preview

A Smart City Is Not Just About The Good Things

Decent Essays

“Life is not just about the good things or just about the bad things. It is both. It all depends on where you focus your attention.” Similarly, this quote taken from author Anne-Marie Aguilar emphasizes this paper’s argument that the concept of a smart city has positive, but also negative impacts, such as generating class division and social inequality. However, because attention is directed towards the positive effects, this often leads one to overlook the primarily negative influence of this phenomenon. To start with, we define a smart city "as a city in which ICT is merged with traditional infrastructures, coordinated and integrated using new digital technologies”, (Batty, 2012). A real world example of this would be India, where its “government has announced their ‘Smart Cities Mission’” ("2nd smart cities," 2015). Eventually this category of cities will lead to social inequality and exclusion, as companies, and cities focus on those who can pay to generate profits, while ignore the social benefit of the predominant lower class citizens of India. And finally, this exclusion, will add to the digital divide in India as a result of the unequal access to modern information, communication and technology, something a smart city revolves around. Furthermore a smart city’s focus is “to enable more efficient forms of urban management and service delivery”; however, this city leads to more than just that (Smith, 2015). Clearly, the model of a smart city holds factors which create

Get Access