’s ecosystem need to be understood and considered. There are challenges in different domains which cities and solution providers must address before achieving a successful Smart City Initiative.

We’re not the first to argue that it may be time to retire the phrase “smart cities”, and the evidence of late suggests that the tech industry itself is waking up to the reality that it needs to rethink what and how it’s trying to sell to local governments. Smart cities surfaced as a concept more than 20 years ago and served as an umbrella term to describe a large and varied set of emerging technologies that seemed destined to help metros operate more efficiently. The internet of things for municipalities has to date included everything from simple sensors that allow transportation engineers to track cycle lane usage to full-blown smart-city operations centres that brought to mind scenes from Minority Report. By the middle of the past decade, it was common to see vast sums of grant funding made available to local governments that were keen to join the innovation bandwagon. Smart-city challenges spurred metros of all sizes to adopt new technologies, sometimes to the good but also, it now seems clear, for the sake of becoming a member of the growing global club of cutting-edge communities. Dozens if not hundreds of conferences, marketplaces and expos emerged to showcase the latest gee-whiz gadgets that cities could buy to transform themselves. To pursue a smart-city strategy was to be seen as relevant and forward-thinking, whether or not the problems a local government was aiming to solve would necessarily be best served by an expensive new monitoring system or software package. Criticism of the culture of the smart city predates the coronavirus pandemic. Concerns around privacy, of who should own or control public data and to what extent technology is always the answer could be heard loud and clear at least a couple of years before Covid-19 changed the world. Backlash against the practices of companies like Amazon and Facebook helped spur the grassroots movement that ultimately contributed to the cancellation in May of a major Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto. That the urban-innovations unit embedded within Google’s parent company cited economic uncertainty amid the onset of the pandemic as its reason for changing course was almost beside the point – the Quayside plan had already been scaled down so significantly in the face of community pressure that its viability was no longer clear. The pandemic took much of the remaining air out of the smart-cities bubble. Last summer, City Monitor reported that more smart-city project deployments would be delayed or scrapped in the face of budget and revenue uncertainty, and that city governments were in the midst of shifting their priorities towards economic recovery and digital equity. Since then, one of the industry’s biggest players, Cisco, announced it would pull the plug on its flagship smart-city software. In 2021, the idea that the goal of every city should be to get smarter feels painfully out of touch. “Obviously, a lot has changed. In this moment, the big vendors are in the midst of a pivot,” says Nigel Jacob, co-chair and co-founder of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a civic-innovation incubator and R&D lab within Boston’s city hall. “They’ve all seen the challenges and the opportunities in this pandemic moment. We work very closely with some big companies, and I think they are still struggling and looking at their product portfolio and looking to see what value they can add. I do think the field has shifted. “When I look at some of the products that are coming from the large vendors, they were all being developed in the context of normal operating procedures. And that just isn’t true anymore, and maybe never again?” The pandemic’s effects on the smart-cities sector A City Monitor analysis of global smart-city deployments makes it clear that the eruption of Covid-19 in 2020 did stall the sector’s momentum. The cumulative number of these projects initiated worldwide increased significantly between 2011 and 2019. By 2019, there were 379 fully deployed smart-city projects in 61 countries. In 2020, just 16 countries set in motion a total of 34. The trend becomes even clearer when broken down by region. Europe has long led the way in terms of the quantity of smart-city deployments. Project commencements rose swiftly in Europe between 2011 and 2016, from only two to 43 initiated annually. Since 2016, Europe has added 149. Meanwhile, the country with the most deployments to date is the US with 79. The larger North America region has 90. Both Europe and North America saw significant dips in the number of smart-city deployments in 2020, while other regions remained a bit steadier. Australia, Germany and Italy were the only countries that had more smart-city deployments in 2020 than they did in 2019. Australia had the most of any country in 2020 – seven – up from six in 2019. It’s notable here that Australia is one of the few countries that have been able to control the spread of Covid-19. When examined through the lens of the major suppliers to government-funded smart-city projects, 2020 looks even more like a sea change. Of the top five global suppliers of such undertakings, only one deployed any in 2020. The case against the phrase A further obstacle to the global movement towards smart cities may be the name itself. Even before the pandemic, it wasn’t a particularly descriptive term. What does it actually mean, which technologies count as “smart”, and why did this sector deserve so much attention? These questions were all present prior to 2020. In 2021, the idea that the goal of every city should be to get smarter feels painfully out of touch. This isn’t to suggest that no useful or important smart technologies have been deployed over the past decade. Many are clearly here to stay. There’s a great deal of consensus at this point, for example, that intelligent street-lighting systems combined with LED bulbs – which enable cities to brighten or dim street lamps based on usage – are both cost-effective and vastly more sustainable. It’s also clear that no city will be able to meaningfully tackle its emissions goals without the widespread adoption of smart meters and digitised grids. But as with so many other aspects of life on our planet over the past year, it is starting to feel like the end of an era. “Part of it is that people are sick of talking about this term, ‘smart cities’,” says Story Bellows, a partner at the urban-change management consultancy Cityfi. “People are more focused now on creating outcomes in their communities, whether that’s using technology, whether that’s reinventing processes – kind of the layering of all of those various approaches to making meaningful change on key indicators, whether it’s on health or equity or whatever it is. I think there are still a lot of potential technology drivers and contributors in that, but creating a business model of smart cities just on its own, especially within some of these really big companies, it’s hard to really operationalise and execute.” In Boston, Jacob notes that some of the companies he’s seen have more success selling technologies to local governments over the past year are in fact start-ups or smaller companies that are coming up with pinpointed solutions to very distinct, often urgent problems. These include products aimed at coordinating resources during the crisis, like volunteer management systems designed to help get food to the people who need it. Not all of these more specific pandemic-era efforts have been successful: the sheer number of failed contact-tracing apps and broken vaccine appointment-scheduling platforms is a testament to how easily newcomers to the cities sector can guess incorrectly about what’s needed. But what they had going for them was specificity and a sense of importance. “With the exception of straight-on climate change issues, in general in smart cities, we’re not actually tackling the big issues,” Jacob says. “And the big issues have all been thrust out into the open now through the pandemic. Racism, inequality – that sort of thing. We’re just beginning to see people grapple with that. Planners are starting to wade into this, but I’ve not seen anyone dig into it and say, ‘These are anti-racism sensors.’” Sensors aren’t going away, both Bellows and Jacob say, but companies seeking to sell tech to local governments will need a sharper sales pitch beyond just being “smart”. One sensor-based solution Jacob suspects would be quite welcome? “I haven’t seen the Covid-19 sensor yet.”

