Ben Green

a PhD candidate in Applied Math at Harvard, an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and a Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute at NYU; he studies the social and policy impacts of data science, with a focus on algorithmic fairness, municipal governments, and the criminal justice system; his book, The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, was published in 2019 by MIT Press

from Chapter 1: The Smart City: A New Era on the Horizon

In 2016, New York City replaced thousands of pay phones with digital kiosks to create the world’s largest and fastest free public Wi-Fi network.6 These kiosks, branded under the name LinkNYC, also offer free domestic phone calls, USB charging ports, and interactive maps. As an added bonus, the kiosks do not cost the city a dime. LinkNYC’s deployment highlighted the need for every city to democratize access to high-speed internet.

Once again, however, this new technology came with caveats. The LinkNYC kiosks are not a public service run by New York City. Instead, they are owned and operated by Sidewalk Labs—a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. How the kiosks are actually funded should thus be no surprise: Sidewalk Labs gathers data about everyone who uses the services, enabling it to generate targeted advertising. Connecting to the public Wi-Fi network therefore comes at the cost of providing data about your location and behavior to private companies. Everybody desires better public services, but if deploying them entails setting up corporate surveillance nodes throughout urban centers, what kinds of cities are we poised to create?

Each of these stories points toward a new type of city that is on the horizon, made possible by new technology: the “smart city.” This book is about why, far too often, applications of technology in cities produce adverse consequences—and what we must do to ensure that technology helps create a more just and equitable urban future.

from The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future by Ben Green (MIT Press, 2019)