A big reason for the disconnect between smart city potential and reality is the fact that smart cities are where the digital world blends, but can also collide, with the non-digital world. Non-digital issues such as legacy governance, social justice, politics, ideology, privacy and financial elements that are not so smart, efficient or resilient when smart-city planning starts can become large factors. Any one of these elements can pose a challenge in and of itself and grow to monstrous proportions when combined with other longstanding problems in a city. Imagine the entanglements that existing public and private industries must go through to implement a single smart city project, let alone numerous projects such as smart lighting, smart transportation, smart buildings and the like to actually make a more complete smart city. Bill Gates’ effort is notable because Belmont is a blank slate to be built from the ground up.

The second problem is more severe. In fact, there is an inherent tradeoff between efficiency afforded by a smart contract and the flexibility that the language of ambiguous contracts provides.82 Smart contracts are fully efficient only if they can execute automatically. To that end, they must be ‘complete contracts’ 83 – specifying all possible contingencies upfront. Even if this was feasible, it would be costly for complex issues, thus increasing the cost of ex ante contract design. More importantly, complete contracts may not be collectively desirable. Governance actors may not want to be collectively bound by a formal treaty provision if circumstances change unexpectedly.84 Indeed, many international agreements include escape clauses, treaty reservations, non-legally binding provisions, and procedural standards that need further interpretation. This is not accidental but a deliberate design choice by states which desire flexibility, especially when uncertainty about the state of the world is high.85

Where blockchain transactions require enforcement in the real world, the blockchain is as ineffective as conventional international law if powerful states renege on their promises in the absence of a world government. And even where execution is possible as in the case of on-chain events, the strength of guaranteed execution might actually turn into a weakness: states anticipating guaranteed punishment for reneging might be unwilling to make ambitious commitments in the first place. This implies that state commitments under smart contracts will likely be trivial, or participation in blockchain-based governance would be limited to states that are willing to comply or that expect to comply with contract obligations.86